Building the Cycling City

by Melissa Bruntlett

  While the Burrard Street Bridge experienced almost instant success, Dunsmuir and Hornby Streets—critical pieces in creating a grid-like bike-lane network—saw a slower uptake in cycling numbers, which only fueled the controversy. Gauthier infamously stated, “We have to ensure that we’re not choking the lifeblood out of the downtown.” Many bike advocates recall the iconic image of Mike Brascia, a downtown tailor, standing in the middle of an underutilized Hornby Street bike lane, his arms outstretched, bemoaning the lack of parking for his customers. It may have been a more meaningful statement, however, if he weren’t standing next to a half-empty multistory parking garage.

  Robertson has since learned his lesson. He now ensures that the Business Improvement Associations are more involved in the conversation from the start: “The BIAs are justifiably concerned about the interests of their business owners, despite data and reports from other cities that bike lanes are good for business.” As new sections are added to the network, the proof of their success is becoming more and more apparent, changing the hearts and minds of even their most vocal opponents. “Once the numbers became obvious, they’ve become big supporters,” Robertson declares.

  Nowhere is that more obvious than with the aforementioned DVBIA. In the summer of 2015, they launched “Re-Imagine Downtown”—an extensive public-engagement process that asked residents and visitors how they envisioned a more resilient and competitive city center might take shape over the next 25 years. After polling 11,000 people, the results challenged many of the their core assumptions and beliefs, with a clear majority desiring a more walkable, bikeable, people-oriented downtown, and with just 6 percent of respondents saying they wanted more space for cars.

  Gauthier and the DVBIA heard their customers loud and clear. And to his immense credit, Gauthier has become one of the city’s most vocal proponents of bicycle infrastructure, reversing his organization’s position on the protected bike lanes on Dunsmuir and Hornby Streets (he now calls them “the way of the future”), supporting the most recent walking and cycling improvements to the Burrard Street Bridge (a “win–win–win for all users”), championing the arrival of bike-share to Vancouver, and even hosting HUB Cycling’s annual “Bike-Friendly Business Awards.” In early 2017, the DVBIA cemented this progression with a platinum HUB membership, making a $15,000 annual commitment to the nonprofit advocacy group to invest in initiatives such as “Bike to Work Week” and “Bike to Shop Days.”

  When asked about how such a dramatic change of heart can influence other business leaders in the city, Robertson says, “I’m hopeful that our successes in some parts of the city make it easier to go forward to building a complete streets network in others. That’s what we’re all striving for—making our streets vibrant, safe, and engaging, and that means supporting all forms of transportation and ensuring that active transportation is part of the landscape.” He is quick to note that, while much of the council’s focus has outwardly appeared fixated on cycling, their commitment to the transportation hierarchy matches that of Groningen, putting walking first, cycling second, public transportation third, and then private cars at the bottom of the priority list.

  Throughout all of this pushback and opposition, Vancouver has experienced an authentic bike boom, with the modal share increasing by nearly 300 percent. As of May 2016, 10 percent of trips to work were made by bike, one of the highest rates in North America. The most striking changes, however, have been qualitative. Many longtime Vancouverites can recall the days before the bike lanes—with sporty cyclists, predominantly men, on road bikes jostling for space on busy streets where cycling was only for the fit and the brave. Nowadays, the city’s seawall, cycle tracks, and neighborhood greenways are awash with residents of all ages and abilities enjoying safe, comfortable bike trips to school, work, shops, and everywhere in between. “We’ve seen an incredible growth in the number of people riding bikes, especially women, children, and the elderly,” Robertson submits. While they didn’t specifically predict this shift, women now make up nearly half of all trips made by bicycle.

  That’s not to say that opposition has completely disappeared. “The media has overinflated how controversial it is,” claims Robertson. “The changes have been positive, but there’s a perception among car drivers and media that there’s a negative impact, which doesn’t bear out in the data or research.” He is confident that Vancouver has reached a cultural tipping point, with a quiet majority of residents very much in favor of the infrastructure improvements and the positive impact it is having on the health and happiness of people living in and moving around the city.

  Today, with few exceptions, it is rare to read anything negative about the building of bike lanes—if anything is written at all—and Vancouver is well on its way to having a complete, citywide AAA network connecting east to west and north to south. When asked whether or not the fight was worth it, Robertson is confident that he’s on the correct side of history: “It’s the right thing to do. Change is always challenging, particularly when it involves daily commutes, and we’ve had an aggressive commitment to ensure we make cycling safer in Vancouver. It’s great for quality of life—people are getting active and healthier, and our streets are safer and less congested. It’s a win–win.”

  04 ONE SIZE WON’T FIT ALL

  Humans make errors and willingly or unwillingly break rules. This is a given that cannot be changed. So roads and streets should be designed in such a way that this natural human behavior does not lead to crashes and injuries.

  — DUTCH INSTITUTE FOR ROAD SAFETY RESEARCH

  Sustainable Safety Principles

  Vancouver is just one of countless cities implementing strategic cycling plans, each with the goal of getting more people riding more often. But even with this forward momentum, there persists an erroneous belief that, while the Dutch can provide encouragement, their methods are unrepeatable and results unattainable. Miles of dedicated cycle tracks, bike streets, and off-street bikeways are something that only works for “them” and not “us.” However, as Janette Sadik-Khan has implied, even the Netherlands had to start somewhere. So can the country that has spent decades building comfortable cycling infrastructure provide a blueprint for North American cities?

  Each year, delegations of engineers, planners, city officials, and general enthusiasts visit cities such as Rotterdam, Groningen, and Amsterdam to experience and perhaps to be inspired by the brilliance of a matured cycling culture that appears to work so effortlessly. Meredith Glaser, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam’s Urban Cycling Institute, hosts many of these groups through a partnership with the US-based nonprofit PeopleForBikes, and often surprises them by revealing that many of the Netherlands’ successes actually have very little to do with the bicycle.

  In 1992, a new approach was adopted by the Dutch national government called Duurzaam Veilig (“Sustainable Safety”), a Swedish concept that Dutch road managers happily took and adapted to their own context. “It’s more than bike-network design, but rather a broader approach to safe streets,” Glaser explains. “Sustainable Safety is about systematic road safety, an approach that looks at the volumes of cars and the speeds at which they travel on any given street, and then offers guidance on the types of infrastructure that should be found on those streets.” While the phrase itself can be a bit misleading—Sustainable Safety has nothing to do with environmental sustainability—it is no longer just a European idea, having been adapted from its Swedish origins into the “Vision Zero” policy now gaining traction across North America.

  “Large differences in speed and mass of different road users in the same space must be eliminated as much as possible. Road users can best be forced to travel at lower speeds by road design,” state the Sustainable Safety principles succinctly. This systematic, safe-streets approach established three main road categories, as well as their corresponding bicycle infrastructure, all of which is prescribed in the Dutch Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic (generally known as the CROW Manual, from the acro
nym of the Centrum voor Regelgeving en Onderzoek in de Wegenbouw—the “Center for Regulation and Research in Road Construction and Traffic Engineering”).

  Stroomwegen (“Flow/Through Roads”) are designed to move a large volume of cars at speeds over 100 km/h (60 mph). North Americans would define these as highways and interstates. On such roads, physical separation of motorized traffic and bicycles is mandatory, often achieved through a nearby separated cycling path, like the new cycle superhighways being built across the country, or a parallel road where conditions are vastly safer.

  Gebiedsontsluitingswegen (“Distributor Roads”) are essentially arterial roads; speeds here range between 50 km/h (30 mph) and 70 km/h (40 mph). They are designed for flow but include exchanges at intersections, whether junctions or roundabouts. Separation is still mandatory between fast and slow users. This can be achieved through three types of cycle tracks. Segregated cycle tracks are physically separated from the road space through the use of a wide median or grass. Protected cycle tracks are adjacent to the road space but provide protection via the use of parked cars, cement barriers, planters, bollards, or a painted buffer. Raised cycle tracks are adjacent to the road, but elevated to indicate the space is dedicated to bicycles.

  Erftoegangswegen (“Access Roads”) are neighborhood roads where modes can mix thanks to reduced speeds. On rural or regional access roads, this can be up to 60 km/h (35 mph), and ideally there is physical separation between modes. However, in dense urban areas the speeds cannot exceed 30 km/h (20 mph), and signage and road surface treatments are used to clearly identify it as a shared space. The one exception is a woonerf (“living street”), where speeds are limited to 15 km/h (10 mph), and pedestrians rule the road. Considered to be extensions of the living room, woonerfs are outdoor spaces for play and socialization, where parking is limited and driving is made inconvenient and thus is avoided by most except people who live locally.

  Glaser is quick to point out that these delineations between road and infrastructure types are just one part of the equation: “The basic tenets of bike network design are that it must be continuous, recognizable, safe, and intuitive for all users.” Cycling infrastructure of any kind is of little use to anyone if it doesn’t connect them to where they want to go, which is why looking at the cycling maps of any Dutch city will show a well-connected web of bike routes that take travelers directly to their destination without sacrificing comfort or convenience.

  That continuity goes hand in hand with being recognizable, and is achieved in several ways. Of course, the most recognizable treatment for both locals and anyone who has visited the Netherlands is the ubiquitous red pavement—a 3-centimeter- (1-inch-) thick top layer of special dyed-red asphalt that is used for all separated cycle tracks, most bike lanes, and any fietsstraat (“bicycle street”). For neighborhood streets, cities often use paving stones, usually a similar red to that of the cycle tracks, which not only identify a space as shared, but also serve to slow cars.

  Figure 4-1: The CROW Manual mandates separated cycle tracks on all “Distributor Roads,” like this one on Amsterdam’s Jan Pieter Heijestraat. (Credit: Modacity)

  “If you travel from an arterial to a residential street, there’s a difference in materials, elevation, and cues in the environment used to slow cars down,” Glaser explains. “For example, a car driver would cross onto what I would call a ‘welcome mat,’ an elevated area at the same level as the bicycle and pedestrian pathway. This creates a shared-space situation where a driver has to traverse over the foot- and cycle-path and back down to street level, where the textures again would change. Drivers immediately understand they are in a different space and need to watch out.”

  Glaser points out that the treatment of cyclists and pedestrians is glaringly different in North America. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she recalls a childhood spent stepping down into the dangerous “driving zone” to cross a street, and she loves that her daughter, by contrast, is growing up in a place where drivers have to slow to a crawl and move up into the walking and cycling space—treated as a trespasser—before going back down again. “It really levels the playing field. All types of road users are on this same space and you have to negotiate with each other,” she points out. “That sense of entitlement is decreased—if not eliminated entirely—and you have to really interact with everyone in these spaces.”

  A clear, continuous network is important in order to permit safe travel throughout a city, but Glaser argues that making it intuitive supersedes any other quality. “It’s an important component to the Dutch approach,” she says, “because context is paramount for Dutch bike network design. There is no copy-paste solution, there’s no prescription for each street. Each one really has its own way of fitting within the network.” The treatment of a street or intersection, and how it connects to others in a complete network, is selected based on the travel patterns of its users. This eliminates the need for indicators or signage to tell users how to behave; they already know instinctively.

  This idea seems counterintuitive in an age where bicycle infrastructure is being prescribed as the “cure-all” for getting more people cycling elsewhere in the world. As Glaser points out, elements such as land use and local context play a huge role in how a street will be treated: “When it comes down to it, the street itself will dictate what type of solution will be employed there.” She uses the example of the street on which she lives, which is home to the local elementary school. Sections of the adjacent street are restricted solely to bike and scooter/moped access, allowing more space for bicycle parking and even a small playground. No special car parking is available, which limits the number of parents who drive their children to and from school. Adapting streets in this way—along with more efficient land-use planning—is one of the reasons why the number of children driven to school in the Netherlands is dramatically lower than elsewhere; whereas 86 percent of Dutch kids walk or bike to school, only 11 percent do so in the United States. Here again, though, Glaser is clear that solutions like the one working in her neighborhood are not always applied to the entire street: “Context is used where it’s needed.”

  All of these tenets—continuity, recognition, safety, and intuitiveness—combine to establish one guiding principle that Glaser says is key to success: “It’s really about intensive traffic-calming, moving as many people through the street as possible, and that’s what the Dutch approach does.” Elements like wider sidewalks, slower speeds, reduced and expensive parking, and rerouting cars—when combined with a complete bicycle network—get more people traveling through the city because they use the land in a way that brings destinations closer together. From home, to school, to work, to the grocer and back, all in the most suitable and efficient way possible.

  From across the Atlantic, the highly evolved bicycle networks and long-established cycling culture enjoyed in the Netherlands may look intimidating to planners just breaking ground on their own designs, but, as Glaser notes, what may look like a “finished product” never has been, nor ever will be. “The streets here have also gone through several different renditions throughout the years, so they’re not something that’s a fixed solution either.” She drives this fact home as she takes delegations from around the globe through her adopted home of Amsterdam, showing off some of its historical transformations—like the successful freeway fight on Jodenbreestraat—and the new experiments that she and her Urban Cycling Institute colleagues are researching across town, with the hope of sharing inspiring ideas that visitors can take back to their own cities. “The simple act of being able to imagine oneself on a bike is much more complex than it seems,” reflects Glaser. “So coming to a place to experience it firsthand seems to have an effect on that ability to imagine and also the ability to talk about mobility in a different way. But, in the end, it’s still not about bikes and even bike lanes or putting more bikes on the streets. It’s about safety. It’s about comfort. It’s about having strong cities that are economical viable and wonderfu
l places to be.”

  Translating Dutch Ideas for the World

  Glaser will admit that translating the complex concept of increasing resiliency and economic viability through street design is a difficult task, so just how can the Dutch clearly communicate their successful tactics to a broader audience, without elements getting lost in translation? Mirjam Borsboom, director of the Dutch Cycling Embassy and founder of Movida Transport Solutions, is pragmatic in her methodology: “Every city has its own characteristics, inhabitants, habits and cultures, so there is one way for every city—you just need to find out what that is.”

  Located in Delft, the Dutch Cycling Embassy is a nonprofit established in 2011 with one clear mission: “Cycling for Everyone.” They mean that in the broadest sense. “It’s providing the opportunity for everyone at least willing to use a bicycle to have access to one in every country,” Borsboom says. “As soon as everyone has the choice to use a bicycle to get where they want to go, our mission will be accomplished.”

  Through public–private partnerships, Borsboom and her small but influential team coordinate a network of Dutch private partners, NGOs, and universities, as well as anyone consulting on cycling in the Netherlands. The Dutch Cycling Embassy connects them to organizations, governments, and businesses from around the world interested in gaining their perspective. “We try to help as much as we can, providing information on anything from education, children, infrastructure, and social inclusion to technical designs. It’s super-diverse, and every day is different,” she says enthusiastically.