The Limits of Bike Culture and Encouragement Programming

Over at our local Strong Towns group, they posted a note about Encouragement programming for creating a culture of bicycling.

via FB

There's nothing wrong or false in the piece, "Supporting Cycling Goes Beyond Infrastructure," but it might not have quite the right emphasis or proportion in real ingredients for more bicycling.

If you look at that picture, it shows urban midrise construction. (Quite possibly in Europe, also. With the cobbled street, it doesn't look very American. It is nearly certain to be pre-automobile era.) Pretty consistently bicycle advocacy misses on the values in proximity and adjacency, and the value of land use.

Walking and biking trips require short distances
People for Bikes, italics and vertical rule added

Most people biking don't go very far, and data even on Dutch cyclists show bike trips peak at about one mile in length. 

Useful things need to be close together! Not separated by parking lots, expanses of single detached housing, and wide zoomy arterials.

Encouragement only goes so far in the context of our city form, which is truly a geography of discouragement. 

Portland has an amazing bike culture and great Encouragement programming, and yet they have seen declines in bicycling. Other factors seem more determinative.

As for the specific things Strong Towns recommends, Salem has, or has had, all of them - but with limited success. "Encouragement" programming has not moved the needle here.

• A Comprehensive Bike Map. Salem has this.
• Free Lessons for Kids. A decade and more ago through the BTA Bike Safety Education Program, upper elementary school students got a two-week course on bike riding and bike safety. Currently the Safe Routes to School program operates a more sporadic "Bicycle Rodeo" model of a couple of hours of instruction. There is great opportunity here to revert to the longer two-week classes.
  
• Skill Sharing and Maintenance Training. Programming at the NW Hub looks a lot like what Strong Towns described for the Boise program.
• Group Rides. There's a newish Salem Social Cyclists group in addition to longer established (and longer distance) club rides. There could always be more of these, of course, and oriented to smaller, niche social groups.
• (Not mentioned in the article are Encouragement contests like the Bike Commute Challenge and the forthcoming Get There Challenge in October. Oregon has generally a more robust set of Encouragement activities than the intended audience of the Strong Towns piece, for whom much of this would be more novel.)
  

They say, "That’s not to say that a little bit of paint can’t make a big difference, but there are ways to build an appetite for biking that don’t require involving a municipal or state agency." Generally, with their preference for small and individual, extolling a kind of modern yeoman neighbor, over large and communal/corporate, Strong Towns sometimes misses the scale of aggregate change necessary for real transformation.

Not always (August 23rd, 1923)

Each of the recommendations Strong Towns makes has value, a signalling function in culture and is a neat expression of niche association. There's no reason not to do them. 

But there are reasons not to depend on them. They do not easily scale to the thousands or tens of thousands of citizens necessary for durable change in a city. To be fully operational and sustainable, projects often need to be funded and institutionalized. That way they don't depend on extracting surplus value from volunteers and risk volunteer burn out. Governmental organizations definitely have roles, especially for things like parking reform, road pricing, and ending other forms of autoist subsidy, which currently operate to make driving the "intuitive" choice of first resort.

Recently here at greater length on decline in cycling and limitations of a focus on Encouragement, see:

• "On the Decline of Cycling and a Grant for Salem Bike Vision"
  
• On Encouragement and promotion particularly, "Break the Annual Cycles of Bike Month"