So you want to build some bicycle infrastructure for your city.
Good for you. Cycling is good for the planet as well as your citizens' poorly-nourished, ill-used bodies, and studies show more people are willing to ride if cities provide infrastructure to support them. Protected bike lanes not only make cyclists feel safer, but halve their risk of injury. More infrastructure means more comrades-in-wheels: The folks at Portland State University found that when five major US cities added protected bike lanes, ridership rose 20 to 170 percent.
But maybe you've heard: Building any infrastructure, anywhere, is a pain in the neck. You've got to find exactly the right government agencies, community groups, funding sources, and contractors. And then you've got to figure out the logistics of construction and worry about the inevitable delays and cost overruns.
Don't despair just yet. There's good news for you and your soon-to-be bicycling-loving city. Across the country, usually stodgy governments are trying quick and dirty pilot projects, putting down cheap and temporary bicycle infrastructure and giving it a literal test drive (well, ride) before committing to the big stuff.
If your city can afford some paint to outline bike lanes (less than a hundred bucks a bucket), plastic bollards to protect them (about $150 a pop), and planters (roughly $1,000 each) to separate them from traffic, you can join them. A temporary setup shouldn't cost more than five figures.
By contrast, a fully-realized protected bike lane costs about $445,000 per mile, according to the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. (Infrastructure costs vary widely by location, but compare that to the $280,000 the city spends to install a single traffic signal, or the $571 million per mile spent building Presidio Parkway.) Temporary infrastructure can be built, studied, and scrapped if necessary without too much financial fuss.
Cycling advocacy group PeopleForBikes lays out the trend in a recent report. It cites Memphis, Tennessee; New York; and Seattle among the cities that have embraced quickly deployed, temporary, community-driven projects. The idea is to come in, lay down some paint, and see how cyclists and motorists react.
This "quick-build" method is a welcome break from the old way of doing transportation work, says Wesley Marshall, a civil engineer with the University of Colorado, Denver. "You look at the history of transportation, and it's more of a pseudo-science," he says. "Guidelines and standards feel like they come down from the gods, but you realize how [they're] based on standards built in the 50s, 60s." Today, more Americans are interested in traveling by bike or foot. That requires a more iterative process, Marshall says, one that nimbly constructs---and sometimes kills---experimental bike projects.
New York in the late aughts was a great place to see this approach. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, the city used colorful paint and not-your-mother's planter boxes to speedily delineate bike lanes. In 2009, for example, community groups asked the Department of Transportation for a safer cyclist- and pedestrian-oriented boulevard at the intersections of Pike and Monroe Streets in lower Manhattan.1
Less than a year later, one could gaze down at the street from the Manhattan Bridge and see newly-created bike lanes, buffered from car traffic by plastic bollards and planters, and outlined in colorful asphalt. The city also created a mini pedestrian plaza using a few benches and chairs.
Cyclists loved it. Ridership along the path increased 43 percent for northbound traffic, and 23 percent for southbound. Collisions between cars and bikes dropped 35 percent. The city was so happy it made the changes permanent, creating a concrete buffer for the bike lane and installing hardier outdoor furniture. The whole project, from proposal to pilot to bike lane, took just about three years.
Laying down temporary infrastructure before ginning up anything permanent also provides an opportunity to convince skeptics about the upsides of bike travel. "Demonstration projects go a long way in terms of alleviating fears," says Christopher Monsere, the chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Portland State University.
Once residents see bicycle infrastructure in action, he says, they (usually) decide it doesn't take up too much room or cost too much money. That makes it politically easier to build permanent protected lanes, bike boxes, and signals.
The key to this "quick build" method is banishing the fear of failure. Infrastructure projects that go south are bad for a city's optics, not to mention its budget. (Boston's Big Dig, for example, is now shorthand for "disastrous boondoggle.") Saving money and moving quickly can lead to permanent projects, as long as a city is willing to scrap ideas that don't work out.
"If you don’t like it, say you don’t like it, and get rid of it," says Ahmed El-Geneidy, a transportation planner and associate professor at McGill University's School of Urban Planning in Montreal. "It's not just someone like me sitting in a room and doing some predictions and saying, 'Okay, let's go and make it permanent.'"
Still, a note of caution: Even if bicycle infrastructure projects are temporary, they can be difficult to pry from the strong thighs of cyclists, who tend to be well organized and exceedingly vocal. "You cannot take anything from cyclists---you cannot," says El-Geneidy, who compares riders guarding bike lanes to a lioness protecting her cubs. Any city taking its experimental pilot projects seriously should be ready to face the lion's den.
1Post updated Friday April 15 at 18:10 EST to include the correct location of the NYC DOT project.
