|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
“If a country builds a few hundred golf courses it ends up with a some ten-thousand entitled men driving around in little carts – claiming to do sports.
If a country builds a few thousand pickleball courts it ends up with millions of all kinds of people doing sports – thinking they play a game.” [Zarathustra]
According to Zarathustra, governing is fairly easy here. You plan for the desired outcome and then build the infrastructure that leads you there.
County and City leaders (C/CAG) must know that too. They have hired third party consultants, paid millions in fees and salaries, spent hours with staff and volunteers to develop all kinds of plans, and told them the same thing. If you build it, they will come:
- Rail Corridor Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Plan (2005)
- Truck Study Route (2008)
- North Central Community Based Transportation Plan (2011)
- San Mateo Bicycle Master Plan (2011)
- San Mateo Pedestrian Master Plan (2012)
- Countywide Shared Vision 2025 (2013)
- San Mateo Sustainable Streets Plan (2015)
- Caltrans District 4 Bicycle Plan (2017)
- Green Infrastructure Plan (2019)
- San Mateo Bicycle Master Plan (2020)
- C/CAG Comprehensive Bike/Pedestrian Plan (2021)
- Bay Area Plan 2050 (2021)
- C/CAG of San Mateo County Youth-Based High Injury Network (HIN) Report (2022)
- TOD Pedestrian Access Plan (2022)
- San Mateo Strive 2040 General Plan (2023)
- North Central Complete Streets Plan (2023)
- Countywide Shared Vision 2025 (2023)
Especially in the Bay Area, there are a lot of advantages to support pickleball courts over the golf courses. Golf courses need so much water and are a wasteful form of land use in a valuable metropolitan area like this. If you want people to exercise, move, be healthy and happy, pickleball courts are a much better and more economical choice.
The same is true for car-centric transportation. That is why all these plans basically say the same thing: Improve Public Transportation and improve Active Transportation. These are the most important modes of transportation now and in the future. But that requires real infrastructure improvements for bus service (bus shelters, bus schedules, bus lanes) and real infrastructure for people walking or biking.
San Mateo City Council just violated all of their plans
Plans are set, let’s get to work and create the infrastructure. And then five San Mateo City Council members (Mayor Rob Newsom Jr., Adam Loraine, Lisa Diaz Nash, Danielle Cwirko-Godycki, Nicole Fernandez) came along and apparently decided that all those plans must have been hogwash. The justification for attacking an Equity Focus Area like North Central at its core was that there is just not enough ‘Bicycle Culture’ in North Central to justify ‘Bicycle Infrastructure‘ here. The Mayor took a personal stroll down the street and didn’t see enough cyclists on a rainy evening. So the 2-year-old Humboldt Street Bike Lanes needed to go and District 2 council member Nicole Fernandez did not exactly stand up for her district either. She just let the discrimination happen. Or using our earlier example … the entitled culture behind these golf carts is more important to these San Mateo city leaders than promoting more people playing pickleball.
Well maybe, just maybe … is there a chance these five city council Democrats know something the rest of the world doesn’t? Is their opinion worth more than the millions spent on experts, staff hours, and volunteer hours to create some 20 plans, saying they are wrong?
Is “Culture” The Chicken or The Egg?
Now in Northern Europe this wouldn’t even be a question, the bike lanes would have stayed. But Northern Europe historically has a “bicycle culture” and North America does not. Which brings us to the following question:
- Are people in Europe commuting more by bicycle because of “Culture”?
- Are people in Europe commuting more by bicycle because of “Infrastructure”?
This is basically the old “The Chicken or The Egg” discussion. Is Infrastructure leading to culture, or do American children need to find bicycle culture first before they deserve infrastructure?
But of course we cannot trust these European Researchers who grew up with “bicycle culture”. But we can trust North American researchers who grew up around good old “car culture” and must, therefore, love it.
So let’s make the case that “Bicycle Infrastructure Always Eats Bicycle Culture For Breakfast” the only way Americans understand: baseball-style. We are counting balls and strikes.
1997 – Nelson and Allen (doi.org/10.3141/1578-10)
“If you Build Them, Commuters Will Use Them. – Association Between Bicycle Facilities and Bicycle Commuting”
The use of large aggregated datasets has suggested that there is a correlation between the amount of bicycle facilities and the rate of bicycle ridership. One of the first types of this type of study, conducted by Arthur Nelson and David Allen (1997) used a before and after analysis of 18 cities to look at the relationship between the installation of bicycle facilities and their effect on bicycle commuting. They also looked at a myriad of other variables including mean temperature, number of rainy days, percent of students and number of bicycle pathways against bicycle commute rates. Their results found that, “each mile of bikeway per 100,000 residents is associated with a 0.069 percent increase in commuters using bicycles, holding other factors constant” (Nelson and Allen 1997)
2003 – Jennifer Dill and Theresa Carr (doi.org/10.3141/1828-14)
The Dill and Carr study used the 35 largest cities, excluding “college towns” in the United States. Using a regression analysis, they found a strong correlation between commute rates and the number of bicycle lanes and paths that were built.
2007 – Tilahun, Levinson, Krisek (doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2006.09.007)
A study by Nebiyou Tilahun, David Levinson, Kevin J. Krizek found that individuals were willing to choose different types of infrastructure at the cost of travel time. By having survey participants select their preferences from pictures with and without bicycle lanes, the researchers found that individuals were willing to add more travel time to use off-road bicycle facilities than unmarked streets with on-street parking.
2008 – Jennifer Dill and John Gliebe (doi.org/10.15760/trec.151)
In their study, 164 adults showed that individuals placed high importance on directness of their route and avoiding streets with heavy vehicular traffic. In some cases, the study participants would go out of their way to utilize low traffic streets over higher trafficked streets with bicycle lanes, which supports the Krizek study (2009). Additionally, there was a clear difference between route choice and gender, which supports the findings that Emond, et al (2009) found in their stated preference study.
It is shown that streets with speeds reduced to less than 20 mph have fewer injuries than streets that have not reduced their speeds (Grundy et al. 2009). Coincidentally, these low speed streets are the same streets that Dill and Gliebe highlight as preferred by cyclists.
Individuals will have to choose between traveling on high-traffic streets with bicycle lanes, which are direct, or traveling on roads with no facilities that are not direct but have less traffic. In the Dill and Gliebe study, it showed that individuals were more willing to go against their stated preference by traveling out of their way to avoid unfavorable facilities. Ultimately, this change was at a cost to the directness of the route.
2009 – Krizek, Barnes, Thompson (doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9488(2009)135:2(66))
Kevin Krizek studied bicycle facilities in Minneapolis/St. Paul used U.S. census data from 1990 to 2000 to correlate with the availability of bicycle infrastructure. Individuals living near bicycle facilities significantly increased bicycle mode share (BMS). Additional findings included that men preferred to live in communities where bicycle facilities already exist, while women preferred to live in communities that they felt safe.
2011 – J. Pucher (Rutgers University) and R. Buehler (Virginia Tech) (doi.org/10.1007/s11116-011-9355-8)
In the recent study using similar data, Buehler and Pucher expanded the dataset to include the largest 90 cities in the United States. Using similar methods, they found similar results, which confirmed that there was a similar correlation between the presence of bicycle lanes and paths and the percentage of individuals who bicycle to work.
2019 Veillette, Grise, El-Geneidy, Quebec (doi.org/10.1177/0361198119844741)
Does One Bicycle Facility Type Fit All?
“For cities wishing to foster a strong culture of cycling, developing a network of safe and efficient bicycle infrastructure is paramount“
The research only looks at real bicycle facilities like recreational paths, bi-directional protected lanes, and painted bike lanes. Survey participants seem to prefer recreational paths (Class 1). There is no clear preference between painted bike lanes (Class 2) and protected bike lanes (Class 4). This seems like a case-by-case and personal preference issue.
2019 Marshall, Ferenchack (doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2019.03.004)
According to their report “Why cities with high bicycling rates are safer for all road users.”, Wesley E. Marshall (CU Denver) and Nicholas N. Ferenchak (University of New Mexico, Albuquerque) looked at thirteen years of data from twelve large U.S. cities. They investigated over 17,000 fatalities and 77,000 severe injuries across nearly 8700 block groups via multilevel, longitudinal, negative binomial regression models.
“In the most comprehensive look at bicycle and road safety to date, researchers at the University of Colorado Denver and the University of New Mexico discovered that it’s not the cyclists, but the infrastructure built for them, that is making roads safer for everyone.” [CU Denver]
Their results suggested that more bicyclists are not the reason why these cities are safer for all road users. Better safety outcomes are instead associated with a greater prevalence of bike facilities – particularly protected and separated bike facilities – at the block group level and, more strongly so, across the overall city. Higher intersection density, which typically corresponds to more compact and lower-speed built environments, was strongly associated with better road safety outcomes for all road users.
Strike One – What do U.S. Researchers say?
Q: So are these five city council members bringing something new to the table with their “bicycle culture” vs “car culture” discussion?
A: That is a very big NO and Strike One against city leadership – at least according to U.S. researchers.
“A network of safe bicycle lanes is the single biggest predictor for the level of cycling in any city in the world. It’s significantly more important than any other metric, including culture, distance, hills, and weather. After a safe bicycle network, the next most important element is snow removal.” [ NotJustBikes ]
“Bicycle Culture” in America is mostly defined by how many people are riding their bicycles. And the cult that is done around the topic. The City of San Mateo already flunked on the goal to “increase the mode share of bicycle and pedestrian travel to 30% for trips one mile or less by 2020.” Instead of taking the blame for not installing infrastructure, we can be sure city leadership is blaming “the lack of bicycle culture” for this as well.
But U.S. researchers are telling us the same thing over and over again. Culture doesn’t get you anywhere fast. First you need to start building infrastructure – no matter if we talk about bicycles or pickleball.
More Information
- 2011 Ruttgers: Cycling to work in 90 large American cities
- CU Denver: Cycling lanes, not cyclists, lower road fatalities
- ScienceDirect: Why cities with high bicycling rates are safer for all road users
- ScienceDirect: Suppressed child pedestrian and bicycle trips as an indicator of safety
Editor’s Note: The views and opinions expressed in all blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Redwood City Pulse or its staff.
