Reflections on Bike to Work Week 2023

Bike to Work Week: Gathering at New Bo City Market
 for Thursday night's group ride

"Small cities must become safe. They are not safe just because they are small."--GILBERT PENALOSA 

I feel bad about criticizing last week's Bike-to-Work-Week because I had a lot of fun, and the people who ran it were friendly and I know they worked hard to pull it off. But I don't feel bad enough to refrain from criticism, because this year's heavy tilt towards recreational trail riding missed the opportunity to do the vital task of promoting bicycle commuting on the streets where we live. 

From Cedar Rapids Climate Action Plan (2021):
You can't get there in an SUV, nor in a giant truck
even if it's electric

Should we not celebrate the tremendous strides our community has made towards a trails network? We are about two years away from connecting all parts of the city as well as outlying areas in a way that will serve daily commuters as well as recreational riders. 

Yes, we should celebrate! But the dailiness of bicycle commuting makes it uniquely crucial to solving the problems caused by decades of auto-centric design.

(1) Bicycle commuting is different from trail riding. 

Commuting differs from recreational riding in a lot of ways. It's a choice among lifestyles, not just a choice among activities. It requires, in most cases, negotiating space that is particularly crowded during traditional business hours. Even the longest, best-connected trails are only part of the journey; connections to the trails will be made at the start and end of the trip from streets, and those streets were designed for cars. 

This is unavoidable: There are limits to how much land and money we have to work with, and expanding infrastructure, even for worthy reasons, puts more distance between destinations. (Widening streets to accommodate protected bike lanes, for example, makes for longer intersection cross times for pedestrians and wheelchair users.) So we need to get serious about the streets themselves (Negroni 2023).

And once we arrive at work or school--or the store, or your friend's house (see "68% of Ontarians" 2023), bicycle commuting requires secure storage for the hours we're going to spend there. 

Oh dear. (Czech Village, May 2023)

(2) Bicycle commuting requires more than just infrastructure. 

Cedar Rapids has in the last decade built some excellent things: added bike lanes, some of the downtown ones separated, and restored two-way traffic on one-way streets. We pulled off a heroic effort to replant street trees after the August 2020 derecho (cf. Steuteville 2023). This has helped get people onto bicycles--but those riders are and will remain a tiny minority of those going to work or school or errands unless more is done to change the context. 

Huge connection: tunnel under 1st Ave
at about 30th St E

Our goal here is more than infrastructure--way more. Infrastructure is one important means to the end, but it's not the end. The end/goal is to replace car trips with bike (or walking, or bus, &c.) trips on a large scale. To impact everything that needs impacting, we should expand the set of bikers tenfold, from maybe 2.5 percent of the metro population to around 25 percent. [NOTE 7/17/2024: These are numbers I made up. Pro tip: Never do this! According to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 2022, the actual proportion of commuter cyclists is 0.1 percent.]  That's going to require expanding the current profile of bike commuters to include the less confident, women, people of color, and children. (This People for Bikes report from 2021 looks like it might be very interesting in that connection.)

(3) Bicycle commuting addresses public problems, so it should be a priority for policy makers. 

As The War on Cars says, "#carsaretheproblem." Transportation is a primary source of greenhouse gas emissions, and any city serious about its climate action plan needs to think seriously about how people get around (See Litman 2022). To address the rising incidence of traffic deaths, environmental destruction, super-empowered multinational corporations and despotic regimes, traffic congestion, land lost to parking, and household transportation costs, we have to make it attractive for people to drive less. Or not at all. We achieve this only by having safe, reliable alternatives. That's going to require government policy making, if only to help undo the unintended policy consequences of former times. I'm not confident it is city policy, but with all those reasons it should be. 

Awkward interface: Wide sidewalk on C Avenue NE
crosses Collins Road in front of right-turn lane
on the way to Collins Aerospace

Among other things, therefore, elected officials need to take part in Bike to Work Week activities, partly for symbolic support, but mostly because they need to participate in the discussions that will lead to  policy solutions. To be sure, the mayor and city council were elected by constituents who predominantly drive everywhere, but they are also responsible for leading policy making in response to public problems.

(4) But, alas, what needs to be done is less clearly perceived and more difficult to do. 

One of the attractions of trail-building, I expect, is that whatever the difficulties in getting them built, the task itself is quite straightforward. Plan the route, acquire the land, build the trail. And then people use them, even in Iowa with our wildly variable weather. In town, the bike lanes and two-way streets have helped, but we need to do more than accommodate biking, we need to encourage it. How that is done is not clear, but it probably involves working with people more than building things.

In a post last winter, I spitballed some ways policy makers and cycling advocates could encourage more cycling in town. During Bike to Work Week, I pulled some of them to add to the city's wish list boards. I tried to stay away from infrastructure, because as I've said, the obstacles are more and trickier than infrastructure alone can solve.

Opportunity: Loftus Lumber on 3rd Street SE,
 site of future mixed-use high-rise

• Aggressive promotion. Take advantage of the 2,000 or so living units that are coming online in the core of the city over the next year. Shower the new residents with love and attention. Work with building management to schedule biking events, invite them all, get them together with bicycles, get them bus passes. Find out where they work and use that information to improve connectivity.
• Focus on key streets, like Wiley Boulevard SW near the new Westside Library, and the areas around the new schools. How safe is it for a child to walk from the affordable housing clusters to the library? Make it safer. How do children negotiate the crossing of, say 27th or 29th Streets by the new Trailside School? As the video at the bottom of the post argues, the proportion of children walking to school has plummeted in 40 years for a variety of intertwined reasons. As Cedar Rapids enlarges school attendance areas, that will make walking less likely but for older children might not rule out biking.

Truth in mapping:
Stop calling C Avenue NE a "bike-friendly street"

• Slow the cars. Nothing's going to stop someone who's determined to be aggressive, but design choices like narrower lanes can reduce average vehicle speeds to where collisions will be survivable. (See, for example, Gardner 2023.) I'd also like to see more traffic enforcement; I doubt we can enforce our way to safe streets, but I'd like to see some consequences for recklessly dangerous behavior. Finally, the city could push for weight and height limitations on SUVs and pickups, or at least be able to tax them more heavily. (On the dangers of vehicle gigantism, see Benfield 2023 and Muller 2023.)
• Invest in a large random sample survey of public attitudes about cycling. Who isn't cycling that could be, and why not? (Right now we're just reaching a convenience sample of cyclists.) What are concerns unique to women, the physically handicapped, parents of small children, and people of color? What are non-cyclists' attitudes about cyclists, and are there concerns we could address?

Awkward interface: The CeMar Trail,
 heading away from Cedar Lake along H Avenue NE

Besides a focus on making shared streets safer, I'd like to see the city look for ways to make cycling and walking more convenient, comfortable and secure. Availability of plenteous parking should not determine design, because the more parking there is for cars, the greater the distance between destinations, and hence the less convenient to walk or bike. At destinations like schools and job sites where people spend a lot of time, create secure bike sheds rather than relying only on bike racks. More people will ride if they can worry less about theft. 

I'd like to see more emphasis on specific groups who are underrepresented and hence easy to overlook. What about a morning group ride for women? Audits of routes from the perspective of disabled individuals? Outreach to communities of color? Who are the employers, retailers, and such who innovating in making it easier for their employees and customers to get their by bike? 

And then celebrate our progress during the next Bike-to-Work Week!

Much improved interface:
Cedar River Trail crossing 1st Avenue E, 2023

Same intersection, 2014

(I hope they don't make me give the t-shirt back.)

INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: David Jones, "Bike Commuting Statistics: 74 Cycling to Work Stats for 2023," Discerning Cyclist, 5 March 2023 [HT Ron Griffith for this one]

VIDEO: Jason Kottke, "Why Did Kids Stop Walking to School?" (12:38, from kottke.org)