Building the Cycling City

by Melissa Bruntlett

  One of the more lauded and high-profile examples of this new attitude can be found in a former Dutch colony that is now the seemingly untamable global capital—New York City, formerly New Amsterdam. The “City That Never Sleeps” undertook a dramatic transformation that is largely credited to its darling—at least in transportation planning circles—Janette Sadik-Khan, transportation principal with Bloomberg Associates, chair of the North American Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), and co-author of Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution.

  “My education of the streets started at a very young age, walking throughout the city with my mom,” Sadik-Khan reminisces. “When you look at the street from the foot up, it’s a very different perspective, and that really informed my ideas around city building and transportation.” Growing up as a New Yorker, she spent her childhood experiencing her city, in all its glory and failings, at the ground level, which ultimately informed her professional journey, beginning as an employee for the New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) under Mayor David Dinkins.

  But it wasn’t until her return after 15 years in the transportation field at the national and international level—including a stint advising President Bill Clinton—that she was given the chance to bring out the best in the streets she had grown up with. In 2007, as the newly elected mayor, Michael Bloomberg, began putting together his administration, Sadik-Khan successfully lobbied for the position of transportation commissioner. Her aspirational plan included a bold vision to bring the best ideas from around the world to the 6,300 linear miles of New York City streets—an astonishing 25 percent of its surface area—and shape this diverse metropolis for the better.

  From day one, she challenged the status quo, asking her engineers, “Why can’t we do something like that here?”—referring to examples of rapid bus lines in Bogotá, separated cycle tracks in the Netherlands, and the new public space being added to the centers of a growing number of cities. “The common response I got,” she says, “was that the issue was mostly political and cultural, but didn’t have much to do with engineering.”

  Luckily for Sadik-Khan, she had the political climate on her side. Mayor Bloomberg was dedicating his tenure to PlaNYC, a sustainability agenda that studied what needed to be done to make New York City become a better functioning place by 2030. The farsighted plan, anticipating an influx of a million more people, aimed to improve New Yorkers’ quality of life by improving the quality of their neighborhoods and business districts. PlaNYC “raised some pretty profound questions for the Department of Transportation, and there was no way to get there without rethinking our streets,” says Sadik-Khan. “Fortunately we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.” By looking at global examples, Sadik-Khan and her team developed their own “New York Way” of designing their streets to ensure they would be safe for people whether seven or seventy.

  At that time, global information sharing around urban development was still in its infancy, with Twitter barely a year old and the most popular urbanist blogs yet to reach a mainstream audience. For many of the New Yorkers whom Sadik-Khan was trying to reach, images of cycling utopias such as Amsterdam were unfamiliar, and they were understandably skeptical of any proposed change to the streetscape.

  Sadik-Khan’s approach to this was pragmatic. “The point isn’t that there is a ‘Dutch’ bike lane,” she says, “it’s really more of an approach that you’re bringing. The Netherlands wasn’t always this way—it was created and evolved—and that was very inspiring to me.” To change the hearts and minds of residents, these upgrades couldn’t be a cut-and-paste duplicate of somewhere else—they had to be created in New York. Her department would install over 400 miles of “Made in New York” bike lanes, and later launch Citi Bike, the single largest public bike-sharing scheme on the continent.

  Figure 1-3: A protected bike lane along Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, once referred to as “the most contested piece of land outside the Gaza Strip.” (Credit: Doug Gordon)

  Many of these upgrades were made possible simply by unlocking the hidden potential found in most city streets. For example, traffic engineers have historically designed automobile lanes to be 12 feet in width—even in an urban setting—despite the typical Toyota Camry being just 6 feet wide. This standard is meant to provide a safety “buffer” typical of rural highways, where vehicles are moving at much faster speeds. By revisiting some of those design decisions, such as reducing lane width to 9 or 10 feet, Sadik-Khan and her team were able to find additional room for wider sidewalks, protected bike lanes, and generous bus stops. Fulfilling this potential meant a much more effective use of space along these corridors, moving a greater number of people in a quicker and more secure manner.

  Armed with the knowledge that half the population would be suspicious of the government arriving and saying, “We’re here to help,” and the other half tired of grand plans that might never come to fruition, Sadik-Khan used a fresh “tactical urbanism” strategy to bring about change in a provisional and cost-effective manner. A growing practice among planners and advocates, tactical urbanism is the act of quickly transforming an existing space, using inexpensive materials, to temporarily create a more welcoming environment for walking, cycling, or public life.

  Despite early skepticism from the media and the public, by the end of her six-year reign as transportation commissioner, Sadik-Khan became renowned for lighter, quicker, cheaper projects. Her team would redesign a space overnight with some paint and planters, creating pop-up bike lanes and reclaiming public spaces from cars, the most notable example being the now-permanent plaza in Times Square—once a noisy, car-choked, and dangerous destination, now a cherished legacy of Sadik-Khan’s tenure.

  “I think we were able to push back against the cynicism and challenges by moving quickly and showing New Yorkers something they could touch and feel instead of just arguing about it, and that these projects were a good idea,” she insists. But it was about more than just seeing the plans in action. “[The pilot projects] gave us something to measure, and that went a long way to convince some of our biggest skeptics that the program was working, turning them into our biggest supporters.”

  Mayor Bloomberg’s motto was, “In God we trust. Everyone else bring data.” That’s exactly what she did. After implementing the highly contested protected bike lanes along Ninth Avenue, retailers who had insisted that the lanes would be the death of their business instead saw a sales increase of 49 percent. In the Bronx, along the route of the first of seven rapid bus lines created during Sadik-Khan’s tenure, sales shot up 71 percent. As for the plazas, one of the most dramatic increases happened at the small de facto parking lot—and first pop-up plaza—on Brooklyn’s Pearl Street, at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. By simply applying paint, purchasing some planters, and bringing in tables and chairs, the NYC DOT completely transformed the space, and retail sales went up by a whopping 172 percent.

  “We were able to show that the better we design our streets, the better it was for business. Having that data can really change the argument from anecdote to analysis,” Sadik-Khan points out. By having evidence-based studies to back up the program, the NYC DOT team were able to go to other neighborhoods and communities, show the data, and completely change the tone of the debate. Nowadays, the demand by citizens and businesses alike for bike lanes, parklets, and plazas are off the charts. New Yorkers have seen that such amenities work, and they have watched as life went on as usual and their city became a more vibrant place to live, work, and play.

  Business development associations are now teaming up with the City to participate in the Street Seats scheme, in which they transform old parking spaces into places with seating and then commit to creating a well-maintained and supervised program of regular activities. In addition, more than 75 plazas have been created as a part of this innovative arrangement, with local businesses contributing to the upkeep of the new spaces. “When you measure the streets and see a lot of that economic development, there’
s really nothing more powerful than that,” Sadik-Khan suggests, referring to how cities can use data to win the favor of businesses, often the fiercest opponents to such change.

  Since stepping down as transportation commissioner in 2013, Sadik-Khan has turned her focus to sharing her knowledge and expertise with cities around the world in order to help them develop their own methods for improving their streets. “The point isn’t that there’s just one approach,” she insists. “I think it’s fascinating to see cities learning from one another, and tailoring what they’re seeing in other places to their own streets. It’s what we’re seeing all over the world. It’s ignited a different kind of revolution on our streets, one that prioritizes putting people at the top of the transportation hierarchy.” Sadik-Khan even admits that she takes delight in watching ambitious mayors compete with one another to make their city “the best.”

  As the chair of NACTO, she helps the organization provide guidance to its members, enabling and supporting the innovation now taking place in cities across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and giving them the blueprints they need to get started. In 2017, NACTO’s Global Designing Cities Initiative launched the first-ever Global Street Design Guide, giving cities on every continent access to the same transformative tools. The guide was adopted by 35 different cities and 19 nongovernmental organizations in just the first six months after publication. “That’s what it’s all about,” Sadik-Khan emphasizes. “Sharing ideas. That’s key to successful cities in the twenty-first century—creating a network of experienced planners and engineers who share ideas of what works on their streets, what doesn’t, and why.”

  Ten years on, Sadik-Khan also believes that, with the explosion of global communications, it’s easier than ever to import ideas and strategies from across the globe for how to build streets that work for people. A new crop of passionate urbanists has emerged, using social media as a powerful tool to share what they’ve been doing. She is now seeing New York City’s influence in places like Addis-Ababa, Mumbai, and even in already forward-thinking cities such as Rotterdam. While federal governments seem to be slower to implement large-scale change, citizens and municipalities are more than ready to take up the challenge, and Sadik-Khan couldn’t be happier with how her legacy is inspiring a genuine urban revolution. “Right now,” she says, “cities are doing it for themselves, and that’s a great thing.”

  Bringing the “JSK Approach” to Rotterdam

  Back in Rotterdam, the desire to reinvent their public realm remains as strong as ever. In fact, inspired by Janette Sadik-Khan, the municipality is looking to accelerate change through strategic projects in their own city center. Their newest mobility plan focuses on shifting citizens out of their cars while providing more room for walking and cycling. To complement that work, officials have developed a “City Lounge” strategy (implementing pop-up terraces like those in New York) in an attempt to breathe life back into a historically hollow center.

  These planners recognize that, in Rotterdam as in other cities, it is as important to look outside their borders as within, to learn what works best when reshaping their streets. Looking at places like San Francisco, Bogotá, and Paris, and even borrowing New York’s “JSK approach” (a shorthand lovingly adopted in urban planning circles), they are bringing people back into the heart of Rotterdam, one pilot project at a time.

  José Besselink is an urban planner who grew up in the suburbs of Rotterdam, later moving to Utrecht to attend the university. She now commutes daily from there by train to work for the City of Rotterdam, where she has been improving her childhood home for the past decade. Over the last five years, her work has been heavily focused on the “City Lounge” strategy and inner-city development, and she freely admits that much of her inspiration comes from Sadik-Khan’s work across the Atlantic. “Even in Rotterdam, change is hard, so we use pilot projects to alter the mental map of citizens and entrepreneurs,” Besselink explains. She and her team want residents to rethink how public space can be more inclusive. They have implemented their own “Made in Rotterdam” streetscape and street furniture while reducing on-street parking to make greater use of the large number of underutilized parking garages in the city center.

  As Provoost and Laven noted, after the bombing during the Second World War housing was relocated outside the city center to the surrounding neighborhoods. Besselink now focuses on bringing residents back into the core. “Densification—or welcoming more inhabitants—is one of the main goals of the ‘City Lounge’ strategy,” she notes. “Because there were a lot of new building projects, we built a few extra [underground] parking garages to facilitate parking for these new buildings, and to help us create a more attractive public space above ground.” To attract average citizens, including families, back into the downtown core, it is vitally important to build vibrant parks and plazas that function as their back garden. This is why the area around the Lijnbaan—which, when it opened in 1953, was the world’s first pedestrianized shopping street—has experienced the highest rate of densification. Rotterdammers want to live in connected places, with access to retail, dining, and public spaces that aren’t diminished by expanses of surface parking.

  In response to this demand, the City has committed to an ambitious target of reducing on-street parking by 3,000 spaces, a third of the total supply. Many of these spots are removed in the conventional way: redesigning streets to prioritize walking and cycling. But in order to accelerate change, they have incorporated the goal into the “City Lounge” investment program, which works with businesses to create pop-up terraces in the summer months. Merchants apply for permits to take over street parking spots, which become extensions of their storefronts—increasing patio space, establishing outdoor shopping areas, or just creating good places to stop and rest.

  Because of its grid-like pattern of wide streets, Rotterdam is known in the Netherlands as a “car city,” but Besselink thinks they have finally started to shed that image. “We are at an interesting time because we are in the middle of change, and a lot of people are still attached to their cars. I would say it would have been fair, looking back. But we are in the midst of a moment where this is all changing.” She points out that over the last 10 years, the number of people cycling in the city has increased by 63 percent.

  The increase in cycling numbers brings a new set of challenges not unlike those seen in Amsterdam and Utrecht: where, for example, do you park all those bicycles? While Utrecht has its own aggressive strategy—one that Besselink makes use of every day on her trip to the office—the approach in Rotterdam has been to stimulate grassroots initiatives to accelerate and complement the conventional “top-down” planning process. Residents in communities across Rotterdam were expressing concerns about the crowds of parked bikes taking over the footpaths, so two years ago, a pair of pioneering individuals decided to work with the City to test a solution in their neighborhood. For a six-month trial, they chose five on-street car parking spaces that would be designated as “bike corrals,” suddenly creating room to store 50 bikes. If these corrals didn’t help solve the bike parking problem, they could be easily removed. No harm, no foul.

  In fact, Besselink reports enthusiastically, “the parking spots were very well used, which allowed us to eliminate not only the original five spaces, but add more in the surrounding neighborhood. We were also able to widen the sidewalks in some areas, and add trees in others. In the end we were able to do more with this pilot than we would have been able to do with a traditional planning process.”

  Besselink points out that much of the recent work in Rotterdam around improving the public realm has happened through the spirit of collaboration. Instead of developing ideas behind closed doors and releasing them to the public in a high-handed way, the City has openly welcomed input and ideas from their citizens. They are the ones who walk and cycle the streets every day, and they have the best feeling for what is happening at street level, which makes their insight invaluable. “It’s not about me sitting at
a desk making decisions, but by working with change-makers who are citizens themselves, and are willing to work with us to create change,” Besselink explains. While working on their latest mobility plan, the City invited the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT) from Erasmus University Rotterdam to collaborate on workshops tailored to residents. There, locals were invited to bring their ideas for long-term initiatives that could improve the streets and match the municipality’s ambitious goals to boost walking and cycling.

  During one of these sessions, José met Jorn Wemmenhove, partner from the local urban-design agency Street Makers. Looking beyond Dutch borders for inspiration—this time to Bogotá, Columbia—Wemmenhove pitched to Besselink the idea of bringing a large-scale street fair to the heart of Rotterdam. It would be modeled on Bogotá’s weekly Ciclovía event, where 120 kilometers (75 miles) of streets are closed to cars and reserved for pedestrians and cyclists each and every Sunday. Named the “Happy Streets Foundation,” the collaboration established three guiding principles for any potential pilot project. One: What is the end goal? Two: What is the transition we want to accelerate? Three: Does it fit within the “City Lounge” policy?

  With these standards in mind, they launched their inaugural open-streets event on a Sunday from 9:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. in September 2016, opening up one and a half kilometers of streets to the people to enjoy without interference from cars. The event drew about 1,000 Rotterdammers and was deemed enough of a success to ensure its continuation in coming years, expanded to other areas of the city.

  After the success of these workshops, Wemmenhove identified the desperate need for a safer pedestrian crossing at the postwar thoroughfare of Westblaak, which acted as a wall carving the city into two halves. If the city was truly committed to improving the safety of their streets, this was ripe for a redesign.