Bike Networks Now!

Dr. Meredith Glaser is the CEO of the Urban Cycling Institute , an urban planning lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, and a Professor of Cycling at Ghent University. This conversation is part of a series with leading European bike thinkers. Austin, Albuquerque, and Albany aren’t Amsterdam, but there’s a lot we can learn from how European cities have navigated many of the same challenges we fa...

This is a conversation with Ruth Oldenziel, an emeritus professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology and an expert on the history of technology. Ruth is the program leader of the Cycling Cities Project, a research initiative to understand what has worked and what hasn't to make bike transportation a reality in cities across the globe. I wanted to talk to Ruth about that research, how some E...

The bike story in Boston in recent years has been tumultuous. Mayor Michelle Wu was originally a champion of the cause. Then she got cold feet. Now, perhaps, she’s back on board. What happened in Boston? How do we lose political allies? How do leaders sour on biking? And what can we learn to keep them on board even when the going gets tough? Tiffany Cogell is the Interim Executive Director of the...

Jon Orcutt has more than 30 years of experience shaping transportation policy. He was the Director of Policy at the New York City Department of Transportation from 2007-2014, during the halcyon years of the department during the mayorship of Michael Bloomberg. That means he was the lieutenant to Janette Sadik-Khan, one of the most influential leaders in the modern street-transformation movement. H...

“There is rarely ever any negative feedback on these projects.” Bet you’ve rarely heard those words associated with a bikeway or street safety development project. But in Indianapolis, because of the city’s enlightened tactical urbanism program, it’s become the norm. Every city transportation official should study the Indy program. And every city have their own tactical urbanism program. In this s...

Dave Snyder is a battle-tested bike advocate and social entrepreneur. He revived and led the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition for 11 years. He founded Transportation for a Livable City and the SF Transit Riders Union. He led the California Bike Coalition for a decade. And then he was the Senior Director for Infrastructure at PeopleForBikes. Despite decades as the consummate insider — indeed, inform...

Why isn’t tactical urbanism more common? On the grandest scale, it was good enough for New York City in the redesign of Times Square. Why aren’t we using this to figure out how to make streets better all the time? Indianapolis hasn’t quite done that, but they are one of the few cities with has a formal Tactical Urbanism program. 00:00 — Why Tactical Urbanism Matters 03:26 — What Tactical Urbanism...

Our guest is John Simmerman, founder of Active Towns. John travels around the world trying to understand what’s working well in active transportation systems and what’s not. He chronicles his adventures on the excellent Active Towns podcast and his prolific Active Towns YouTube channel. 00:00 — The Idea of “Activity Assets” 05:14 — Streets for People and Human Flourishing 09:54 — How We Gave the S...

In this conversation, we’re headed to Blacksburg, Virginia, the home of Virginia Tech. In previous episodes, we’ve investigated the state of biking in big metropolitan areas – Denver, New Orleans, Houston, Portland. Blacksburg, by contrast, is a college town with a population of 45,000. When school is in session, the population almost doubles. So what’s it like trying to get around this college to...

On this episode, we’re headed to Portland, which is to many people the Xanadu of American bike cities. If I only had a quarter for every time someone, talking about biking, has wistfully started a sentence with, “In Portland…” What is the reality on the ground in Portland? It’s ranked 8th for cities its size in the PeopleForBikes City Ratings. Is its reputation deserved? And why have recent times...

In this episode, we're headed to Houston. If you’re like, “Biking in Houston?!” that's exactly why this is one of the conversations I've been most looking forward to. Houston is the punchline in a lot of national conversations about cars and sprawl—the fourth-largest city in the country, defined in the popular imagination by freeways and heat and distance. The city rating from PeopleForBikes for H...

My guest today has spent years building the tools that let us actually measure whether that is indeed true. Martina Haggerty is the vice president of infrastructure at People for Bikes, where she leads the great bike infrastructure and the city ratings initiatives, which score hundreds of cities on how well their bike networks actually connect people to the places they want to go. They call this t...

If there’s one picture that summarizes the vision of a modern innovation approach to building complete bike networks, it’s this: a small child on a 16-inch bicycle on a New York City street. She’s not ripping along with an urban ninja’s grimace on her face; rather, she’s serpentining joyfully as kids do.

My guest is Andy Boneau, the Director of Transportation for the City of Richmond and the author of the Substack Urbanism Speakeasy, which he’s been writing since 2013. His 2024 book is called “Neighborhood Character: 365 Daily Affirmations for Defenders of the Status Quo (2024).” A recent post he wrote called “Here's why the status quo keeps winning” caught my eye and I wanted to have him on to ta...

We’ve only succeeded if huge numbers of people use the complete bike network we create. Without that outcome, it’s just a bunch of inanimate signs and concrete. Part of our work to activate the network is to reframe how people perceive biking. We need to up our advertising and communications game. Those of us who already ride bikes know how awesome it is, but that perception isn’t widely shared.

Among those cultural changes cities need to make is a shift in the research questions they ask. Once you’ve done enough innovation work and taken enough lumps from getting it wrong, you know not to touch the question “What would you do?” with a ten-foot pole. Behavioral psychology has shown us that people aren’t good at predicting their future behavior. Instead, we need to ask people questions abo...

In this conversation, we’re taking a good look at Minneapolis. Laura Mitchell is the previous board president of Our Streets, the main advocacy group in the city. She’s now the founder of the Minnesota Cargo Bike Library. And Patrick Stephenson is a long-time Minneapolis bike person. He’s the founder of 30 Days of Biking and the Joyful Riders Club.

One of the strangest ironies is that cities already have many of the techniques described above. We have the tools to create complete networks, but we don’t use them. It’s also quite clear that we’re not getting enough people on bikes. Yet we persist with the status quo approach to building bike networks.

After a decade of observation and advocacy, I’ve become convinced that endless conflict to build bike networks is a failed strategy. It’s the bike equivalent of trench warfare: unacceptably limited progress and massive costs in time, money, and pain.

David Meza is the Community Programs Coordinator and Adam Davies is a Board Member at Bike Easy, the bike advocacy group in New Orleans. We’ve been collaborating on a low-stress bike map over the last few months and I’ve been fascinated by the challenges in New Orleans that are at once unique and quite familiar based on what I’ve seen in cities across the country. So we’re here today to discuss th...

The bike movement’s struggle is rooted in two problems: 1. Inadequate Political Support – We need broad coalitions that impel mayors and city councils to give local departments of transportation mandates to build and activate complete bike networks. 2. Inability to Execute – We need incentives designed to produce actual ridership and an entrepreneurial innovation model to actually make it happen....

Any battle-hardened entrepreneur will tell you there’s no such thing as a complete or finished product. Rather, a product is always imperfect and there are always opportunities to refine and optimize. Throughout the process of creating a complete network, we should have our ear to the ground, observing what’s working well and what needs improvement. Quantitative insights come from digital infrastr...

Bill Nesper is the Executive Director of the League of American Bicyclists, the voice of bike advocacy at the federal level. We talk with Bill about where bike advocacy needs to grow, getting people on bikes to experience “the good life,” and building a more mainstream movement.

Having resolved many of the low-hanging fruit upgrades to our complete bike network, we turn our attention to the big, chunky projects – many of which exist in a city’s bike master plan. Some of these are projects that the status quo approach would address first: protected bike lanes on big, gnarly arterial streets, dedicated signals, new trails, etc. The Network First approach is quite different....

The creation of network version 1.0 is a huge milestone. It’s a dramatic departure from the status quo approach to networks that theoretically take 25 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete – but never really happen. Nonetheless, our work is far from over. Entrepreneurs are their own worst critics and recognize that their products are never fully optimized. Network version 2.0, whic...