Bike Networks Now!

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...

We now have the toolkit to make streets safer, quieter, and better for neighbors. So we turn our attention to scale and the creation of a complete citywide bike network for people of all ages and abilities. This is the elusive reality that has limited the adoption of bike transportation in America. The days of piecemeal bike lane creation over decades must end. And now we have the tools to do it.

Paul Karolyi & Avi Stopper: A VAMOS Deep Dive This is a podcast trying to figure out how cities can produce complete bike networks, make bike riding a real transportation option. And true to form, this is a different kind of episode oriented around our work here in Denver to get the city to build a complete high-comfort bike network. We think it can be done in a short period of time for a budget t...

A VAMOS Audio Snapshot Transcript This is Avi Stopper from Bike Streets and this is an audio snapshot of what the Vibrant Streets Pilot Program would be like. You’d step out your door, hop on your bike, and ride to the nearest demonstration project location. This would be on a weekend – that’s as long as the initial pilots would last. You would ride a mile or so down a quiet residential street mad...

Once we’ve created solid molecular units, which should take about six months, we graduate to small networks composed of multiple intersecting streets that make neighborhoods more connected, navigable, and delightful. There’s a clear progression from simple atomic units to complex clusters. If we don’t adequately refine our atomic and molecular units, our networks – big and small – will struggle to...

Once satisfied with our atomic units, we assemble atoms into molecules. These are corridors that prioritize bike transportation by linking multiple atomic units in sequence. For example, a series of diverters every 2-4 blocks, that connect to a sidewalk designated as a multi-use path, that, in turn, makes it possible to overcome a challenging boundary and connect to a regional trail.

We’ve now done 10 episodes of the podcast in our quest to understand why bike transportation still isn’t possible for most people in most cities. They’ve been pretty high-level conversations about the bike movement broadly. Over the next five episodes, we’re going local. We’re going to try to learn as many things as we can about how the bike movement is doing in cities across America by talking wi...

Bike Networks Now! Audiobook: Chapter 10. The Atomic Unit Once we’ve deployed digital infrastructure and made it possible for people to find chill routes using the infrastructure that exists today, we turn our attention to upgrading on-the-ground reality. The place to start is with the creation of “atomic units,” design elements that have the potential to scale. These features must: Create safe, h...

Bike Networks Now! Audiobook: Chapter 9. Digital Infrastructure For a map to evolve, it needs a publishing mechanism that’s up to the task of illuminating a bike network years before it’s formalized. Once a city identifies its Best Available Network, the next step is to use digital infrastructure to light it up so people can go use it now. The ramifications are incredible: within six months, any c...

My guest is Carter Lavin, author of the book "If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight" — a guide to effective transportation advocacy. Carter has worked on a wide range of transportation advocacy projects, from rail to bus service to bikeways. As co-founder of the TransBay Coalition, he helped secure a billion dollars in extra funding for transit. Rather than talking in the abstract, I'd like to e...

Bike Networks Now! Audiobook: Chapter 8. The Best Available Network A map is a key to unlock the world around us. And as the world around us is imperfect, and there are no direct, human-sized pneumatic tubes from A-to-B, a map is the best representation of how to navigate imperfection. The first step cities need to take to create complete, connected high-comfort bike networks is to create a Low-St...

Bike Networks Now! Audiobook: Chapter 7. The North Star The point of building bike infrastructure is to get people to ride bikes. So it seems obvious that we should set straightforward goals for every project: X daily riders and an increase of Y systemwide. This is the North Star we need to guide our work and challenge us to doggedly pursue meaningful results. But few projects have these kinds of...

This is a conversation with August Ritter, Managing Director of Global Portfolio Management at The Nature Conservancy, where he oversees a 150 million dollar global conservation fund across 79 countries. In 2021, August brought me on as Entrepreneur in Residence to lead an early-stage team working on a new strategy and bring modern innovation strategies to the table. August is a leading light in b...

Bike Networks Now! Audiobook: Chapter 6. Time Plus Money Equals Risk One of the most surprising qualities in exceptional innovators is an ability to carefully manage risk, which comes in the form of time and money. This preoccupation with risk management is counterintuitive. In popular perception, entrepreneurship and innovation is about making big bets. That’s certainly one approach: OpenAI expec...

Bike Networks Now! Audiobook: Chapter 5. Exhibit A for "Abundance" Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book “Abundance” calls out the inability of blue cities and states over recent decades to build the stuff that voters want: housing, high-speed rail, and the medical breakthroughs we desperately need. “Countless dollars,” they observe, “Were spent on health insurance, housing vouchers, and infrastruc...

In this conversation, we’re gonna flip the script. A few weeks ago, I got an email from two 8th graders, Cooper and Hugo, who were working on a school project about how they can help get better bike lanes in the area. I love it when young people care about civic issues – during the 2020 pandemic election, I co-led a project with some local high schoolers and Princeton students to recruit young peo...