The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

Cycling deadlock

I was recently introduced to the Wheeled Pedestrian blog. He is best described as a former cycling advocate. A bit disgruntled perhaps. He was lamenting the failure of cycling advocacy to achieve anything:

Progress will remain stalled while advocates fail to reflect on the reasons why they are failing. It is too convenient to blame AT. — @MarkBracey on twitter

I have made a dot map of cycling mode share a while ago. Now also on Observable. One dot for every quantum of 3 responses to the NZ Census. If you have a strong computer you can get an idea of the sheer difference in uptake between cycling and driving:

Sometimes the simplest of visualisations is the most bluntly clear. If we want cycling to be mainstream we have worse problems than just the lack of infrastructure.

Remember back when they proposed a few rule changes, including a proposition to allow cyclists to ride on the footpath? Bike Auckland has supported this for a long time.

But somehow, Generation Zero blundered into opposing it, mostly for ideological reasons.

And even though their points make sense I think this opposition was misguided. To explain why, we have to understand why we can’t have bike lanes.

Getting people on bikes

The problem with building bike lanes is not that we don’t know how to do it. I can probably do it myself with a can of paint, a few wheelbarrows of concrete and some wooden formwork. Europe figured this out decades ago. No, the problem is convincing people it is a good idea to do this.

Just how low is cycling mode share? Well, look at this map, and think about what it means:

The highlighted area is a SA2 unit, over 2000 people, and not a single cyclist was counted. (strictly speaking, no quantum of 3 cyclists, but you get the gist). There are several others nearby with exactly 0 reported bike mode share. In the north, Albany and surroundings is similarly low.

(and before you ask: cycling to education is even more lopsided)

We are well beyond the point where most people don’t ride a bicycle to work. We have areas of thousands of people, from whom less than 10 rides to work or study. If you’re on Bike Twitter all day, let this sink in.

Most people don’t even know anyone who rides a bicycle to work.

You can start to see why it is so difficult to get support for bike lanes. It is hard to imagine anyone using them if if nobody in your community rides a bicycle. Riding a bicycle to the grocery store is as alien as riding the horse to the grocery store.

It is in this context that the law changes were proposed. One of which is to allow cycling on footpaths. Will it solve all our cycling woes? Of course not. But sometimes you have to choose pragmatism over idealism. One step in breaking the deadlock.

We are starting from scratch

This is not the Netherlands of the 1970’s. We don’t have a broad section of society who are still riding bicycles from which to draw support. We are starting from almost zero. Our problem is not building bike lanes, our problem is getting anyone to support it.

Bootstrapping cycling

This is a post which got split into 3 parts:

• The cycling deadlock (you’re here)
• Best practice bicycle infrastructure or nothing?
• Cycling on the footpath

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