Three Way Street - Chaos in New York

Mike Rubbo sent me a link to this video by Ron Gabriel. It's very nicely made, and shows very dramatically the points of conflict which he saw over a brief period of time.

However, I think the way Ron himself as well as other people who have commented on the video talk about what they see is quite telling.

The discussion on Vimeo and on the blog is about "long-standing bad habits" of users of various modes, about "selfish people" and enforcement of the law.

I don't see the behaviour at this junction as being about "bad habits". What I see is simply a very badly designed junction which almost invites people to behave in the way that they do.

Dutch road junctions don't look like and work like this - the designs are different for a reason: A long-standing theme of Dutch road design is the concept of Sustainable Safety. Conflict is removed, collisions are therefore rare and the consequences of those collisions which remain are relatively small compared with other countries. Roads are made self-explanatory so that excessive signing is not depended upon to reduce bad behaviour but the way in which people behave is changed because of their environment. Less "enforcement" is needed when people have no reason to want to do dangerous things. This has resulted in the safest roads in the world.

The links below take you to several examples of these principles at work, some of which if adopted in New York could reduce the problems at junctions like this:

• Simultaneous Green lights for cyclists, keeping cyclists and motor vehicles apart.
• Roundabouts designed to keep modes apart.
• Avoidance of traffic lights for cyclists
• Short delays for crossing the road for cyclists and pedestrians
• Cycle Paths to provide cyclists with their own space
• Streets which prioritize cyclists, or pedestrians, over drivers (not just back streets, but those which take the most direct route)

Most of these examples deal with cycling more than other modes. The others deal with pedestrians. There are reasons for this emphasis.

It's quite common in other countries that cyclists are singled out for more criticism than other groups. There is a reason for this. While there are sidewalks for pedestrians and roads for drivers, cyclists have no true place of their own and are left with a choice of "sharing the road" rather unequally with motor vehicles or riding illegally on the sidewalk. Cyclists are an out-group not only in social terms but also in terms of road design.

Road design overall is in general rather too dominated by motor vehicles. That's certainly the case in New York, and while New Yorkers walk quite a lot, conditions for cycling remain poor. This contributes to the still very low cycling rate of the city. There is an inadequate level of all three types of safety for cyclists and the lack of subjective safety is especially clear from watching the video.

Even amongst those who are brave enough to cycle in the city, few would want or encourage their children or grandparents doing the same thing.

There is a solution to this problem, but it doesn't come from maintaining the design status quo while enforcing rules. Design of infrastructure needs to change to reflect the usage which you want to have and to encourage people to behave in a safe way. It's especially important at intersections.

The truth about New York, and other unlikely places to look for inspiration...

For some time, I've wondered why it is that British politicians and commentators look so very often across the Atlantic to the United States for inspiration, when they could more profitably take a much shorter journey across the North Sea to the Netherlands or other European nations to find better solutions for their problems. This is particularly true when it comes to cycling.

A great example of this appeared recently in the "bike blog" of The Guardian newspaper in Britain, with the rather hyperbolic headline of "How one New York bike lane could affect the future of cycling worldwide".

Cyclists in the USA, and at this time particularly in New York face many problems. I'd of course like to see them resolved. But my question in this post is about why it is that a British newspaper would make such a remark. Is New York really so significant in cycling terms ?

The last figures I saw for the cycling rate of the city suggest that just 0.6% of commutes in the city are by bike (and that this small number is enough to put it in sixth place amongst larger American cities). Only around one-fifth of all journeys made are for commuting purposes. However, commuting figures are often quoted for cycling because commuters are by definition adults of working age - a relatively easy group to attract to cycling. By concerning ourselves only with commuters we don't have to concern ourselves with the more tricky demographic groups - including children, parents accompanying children and older people. Commuting figures are usually the highest figures for utility cycling that you can quote, and it makes it easier to claim a larger modal share than is real when the entire population and all reasons for journeys are discussed.

In this case let's be generous and assume for the sake of simplicity that 0.6% of all journeys by everyone are by bike in New York. The city has a population of around 8.4 million, and it's normal for people to make an average of around 2.5 journeys per day. Therefore, about 21 million journeys will be made per day in New York. Taking our generous estimate of cycle usage, we can assume that there are around 125000 journeys made per day by bike in the city. If this blog was into baffling with large numbers, I'd perhaps stop there and report the huge number of cyclists. However, that's not really very helpful.

Even compared with London, where The Guardian is based, this isn't actually impressive at all. London's population is a little smaller than New York's, but Londoners reportedly use bikes for roughly 500000 journeys per day (only a small minority of these journeys, around 13000, are made on bikes which are part of the much hyped, incredibly expensive bike share scheme).

In comparison with cities in the Netherlands, the number of trips made by bike in New York is roughly equal to a city with a population of around 150000 people and a merely average cycling rate. Higher cycling rate cities do better, of course. Assen, where we now live, is a tiny place with just 65000 people. However, they make over 70000 cycle journeys each day, which is a remarkably high proportion of our generous estimate for New York. The world's highest cycling rate is in Groningen, where a population of 190000 makes over 300000 journeys per day. Easily more than double the numbers made by New Yorkers.

Other American cities are similar. Even the much lauded Portland has only a 4.7% commuting rate. That's around 1/6th the cycling modal share of an average Dutch city. No place in the Netherlands has such a low modal share as Portland, yet Portland is also frequently an inspiration to some people in the UK.

Cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands is built to cope with far higher levels of usage and by a far wider demographic than many outside observers realise.

But this blog post isn't really about New York or Portland or even about infrastructure. Rather, I'm interested in the British media's obsession with everything from America, and their apparently unquestioning belief of any hype or "cheerleading" which they hear. If you consistently look in the wrong direction, then you consistently end up with the wrong answers. That is, unfortunately, precisely what keeps happening in the UK, where it appears that many people stand with their backs to Europe and gaze longingly across the North Atlantic for inspiration for ways to solve any given problem.

That The Guardian should write about cycling in New York in the article that I linked to is not at all unusual. The Guardian actually writes an awful lot about cycling in New York. In fact, search the newspaper for "New York cycling" and you get 10000 hits. Search for "Copenhagen cycling" (another place known for hype) and you get 2100 hits, "Portland cycling" gets 150 hits (all these numbers were correct at the time of writing this post. Google's indexes and the Guardian's content both change, but when checked a couple of years later the numbers were still similar)

And does the Guardian also write about Groningen, the place which has the highest cycling rate in the world ? Well, search for "Groningen cycling" and you find a mere 29 hits, more than one of which are due to the comments I used to make beneath "bike blog" articles before seeing how utterly pointless it was to bother with them.

There's surely something wrong with this picture. There's a saying about Journalism: "if your mother says she loves you, check it out.". Why is The Guardian, a "quality newspaper" not checking-out the stories that they tell about cycling ? Why are they not more skeptical of their sources, and ensuring sensible coverage of cycling ? The journalism on their "bike blog" often seems to consist of little more than reproducing press releases from whoever shouts loudest about their cycling "successes".

The Netherlands has a smaller population than the Metropolitan area of New York City (16 million vs 22 million) but there are vastly more cycle journeys here. A million cycle journeys per hour, in fact, during much of every week. It may not be easy to see what this compares with, but there's one simple comparison which is startling: The tiny population of this country make more journeys by bike than the whole of the USA, Britain and Australia put together.

When looking for examples of successful policy to copy, does it not make most sense to look where policies genuinely have been successful instead of looking to where proudly claimed successes are actually rather small and only visible relative to even smaller numbers of cyclists previously ?

When Americans visit Dutch cities, there is a reason why they are amazed and inspired. If journalists from the Guardian were to make the same journey, they'd see the same things. I have suggested this to them before, and indeed I also sent invitations to journalists with this and other newspapers in the UK over some years with trying to promote the idea of a Study Tour to them. I'm still waiting for a response.

Some numbers:

Yes, there are just 24000 bike commuters in the whole of New York City. Within the US, Portland leads for overall cycling rate. However, even here the figures are remarkably small in comparison with any Dutch city - including even those which consider themselves to have low rates of cycling. It's great that progress is being made in the USA, but it's very slow progress and other nations would be better off looking to the Netherlands for real examples of what really does work to promote cycling.

In the last week we've made four different posts which refer to the USA in one way or another. To make it easy to see all "USA" posts, you can select those posts by label.

Please don't get any silly idea that I dislike New York, New Yorkers, or Americans in general. How could I ? New York's and New Yorker's influence on western culture has been huge. I grew up listening to Talking Heads and Suzanne Vega, and watching films by Woody Allen. However, just as it would make no sense at all to ask the Dutch about running a successful mission to the moon, it makes no sense to ask Americans how to make cycling a normal part of everyone's lives. That goes double when you see that enlightened Americans are actually looking to the Netherlands. Once upon a time, America was the leading cycling nation, but at the moment cycling in the USA faces many problems. I'd like to see them resolved.

Do you want to see how different it could be ? Book a study tour and see how Dutch infrastructure has lead to the highest cycling modal share in the world.

Population density vs. cycling rate for a range of cities

This is another of those myths and excuses that I've covered before, but just keeps on coming up. i.e. that the Netherlands has a high rate of cycling because Dutch cities are especially dense. Some campaigners make a lot of noise about high density being required to achieve a higher cycling rate or lower car use. Actually, there is not much of a correlation between cycling rate and density.

As you'll see in the plot above, it isn't true that cities with the highest population densities have the highest cycling rates. Rather, you'll find that Dutch and Danish cities have the highest cycling rates, whatever their density happens to be, because cycling in them there is a more pleasant experience because these cities have invested in cycling infrastructure in order to make it pleasant. Subjective safety is very important.

The belief that the Dutch live in remarkably highly densely populated cities is just a myth. Assen, where we live, has just 780 people per square km. That's not only significantly less dense than New York, but also less dense than relatively spread out American cities such as Portland (1655 people per square km).

New York makes a great example. Over 10000 people live in each square km of what is a very compact city for its population, yet for all the recent hype about growing cycling, the cycling rate remains extraordinarily low by international standards: Just 0.6% of commutes are by bike in that city. Conditions may be slowly improving, and it's a very good thing that they are, but it's still not yet a place to look to internationally as a success story. They're a very long way from the point where all types of people feel safe to cycle for a large proportion of their journeys.

Dutch cities need cycle paths like this
precisely because they are not dense

Much to my amusement, some Dutch people believe the same story about density. i.e. that they have relatively densely populated cities. I was once told this as part of a presentation about Groningen, the density of which is actually just 2300 people per square km. Even the capital of the country, Amsterdam, has just 3500 people per square km. The highest density city in the Netherlands is Den Haag with 5900 people per square km, but Den Haag does not have anything like the highest cycling modal share for a Dutch city. Quite the reverse, in fact, as in a presentation to us on a visit a few years back, the cycling rate there was described as "quite low".

To summarize, population density has little to do with cycling rate. Even within individual countries there is little correlation. You'll see that less densely populated Portland has more cycling than more densely populated New York, that Cambridge people cycle more than Londoners, that Bremen does better than Berlin, and that Groningen has more cycling than Amsterdam even though the densities of each of the higher cycling cities in those pairs is lower.

At this point, it's traditional for some people to respond with comments about average journey distances being so much longer in whichever country they live in. However, I'm afraid that doesn't really hold water either. While the mean distance is skewed due to the maximum possible journey distances being greater, the median for everyday journeys does not vary as much as you might imagine. Even in the USA, every-day journey distances are limited by time more than by the actual distance and 40% of all journeys are under 2 miles in length. The longest journeys may not be practical by bike, but Americans rarely choose cycling as a mode of transport even for the shortest journeys.

By contrast, longer cycle journeys are easier to make in the Netherlands. We find this from our own experience. Places that seemed "too far to cycle to" in the UK are often closer together than we remember them being, and people make the same and longer distance journeys here by bike without a second thought.

The reason for the vastly higher rate of cycling in the Netherlands is not population density, but policy which support cycling, effective campaigning, and successful infrastructure design.

For those who prefer a scatter graph:

The cycling rates for cities with stars after their names are the lowest on my graph, but they're all actually exaggerated relative to the other cities in the list. For these cities I could find only figures for "commuters" and not for all journeys. That the local authorities should choose to publicise this figure instead of one for all journeys is itself an indication that you don't see a lot of school children, parents with children, or pensioners on the streets of these cities. Where there is a healthy cycling culture, commuters are a minority of cyclists.

Do people cycle in the Netherlands because it's difficult to drive here ?

Researchers at IBM have come up with an index for how bad it is to commute by car in various cities in the world.

For a long time I've argued that the Netherlands wins cyclists mostly by making cycling pleasant. Use of the carrot rather than a stick. It's much better to convince people to do something because they want to do it than to force them to do something they don't want to do. And that's how it is here. There is no "them vs. us" feeling around cycling vs. driving. Most people both cycle and drive.

Of all the cities in the survey, Amsterdam has easily the highest cycling rate. It has been shown that increasing the proportion of journeys by bike has many benefits, amongst them improving conditions for the remaining drivers.

This is born out by this research which reveals that not only is Amsterdam good for cyclists, but it is also a better city for drivers than car oriented cities such as London, Madrid and Paris. For drivers, Amsterdam is on a par with Los Angeles and only very slightly worse than Berlin, Montreal, New York and Melbourne.

The worst place in the survey for cycling is Beijing, a city where driving is rising as fast as cycling is falling.

Roads in the Netherlands are actually very good. They're an efficient network, well maintained. They are also well sign-posted and car parking is not difficult to find. It's an easy place to drive. However, despite this, car ownership is actually relatively low for such a wealthy nation.

People cycle here because they feel that they can. Cycling is attractive, convenient and safe.

Why doesn't everywhere try to emulate the Dutch success in cycling ? It really is difficult to find an excuse which holds water. Even the world's best cycling infrastructure is not actually expensive. It's quite possibly the most cost effective method for improving conditions for drivers.

The IBM link came via Velo Mondial.

The effect of population density on cycling

Much is sometimes made of the requirement for cities to have a high population density in order to encourage cycling. It is said that it is essential for populations to live in densely packed areas to keep journey distances short before people will take to cycling.

Looking at the behaviour of the Dutch, who cycle more than the people of any other country, this seems to be a flawed suggestion. Or at least an over-simplification.

It is true that the population density of the Netherlands as a whole is quite high. There are nearly 400 people per square km in this country. Much higher than the 32 per square km that you find in the USA. However, whole country size scales don't really have much to do with the journeys that most people make on a daily basis.

Let's try this with densities of provinces or states, and cities within them. Assen is the capital of the province of Drenthe. This province has the lowest population density in the country, with 183 people per square kilometre. The capital of Drenthe is Assen, which has an area of 83 square km and 784 people per square km.

Five US states are denser in population than Drenthe. New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maryland all have higher densities, New Jersey's population density is higher than that of the Netherlands as a whole. Delaware has the closest density to Drenthe, at 170 per square km. The capital of Delaware is a small city called Dover home of just 35000 people spread across 58 square km - which makes 617 people per square km.

These figures are really not so different to those for Assen. Assen's population makes 41% of all journeys by bike. Does anyone know the cycling rate of Dover ? Would it be reasonable to assume it's somewhat lower than Assen ?

Los Angeles in the 1950s

Or look at the bigger cities. Los Angeles has over 3000 people per square km, but just 0.9% of commutes are by bike. New York has over 10000 people per square km. That's more than twice the population density of Amsterdam, but while 38% of all journeys in Amsterdam are by bike, only 0.6% of commutes are by bike in New York (which amazingly is still enough to be in sixth place amongst large American cities).

The same is also true of Devon in Delaware. Take a look at high school parking in Delaware and compare it with high school parking in Assen. Would it be conceivable for an American school to hold a triathlon as my daughter's school did here in Assen, telling the students to ride their bikes unaccompanied to a swimming pool at a sports centre 20 km away ?

It's quite mind-boggling just how little Americans cycle. However, it's also quite obvious why. Infrastructure has been designed over decades in such a way that it excludes cyclists. The photo was taken in the 1950s in Los Angeles.

Does where you live look like an inviting place to cycle ? Driving is the norm in many places because the infrastructure is designed around the car and it makes driving appear to be the only reasonable option. You see cars and car centric infrastructure almost anywhere that you randomly drop the Google Street View man in the USA. Whereas you've a good chance of getting cycling infrastructure and cyclists in street view scenes in the Netherlands.

It's perhaps interesting to note that the highest cycling rates in much of the Netherlands are actually in the North of the country, in the least densely populated areas, where journey lengths are often a bit longer. It's not population density which really makes the difference in cycling rates, but infrastructure which makes cycling into an obvious option. It has to be the most convenient, pleasant and safe way to get about. That's why 93% of the Dutch population ride a bike at least once a week.

There are many other excuses for why populations of other countries don't cycle.

I featured that photo at the top before. It's what Los Angeles already looked like in the 1950s. Roads like this are a large part of why people would choose not to cycle.

Are transport priorities the right way up ?

It has long been the stated aim of many places to have a road user hierarchy in which pedestrians come top, cyclists follow soon after, public transport fits in next and in which private cars come in at the bottom.

However, very few places actually behave like this. Typically there is very little obvious link between what literature states about priorities and what is done on the street.

Tom Vanderbilt recently had a good example on his blog. A sketch by the Danish architect Jan Gehl showing volumes of traffic by mode on a New York street, and how much of the street had been allocated to each mode. It is shown below:

I would be surprised not to learn that a similar pattern wasn't also in place regarding such things as timings of crossings. Typically the average delay for a pedestrian is much longer than that for a driver.

And of course both the allocation of space and the pattern of timings in favour of drivers is repeated in many cities across the world (such as in Cambridge when we found that cycling got just 0.6% of the transport budget) - yet many people wonder why it is that driving becomes the most popular way of getting around.

For cyclists, it's not the same here. There are instances of cycle paths smoother than roads and traffic lights which give priority to cyclists over drivers.

And... it seems that it is possible to do this without drivers rioting in the streets. In fact, of course, such progressive steps help everyone. It makes it easier for more people not use cars, resulting in everyone suffering from fewer of the problems caused by driving, and that in itself makes it easier to continue to turn transport priorities around.

Conditions for cyclists are not perfect here, but they are an awful lot better than in most places. This is the reason why we organise cycling study tours in this location. It's a great place to come and see the infrastructure which features on this blog for yourself, or encourage your local planners or cycling officers to visit. We have the experience both of what is normal in the UK (where street design is similar in intent to the US), and here.

To recap, here are examples of directness, comparisons with the UK, school travel and the important of subjective safety.

Cyclists being given a much greater importance in planning is also one of the reasons why this is such a good place to have a cycling holiday.