Hats off to Doug Bertie for the recent piece in the Star Tribune about the
lack of "blossoming" of biking in Minneapolis. We were sold that if we just
put in enough bike infrastructure, people would naturally leave their cars
and start biking. We would become Oslo if we just built enough bike lanes.
Of course, this has been coupled with the City actively making it harder to
drive, including removing lanes, putting in fake bike lanes that are there
just to make it harder to drive, removing parking, and building new housing
with drastically too little parking.
But does this thinking hold up? I have been arguing that people are
rational decision-makers in trip taking, by and large. If they could live
without a car, they do. And that most people who drive don't have the
ability to make their lives work without a car. Building more bike
infrastructure just creates underutilized bike infrastructure.
Who is right? Mr. Bertie found:
• "Of 1,843 vehicles counted — motorized vehicles and bicycles — only 46
were bicycles. That is just 2.5 percent, not the 5 percent touted by the
city.
• The estimated width of the motorized vehicle and bicycle lanes was
obtained by hurriedly measuring those lanes with a tape measure in moments
where there was a brief lull in traffic. (The inches measured are good
estimates but could be off by a couple of inches either way.)
The overall width of all the motorized lanes added together is an estimated
3,865 inches. The overall width of the bicycle lanes added together is an
estimated 1,897 inches.
This means that 33 percent of the available roadway has been allocated to
bicycles, which make up 2.5 percent of traffic on those roads.
• Realizing that use of bicycle lanes varies from street to street, it’s
instructive to note that in no case did the proportion of bicycles using a
road come close to the proportion of roadway designated for bicycles. The
closest thing to a “fair share” was observed in Dinkytown, where bicycle
traffic constituted 13 percent of traffic and 29 percent of roadway was
allocated to bicycles.
• These numbers understate the extent to which bicycles are given a
disproportionate share of available roadway because they reflect only the
number of vehicles (including bicycles) and not the number of travelers
involved. When one considers the fact that motorized vehicles often carry
multiple people, and buses carry many, whereas bicycles almost always carry
only one person, the proportion of roadway used by bicyclists becomes even
more disproportionate.
• Wider bicycle lanes do not appear to improve the balance between bicycle
usage and amount of roadway dedicated to bicycles. In fact, the widest
bicycle lanes (each estimated at 176 inches, or 39 percent of the available
roadway) carried 13 bicycles during three measurements compared to 607
motorized vehicles — meaning that bicycles in those situations constituted
2 percent of traffic while commandeering almost 40 percent of the roadway."
So got that? 1/3 of roadway capacity going to 2.5% of users. Meanwhile,
the other 97.5% are slowed from getting to jobs and their family and their
children. Now we could have done this differently. We could have put in
bike infrastructure without making it a zero sum game. We could have
focused where there is actual demand. But we haven't. The needs of a tiny
few now are more important than the needs of the vast majority. I am
always amused because at the federal level, they figured this out a long
time ago. Having one mode fight against another just makes it worse for
both modes.
We can do better. We can create a city where people who need to drive are
not second class citizens to the tiny number able to bike. We can have a
city that works for everyone. If we choose.
Carol Becker
Longfellow