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| Sunday in Central Park. Marjory Collins/FSA, 1942. |
There's a cloud that lurks over the current boom in bicycling. It's often invisible, but in stressful times it seeps in like a fog. And for veterans of the last few decades of bicycling in the United States, I don't think it ever really goes away.
The cloud is the meteoric rise and equally precipitous collapse of American bicycling in the 1890s. For most people, this history seems about as relevant as Homer's recounting of the fall of Troy.
And I think that's accurate. The fall of Troy, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dutch Tulip Bubble, all this history lives today even for people who are unaware of it. And the collapse of bicycling in America, on a smaller scale, informs the views of bicycle advocates today, and I think it informs the views of the anti-bicycle group, many of whom are completely unaware of the history.
So will our present bike boom also crash? I don't think so. I think it's a durable boom. I think the only question is how big bicycling will become in places like Philadelphia.
Durability
But let's start with durability. Here's a story. On January 17 of this year, I had occasion to visit the medical city on the west side of the South Street bridge; as I was leaving, I decided to count the number of bicycles parked in the bike racks that are, at this point, basically everywhere on Civic Center Boulevard and on the surrounding streets. I found 244 bikes and electric scooters (there were about a dozen scooters; I didn't count them separately).
I thought that was a pretty good count, and then, as I walked home, I remembered that I had conducted the same count a few years ago.
After I got home I searched around a bit on my computer and found the email I had written on August 28, 2015. I had had a doctor's appointment that morning, and I had counted the bikes around 10 a.m., the same time I counted this year.
In 2015, I counted 335. (I don't recall any electric scooters.)
My first reaction was surprise. I hadn't expected to see a drop in the bike count. But then I said, Okay, knucklehead, have you heard of the coronavirus?
And then I remembered that in 2015 it was a "beautiful day" in August, as I mentioned in my email, and this year's count was on a cool, overcast day in January. I'm willing to concede a certain amount of seasonality in the amount of bicycle commuting in Philadelphia.
Every year, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia counts the number of bikes crossing the Schuylkill River bridges at rush hour. In 2021, the rate was 639 per hour, down from the peak of 913 in 2017. In 2015, the first time I counted parked bikes, the count was 780 per hour. So the bridge counts and my parking counts seem to be roughly in agreement.
Looking at my 244 count for this year, and thinking about all these things, I've decided 244 is good evidence that our current bicycle boom is remarkably durable. If this little cavalry squadron, parked around Civic Center Boulevard, could survive the Covid epidemic, I don't think it's going away.
(I've also been made aware that there are now indoor bike racks for about 50 bicycles in the 3600 Civic Center Boulevard garage, which I did not count. For a map of bike parking spots at Penn, click here. I only counted the racks on or very near Civic Center Boulevard.)
How Big?
So how big can biking get in Philly? As I've often said, I think bikes and their assorted fellow travelers could see a 50 percent mode share in center city and surrounding areas. This is essentially the older part of the city, which was originally built for pedestrians and horses and wagons, not cars. This area, with its many small streets, is where the viability of our current over-reliance on automobiles is most obviously in question every day.
The key to a 50 percent mode share for bikes and scooters is a complete, fully connected network of protected bike lanes.
Here's why. When it comes to bicycling, people fall into four groups: the strong and fearless, the enthused and confident, the interested but concerned, and the no way, no how. The strong and fearless are people like bicycle messengers, and research indicates they comprise perhaps 1 percent of the population. The enthused and confident are those who are willing to share traffic lanes with motor vehicles when necessary. They are about 7 percent of the population. The interested but concerned are generally not biking around town for a simple reason: They fear a crash with a motor vehicle that leaves them with a life-altering injury, or possibly just dead. They are about 60 percent of the population. The no way no how group has several subgroups. Some people, because of illness or injury, are simply unable to ride. Some people actively dislike bicyclists and would never get on a bicycle themselves. And others are simply uninterested. The no way no how group is about one-third of the population. (For an interesting article on the history of this typology, click here.)
So the interested but concerned are 60 percent of the population. Here's how you get them riding. You build a complete, fully connected network of protected bike lanes. Then you'll be appealing to about 70 percent of the population, instead of 7 percent.
If we look at pre-pandemic bicycling data for center city and south Philadelphia, you can see that it's already over 7 percent in a few places. The Center City District reports that, in 2017, commuter cycling mode share was 7.3 percent in center city and 8.1 percent in south Philadelphia. These are the most recent data available from CCD. In 2020 the Bicycle Coalition found a section of south Philadelphia where the bike commuter mode share was 21 percent.
Have the interested but concerned started commuting by bike? Perhaps. Or maybe the 21-percent spot has a concentration of the enthused and confident? I think it's a good reminder that this typology is a useful tool, and not a sacred tablet.
Just in case you're thinking that everybody else is driving, pedestrian mode share in center city hovers around 30 percent. Transit, before the pandemic, was 20 percent. Motor vehicles had a mode share under 40 percent. (For more, click here.) This motor-vehicle mode share makes center city Philly look more like a European city than an American one, where the private motor-vehicle mode share is generally in the eighties or nineties. Munich, for instance, has a car mode share of 34 percent. But don't worry, we're still not Amsterdam! It has a private-car mode share of 27 percent. (For mode-share levels in cities around the world, click here.)
How will things look as we finally get back to something resembling normal? I'm hopeful that we'll be getting data on this soon. But center city is definitely recovering. The Center City District provides monthly pedestrian counts, and in November 2022 it reported that pedestrian traffic had reach three-quarters of its pre-pandemic volume. (To see these reports, click here.)
What Does a Pretty Good Bike-Lane Network Look Like?
The medical city on the west side of the Schuylkill has some of the best bicycle routes in Philadelphia. They're not perfect, but they're pretty good, and they keep getting better. The South street bridge has very good bike lanes. They connect to other bike lanes east of the Schuylkill that carry you almost to the Delaware. Chestnut street now has a bike lane that runs from 45th street in west Philly to 22nd street in center city, where it connects with the 22nd street bike lane. In the near future we will be getting a new two-way cycle track on Market street between 20th and 23rd, also connecting with the 22nd street bike lane. (Construction is basically complete, and we are just awaiting a few final touches.) Penndot will also be rebuilding the Market street bridge soon, and the hope is that the bicycle connections there will improve dramatically, including a connection to the trail on the Schuylkill Banks.
I think you can get a sense of the effect of all this lane construction when you look at the bike racks around the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Bikes are here to stay. The only real question is this: Will we do biking well, or will we do it badly?
If recent history is any guide, progress will be slow, opposition will be intense and effective, and we will eventually get what we need.
It Was a Different World
But there's always the fear that a new mayor will come along and decide to rip out all the bike lanes. This would be a popular move among certain segments of the population.
I don't think it will happen, but it could. Far too many people in this town still view bicycles - and scooters and all their cousins - as temporary interlopers.
And bicyclists and bicycle advocates themselves, I think, harbor similar thoughts deep in their minds. The difference being that their thoughts are fears rather than hopes.
And I think a big part of this formless dread dates from the collapse of an astonishingly large bicycling culture - one which even had its own bicycle highways - in the years around 1900. (For instance, the Coney Island Cycle Path in Brooklyn ran next to the existing Ocean Parkway for 5.5 miles, from Prospect Park to Coney Island. Estimates of daily ridership during the mid-1890s regularly ran from 25,000 to 30,000. See Evan Friss, The Cycling City, Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s, 2015, pp. 102-104. This path is still there, with less traffic.)
Why is this dark cloud - so very old - also so persistent? Perhaps it is because we still don't know the whole story of why the collapse happened. A number of good books have come out recently that look at the boom and the collapse, and we already know a lot more than we did. (In addition to Evan Friss's Cycling City, I look principally to James Longhurst, Bike Battles, A History of Sharing the American Road, 2015, chapters 1-3 and another book by Friss: On Bicycles, A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City, 2019, chapters 1-2.)
The bike boom of the 1890s was led by the League of American Wheelmen (bicycles were called wheels back then). This was an elite organization of well-to-do white men, who were only interested in bicycling as a recreational activity for people like them. They were uninterested in forms of cycling other than recreation - commuting to work, for instance - and they had no interest in bicycling by women or people of color. In other words, even though they clearly had a mass base available to them in the 1890s, they refused to connect to it.
The League was powerful, and it did a lot to promote better roads. At the time America's roads were - how should I put this? - just terrible. And the League had members like John Jacob Astor and John D. Rockefeller, and the roads got better.
But the lack of a mass base and the lack of interest in utility bicycling - commuting, to be sure, but also getting around town to run errands - meant that the movement lacked a firm foundation and was dependent on the whims of the super-rich.
The League's membership peaked in 1898 with 103,000 members. By 1900 it had to declined to 76,000, and by 1902 membership was at 8,000.
So where did all these avid bicyclists go? The obvious culprit would be the arrival of cars, but the real explosion of car ownership did not start until 1908, when Ford introduced the Model T.
In the past I have felt that the collapse was not due to the arrival of cars. However, I've been rethinking this. The Census Bureau reports that, in 1900, car companies produced 5,000 vehicles, and that 8,000 motor vehicles were registered in the United States. By 1907, the year before the Model T was introduced, there were 142,061 cars kicking around America's roads.
I'm particularly interested in the Oldsmobile. Ransom Olds founded his company in 1897 and didn't do much until 1901, when he produced 425 cars. In 1902 production was up to 2,500, and we were off to the races.
There was a car boom before the Model T. It was, compared to what came later, tiny. But were there enough of these cars to attract a relatively small market of prosperous young men looking to be early adopters of the next new thing? I don't know, but I'm intrigued.
Last year I was working on a story about the history of Asbury Park, a beach town in New Jersey, eventually titled "Layers at the Beach Front." My wife pointed me to a promotional pamphlet produced by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1905, promoting a meeting of the National Education Association that would be in Asbury Park that summer. It had some interesting things to say about cars.
"No resort section in the world presents so many delights to the driver and automobilist as Monmouth County, in which is situated Asbury Park. Hundreds of miles of hard roads radiate in all directions, covering a country charming in natural beauty, enhanced by the development of money and brains, and filled with historic associations. ... One may procure vehicles of all kinds from the livery stables maintained in Asbury Park, so that driving and auto rides are frequent."
So cars were clearly an attraction in 1905, and it doesn't feel like they were a novelty. (To see the whole pamphlet, click here.)
I do have a concern about the idea that elite Wheelmen swapped out their bikes for cars. Let's call it the exercise factor. These were people who were accustomed to a certain level of physical activity. Where did they go to burn those calories?
Golf, maybe? Moderate exercise, a bit of competition, and of course the nineteenth hole for refreshments.
Again, I don't know. But it would be interesting to put the membership lists of the League and more local bicycling clubs up against the membership lists of golf clubs in a particular area - say, Philadelphia.
I never thought I'd be writing about bicycles and golf in the same sentence. but here goes: How many ex-Wheelmen joined golf clubs?
Resistance to Change
Today, many of the issues that contributed to the collapse of bicycling around 1900 simply do not apply. Most importantly, cycling today is a mass - and very open and inclusive - movement. But there were other issues - for instance, women are no longer expected to wear corsets when they go bicycling. (See Patricia Campbell Warner, When the Girls Came Out to Play, The Birth of American Sportswear, 2006, pp. 119-121.) It was indeed a different world.
There is today, however, a strong countervailing force that did not exist in the 1890s, which boils down to inertia. After a century of dominance by the car industry, people are used to things the way they are. To a very large extent, the general public and our institutions simply don't have a great interest in changing things on our streets.
The Vision Zero initiative is useful in this regard, and I have seen some shifts. Not so long ago, a fellow who was president of a local community organization in Philadelphia told me that he thought 35,000 dead on America's roads and streets every year was a reasonable cost of doing business. I haven't heard that line recently. Instead, people seem to have retreated to denial: The numbers are wrong. They don't reflect what we see on our street every day. This is, of course, lunacy, but given the way things have been going in this country, I'm not sure it's going away any time soon.
Traffic fatalities reached 42,915 in 2021.
Philadelphia has a particular problem in its city hall, where I sense a profound entropy. When I look at city hall these days, I find myself thinking about an aging octopus, no longer fully in control of its tentacles, given to long naps and disorientation upon awakening. This syndrome seems to have enveloped the last several mayors, city council for as long as I can remember, and young staffers who quietly ask themselves if this is the way things are supposed to be.
Let's look at the city bureaucracy. Recently, I have heard that the Streets department in Philadelphia may, as an entity, be moving away from its fierce, if largely passive aggressive, resistance to bicycles. I'm going to wait and see on this one.
And there is substantial resistance to bicycling among some members of the general public. Part of this seems to be a simple, and very human, dislike of change. This can be paired with an automatic dislike of people who are not exactly like you. And if those people have different needs from yours, then that can be another catalyst for opposition.
In addition, I've found that there seems to be an unwillingness to see bicyclists as they actually are. One of the most common misconceptions I run into is the idea that bicycling is still almost entirely about leisure. That simply is not true in Philadelphia today. As we saw in the bike racks around Civic Center Boulevard, there's a lot of bike commuting. Beyond commuting, there's utility biking that takes place throughout the course of the day - taking kids to school (and home again), shopping, visiting Aunt Tillie - oh, and yes, delivering food. Bicycling - and scooting - have been integrated into the fabric of the city's life.
Finally, we need to look at the people in the shadows behind the people. They've learned how to coopt community organizing and use it for their own ends. A good example is the recent fiasco on Washington Avenue, where community groups were essentially pawns of the local business establishment, and the folks in city hall were happy to play along. {For two stories on Washington Avenue, click here and here.)
This approach is qualitatively different from the more traditional approach that has its roots in the advertising industry - controlling people's minds to sell them a product or a candidate. Essentially the people pulling the strings have adopted the tactics of the left. This shift has been underway for a while. I remember, back in the 1990s, there was a push in the corporate world to develop their "grassroots." I don't believe this went well, because employees kept showing up at political events wearing polo shirts with the company logo. And people started referring to "astroturf."
The new system, on the other hand, clearly works, and we can see examples of it all around us. I invariably find it sad to watch people being exploited in this manner, but it works, and I don't think it's going away any time soon.
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| Pocatello, Idaho. Russell Lee/FSA, 1942. |
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