“New mobility aims towards a human system. Old mobility aims at a car system.” Eric Britton, New Mobility Agenda
Streetsblog posted a great video at the end of last week that covers many of the innovative things being done in Paris (France, not Texas) to make streets safer and more accessible to cyclists and pedestrians alike.
The City of Paris has already made great strides in creating a massive bicycle path/lane network and introducing their wildly popular bike share program. Now they are experimenting with how to make streets safe and accessible if cars, bikes, pedestrians, and buses all share the same space. It turns out the way the street is built has a huge effect on its accessibility.
“The only way to slow down the car, is not through the police and is not through the radar, but it is through getting rid of the straight lines and through making the streets sufficiently irregular,” says Eric Britton of New Mobility Agenda in this Streetsfilm short documentary.
This sounds a lot like what New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is doing to create public space and slow cars down on some of the widest, busiest streets in the Big Apple. What’s even better about what Sadik-Khan is doing is that she achieves many of the results of what Paris has done with low lost, temporary measures to test results. There is no reason why any American city could not try out what Sadik-Khan is doing (hint, hint, City of Austin Public Works.)
In addition to changing the streets, the Parisians have developed a culture of looking out for those who are smaller than they are. Cyclists have the responsibility to look after pedestrians, cars after cyclists, buses and trucks after cars. What a concept! We should think about someone other than ourselves? That sounds downright unAmerican!
I think this should be a guide for those thinking bikes and cars should share the same space at the expense of bike lanes and other infrastructure. I’m taking about people like the Dallas Bicycle Coordinator, whom some people think we have a vendetta against. Yes, bikes can occupy the same spaces as cars safely but not in streets built only to move cars as fast as possible and not in a culture ingrained with self-centered, car dominance.
In the meantime, bicycle infrastructure and sidewalks are very reasonable responses to building safe places for bicycles and pedestrians in our car culture. That’s why we encourage you to help make sure Austin builds this kind of infrastructure by signing the Austin Bike Plan Petition if you have not yet done so.
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on Jan 19th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
What I find interesting is that Paris, on certain streets, is using the bicyclist as a traffic calming device. I may be missing the point, but I don’t see how this is any different than what exists in America today. Except for a promotion of bigger vehicles being responsible for smaller vehicles, most American cities force cyclists to ride with the traffic.
Even though it is not widely enforced or accepted, I believe that in most urban environments the right of way is ceded to to the smaller entity. Bikes yield to pedestrians cars to bikes etc. The only thing we don’t have here is lots of bikes in the street.
So, lets get out there.
on Jan 19th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Tom,
I think the issue here is two fold, street structure and cultural. I think what the French are doing with the streetscape is fundamentally different than most U.S. roads. They are making space for all modes of transportation and viewing the street as public space, not just a place to move cars as rapidly as possible. This is outlook creates space that is inherently safer for everyone than what we conventionally do in America.
The second is cultural. Bicycles may have a right to the road but many a cyclist will share him or her story with you about being verbally and at times physically harassed by drivers. I agree with you that the more cyclists there are on the road, the more accepted they’ll be by the general driving public. In fact, there is a correlation between the number of cyclists on the road and the number of cycling fatalities per capita. However without proper cycling infrastructure that make the average cyclist feel safe, only a hard core group will make it out on the road.
on Jan 21st, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I think bikes are better in rural areas. I get nervous with a lot of bikers on a busy road.
on Jan 21st, 2009 at 2:36 pm
I get nervous with a lot of cars on the road. Perhaps we should just limit them to rural areas.
on Feb 4th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Elliott, Why do people who won’t ride on the street without a painted bike lane always perpetuate the myth that it’s only possible to ride VC if you’re a “hard-core” superman-like rider? lol
Everyone is a beginner at one time. If I, or anyone else can ride VC, you can too.
The only thing different about any of us that are out there now, is that we were willing to try it and stick with it, and have come to learn via first hand experience that, for the most part, people like Forrester are spot-on correct.
Is there a need for bike lanes in SOME places? Sure. Of course there is.
No ones disputing that at all. We need them on all the big streets so we can get across town as directly as people in cars do, and we need sharrows at all intersections to eliminate almost all of the “right hook” type accidents that bike lane advocates seem to be so willing to accept.
We don’t need them on small streets streets like White Rock Trail {nice safe 22′ lanes}, but a quarter mile over on Skillman with 12′ lanes? You bet! Sign me up! I’ll support one there for sure. The entire right lane on both sides will do nicely, thanks.
on Feb 4th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
dallasbikerider,
I’m a pretty aggressive rider and I have no problem riding as a vehicle most of the time. This is not about me or my comfort level. This is about getting the other 99% of potential riders out there out of their cars and using bikes for short trips where it makes no sense to drive. Those people, which include members of my own family, flat out refuse to ride out of fear of being hit. You and all the other VCers need to realize this is not about you and your comfort level. This is about people who aren’t “cyclists”, they are people who happen to ride bikes. The roads with sharrows, bike lane, bikeways etc need to be built for them, not necessarily us. The idea that everyone has to be trained to be hard core riders before they can ride means we’ll never get there. As Enrique Peñalosa said a few weeks ago, “If an eight year old can’t safely ride on the bike route, it is not a say bikeway.” Would YOU let your eight year old ride in on Dallas streets?
In America, we build roads to with one purpose: to move cars quickly. All other purposes are secondary. This fear from the general public about riding is a response to that. Look at how countries like Holland and Denmark, with near majorities biking for transportation every day, build their bike facilities. They are safe enough for children and adults alike. America, including Dallas, have tried it your way for decades with a stagnant 1-2% bike commuter rate. I’d say the numbers speak for themselves. You approach is a failure. Let’s try something different and see what happens. It can’t be any worse.
on Feb 5th, 2009 at 1:34 am
Elliott, weren’t most all of us part of the 99% at one time? It’s just like anything else in life, you just have to want to do it.
I started riding regularly when the company I worked for at the time decided to move to within 7 miles of my house. My first thought was, “cool! I can ride a bike to work”.
I wasn’t a cyclist at the time and didn’t own a bike. I just knew I wanted to because I knew that riding a bike is fun and that I was going to find a way to make it work no matter what. I looked at it like, being that close, who, in their right mind WOULDN’T want to? At least on nice days, of course.
I still remember feeling on that first ride as though I’d never make it, but I did.
After riding awhile and trying to make every effort possible to run like a scared rabbit trying to not get in the way of any vehicles, I started realizing that if I applied the rules of traffic and acted like I belonged there, the vast majority of drivers didn’t mind me being there at all and over the years my commute got exponentially easier.
So I’ve been there too. If I can do it, anyone can as there’s nothing special about me, or any other VCers when it comes to riding a bike. We all got here a little at a time.
If you can understand the rules well enough to maneuver a car on the streets in a safe and prudent manner, you should have no problem with a bike, either. Again, you just have to want to.
To answer your question about the 8yo, I wouldn’t let any young child ride alone across any big city, bike lanes or not. Only a fool would allow that. Ain’t no way I’m lettin’ MY 8yo out of my sight on the streets or trails of Dallas, and hopefully you wouldn’t let yours either. So to say a bike lane system needs to be designed for 8yo’s is laughable at best.
Not to mention that to design a bike lane system that’s suitable for an 8yo to traverse Dallas in a truly safe way would likely be useless to most adult riders trying to actually get somewhere in a timely manner.
Adults ride bikes with gears combos that allow for flat road travel at 20-30mph, not at the speeds an 8yo would ride, and in Copenhagen they mostly ride slow, heavy, up-right 3 speed bikes. Those are not what commuters are riding here, so why do we want a system modeled on that type of riding?
I understand what you mean about some people that are fearful of cars behind them and use it as an excuse to not ever ride, but have you attempted to show them how much less safe they’d be on a segregated bike lane while crossing our big city intersections? I will agree that the stats show a slight decrease in cyclists being struck from behind while riding between intersections in a bike lane, but that number is more than made up for AT the intersections. 30 years worth of stats from Europe confirm it.
So why can’t we cherry-pick only the best parts of their bike lane system and combine it with the best parts of VC riding and create a truly great bike transportation system that actually IS safer all the way around for everybody?
While at the same time undertaking a real driver education campaign aimed at vastly increasing driver awareness of cyclist and our Rights to the road so that people might forget the stereotype that keeps so many people too fearful to ride? Or are they just victims of their own fear and un-teachable as to what the actual threats are?
Why do we have to settle for something that caters to a generally non-riding, un-educated public? {uneducated relative to real-World bike safety, anyways}
It’s like this. There are drivers out there who are fearful of driving on the expressway too, but we don’t cater to them and design 30mph freeways to make sure they feel extra safe, do we? No, we don’t. We expect people to be smart enough to be able to use a 60+mph freeway thats designed to get adults around in an adult World at adult speeds, and adult bike commuters should expect no less from a bike transportation system, either.
Since it seems as though we will be forced to do something different whether we want to or not, can you at least agree that if people start getting hit in bike lanes at intersections that there will then be a push to have them removed?
Remember, Dallas drivers are like old dogs. They don’t learn new tricks very easily and learning not to turn across bike lanes would be a pretty big trick for them to learn.
So we should expect casualties from this experiment. Problem is, they’ll most likely be those newbie riders who are too afraid to ride as it is now, but will suddenly think they are safe when they see the stripes of paint go down.