What would our streets look like if we gave them back to the people? In my opinion, they'd look a lot like boardwalks.
Recently I've been spending a bunch of time on the Asbury Park boardwalk. Just to orient you, the boardwalk runs north-south. To the east is the beach and the Atlantic Ocean. To the west is Ocean Avenue, on the western side of which lie a number of cultural attractions, including the Stone Pony, where Bruce Springsteen still shows up occasionally to jam. Madam Marie's is actually on the boardwalk, along with a bunch of pavilions that contain restaurants, saloons, a pinball museum that also sells pizza, and a variety of retail shops ranging from schlock to above my pay grade.
Towards the north, and straddling the boardwalk, lies Convention Hall, which has a bunch of shops, two theaters, two saloons, an oyster bar, and one of my favorite coffee shops in the world. I have to say that my favorite favorite coffee shop in Asbury Park is Volan, which is over in the business district, near Cookman Avenue.
Towards the south, near the Methodist camp meeting site known as Ocean Grove, is something called the Casino, which figured greatly in television news broadcasts after Hurricane Sandy. The Casino is a wreck. It was a wreck many years before Sandy. But still it was a good backdrop, and it helped bring money to the Jersey shore at an important time, so I'm not complaining about the journalistic shorthand. The main attraction at the Casino is the guy with the keyboard who plays carousel tunes - there once was a carousel in the carousel house next to the Casino, but it's not there anymore.
The Teacup
My favorite part of the boardwalk is the Teacup. It lies about midway between Convention Hall and the Casino, and it is part of a children's water park. The Teacup is very large and sits on a high podium; it fills slowly as the little children stand below, and when it is full it tips over and showers them - inundates them - with water. The children squeal with delight and run around. I stand and watch this, and I am delighted.
Photo by Alicia West
The Teacup tells us something about fun, and it reminds us that we were not necessarily designed for the world that we now live in. And here's the thing: the whole boardwalk is that way. It shows us, pretty much, what streets were like before the cars came.
Streets used to be about people on foot - pedestrians. Of course there were other occupants of the road, mainly horse-drawn wagons, carriages, and streetcars, but pedestrians set the tone, and most traffic didn't go much faster than a brisk walk.
And the street was not just for coming and going. It was also for socializing and entertainment - for dwelling. It was okay to stop in the middle of the street and talk to a friend you had just run into. And people did not march down the right side of the street in columns of four, like infantry regiments on parade. They wandered, they swirled, they doubled back to look at something interesting. Pretty much the way they behave on a boardwalk today.
No Lines, No Signs
Naturally there are those who would like to organize the traffic on the boardwalk, make it look more like the car traffic on the street. In Asbury Park even some bicyclists find the random, impulsive, darting behavior of pedestrians frustrating, and there has been talk of striping bicycle lanes on the boardwalk.
But the search for order misses the point. Carving up the boardwalk with separate lanes for different uses would simply turn it into a modern street. In the old street nobody owned a lane, and the pedestrian had the right of way over the street's larger, faster denizens.
And in fact there were no lane stripes. There were no traffic signals. People actually had to deal with one another and negotiate their paths. This goes on today, every day, on the Asbury Park boardwalk.
The system was a bit chaotic, but it allowed people to behave naturally, and everybody was moving slowly.
Scorchers
This approach to life on the street had been around for millennia, but it began to break down in the 1890's, with the arrival of bicycles and the electric streetcar. People were particularly incensed by rapid bicyclists, called scorchers, who had the temerity to pedal at 15 miles an hour!
Needless to say, the arrival of the car took everything to a new level, and fairly rapidly the old, pedestrian-centric street pretty much disappeared, except for niches like the boardwalk.
A Reasonable Compromise
Today, on the Asbury boardwalk, bicycles can and do participate in the dance of traffic until noon, which strikes me as a reasonable compromise. It can get very crowded in the afternoon. Service vehicles - the glorified golf carts used by the police and trash collectors - are on the boardwalk at all times. No horses pulling trash carts, but still the analogy with the pre-car street is strong.
We even have scorchers. Not many, but there is a lady on an elliptiGO - a mashup of an indoor elliptical trainer and a bicycle - who loudly bulls her way through the crowd. People make way, perhaps a bit grudgingly. Again, you're not going to go very fast on an elliptiGO; I personally think she's afraid of going too slow and falling over. Bikes are easier. You just put a foot down and wait.
The towns south of Asbury also have boardwalks; you can ride a long way. I've done it a lot, and it's a nice ride. However, many of the towns to the south have more restrictive riding hours than Asbury Park. I think the bicycle interests could do a good thing by asking these southern towns to extend their bicycle-friendly hours.
The guys on road bikes - the ones in spandex - will still need to go share the road with the cars. This raises the subject of protected bicycle lanes, which is a topic for another day.
A Liminal Space
Beyond being a pedestrian street, the boardwalk in Asbury Park is special in another, and probably more powerful, way. It is a liminal space, mediating the dry land of Ocean Avenue and the Stone Pony (well, perhaps not entirely dry) and the world of water represented by the beach and the ocean. There is a quiet magic to liminal spaces, perhaps none more so than at the water's edge.
And so people may not be entirely conscious of the undertow that the boardwalk wraps them in, floating them back into the old, pedestrian-centric street, an experience that is astonishingly rare today.
Perhaps tomorrow it will not be quite so rare. I hope.
Go to Fitler Square. Look west. You'll see three alleys leading down to the park by the Schuylkill River. The 2400 blocks of Panama, Delancey, and Cypress. They can talk to us about what it's like to be an alley in Philadelphia.
Let's start with Panama Street. This is an old street that has seen hard use and survived in very good shape. Its scars (have a look at the tree behind the dog walker) should be seen as badges of honor. I don't want to turn Philadelphia into Disneyland.
I think this is one of the most beautiful streets in Philadelphia. On my rating scale (seeCenter City Quarterly, Fall 2015, p. 1), I give it an A. I choose not to see its flaws, and it sparks joy. Make that an A+.
Pavement on Panama Street
Next is Delancey. A very different block from Panama, with a lovely Mediterranean vibe. Don't know how to improve it. It's been on my basic running route for many years, and I've watched the work that got it to where it is. Another A.
Delancey
Ah, Cypress. There are some very good elements here, but the block hasn't gelled. The other two alleys hold you, but this one lets the space bleed away on the north side, over the garage gates.
I think part of the problem is that the alley is so wide. The gates simply aren't tall enough to provide closure.
Cypress
And there are no sidewalks. Well, there are some remnants, but mainly this alley is wall-to-wall asphalt. I feel adrift, and it's not a wine-dark sea. We need a little poetry here.
What to do? Sidewalks would be nice; they would help define the space. But they would be expensive. Strings of LED lights over the parking spaces on the north side would provide an attractive visual closure, at least at night.
Have a look at the building to the left in the picture, with the red-painted brick. Call Isaiah Zagar and get a mural. One with lots of mirror shards. The light at this end is dead.
Also, the buildings on the south side might want to consider some Mediterranean pastels for their facades, which are actually quite nice in their current shades of off-white. But the block needs something. (The house facing the park, on the south side of the alley, has already made a nice start in this regard.)
Cypress, corner of 25th
Bury the utility wires. Maybe some trees? There are a few, but not enough to pull the block together.
2400 Cypress is a clean utilitarian alley. There are no derelict structures. I'll give it a B.
Some of the finest architecture in Philadelphia stands next to this alley, which today, as you can see above, is largely devoted to the storage of trash. Welcome to the 1400 block of Moravian Street, just west of Broad Street, south of Sansom, north of Walnut. Two blocks from City Hall. But more importantly, this is where the people who really ran things, for many years, used to hang out.
To the left, in the picture above, is the Union League. To the right the big building, with the columns well above ground-level, used to be the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. The Drexel building, which we will see in a minute, is to the right, facing 15th Street and Walnut.
Years ago, I used to work in lower Manhattan. One day I was walking down Broadway near Trinity Church, and I passed a group of tourists who were standing at the head of Wall Street, by the church. An older gentleman placed his bag on the pavement with an air of arrival, straightened up, looked down Wall Street, and said, "Ach so, die Zentrum der Platz."
So that was Wall Street, and the alley above was essentially our Zentrum from before World War I to after World War II. I wonder what it was like when all the financiers crossed Moravian to eat lunch at the Union League, and when they went back to their offices after their steaks and succotash. Did they have dumpsters in those days?
I think most people don't even know this alley exists. Below is Moravian at 15th Street, the Union League to the left, the Drexel and Company building to the right. Looks thoroughly respectable, doesn't it? To see the alley, you need to be standing in the right place, and you need to be looking for it.
The Drexel family has a university named after it, but the eponymous building here was the brainchild of Edward T. Stotesbury, who in addition to running the Drexel firm found time to dabble in the sport of racing rowboats. The Stotesbury Cup, held on the Schuylkill every spring, is named after him.
The design of the Drexel and Company building is based on the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. The Strozzi were rivals of the Medici, and they had a better architect. The Drexel building went up between 1925 and 1927.
And here's the Broad Street end, with the Banana Republic and a pile of condo apartments on the left and the Union League on the right.
You'll notice that this end of the Union League looks a lot different from the 15th Street end. That's because they're two different buildings. The building on Broad Street dates from 1865; the Renaissance palace fronting 15th Street was designed by Horace Trumbauer and went up between 1909 and 1911.
These two very different buildings joined at the hip can be a bit disconcerting to the modern eye. But I've gotten used to it. And this isn't the only building on Broad Street that looks like this. A few blocks to the south, at Pine Street, stands the main building of the University of the Arts, Dorrance Hamilton Hall. The front of this structure, which like the Union League extends through to 15th Street, was designed by John Haviland and built between 1824 and 1826, with wings added in 1838 by William Strickland. The back part was designed in 1875 by Frank Furness in his own style.
I've taken to walking down the 1400 block of Moravian on my way to the Reading Terminal Market. It's not a pretty place. Recently I've noticed that it's cleaner than it used to be. That's true of a lot of the alleys that I walk down. I haven't seen a dead rat in quite a while.
But still it's ugly. My best story comes from last year, in the warm weather. I was walking down the middle of the street, dodging puddles of slime - you need to watch your step in these alleys - and almost missed a man sitting on the sidewalk with his back resting against the old Stock Exchange building. He was a homeless man, bearded and quite dirty, and he was naked. His clothes were on the sidewalk next to him. I could relate. It was a warm day, his clothes were very dirty, and so was he. It probably felt good getting some fresh air on his skin.
But still. What would Mr. Stotesbury have said?
I'm not one of those who wishes that the homeless would just disappear, and doesn't particularly care what happens to them when that happens. Again, though, this should be one of the premier pedestrian streets in Philadelphia.
Just have a look at the front facade of the Stock Exchange building, over on Walnut Street. This is what the Moravian Street facade should look like as well, instead of having those lovely arched openings at ground level blocked in ways that only the Department of Licenses and Inspections could love.
The other Walnut Street frontages, below, show a similar sense of possibility.
If you go all the way back to the first picture, you'll notice that several of these buildings have fire escapes on their Moravian frontages. Show stopper, you say. Well, no. Andy Nicolini has been working on giving the 2000 block of Moravian, next to the Shake Shack, a makeover, and he and his design crew have come up with some very nice ways to make fire escapes cute, and even fun, without reducing their effectiveness in an emergency. (See Center City Quarterly5:3, Fall 2015, p. 15.) Now he just needs to get his funding, so we can stop looking at drawings and actually go to the alley and look at the real thing. I think when that happens people will finally understand the value in these alleys - and, to use a real estate term - they may even feel motivated to unlock that value.
Finally, here is a shot of something that few people see. It is the south side of the Union League's new building - the extension built by Trumbauer in 1909-1911.
I like to think that, at some point, that naked homeless guy looked up and saw this.
The breakthrough moment for bicycles came at the beginning of the 1890s, when the "safety" bicycle finally offered a viable alternative to walking and horseback riding for personal transportation. Both Europe and the United States experienced a remarkable cycling boom in the 1890s, often called the "Golden Age" on both sides of the Atlantic. Then, after 1900, their paths diverged.
In the United States, interest in bicycling declined dramatically after 1900, and the 1908 introduction of the affordable Model T Ford led to a craze for automobiles that, in some ways, persists to this day. By 1930 the country was well started on a project to reconstruct its built environment to support an essentially monomodal transportation system based on the car.
Meanwhile, in Europe, things went differently. As Pryor Dodge puts it in his book The Bicycle (1996), "In Europe, where a vast web of local railroads continued to meet the needs of public and commercial transportation, bicycles still served utilitarian ends, and cycling thrived as an organized spectator and club sport long after the Golden Age." (P. 182.)
American bicycling experienced a minor uptick during the Depression years of the 1930s. David V. Herlihy, in Bicycle: The History (2004), reports that "The number of bicycles circulating in the United States climbed to about two or three million by the mid-1930s, but that figure paled in comparison to the European fleets. Germany, which had half the American population, counted fifteen million bicycles. Great Britain and France each had about seven million cycles, followed by Italy with four million. Even the tiny Netherlands had three million: one for almost every other citizen. Every working day, some 400,000 cyclists commuted in and out of Amsterdam alone." (P. 328.)
Herlihy also notes that a 1930 study of traffic in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, found that bicycling was the most widely used means of transportation - "bicycles carried fully a third of the populace; 29 percent of the people used street railways, 21 percent walked, and the rest rode in automobiles or some other vehicle." (P. 328.)
A bit after World War II, things began to change. Dodge again: "By the late 1950s, improved economic conditions in Europe allowed consumers to follow the American fascination with the automobile, and the bicycling industry experienced a distinct decline. Yet although the bicycle began to be displaced by an increasingly dense automobile population, bicycle culture remained more deeply embedded in Western Europe, especially in the northern countries, where governments became actively involved in planning for what one author called the 'vehicle for a small planet.'" (P. 182.)
The Dutch and the Danes
Of all the countries of Europe, it was the Netherlands where bicycling was most deeply embedded in the culture. How embedded? Let's ask Inspector Van der Valk, protagonist in a series of detective novels by Nicolas Freeling. Here is the inspector in Double Barrel, from 1964: "Driving the Volkswagen down the falsely genial shopping street, Van der Valk felt like a Mexican on his donkey. Housewives riding bikes, pushing bikes, lugging tiny children off the back of bikes - all in the middle of the road and paying not the least attention either to him in his tiny black-beetle auto or to Albert Heijn's truck, which is ten feet tall and thirty feet long. The housewives are busy with the shopping. ... It looked identical to everywhere else in Holland, and could just as easily have been the Jan Galenstraat in Amsterdam West." (Pp. 48-49.)
As Evan Friss points out in The Cycling City (2015), this picture did not happen by accident. "Indeed, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, municipal governments in cities across the Netherlands grappled with how to promote cycling and, in 1935, officials in Amsterdam designed a comprehensive plan for the city to ensure that it remained commutable for cyclists. The goal was to design a 'bicycle city.' In the Netherlands, and in certain other European centers, the state continued to play an important role in fostering urban cycling throughout the twentieth century." (P. 200.)
(Friss cites a 1999 report from the Dutch ministry of transport, which turns out to be a nice history of Dutch bicycling. An English version is available online. As for the present, take a look at this video on cycling in the Dutch city of Groningen.)
Van der Valk's experience on the shopping street takes place less than ten years before the oil crisis of the early 1970s, which had a profound effect in Europe. As Dodge puts it (pp. 182, 185), "After the world oil crisis of 1973-4, bicycling experienced a notable revival, both as a sport and as an alternative to the automobile. But it was only with the financial assistance and cooperation of national governments that bicycles came to rival automobiles with any degree of credibility. In the late 1960s, the Dutch government began to create a vast network of cycle lanes on a landscape practically designed for the mass use of bicycles; by the late 1980s, over eighty thousand miles of bicycle paths criss-crossed the country. ... By the mid-1980s, bicycle use as a percentage of transport preference averaged between twenty and fifty percent in the cities and towns of the Netherlands: here, cycling had become a practical alternative to the automobile. Denmark also embarked on an ambitious program to build bicycle lanes. By the late 1980s, cycle paths ran alongside seventy-five percent of main roads, and bicycles made up twenty percent of the traffic in urban areas."
Muenster
I've noticed that, when discussing European cycling, people tend to focus on the Dutch and the Danes. I tend to do this myself. As an antidote, let's have a look at the German city of Muenster. In 1997, John Pucher published an article on bicycling in Germany and particularly in Muenster, which is pretty much the poster city for German cycling. (John Pucher, "Bicycling Boom in Germany: A Revival Engineered by Public Policy," Transportation Quarterly 51:4, Fall 1997, pp. 31-46.) The article was based on, among other things, three extended research fellowships in Germany, in 1984-1986, 1992, and 1996.
Muenster is a pleasant college town in northwestern Germany founded, according to the available records, in 793 A.D. It currently has a population of a little over 300,000, and for some time it has had a simply spectacular network of bike paths.
The backbone of the bike path network is a ring-road that follows the footprint of the medieval city wall. Unlike the situation in many other European cities, this ring-road is devoted to bicycles, not cars. (Imagine the D.C. Beltway or the Vienna Ringstrasse, only smaller, and with bicycles.) This "bicycle expressway" connects with 16 major outbound bike routes leading to suburbs and the countryside, and also 26 bike routes heading in toward the town center.
In Muenster, in 1994, 32 percent of all trips were by bicycle; 22 percent by walking; 10 percent by public transport; and 37 percent by auto. Other German cities had lower, but still quite respectable, bicycling numbers. Munich, the third largest city in Germany, with about the same population as Philadelphia, had a bike share of 15 percent in 1995.
Germany, Europe, the U.S.
Pucher takes a look at western Germany (before reunification in 1990 this would have been West Germany) and finds an overall biking rate for all trips of 12 percent. This is well below the 30 percent rate in the Netherlands or the 20 percent rate for Denmark, but it is well above the 8 percent rate for England and Wales, or the 5 percent rate for France, and it is 12 times the 1 percent rate of the United States.
It's interesting to follow England, France, and West Germany from the seventies to the nineties. In Germany, urban bicycling rose from 8 percent in 1972 to 12 percent in 1995. Munich's bike share rose from 6 percent in 1976 to 15 percent in 1992. Meanwhile, cycling in England fell from 12 percent in 1975 to 8 percent in 1991; in France it fell from 8 percent in 1978 to a low point of 4 percent in 1990.
Pucher attributes these arrows headed in different directions to public policy. The Germans worked hard to promote bicycling, and the English and the French didn't.
It's also worth noting that European countries weak on bicycling may be simply fabulous on walking. Sweden does 10 percent on biking, but 39 percent on walking in Pucher's data. And France, a European bicycling laggard at 5 percent, does 30 percent on walking. Meanwhile the U.S. does 1 percent on biking and 9 percent on walking - the lowest walking number among the countries Pucher studied.
At the same time, the U.S. did 84 percent of its trips by car, while most European countries were in the 40's and 30's.
As I look at these numbers, several thoughts occur to me. First, cars aren't going away. Even in biking heaven - the Netherlands - where 30 percent of trips are by bike and 18 percent by walking, 45 percent are by auto.
Is there an irreducible minimum for trips by car? In the world we live in, I think so. I don't know what the number is, but I think it's greater than zero and less than 40. In that range you can have a balanced transportation system.
Meanwhile, in America, with an 84 percent car share, you have The Amoeba That Ate Cleveland. There's very little room for anything else.
The Essential Difference
Why is the American transportation system so different from the systems we see in Europe? Answers to such questions are normally complex, but in this case the answer is starkly simple: Government policy. In the mid-1920s, Herbert Hoover, as U.S. secretary of commerce, effectively ceded control of national transportation policy to the car manufacturers and their allies, a situation that continued unabated until the late 1960s and is still largely intact today. (See Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011, pp. 178-196, 230-234, 253-254.)
The Situation Now
In 2012 the MIT Press published the best survey of current biking conditions and issues that I have been able to find. Edited by John Pucher (he gets around) and Ralph Buehler, City Cycling has contributions from 21 scholars on four continents.
And guess what? There's a bunch of good news. American bicycling is showing definite signs of life. Our national numbers are still low, but there are many bright spots at the local level.
Let's have a look at Davis, California, and Boulder, Colorado. Like Muenster, both of these are college towns. And they both came to the bicycle game early. In 1967, Davis "striped the first bicycle lanes in the United States." Also, in 1967, "Boulder became the first US city to institute a sales tax dedicated to the purchase of open space and the funding of transportation infrastructure." Boulder's 1995 transportation plan was the first in the United States "to set a goal of reducing vehicle miles of travel." (Pucher, ed., 2012, pp. 261, 263-264.)
As of 2009, "Davis and Boulder especially stand out with 15.5 percent and 9.6 percent of workers, respectively, reporting that they usually commuted by bicycle in the 2005-2009 American Community Survey." (Ibid., p. 260.)
Portland, Oregon, has raised bike commuting from 1.1 percent in 1990 to 6.0 percent in 2008 - a more than five-fold increase. Portland has been helped by its location in the state of Oregon, "which since 1971 has required that 1 percent of state highway funds be devoted to bicycles and pedestrians." (Ibid., pp. 134, 292.)
Portland is in a class by itself, but other cities are turning in solid performances. Washington, D.C., moved commuting bike share from 0.8 percent in 1990 to 2.3 percent in 2008. In 2010, in D.C., approved bike infrastructure projects amounted to $8 per capita per year. (Ibid., pp. 134, 292.)
Let's check in with some of our old friends in Europe. Amsterdam's bike share for commuting went from 27 percent in 1990 to 34 percent in 2009; Copenhagen went from 30 percent in 1990 to 37 percent in 2005. (Ibid., p. 292.)
And here's a new friend: Berlin's bike commuting share went from 6 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2008. Other European capitals are lower, but still quite strong by American standards. Paris had an all-trip bicycling share of 1.0 percent in 2000 and 2.5 percent in 2010. London went from 1.2 percent in 2000 to 2.0 percent in 2007. (Ibid., pp. 292, 323.) And remember, Paris and London are very walkable cities. Not to mention the metro and the tube.
So What Can We Learn from the Europeans?
Europe continues to be well ahead of the United States when it comes to bicycling. The national rates are higher - sometimes eye-poppingly so - and their standout cities still outshine our standout cities. So, aside from having the right government policies, what can we learn from them?
In the end, bicycling boils down to an individual walking out the door and climbing on to a bike. The people who do this, or might do it in the future, are not a homogeneous group. I'd like to suggest several different approaches to breaking the group down for closer analysis, along with some implications.
The skinny guys in spandex, and the "interested but concerned." Not all of us want to be bicycle messengers. That's because we're not "strong and fearless." No diss intended. "Strong and fearless" is one of four categories originally developed in Portland. After strong and fearless comes "enthused and confident," followed by "interested but concerned" and my favorite, "no way no how."
This typology has been around for a number of years. A recent national poll, covering 50 major metropolitan areas in the United States, found that the "interested but concerned" category was by far the largest, with about half of all respondents, a figure comparable to the results of other polls.
Here's the thing about the "interested but concerned" folks. If you want them to go biking, you need to give them a protected bike path at minimum. Just striping a bike lane on a street won't do it.
Why is this? It's because the "interested but concerned" are worried about their safety - more specifically, getting into a crash with a car.
If you want to see biking numbers in your city that are comparable to the numbers in Europe, you need a large network of protected bike lanes. It's that simple.
Men, women, children, old people. Humans aren't really four different species. It just feels that way sometimes. Take old people, for instance. There's an unexamined assumption that they're too frail to bicycle. Well, not in Europe. In Denmark, cycling holds steady from 50 years to past 70, and is actually higher than it is for the 30-49 crowd. The Netherlands is similar. (Pucher, ed., 2012, p. 14.)
On to kids. In the Netherlands, 49 percent of children in primary school (ages 5-12) ride bikes to school; 37 percent walk; and only 14 percent ride in a car. In Odense, Denmark, 38 percent of nine-year-olds bike to school. High-schoolers - 15 years old - bike at the rate of 67 percent for boys and 64 percent for girls. (Ibid., pp. 236-237.)
Never happen in the U.S., you say. Sorry. Davis, California, again, where 43.4 percent of high-school boys bike to school, as do 30 percent of girls. "Davis has no regular school bus service because bicycling is the usual mode for children to get to school." (Ibid., pp. 113, 216.) Congratulations, Mom. You just got fired from your job as a chauffeur.
Professor Peter G. Furth, writing in Pucher's 2012 book (p. 135), says, "It is this writer's opinion that the turning point will be when children begin again riding bikes to school in large numbers. When bicycle infrastructure and children's safety become intertwined, funding for bicycle infrastructure will be secure."
Recreational cyclists and commuters. Actually, let's broaden "commuters" to "utilitarian cyclists." You'll remember Inspector Van der Valk and the Ladies Who Shop. Historically, the ethos of U.S. cycling has been overwhelmingly recreational, although there have always been utility riders. If we want to build a real bicycling community, we need to think about commuters, and we need to think about all those intraday trips - taking the kids to pre-school, grocery shopping, you name it. There are implications here for where we put bike lanes first, and where we put Indego bike-share stations.
Beyond that, we need to rethink the spandex thing. The Dutch aren't riding $3,000 road bikes; they're riding utility bikes, with comfortable seats, handlebars well above the seat, chain guards, fenders to keep the mud off. (See Pucher, ed., 2012, chapter 5.) And they're wearing street clothes. So when they get to the office, they don't need a shower, they don't need a locker room, and they don't need to change their clothes because they're not spattered with mud (at least not most days). The Danes even have a bike fashion blog, called Cycle Chic. (To see it, click here.)
And finally
Here we are at the end. Before we part ways, let's consider for a moment what the Europeans are really doing. It's not just about bicycles. It's about rebuilding our public spaces for people, not cars. I think it may be hard for us to admit that we've been doing it wrong since the days of Herbert Hoover. But maybe the Europeans really do have a better idea. Personally, I'm quite certain of it.
Bikes came first. There was a huge bicycle boom way back in the 1890's, fueled by the introduction of the "safety" bicycle - the first recognizably modern bike. A big gear by the pedals used a chain to drive a small gear on the rear axle. This allowed both wheels to be the same size; and pneumatic tires made the ride much more comfortable.
People loved them. American manufacturers built and sold scads of them during the 1890's, with production reaching as high as 3 million units per year. Compare this with the total population of the United States, which was around 63 million in the 1890 census.
(This article relies heavily on James Longhurst, Bike Battles, 2015, and Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011. For the two paragraphs above, see Longhurst, pp. 55-56.)
The bike boom started to wane around 1900. Then, in 1908, the Model T Ford was introduced, and the nation's long love affair with the car burst into full bloom.
The automobile was a highly disruptive force, particularly on the streets of America's cities. Cars were big and fast, and they did not mix well with the existing traffic, which moved more slowly and was accustomed to sharing the road. Cars wanted the other users to get out of the way.
Between 1915 and 1930 there was a virtual war for control of the streets. (See Norton, p. 2.) The cars won. All the other users - bicycles, pedestrians, streetcars, horses and wagons - lost.
Cars would probably have won anyway, but they were fortunate in their opponents, and their victory was more complete than it might otherwise have been, if only the opposing forces had been stronger and wiser. The bicycle movement, for instance, had been born with a number of weaknesses that compromised its ability to stake out and maintain a viable position on the nation's streets and roads.
The 1890's Bike Boom and the Seeds of Defeat
Led by the League of American Wheelmen (founded in 1880), the bike movement of the 1890's had organization, money, and influence. It lacked unity around common goals, and it lacked a mass base, even though, in view of the sales figures, one was obviously available. (For this section, see Longhurst, chapter 2.)
Bicycling in the 1890's did face a major challenge. We've got all these bicycles. Where are we going to ride them?
On the road, you say? Well, think again. In 1890 the state of American roads left a great deal to be desired. As Longhurst puts it (pp. 62-63), "The state of nineteenth-century roads was a symptom of an essentially local, decentralized system of financing road construction, itself the consequence of weak municipal governments and a distrust of public works. Before the twentieth century, most urban streets were paved only when adjoining property owners - abutters - clubbed together to fund the work. Rural roads were built by the occasional 'working out' of road taxes, where nearby property owners were required to provide a week or so of their own labor in a work gang under the supervision of an appointed county 'pathmaster.'"
So, without putting too fine a point on it, no tax base, and no county road department.
The League of American Wheelmen confronted this problem head-on with something called the Good Roads movement, which proposed to tax the public to pay for the roads. At around the same time, another movement got started in northern New York state. Its ambitions were more narrowly focused on improving mobility for bicyclists by building sidepaths - what we would today call bicycle lanes. These were typically leveled and gravel-covered lanes at the side of the main road.
These two initiatives did not need to be competitors. The League, however, went to war - or more precisely to Albany - and successfully fought enabling legislation that would have allowed counties in New York state to foster the construction and maintenance of sidepaths. Around the same time it got the New York legislature to approve a bill which said the state should pay half the cost of road construction.
The League eventually relented and agreed that sidepaths were an appropriate approach in places where the roads were unlikely to improve any time soon. And quite a few sidepaths were built around the country. However, sidepaths never benefited from the steady source of funding that the League worked so hard to get for roads.
The sidepaths proved ephemeral. It appears they basically got paved over as Good Roads funding was spent to improve the full width of the road. However, the great beneficiary of all this road work turned out to be, not the bicycle, but the car.
The League proved unable to protect the interests of bicycling after 1900 because it had failed to build a mass base. It's fair to say that the League went out of its way not to build a mass base because it was a profoundly elitist organization. It existed to serve a small group of well-to-do white men who used their bikes for leisure.
The League barely tolerated the women in their bloomers who equated the bike with freedom. Susan B. Anthony, the leader of the women's suffrage movement whose image graced the dollar coin for a few years beginning in 1979, had this to say about the bicycle in 1896: "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel ... the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood."
Opportunity for a powerful alliance missed. But of course I'm asking the Leaguers to be different people from who they were.
And what did the League think of people who used the bicycle to commute to work? Although data are hard to come by, it's clear that a lot of people were commuting by bike. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported that more than 4,000 Chicagoans were biking to work in 1896, and it had a count of 10,000 in 1898. In 1910, the city engineer in Minneapolis counted as many as 1,258 cyclists at a busy downtown intersection on a nice July day, with an average of 669 per day in observations that spanned 12 months, presumably including the Minnesota winter. (Longhurst, p. 102.)
For the League, bicycling was a social activity for the elite, not a way to get to work. And so it missed a major opportunity to build a solid mass base.
The capstone of the League's policy of exclusion was an 1894 change to membership requirements. Henceforth, members would need to be white. Existing black members protested without avail.
There are many aspects of the Gilded Age that I find quite depressing, but these finishing touches to America's emerging doctrine of Jim Crow are possibly the most painful.
Comes the Model T
Cars started off as a plaything for the elite. The first Packard - America's version of the Rolls-Royce - hit the road in 1899. But then something funny happened on the way to the forum, and the script got rewritten. The Model T Ford, introduced in 1908, put the auto within reach for the masses. And, after some initial hesitation, the leaders of the automobile industry mobilized a mass movement that wound up getting its way at virtually every turn.
From the very beginning it was clear that the automobile was an incompatible use in a way that the bicycle had never been. People had complained about bikes, of course. They were particularly scathing about "scorchers" - bicyclists who went too fast. Little did they know what they were about to experience with the automobile.
The automobile's chief advantage over other forms of transportation was its speed, which even in the early days was formidable. For instance, in 1911, Ray Harroun won the first Indianapolis 500 with an average speed of 74.6 miles an hour.
The automobile's chief disadvantage was "spatial inefficiency" (Norton, p. 174). It took up a lot of space, and this quickly proved to be a major problem on city streets. Many people thought it best suited for rural areas (Norton, p. 12). The auto industry, however, was having none of that. There were a lot of people in the cities, and a lot of money, and the car makers were going to sell cars.
Cars brought with them two main problems: crashes and congestion, which flowed from their speed and their size. Neither of these problems has ever been solved; the war for the streets that lasted from 1915 to 1930 ended with cars dominating the streets and with an acceptance of the problems they brought with them. A War with Three Phases
The war for the streets had three distinct, if overlapping, phases. From the beginning to about 1920, society looked to the police to maintain order; then from 1920 to about 1927, traffic engineers sought to optimize the use of existing infrastructure; and finally, after 1927 the car lobby orchestrated the reconstruction of our roads to increase the "floor space" available for automobiles.
Phase One. The first phase involved imposing order on a realm that had been ruled by custom. As Longhurst puts it (p. 85), "It may be hard to imagine now, but the nineteenth-century road was largely a blank slate, both legally and literally. It lacked traffic laws, signs, lanes, or signals. In the mid-nineteenth century, there was only a single rule of the road: stay on your own side."
The car forced cities to replace custom with formal regulation. Early on, in 1903, New York City introduced "the first traffic code of the coming motor age" (Norton, p. 50). "Rules for Driving" was a four-pager that, among other things, encouraged people to keep right and pass left. After 1910, increasing traffic led to increasing regulation. Around 1915, police departments hit on the idea of painting lines on the streets to encourage the occupants of the road to row in a straight line. About the same time one-way streets started popping up like mushrooms. (Most of Philadelphia's downtown streets were one way by the early 1920s.) In 1914 Cleveland installed its first traffic lights; they may well have been the first in the nation.
The problem with all this, from the automotive point of view, was the police were not there to ensure the fast and efficient passage of motor traffic. They were there to do what cops do, which is maintain order. Without putting too fine a point on it, the police thought speed and safety were mutually incompatible, and they thought that the auto, as the new boy on the block, should do its best to fit in to the pre-existing scheme. (For this paragraph, and the preceding one, see Norton, chapter 2.)
This was not exactly the kind of regulation that proponents of the automobile were looking for, so after 1920 things changed. A new profession, traffic engineering, was in the process of being born. Many of its first practitioners were engineers with experience in running utilities - the water supply department, for instance.
Phase Two. In phase two of the war for the streets, the traffic engineers sought to optimize traffic flow on existing streets.
I haven't found a source for this, but it strikes me that the traffic engineers were banking on the Bernoulli principle. Named after the man who discovered it, Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782), its original application was to a fluid in a pipe. Stated simply, the faster the fluid is moving, the lower its pressure. Translated to cars on a road, this means, for a constant number of cars, the greater the speed, the greater the distance between the cars. That's why a car crash on I-95 causes an instant traffic jam. Same number of cars, but instead of going fast enough to win the 1911 Indianapolis 500, and maintaining decent clearances in the process, all of a sudden they're crawling along bumper to bumper, like a giant centipede.
Norton notes (p. 134) that Miller McClintock, a leading traffic expert of the day, felt that "increasing the speed of traffic on a street increased the street's capacity." But that's all I've got.
Still, in the early, innocent days, it was clearly possible to believe that congestion could be relieved by increasing the speed with which cars traveled on the street. However, for this to happen, all of the elements in the traffic flow had to be capable of going fast. Which kind of rules out pedestrians.
So one of the first things the traffic engineers did was to try to sort out the different forms of traffic that were incompatible with the new plan and place them in different pipes. When it came to pedestrians, that meant pushing them out of the street, over the curb, and onto the sidewalk. This process was essentially complete by 1930 (Norton, p. 79).
Unfortunately, it turned out that drivers were quite capable of creating chaos in the absence of pedestrians. Just about any day on the Schuylkill Expressway will offer you good examples.
Something was lost when the pedestrians were banished to the sidewalk and the cartway (the space between the curbs) was given over entirely to motor vehicles. Before the car, writes Norton (pp. 139-140), "Custom decreed that the centers of streets were to be kept clear for travelers, but the verges were places for almost any kind of public use. Though the curb seemed to mark a distinct boundary between sidewalk and roadway, in practice the border between them was far less distinct. Boys hawked newspapers, shined shoes, or played marbles. Merchants stored crates, acquaintances chatted, horses drank, pushcart vendors sold fruit, and builders stacked bricks. Few of them had any formal grant of privilege."
The street has always been, first and foremost, a place for coming and going. But it has also, at times, been a place for dwelling. After the reorganization of streets in the 1920's, the only things dwelling on the street were the cars parked at the curb, and a lively liminal space became a dead zone for nearly a century.
By the way, the concept of parking vehicles on the street was a complete novelty that arrived with the automobile. Before the car, things were different. As Longhurst puts it (pp. 89-90), "For most of the history of the road, it was not acceptable for people to leave horse-drawn vehicles unattended in the public street." He cites an 1889 judicial decision which said that "the highway may be a convenient place for the owner of carriages to keep them in, but the law ... prohibits any such use of the public streets." (See also Norton, pp. 67, 142, p. 327, footnote 97, and pp. 289-290, footnote 13.)
Phase Three. In 1923-1924, there was a slowdown in car sales, and the third phase of the war for the streets began. Automakers saw the intractable problems of congestion and crashes as the basic causes of the slump, but they noted its predominantly urban character and became concerned about the concept of "saturation" - the idea that, at some point, Americans would decide that they had enough cars. (For the saturation crisis, see Norton, chapter 6.)
So the automakers got organized. As Norton puts it (p. 153), "Until the crisis, manufacturers had little to say about city traffic. Saturation fears ended their silence. Quite suddenly, beginning in 1923, the industry sought a new and direct say in traffic matters, and its role grew swiftly through the rest of the decade."
The manufacturers sought allies and found them. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, the American Automobile Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, all became allies. And perhaps equally important, the generals had a mass base. The foot soldiers - or perhaps the mechanized infantry - of this movement were the legions of American motorists.
The auto lobby also needed to deal with the persistent idea that the personal car was a toy. (Until the mid-1920's the terms "passenger car" and "pleasure car" were synonymous.) "Therefore, in the 1920s motordom organized to reconstruct the passenger car as a necessity." (Norton, p. 220, p. 363, footnote 69.)
But why was the motor car a necessity and not just a peripheral convenience? What was the essential business purpose of the automobile? Everybody wanted people to be able to get downtown by car, but why? The department stores, of course, wanted shoppers - particularly the "carriage trade" types - to be able to get to the store by car. But the main business purpose of the private automobile, even in 1920, was commuting. As Donald Shoup notes about Los Angeles in 1920, "most of the cars parked on downtown streets were owned by commuters, not shoppers." (Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking, pp. 491-492.)
It seems odd that the main justification for the automobile would be a repetitive journey between two fixed points (home and work) often on exactly the same route. This kind of task does not engage the car's freedom of movement - one if its prime competitive advantages. Unlike trains, which are stuck on tracks, cars can go anywhere there is a road. And, because people tend to commute all at the same time (we call this "rush hour") commuting does significantly engage the car's spatial inefficiency (which is one of the reasons why we tend to get "traffic jams" at "rush hour.") Logic might suggest that commuting would much better be left to mass transit.
Be that as it may, the basic problem for the car folks was that the Bernoulli principle wasn't working. Tuning the pipes was not going to open up the way downtown. So the automakers redefined the problem. Cars were big, yes, and they were fast, yes, and they made a mess of the city's streets. The industry's solution was new, bigger streets: Make more space for cars in the city. (Norton, p. 150.)
And that's what happened. In 1928 greater New York City began construction on a major motor highway system. An area that had 3.5 miles of express highways in 1928 had 107 miles early in 1933. (Norton, p. 204, p. 355, footnote 154.)
As Longhurst puts it (pp. 93-94), "Between the two world wars, American roads were rebuilt - and in the absence of a powerful cycling lobby, both the roads and the rules that governed them were designed for cars. These changes made it possible to reimagine the shared resource of the road as solely the province of private automobiles, and planners began to consider what historians now call 'completely car-centered landscapes.'"
Two Problems that Won't Go Away
Through all this rebuilding, and the development of automobile suburbs after World War II and the Interstate Highway System starting in 1956, two things remained unchanged: congestion and crashes. All the added space given over to cars did not solve these two chronic issues.
Congestion. You might think that the added space would be sufficient to allow the Bernoulli principle to work - cars could go faster, and the congestion in the pipe would go down. And that would have worked, basically, if the number of cars had remained constant. But the number of cars in the United States did not remain constant. It grew phenomenally, from 9 million in 1920 to 49 million in 1950 to 218 million in 2000, when there were 771 cars for every 1,000 people. Even a new-born baby gets seven-tenths of a car. (Shoup, pp. 674-675.)
The particularly strange part of this was that people had known from the beginning that increasing "floor space" was not going to solve the congestion problem. In 1925 traffic expert Miller McClintock had suggested, as Norton puts it (p. 167), "that widening streets would merely attract more vehicles to them, leaving traffic as congested as before." Arthur S. Tuttle, a prominent New York City engineer, repeated the warning in 1927. Norton comments, "His warning was a staple of traffic control engineering in the 1920s, but it was independently rediscovered and popularized in the late 1950s and 1960s." (Norton, p. 156, p. 336, footnote 49.)
Crashes. I haven't said much about crashes until now. It's a pretty upsetting subject. Norton estimates (p. 21) that 200,000 people died in car crashes in the 1920's, with 1924 marking the first year that casualties exceeded 20,000 (p. 156). Writes Norton (p. 11), "With the sudden arrival of the automobile came a new kind of mass death. Most of the dead were city people. Most of the car's urban victims were pedestrians, and most of the pedestrian victims were children and youths." In Philadelphia in 1928, 74.9 percent of motor traffic deaths involved a motor vehicle colliding with a pedestrian. Car-on-car crashes accounted for 10.4 percent, and cars crashing with bikes were 2.5 percent of the total (p. 23).
America only had one-third the people in 1920 that it has today. That 20,000 death toll, projected on to today's population, would be 60,000 dead in one year. Currently we're running a little over 32,000 dead per year, so progress is possible. Somehow I find that cold comfort.
The Bike Comes Back
While the automobile was rebuilding America, the bicycle did not entirely disappear. It did, however, become primarily a child's toy. Adults still used bicycles, even to get to work (especially during World War II). However, many adult uses were tucked away, far from the fearsome roar of the automobile.
Philadelphia's own Steven Rea, in Hollywood Rides a Bike (2012), has this to say about the studios in Hollywood: "In the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, the studios stocked fleets of Schwinns, Shelbys, Raleighs and Rollfasts so its actors, writers and crew could get from one giant soundstage to another, zip back and forth from dressing room to commissary, or just take a break between scenes. It was Hollywood's idea of a bike-share program, long before Paris implemented Velib'." (P. 7.)
Then, in the 1960's, something interesting happened. With the exception of English imports, the bicycles available to American adults tended to be heavy, slow, one-gear affairs. Shall we say boring. This began to change in 1963, when American companies started importing derailleurs and other bicycle components from Japan to produce more interesting bicycles. What followed in the 1970's was a boom in adult bicycling that recalled the first boom in the 1890's. (Longhurst, pp. 182-183.)
The ten-speed, as the new bike was called regardless of how many gears it actually had, was a nice bike. Light, maneuverable, reasonably fast, and not too terrible on a hill. And it came at a good time.
The Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, gives a hint of the changes that were underway in the public psyche. And then of course there was the war. The Vietnam War, 58,000 dead - less than two years of today's death toll on the roads, but the war tore the country apart. And it's just possible the road deaths, and the many, many injuries, were doing something similar, but more quietly. And in 1973, there was the oil embargo, with the price of oil quadrupling almost in the blinking of an eye.
Adult bike sales hit 15.2 million in 1973, an all-time record (Longhurst, p. 190). So then the old question recurred. Where are we going to ride all these bikes? And bicycle advocates proceeded to replicate the internal fight that had occurred in the 1890's, when Good Roads advocates and sidepath promoters split the bicycling movement at a crucial time.
Longhurst (p. 201) says that supporters of "bikeways" in the 1970's "seemed to be unaware of the existence of the earlier sidepath movement." It's not clear that knowledge of the history would have headed the fight off. Let's just say that things didn't go well, and we probably lost several decades in which we could have been building out bike infrastructure, but instead spent time on an internal squabble over whether we should have separate bicycling facilities or whether we should insist on sharing the road as equals with 18-wheelers.
But the story may yet have a happy ending. As Longhurst puts it (p. 235), "Bicycle advocates of today are finally creating the separated, protected infrastructure that was envisioned and partially built more than a century ago, proposed in the bikeway movement of the late 1960s, and thwarted by the conflicts of the following decade."
Where Do We Go from Here?
It does seem to be a very good time for bikes just now. The Vision Zero movement has the potential to bring together a broad coalition around a common goal of Complete Streets. In other words, several old issues - lacking a mass base, division over goals - may be going away. And this approach should also help with something that has always been a major weakness for the bike movement - the perception that bicyclists are the "other" (on "bikelash" see Longhurst, p. 239).
The skinny guys in spandex stereotype has historical validity going back to the 1890's, but it hardly reflects current reality. All you need to do is stand at a curb and watch bicyclists go by. All kinds of people are riding.
Still, the perception of otherness lingers, both in the general public and with our political leadership. The Vision Zero alliance should help with this. Let's hope so. Once you objectify a group of people, it's fairly easy to marginalize them.
Bikes are a disruptive force on our streets. Thank God. I've spent my life watching a frozen standoff between cars and pedestrians, and it was well past time to start moving in a better direction.
Our streets have an interesting history. The pedestrians were there first. The cars arrived around World War I, and they hit this country like a tsunami, rearranging our built environment, our laws, and our minds. (To read more about all this, see Peter Norton's book Fighting Traffic.)
Before the cars came, the streets were open to all who wished to come and go - pedestrians, beer wagons, hansom cabs, horse-drawn trolleys, the occasional coach and four (that would be four horses). Things could be a bit chaotic, but when it came to getting killed, people seem to have been more worried about Typhoid Mary and other carriers of infectious disease.
When cars showed up, they had a number of advantages - they were big, and heavy, and fast. Before then, the occupants of the street had largely all gone about the same speed. Cars were also very popular. People loved their cars. Now that we're jaded, and overwhelmed by the sheer number of cars on our streets, it's a bit hard to imagine what it was like.
Cars came to own the streets in the 1920s. They basically muscled their way in, and they literally marginalized the pedestrians, pushing them over the curb and confining them to the sidewalk. (Sidewalks date back at least to Roman times, but until the car arrived, they were an amenity, not a ghetto.)
And so there things stood, until a few years ago, with pedestrians pinned to the sidewalk and cars owning the cartway - the street space between the curbs. Pedestrians were allowed to cross at the corner, but it was best to look both ways.
Then along came the bicyclists, and all of a sudden we are reimagining our streets.
I live in Philadelphia, and recently I attended the city's first Vision Zero conference, which was organized, not surprisingly, by the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. Bikes are going to lead the reimagining of our public spaces. But they will need some help - and I think they will get it.
Runners, for instance, have been doing Open Streets for years - they call their events races. The Broad Street Run has shut down the full length of Broad Street in Philadelphia on the first Sunday in May every year for decades.
Children used to play in the street. News flash: In Philadelphia, they still do, on the many little side streets of our town. Now, I live on Lombard Street, which is an access road for the Schuylkill Expressway, and I don't expect to see children in short pants and floppy hats shooting marbles in the middle of Lombard Street anytime soon. But one block away, on Addison Street, children often draw with chalk and play ball in the good weather as their parents sit on stoops, watching over their little ones and socializing with one another.
Restaurants are also getting more aggressive about pushing out on to the sidewalks and even into the streets. Special props to the bagel shop Spread on 20th Street, for figuring out what to do when the pope visited, and vehicular movement was greatly restricted in a large part of the downtown. Spread took the lane, with tables. And very happy customers.
Bikes will lead these groups, because bikes have organization, focus, and even a little bit of money. And because, for bikes, the issue is not optional.
We need bike lanes. We need a network of bike lanes that will allow people to get around town safely. This network will make the streets better for everybody. It will calm traffic, and it will make the streets safer for pedestrians to cross. (See, for instance, the New York City Department of Transportation's 2014 report Protected Bicycle Lanes in NYC.)
And yes, this means that motorists will need to learn to share the road with the many other groups that have legitimate claims on the space.
Twice I have run down the middle of the Champs Elysees in Paris. And I was not alone. It was called the Paris Marathon.
It is forbidden to cross 15th street on the south side of Arch. There are two little men who say so. They're stick figures, caught in the act of walking, and they each have a red line drawn through them.
It doesn't matter. People cross here with great regularity. All kinds of people, not just distracted people talking on cell phones. That's because everything about this intersection - except for the little men - tells people that this is an ordinary intersection with four functioning crosswalks.
I understand that the traffic engineers are trying to cope with traffic coming off the Vine Street Expressway, the Ben Franklin Parkway, and even westbound Arch street. But they really should throw in the towel, paint zebra stripes on the south side of Arch, and take down the little men.
I know this will slow the cars down, particularly the ones that are trying to turn onto 15th street. So be it.
