The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

23 Feb 2022

Eliminating barriers to cycling

Last time we saw our cycling route from Birkenhead to Takapuna, and saw how it is almost, but not quite there. Something like 90% there. So, is it 90% as good as 100% there?

Sadly, no.

The four types of cyclists

It is said that there’s 4 types of cyclists, roughly by level of confidence: The ‘Strong & Fearless’, the ‘Enthused & Confident’, The ‘Interested & Concerned’, and the ‘No Way, No How’. A study in Christchurch, New Zealand *1 gives following numbers:

<1%
7%
60%
33%
There are some that come up with 3 categories instead *2, but anyway, the majority of people is interested in cycling, but has a limited tolerance for risk taking.

Here is that map again:

Route, with required cyclist level.

Most of this route, the green parts, is fine for most cyclists of various level of confidence. Not limited to the young, fit, and slightly reckless male. Looking at all the variations of that bar graph above, it would be a viable route for three-quarters of people. That is…

apart from a few red spots. These spots are barriers. If you want to get your 20–30% bike mode share, you have to find those barriers and eliminate them. It is a somewhat familiar situation for a software developer who is old enough to remember the blogosphere.

When you’re trying to get people to switch from a competitor to your product, you need to understand barriers to entry, and you need to understand them a lot better than you think, or people won’t switch and you’ll be waiting tables.
Joel on Software

What is that about being old enough? Maybe I should do something else with my time than writing this stuff?

You have to eliminate these barriers. All of them. Leave a couple of barriers like Taharoto road in, and the reach of your brand new route just went down to the 0.5% or so of Rambo style bicycle warriors, who honestly would have ridden on the road anyway, and all that work building the thing goes the same way as that stuff flowing onto our beaches after a big rainstorm.

As another high profile example: how is that Northwestern cycleway going? It has been there for, what, pushing 20 years now? It is an important central connection, and its bicycle counter is bragging about up to 2,000 people using it on a good day. That is per hour, right?

Um… right?

No. Per entire day. It is still, after all that time, not worth the space it is taking up. Why is that?

This is because Auckland doesn’t understand that, after fixing the barrier of long distance travel to the city, it now has to work on the next barriers. How do you get from your home onto that bikeway? For almost everyone, there will be at least one intersection, or one piece of arterial on the way that scares off all but the most confident. Almost nobody can reach the thing.

Fixing barriers

There are two red things on that map above.

The first one is the right turn on Birkenhead Avenue. The Dutch build these protected intersections, where cyclist ride around little traffic islands which give some safe space to wait for a hook turn. That is how normal people turn right at big intersections. If you tell people to go into some bicycle advance box in the middle of the area for cars you’ve just lost 99% of people.

Now I don’t know how to fit in cars, buses and bicycles, because all of those must be able to pass here. The landscape with all its gullies rules out any parallel routes. But we have this problem on many arterials, and we have to solve it.

You could do a laneway behind Taharoto Road?

The bit with Taharoto Road, the problem here is you are never going to have an easy right turn out of Rangitira Avenue back on Taharoto Road. The solution is perhaps to create a lane behind the road between Northcote Road and Rangitira Avenue.

When these things are fixed, you turn that 90% route into a 95% route… which already makes it 10% as good as the 100% route. It is something. After this we will have to work on barriers that stop the large majority of interested but cautious cyclists who just don’t like to be squeezed between parked cars and driving cars. Luckily, that part isn’t rocket science.


(*2) 

Laura Cabral, Amy M. Kim (2020) An empirical reappraisal of the four types of cyclists, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice Volume 137, July 2020

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