Building the Cycling City

by Melissa Bruntlett

  Figure 7-3: The on-ramp for Utrecht’s Dafne Schippersbrug allows cyclists to roll up onto the roof of the newly opened Oog in Al School. (Credit: Modacity)

  Now, Van Rossem looks forward to the positive ways that restoring the canal will change his city for the better, becoming a great gathering space not only for tourists but also for locals who once saw it as a wasted piece of the public realm. As with Amsterdam’s famous canals, tourists and residents alike will be able to travel by boat around the core, reviving a long-forgotten romantic connection to a place that was long cold and desolate. As for Van Hooijdonk, having moved to the city as an adult, she is excited for the new possibilities that the revived waterfront will bring to Utrecht, noting that it is something that is already being taken for granted by locals: “I think most people can’t imagine anymore what it used to look like just a few years ago.”

  All in all, Utrecht seems to be staring down the challenges of future growth with optimism and innovation, but this is not happening without its naysayers. Just as with the demolition of cherished buildings and trees in the 1960s and ’70s, residents are wary. “It has spurred a debate because Utrecht has been growing really fast,” admits Van Hooijdonk. “Just a couple of decades ago we only had 200,000 citizens, so I think we’re experiencing growing pains. Some people say they don’t like the growth; it’s not their city anymore; where’s the human scale? I think we’re maybe beyond that discussion now, but 10 or 20 years ago, that was the prime debate.” She also feels that while they’ve made progress, there’s still much work to be done: “I think the funny thing is we still have a long wish list, so we don’t think the city is done improving things for cycling. The local discussion is not about satisfaction, but about what we still need to achieve.”

  This is a common sentiment voiced across the Netherlands, and, to be sure, a healthy dose of cynicism helps to ensure politicians don’t rest on their laurels. While urbanists and advocates in places like Britain and North America look in awe at these cycling havens, their residents are still not satisfied—but international recognition helps. In 2017, Utrecht was listed second on the global Copenhagenize Bicycle-Friendly Cities Index, edging out local superstar Amsterdam; an accolade Van Hooijdonk doesn’t take lightly. The ranking inspires pride in the city she has happily served for some time, and it makes her optimistic about the future.

  Van Rossem, meanwhile, looks to the recent past, recognizing that Utrecht’s success has roots in decisions made before his and Van Hooijdonk’s time: “We are proud of what we have achieved, but we haven’t just done it ourselves,” he admits. “There’s a big team working on it, and our predecessors did a lot of work. But I think we can be proud as well. A lot of people say, ‘We can really see you’re working on new cycling infrastructure now.’”

  “There is a new renaissance for cycling in the Netherlands,” submits Van Hooijdonk. “It’s seen in the interest and attention of the public. I hope it creates new fronts and we’ll have many new projects in the future, because we think we’re not done yet.”

  Building a Better Market Street

  Measuring just 11 kilometers (7 miles) by 11 kilometers, and surrounded on three sides by salt water, it could be argued that San Francisco is one of North America’s few human-scale cities. With a population of 870,000, and a density second only to that of Manhattan, it has many distinct advantages, including its compact nature, mild climate, and a long and storied history of social activism, dissent, and protest. Not only does it lay claim to the modern environmental movement, it is also home of the very first Critical Mass protest ride, which began as a modest gathering in 1992 but has since spread to cities around the world as a tool to mobilize and garner political support. But to many who want their city to become an even more walkable and bikeable place, that heightened level of engagement and awareness has become both a blessing and a curse.

  “If you contrast San Francisco with New York, New York tends to have a very strong mayor, and a long tradition of bold civic leaders, from Robert Moses to Janette Sadik-Khan,” explains Jeff Risom, partner and US managing director for Gehl, a global, Copenhagen-based urban-design consultancy. “San Francisco is more grassroots, with a weaker mayor system, and a lot more civic engagement.” In that environment, what Risom refers to as “the Tea Party of the left” has come to monopolize the city-building conversation for several years—be it on zoning, housing, or transportation. While the city prides itself on being socially progressive and environmentally minded, this combination has created a breed of uncompromising liberal NIMBY (“Not In My Backyard”) so far to the left that they’ve actually become hyperconservative, and government officials have become paralyzed by the many disparate progressive stakeholders and their vast resources.

  For example, in 2006, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) was slapped with a lawsuit by “concerned citizen” and car-free activist Rob Anderson, who—bizarrely—opposed their bicycle network plan on the grounds that removing driving lanes and parking spaces would worsen the air quality. The suit resulted in a court-ordered injunction that prevented the City from building any new infrastructure until a four-year, $1-million review proved that the plan complied with the California Environmental Quality Act, and would not result in an increase in carbon emissions. A judge eventually lifted the injunction in 2010, but not until the SFMTA had fallen woefully behind on their bike plans.

  Yet the City of San Francisco was innovating in unexpected ways, creating groundbreaking permitting programs built on grassroots civic tactics like PARKing Day. It was in that dynamic atmosphere that Gehl—after working on the pedestrianization of New York’s Times Square during the Sadik-Khan era and later opening an office there—opted to open a second US office in San Francisco. In 2014, they joined forces with Rebar, a local art and design studio responsible for the first PARKing Day. Gehl had already been working in the city for three years on the Better Market Street project, which was stalled due to an extensive multi-year environmental review process. Market Street stands as the city’s most iconic and frequented thoroughfare—a grand 38-meter- (120-foot-) wide boulevard stretching 4.8 kilometers (3 miles) from the Embarcadero waterfront on San Francisco Bay to the hills of Twin Peaks in the geographical center of the city. It is also San Francisco’s transit backbone, where a majority of the city’s municipal transit (MUNI) bus and underground train lines converge with the Bay Area Regional Transit (BART) system.

  The planning process for a Better Market Street began in 2009, when state and federal funding was offered to repave the corridor in order to improve transit speeds and reliability. Like the initial incarnation of Utrecht’s Vredenburg, Market Street moves a tremendous number of people—over a quarter million on public transit and hundreds of thousands on foot each day—but suffered from the same inefficiencies, where trams and buses were forced to mix with cyclists and single-occupant vehicles, often causing them to fall behind schedule. Design concepts had been developed and rejected. A solution satisfactory to all stakeholders seemed unlikely, and the project threatened to languish forever.

  That is, until Risom and his team got involved. Gehl was the urban-design lead of a large consortium of internationally recognized design firms selected in 2010 to redesign Market Street; the team included Perkins+Will, CMG Landscape Architecture, David Parisi, and NelsonNygaard. “Market Street is basically the transit and infrastructural backbone of the city,” explains Risom. “It’s the spine where all the transit lines converge, and then diverge to the various spokes.” Along with Market Street’s status as a transit workhorse, Gehl also had to respect its requirements for public space, for local businesses, and for private vehicles—and Gehl had to listen to the 12,000-member-strong San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. “Because of that highly contentious nature, and the impending intensive environmental review of major capital projects, it lent itself to an incremental prototyping approach,” Risom reveals. “Rather than a grand plan, it’s more about the grassroots, scrappy, do-what
-you-can style. That’s what San Francisco culture has been about. The challenge was to still combine that scrappy, do-what-you-can style with a bold vision.”

  The Intersection Center for the Arts, which bills itself as “the oldest alternative nonprofit art space in San Francisco,” had held a small prototyping festival in 2014 that captured the more constructive side of San Francisco’s spirit. But they had to fight through the considerable red tape (over 80 permits were needed to activate a disused block-long section of a street adjacent to Market). To pull off another prototyping festival, this time along several blocks stretching the length of Market Street, the group would need outside support. Risom looked to leverage Gehl’s outsider’s perspective together with this local energy and creativity, and so he introduced the Knight Foundation to the concept of reimagining Market Street thorough prototyping, long familiar to local organizations like Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and its executive director, Deborah Cullinan, and the head of urban design at the Department of City Planning, Neil Hrushowy. In 2015, they all collaborated on a much larger prototyping festival along the entire length of Market Street. For just a few days, residents could experience how a more inviting, inclusive, and livable street felt, and how it could function as both destination and thoroughfare. “That was really important, because it allowed a lot of people to understand what the street could become, in a much more playful and visionary way,” Risom explains, recalling the temporary sidewalk, cycle track, and seating treatments that were tested during this time.

  Later that year, looking to extend the spirit of that short festival to a more permanent vision for the street, the cohort teamed up with Mayor Ed Lee’s Office of Civic Innovation. They established a number of “Living Innovation Zones”—envisioned as “streetlets”: slightly larger variations on the “parklet,” located on the sidewalk—along Market Street. There they provided “blank canvases,” either vertical frontages or rooftops on underutilized portions of the street, where permitting rules would be streamlined and partners were encouraged to be creative in providing space for walking, cycling, seating, and gathering. More partners came to the fore, including the Yerba Buena Community Benefit District and the San Francisco Department of Public Works.

  Through these initiatives, despite San Francisco’s notoriety for its red tape, Risom and the cohort of collaborators made it clear to everyone involved: This was a bureaucracy-free zone. “That was the idea, to provide a space where some of the rules could be easily bent, and where we could actually try stuff,” he recalls. “But not purely run-of-the-mill, boring planning stuff. We said, ‘Hey, let’s partner with fun folks like the Exploratorium [San Francisco’s Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception] and see what they would like to do with that canvas.”

  These activities and events, including pop-up libraries, ping pong tables, and interactive art installations, started attracting a wide range of citizens—inviting more of the kind of meeting, learning, and playing usually reserved for parks or plazas, but rarely seen on streets—and a new vision for Market Street began to emerge. Not only did this eye-opening event appear to get the Market Street scheme back on track, but the data collected by Gehl before, during, and after the prototyping festival helped decision makers revise and refine their goals. “The data we collected was one of the first times someone counted all modes of traffic at the same time: transit users, drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists, all mapped simultaneously,” Risom discloses. “We also measured how people experienced the street. Not just moving through the street, but spending time on it: sitting, standing, playing. We call them ‘stationary activities.’” That shift from quantitative to qualitative data has been critical, and Risom’s team spent a fair amount of time training City workers in their methods: “Now the City does a lot of that collection themselves, and they use that data about street life and use to actively inform their decision-making process.”

  In July 2017, a final design (inspired by Gehl’s work, but ultimately produced by the City) with a $604-million budget was revealed to the public, including generous 6-meter- (20-foot-) wide sidewalks, 2.5-meter (8-foot-) wide protected bike lanes, and dedicated public-transit lanes. While this 3.5-kilometer (2.2-mile) stretch won’t be completely car-free, it restricts through traffic sufficiently in the hopes that, like Vredenburg, that inevitable next step can be made within a decade with minimal blowback.

  Figure 7-4: The new vision for San Francisco’s iconic and much-frequented Market Street includes eight-foot-wide protected bike lanes. (Credit: San Francisco Public Works)

  In addition to building a better Market Street, the SFMTA is also in the process of enhancing the Embarcadero, the 4.8-kilometer (3-mile), at-grade, bayside corridor that was the site of one of America’s most prominent and dramatic freeway removals, albeit, unlike Utrecht’s careful canal reclamation, not by choice. Built in the car-mad 1960s, the Embarcadero Freeway was an elevated, double-decker monstrosity that partially collapsed during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, suddenly reconnecting downtown San Francisco and the surrounding neighborhoods to the city’s waterfront, including popular attractions like the Ferry Building, Fisherman’s Wharf, and adjacent beaches. In light of the decision-making paralysis that plagues the city, it seemed unlikely politicians would ever slate this highway for demolition, as replacing the structure would have been far too costly. But Mother Nature forced their hand—and San Francisco is a more vibrant, connected, and enjoyable place because of it.

  Now, as they embark on a visionary redesign process similar to the transformation of Market Street, city officials and advocates have sky-high hopes for the Embarcadero as a world-class public space that prioritizes people over automobiles. This will likely include the calming of through traffic, a significant increase in the size of spaces to walk and gather, and the conversion of painted bike lanes to ones that are fully protected.

  But Risom warns against oversimplifying and over-romanticizing the idea of freeway removal, particularly in the North American context. “There haven’t been too many situations like the Embarcadero, where it was caused by natural disaster,” he suggests. “I think it’s hard. We have a glorified idea that if we demolish or repurpose this big piece of infrastructure, everything will be okay. But it’s really expensive to do. It’s a real challenge to activate large spaces like that in an inviting and human-scale way. It’s a lot better just not to have built it in the first place.”

  Many of Gehl’s clients in smaller US cities such as Akron, Ohio, are now trying to figure out what to do with the interstate highways bisecting their city centers, and, unfortunately, Risom has no easy answer for them. “They think, ‘Oh, we’ll make the High Line,” says Rison, referring to a popular reclamation of an elevated freight rail line in Manhattan. “‘Or we’ll do this or that.’ But we have to tell them, ‘No you won’t, because this is eighteen times the scale of the High Line, in an area with one-twentieth the population density.’ We’ve got to be really careful with that. It’s romantic and it’s interesting. But I think it’s way more challenging than we imagine.”

  Whether it’s Market Street or the Embarcadero, San Francisco is well on its way to building more-inclusive streets, but Risom fears that cultural inertia may be too difficult to overcome. “I think San Francisco has a huge NIMBY problem. They are paralyzed, crippled by their fear of change and the vested interests that don’t want things to change. So it’s a huge problem. For the city to become more affordable, more has to be built. So it handcuffs cities in this lose–lose situation,” he laments.

  But he certainly sees prototyping and data collection as two valuable tools in surmounting that inertia: “Our hope is by getting good data, we can do some ‘myth busting’ to get on the same page and have different views, but rational conversations about what is actually happening out there. That way we can address natural fear of change, and minimize risk by doing learning as we go. If we can combine that iterative approach with a bold vision and high ambitions for creating invitatio
ns for all people,” he says, “then we’re on the right track.”

  08 USE BIKES TO FEED TRANSIT

  The bicycle is not an alternative for the car. Neither is the train. The combination, though …

  — MARCO TE BRÖMMELSTROET

  Academic Director, University of Amsterdam Urban Cycling Institute

  As a country, the Netherlands—it could be argued—is one of the most well connected in Europe. Their fast and frequently running rail network, consisting of almost 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) of track, ensures that no matter where someone lives or works, they are in close proximity to a station. It therefore comes as no surprise that the nationwide system serves over 1.2 million passengers each and every day, half of whom bookend their train travel with bicycle rides—chiefly because of the practicality evidenced by Utrecht’s massive investment in bike-parking facilities, which nevertheless some suggest will fail to provide enough capacity, even when complete.

  Referred to as the bike–train combination, this remarkably seamless, door-to-door system draws the envy of transportation planners outside the Netherlands who are clamoring to find ways to get their residents to choose other, more-efficient modes over the single-occupant vehicle. But how those Dutch officials got to today isn’t nearly as straightforward, and—as with many policy decisions across the country—has more to do with responding to existing conditions, rather than proactively planning to affect them. “I don’t know if ‘coincidence’ is the right word,” speculates Roland Kager, “but I believe that, while of course each individual component of the bike–train system has been planned, there was never serious policy that envisioned it as a whole, and consequently constructed it. If something happened, it was more of a reactive policy, and that was true until recently.”