CHAPTER 6

Die-Ins and Political Bravery—How Mass Cycling Happens

“We Forced Them to Take Decisions”

An unsuspecting local walking near the Saint Lawrence River in central Montreal that day in 1975 would have been forgiven for being a bit puzzled. Next to the water was a group of protesters with their bikes. Standing on a rock above them, and the focus for a gaggle of press photographers, was a man dressed as Moses—complete with robe, headdress, stick-on beard, and tablet of commandments. In his other hand was a wooden staff, which he was waving vigorously, ordering the waters to part so his people could cross.

This wasn’t some esoteric piece of street theater. It was a demonstration in favor of cycling infrastructure in the Canadian city, carried out by a then–newly formed group whose innovative tactics exemplify many of the elements needed to successfully persuade a city to build for bikes: people power, imagination, and an awful lot of persistence.

The man in the Moses costume was Robert Silverman, aka Bicycle Bob, one of the cofounders of La Monde à Bicyclette, a loose and occasionally chaotic collective of alternative types, left wingers, and general misfits who nonetheless played a pivotal role in turning Montreal into one of North America’s most cycle-friendly cities. “We went down to the riverside, me and another guy, me with a Moses costume rented from a store, with the tablets,” recalls Silverman, now in his eighties. “We pretended we were running away from the Egyptians.”

The stunt was to highlight the fact that decades of car-dominated city planning had left Montreal’s cyclists with no way to cross the river, as they were barred from all the bridges. Earlier protests had included trying to load bikes into canoes, and halting the traffic in the middle of one existing bridge with an impromptu game of volleyball. “We called ourselves the Poetic Velorutionary Tendency,” recalls Silverman. “That implied theater, and making it fun. And so we started doing theatrics.”

“Most people probably thought we were crazy, but the journalists loved our events, as they were so theatrical,” adds Jacques Desjardins, the only French Canadian among the group’s founders. “We were on the front pages every Monday.”

All this gradually bore fruit. A cycle bridge was built. City authorities also allowed bikes to be carried on the city’s subway after La Monde à Bicyclette very publicly carried increasingly outlandish objects onto trains, including ladders and cardboard-cutout elephants. The group staged “die-ins,” as had the equivalent Dutch protesters a few years earlier, though of course Silverman and his allies were even more dramatic, slathering themselves in ketchup to mimic blood.

While many cities experienced bike activism in the 1970s, in Montreal the protesters never gave up. The first bike lanes were eventually built in 1985, and the city now has nearly 400 miles of them, about 150 miles of which are separated from motor traffic, as well as about five thousand public-hire bikes.

While overall cycle use remains relatively low by Dutch or Danish standards, with about 10 percent of central commutes made by bike, as a transport culture it is very noticeable and has helped Montreal be included in many of the league tables of the world’s most livable cities. The maverick campaigners’ role in all this is acknowledged—the main bike route through the center of Montreal is named after Claire Morissette, Silverman’s coleader in La Monde à Bicyclette, who died in 2007.

Desjardins says he is proud of their achievements: “All of this was the result of a citizen’s movement, and not because of the authorities. We forced them to take decisions, year after year.” He adds: “I think we were in many ways probably twenty years ahead of our time. What you call new urbanism—it was talked about in most places in the 1990s, but we were talking about it in the 1970s. Our first congress was about changing the city. We looked much further than the bicycle. The bicycle was a tool to change the city.”

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For all the romantic triumph of La Monde à Bicyclette, it should never be forgotten that the theatrics were just one part of the story. For example, while the stunts on the subway helped shape the political climate, it was a parallel challenge in the courts that prompted the eventual policy change. Getting the cycle bridge, meanwhile, also involved some more traditional lobbying of politicians for funding.

In time, this more traditional approach began to dominate. La Monde à Bicyclette, always split between Silverman’s allies and a smaller cohort of Trotskyists and Maoists (“They said nothing could be done until the workers take power,” Silverman recalls) soon began to fracture. Its dominant role was taken by another group, Vélo Québec, a separate and considerably more sober campaign organization that started out as a bike-based travel agency.

If La Monde à Bicyclette created the climate for Montreal’s bike lanes, Vélo Québec sealed the deal. In 1985, the year the first infrastructure arrived, Vélo Québec launched the Tour de L’Île, a mass bike ride around the city. The first of these, held in autumn, was quite poorly attended, recalls Suzanne Lareau, Vélo Québec’s chief executive. But the next year’s one, moved to June, saw fifteen thousand cyclists. “After that the politicians realized there was a phenomenon there,” Lareau says. “Then we had more and more people.”

She explains: “We always had two goals with the Tour de L’Île. Firstly, it was to encourage people to use bikes and promote cycling. But the second goal was a political message. When you have ten thousand or fifteen thousand or twenty thousand or forty thousand cyclists on the streets, politicians can’t say: ‘Nobody cycles here.’”

After thirty years of the Tour de L’Île, which is now the centerpiece of a weekend of bike events, Montreal’s politicians ignore cyclists at their peril. The city’s current mayor, Denis Coderre, is by no means a die-hard cyclist, and in fact spent much of 2015 very publicly trying to lose some weight, in part so he would be able to ride in the Tour de L’Île. “Cycling is part of our lives,” Coderre told me, leaning on his bike at a rest stop midway through the event, which he did manage to finish. “People enjoy it. The city belongs to everybody, and the bottom line is to always protect the most vulnerable.”¹

Paper in a Drawer

Such talk of protest and theater can sound enticingly romantic. And it was certainly the case that in many places during the 1970s and ’80s, when a move toward more bike-friendly towns and cities happened, it was mainly a bottom-up, demonstration-led process. As we saw earlier, a big impetus in the Netherlands came with the Stop de Kindermoord mass movement for child-friendly streets. In Copenhagen, up to 150,000 people massed outside the city hall in the 1970s “demanding to get their city back,” as the city’s mayor for roads, Morten Kabell, puts it.

These days it seems to be different. Protests can still play a role—riders in London have staged a series of high-profile “die-in” demonstrations over recent years, which have helped focus minds at city hall. But if you look at recent examples of change, the slightly sad truth is that now, whether or not your city gets bike lanes often comes down to individual politicians, and sometimes just luck.

Seville is a case in point for both. We saw in the previous chapter how the construction of protected cycle routes transformed the southern Spanish city. The story behind how this took place is simultaneously heartwarming and also a bit depressing, given how easily it could have not happened.

It all began in 2003, when the fringe United Left political alliance won sufficient city council seats to jointly govern with the Socialists. The city’s traffic was in chaos at the time—because of the local habit of the afternoon siesta, it has four daily rush hours rather than two—and the United Left, traditionally supportive of cycling, managed to get a deal to build the bike lanes onto a coalition agreement. But even then it could easily have come to nothing.

By good fortune, Seville’s head of urban planning was José Garcia Cebrián, a keen cyclist who, like the United Left, had been awaiting such an opportunity. Even then, he cheerfully admits, the main reason the bike lane plan succeeded was because almost no one believed it would ever happen and so very few people bothered to try and stop it.

“In Spain there’s been a lot of planning about cycling, but then the plans get put into a drawer,” Cebrián says. “There’s a Spanish saying for documents like that, ser papel mojado, or ‘wet paper’—something which is no use. That’s what everyone thought the bike lane plans were. So there was no opposition during the planning process, as everyone thought the same thing would happen. The opposition only started when the infrastructure was being built, and by then there was no way back.”²

Among the opponents were some of Cebrián’s own council colleagues, mainly the car-dominated transport department. When the diggers first went out to begin work on the bike lanes, some officials were so outraged they tried to get the construction crews to halt. But it was too late.

Cebrián and the designers of the system even tried to build it in a way that would make the changes harder to reverse. Much of the space used for the bike lanes was taken from bus or parking lanes, but this was raised up to sidewalk level, so a future city government would have a more difficult job altering the layout again.

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As perilous as open political opposition might be for bike infrastructure, almost as bad is lukewarm support, which evaporates the moment a noisy pressure group begins to object. Especially in the modern era of social media a relatively few number of people can create considerable volume, which in turn can spook leaders into inaction or endless delay. This phenomenon is, sadly, all too common.

The new mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, was elected in 2016 amid a string of promises to press ahead with another series of separated bike lanes, including one heading north from the city center, into some wealthy inner suburbs. There had been much consultation about this scheme, with a large majority of respondents being in favor. But within weeks of taking office, Khan announced the plan had been stopped for a review.

His decision followed a tumult of protest from a fairly limited but very well-connected group of objectors. Among the most vocal was Tom Conti, the respected British stage and film actor. In 2015, Conti issued a dire warning about what would happen to his neighborhood, the expensive North London suburb of Hampstead, if part of one road was given over to a bike lane. “The whole area will be destroyed,” he boomed, predicting a “solid queue” of cars all the way to Hatfield, almost twenty miles to the north. “This is the beginning of some kind of Soviet idea to ban all vehicular traffic from London.”³

Astonishingly, Conti’s intervention was not the most absurdly overdramatic. That honor went to Nigel Lawson, a prominent former government minister, who issued a wider view on the bike lane program. “What is happening now has done more damage, and is doing more damage, to London than almost anything since the Blitz,” he said.⁴

Andrew Gilligan, London’s then-commissioner for cycling, treated the comments with remarkable calmness. Responding to Lawson’s claims he pointed out the roadwork to build the bike lanes had caused some minor temporary traffic disruption. In contrast, the Blitz, Germany’s World War II bombing raids, killed more than twenty thousand Londoners and destroyed or damaged a million buildings. As such, Gilligan argued, the two were not strictly comparable.⁵

Slogging in the Trenches

There are a few ways to overcome such skepticism. One solution, the most straightforward if arguably hardest to achieve, is to have a political patron with a big electoral mandate who firmly and publicly supports measures to achieve more cycling.

Andrew Gilligan’s then-boss was the London mayor, Boris Johnson, who by the time Gilligan began introducing separated bike lanes had twice been convincingly elected by the city’s voters and, unlike his successor, was very committed to cycling measures. Given such backing, Gilligan told me, he was able to treat the relatively small groups of objectors with due proportion.

“You’ve got to accept that any serious and meaningful cycling scheme will nearly always have clear majority support, but it will never have unanimous support,” he says. “There are always going to be people who are infuriated by it. You’ve got to listen to reasonable objections, you’ve got to compromise, you’ve got to consult, but in the end you’ve got to realize there’s going to be a group of people for whom no length of consultation, no amount of compromise, will ever suffice. The only thing they want is for the consultation to go on until all eternity and for the scheme to then be scrapped. In the end you’ve got to put your foot down.”

Gilligan has a message for advocates who want to see more cycling provision: try to be as active as the objectors, especially when it comes to lobbying local politicians. “They tend to hear from the NIMBYs [Not in My Backyard], and they think the NIMBYs represent local opinion,” Gilligan says. “They nearly always don’t. I tell cycle campaigners: stop moaning on social media, just go and see your councilors and demand local cycling improvements.”

Gilligan, a journalist with no prior city planning experience, spent the first period of his time in the job viewed with almost equal suspicion by engineers in his own administration and by London’s cycling lobby groups. “At the beginning I was under attack from both sides,” Gilligan says. “There was resistance from some people in Transport for London, and I was attacked by cyclists for not turning London into Amsterdam by Thursday teatime. But it was worth it in the end.”⁶

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A few years beforehand in New York City, Janette Sadik-Khan had faced a similar wave of opposition to a more ambitious program for bike infrastructure and new car-free areas. When Sadik-Khan (no relation to the new London mayor) became the city’s transport commissioner in 2007, her hugely powerful overlord and protector was Michael Bloomberg, then the twice-elected mayor who was about to rewrite the voting laws to permit him to win a third term.

Even so, Sadik-Khan arguably faced more personal criticism even than Gilligan. She was routinely called “brusque” or “uncompromising”—even “shrill”—epithets that, oddly, often seem to be more aimed at the relatively rare women in positions of power than their male peers.

“It’s fair to say that I grew a second skin over the course of six and a half years,” she told me. “There’s eight-point-four million people in New York and I sometimes felt there were eight-point-four million traffic engineers. All one hundred eighty acres of streets that we gave back to people on foot and people on bikes and transit was a hard-fought battle. I get it—transportation is local. People are passionate about their street, and when you talk about new ways to get around which aren’t about driving, a lot of people really erupt.”

Sadik-Khan agrees that having the political heft of someone like Bloomberg to take into battle was a huge help: “There’s no question having a strong leader does help in establishing that vision, and supporting change when the status quo blowback begins.”⁷

Nonetheless, she still faced many of the same problems later experienced by Andrew Gilligan in London. Neighborhood community boards issued streams of micro-objections, sometimes based around the loss of a few or single parking spaces. Some shop owners objected. Rival politicians latched on to the furor to demand “more consultation,” even when much had been done, and had favored the scheme in question. All the while the rhetoric was fanned by an occasionally hysterical media.

Perhaps the apex of this battle was the tumult over a bike lane to be installed alongside Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Lawsuits were filed, demonstrations held, and antibike opposition groups formed with slightly sinister names like Seniors for Safety and Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes. Even after the lane was built and proved vastly successful, some court cases continued for years. It was, one local paper wrote with only slight exaggeration, “the most controversial slab of cement outside the Gaza Strip.”⁸

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To fight such brutal, street-by-street public relations battles, even powerful mayors and their staff need allies. At one point, Andrew Gilligan was worried that a public consultation on the bike route opposed by Tom Conti might be overcome by the energetic efforts of opponents. He appealed to those who wanted the route to take part in the survey, and it was overwhelmingly approved.

In New York, Sadik-Khan was lucky to have the assistance of groups like Transportation Alternatives, a forty-year-old campaign organization with vast experience of “slogging in the trenches” over bike infrastructure, according to its executive director, Paul Steely White. When Sadik-Khan and Bloomberg started to build bike lanes, the group sprang into action, he recalls: “We pride ourselves as smart advocates. On Eighth Avenue we literally went door to door, talking to shopkeepers and business owners, and tried to explain to them why it made sense and why they should support a bike lane. Eventually we got enough onside.”⁹

Jon Orcutt, policy director of New York’s transport department at the time, said the sheer vehemence of the opposition paradoxically helped prove its undoing, as it forced the city to show how much support there was for the changes. “One of the things about the backlash is it got people who measure what New Yorkers think interested in the issue of bike lanes,” he says. “Your typical survey of New Yorkers is things like how the police commissioner is doing on crime. All of a sudden they’re interviewing thousands of people, asking, ‘Would the city be a better place with more bike lanes?’ And the answer was two-thirds in favor, despite all the negative press we were getting. The backlash sowed the seeds of its own destruction.”¹⁰

The City’s Ready, Just Use Your Bike

One of the more unusual occasional jobs in local government involves dressing up in a full-length fluffy duck costume and riding a bike between preschools in Odense before handing out stickers and hugs to the children. It all sounds like innocent fun, but the duck in question, Cycling Anton, has a serious municipal purpose: making sure Odense keeps its much-cherished title of Denmark’s most bike-friendly city.

Cycling Anton, who has been in service for a couple of decades, represents yet another element of efforts to get people cycling: what do you do to improve things when the lanes are already there?

In Odense, much of this involves securing the future of the city’s bike culture by inducting young children into it as early as possible. As well as a hug and a sticker from a cuddly duck, initiatives include getting children as young as two traveling to kindergarten on balance bikes, offering training to nursery staff, and improving nearby cycling routes.

More widely, the city undertook what became known as the “20/20/20” scheme—a program to boost cycling that brought a 20 percent rise in cyclist numbers, and a 20 percent reduction in bike-related crashes, and all for a cost of just 20 million krone, or about $3 million. Along with improved bike paths and parking, the city carried out projects like installing municipal bike pumps, and giving citizens the chance to try out cargo bikes. The public health savings alone were calculated at almost $5 million, with the average person in the city forecast to live five months longer thanks to the plan.¹¹

About half the money went on infrastructure and the rest on promotional campaigns, explains Troels Andersen, in charge of cycling projects for the city. “It was saying, well, the city’s ready, you just have to use your bike a bit more often,” he says. “There’s a lot of things to be done, and it doesn’t always have to cost a lot. It’s about getting in contact with people who want to do it because it’s attractive.”

Unlike places like London or New York, or even Copenhagen, Odense is not so densely built up, and many people live in a house with a garage, which requires a more interventionist approach to cycling. “We don’t have the same traffic congestion, or the same parking fees,” Andersen says. “Here, people cycle because it’s attractive, so we need to sell the message. We are also a sales department, you could say. In Copenhagen they just build infrastructure and they get a lot of cyclists. In our way we do better. We don’t have the benefits of congestion. People do it here for free. When people are cycling here they do it for the fun and pleasure, and for health.”

While such efforts are, of course, built on the foundations of several decades of consistent pro-bike policies, Andersen argues that Odense is a useful template for other similar-sized cities elsewhere. “We’re very average,” he says. “There’s hundreds of cities like this around Europe. So it’s more interesting—you could have hundreds of cities like Odense, all over.”¹²

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In the United States, a broad parallel to Odense would be Portland, Oregon. While about three times bigger, with more than six hundred thousand residents, Portland remains relatively compact and began planning for bikes even earlier than the Danes, with its first cycle action plan passed in 1973.¹³ Yet while Portland sees an impressive-by-US-standards 7 percent of all trips made by bike,¹⁴ this is against the 24 percent figure in Odense.¹⁵

Jonathan Maus runs the Bike Portland website, which has in recent years become critical of what he sees as an almost complacent attitude toward cycling among city authorities. “We had a huge head start,” he says. “And this is Portland, a place which has always seen pioneers and innovative thinkers, and people going against the grain. But being bike-oriented, our whole approach has been a trickle—it’s been incremental, it’s been small steps.” Other places have moved more quickly, he says, and Portland risks being left behind.

One example Maus uses is the sedate arrival of the city’s municipal bike-hire system, which has taken eight or nine years of discussions. “We wanted to be first,” Maus laments. “Now we’re the sixty-fifth major city with a bike share.” Agitating as he does in a small and traditionally consensual city has not always been easy, he says: “I tell you, to do this in this town is sort of heretical. I’ve got a lot of people upset. I’ve been doing this for over ten years and when I first started doing this I was best friends with everyone in city government. Not anymore.”¹⁶

They Saw the Bicycle as the Problem

It’s worth stressing that the narrative described above, of politicians and advocates moving incrementally toward more cycling, does not hold true everywhere. In China, that process has famously run in reverse. Beijing now has a little over 10 percent of commuters who brave the city’s smog and increasingly feral and ferocious motor traffic to travel by bike. But thirty years ago, before China began its breakneck program of industrialization, this figure was 62 percent.¹⁷

China has faced some dreadful consequences with the rapid ascent of the car, not least choking pollution and anything up to two hundred thousand road crash deaths a year.¹⁸ It’s a sobering thought to consider that its leaders chose the path very deliberately, one element of a policy to create an ever-greater number of middle-class consumers.

Dan Burden, one of America’s longest-standing advocates for cycling who began campaigning in the mid-1970s, recalls being accidentally at the center of this destructive policy shift. In 1994, he was among a seven-strong United Nations team invited to Beijing by the Chinese government for a seminar on bicycle traffic. Burden assumed they were there to advise officials how to best keep bikes safe on roads that were even then seeing ever more cars and trucks. He was very wrong.

“We didn’t know in advance what they wanted us to do, other than help them with bicycle safety,” Burden says. “So we thought: this is good. Here’s a country with so many people riding bikes. But once we were at the conference it became very obvious to us that the Chinese officials wanted us to solve the bicycle problem, but they saw the bicycle as the problem. They said it was holding back the free flow of traffic. We were saying, ‘No, there’s just not enough room for your cars, you want more people riding bikes.’”

Eventually there was something of an impasse, Burden recalls: “I don’t think we ever convinced them. But we never changed our tune. We said: you can’t even project how bad your environment’s going to be if you don’t include the bike. The bike is actually what is going to keep your air pure, keep your traffic moving, get people places where they want to, lighten your infrastructure costs and everything. But the government officials who were there had already been given different directions—to go to a car-based society. We delivered the best we could but we simply weren’t being heard.”¹⁹

If the officials had listened to Burden, they could have saved the country a lot of current problems. Some places in China are, however, gradually returning to more bike use. Hangzhou, a prosperous city just south of Shanghai in the east of the country, has relatively high levels of bike use, in part because it never removed the bulk of its network of wide bike lanes. It has installed new bike-only traffic lights, as well as the world’s largest cycle-share system, with more than sixty thousand bikes distributed around the city.

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Any progress in China is, ultimately, up to those in power, given the lack of official tolerance for political lobbying. But consider the plight also of those permitted to agitate but simply face insurmountable odds.

Jack Yabut is president of the Firefly Brigade, a bicycle group with both the most evocative of names and the most difficult of tasks. Set up in 1999, the organization is based in Manila, the capital of the Philippines—a city whose traffic congestion is, according to several surveys, quantifiably the worst in the world.

The statistics are sobering. With a population of more than twelve million people, rising to fifteen million during work hours,²⁰ Manila has far too many vehicles for its limited road network—about four hundred vehicles per kilometer—and not much in the way of nonbus public transport.²¹ As such, astonishingly long commutes are the norm.

Yabut says his nine-mile route to work would take up to two and a half hours each way by car. On a bike it’s little more than forty-five minutes, even with the careful approach necessary in a city with many hazards for the cyclist: “It’s dangerous for two reasons,” Yabut says. “The first danger is the air quality, which is bad. We always try to encourage people to take it easy, don’t exert too much effort, not more than if you were walking, so you don’t get that much exposure. The other threat is the vehicular traffic. Not only is it dense here, the sheer numbers, the daredevil characteristics of Manila drivers are of circus proportions.”

Yabut is still, he argues with some satisfaction, one of the very few Manila residents to get some fun from their commute. “I’m used to it,” he explains with a laugh. “I’ve been commuting by bicycle since the late eighties. And it’s enjoyable, really. I take different routes, I’m not rushing, I just relax, take an hour. But if I’m in a rush I’ll take the main highway, and be with all the other traffic. The good thing about it is that all the cars are in gridlock. The bicycle is the only thing moving.”

Despite his years of campaigning, Yabut estimates there are still no more than fifteen thousand cyclists riding around the city, more than a few years ago but nothing compared to the three million–plus motor vehicles. “We’ve grown since 1999, but if you put that alongside the extent of the problem, we’re still a way off,” he says. “At least now there are some people in government who are listening to us, and entertaining the idea of integrating the bicycle in transportation development, but we’re still at a very early stage.”²²

They Knew Exactly What to Do with Their Streets

All these varying political narratives can seem complicated, and it can sometimes be hard to draw any common lessons. But there are a few. From my limited experience, based on writing about cycling and dealing with the questions, objections, and insults that follow, whether on social media or in person, it does seem bike advocates can achieve a lot, if they choose.

To begin with, as Andrew Gilligan notes, they must be wary of mistaking Twitter or Facebook for the real world, and instead should engage on a neighborhood level with the people who actually make the decisions that affect them. This might seem a bit prosaic and painstaking when the alternative is to post sweeping social media manifestos on how you’d transform your city, but there’s no denying it gets more done.

In the previous chapter, I mentioned the paralysis of my local council in South London over making the difficult decisions to curb car use on the road where I live, which is supposed to be designated as a so-called “quietway,” suitable for everyday cycling.

When it became clear the council was sitting on the issue in the hope it would be forgotten, I went with a neighbor to see our local councilor. We sat down with her over a coffee and explained, as patiently and politely as we could, that keeping the street as it was would mean the “quietway” designation was utterly meaningless. Beforehand, I borrowed a small video camera, attached it the back of my bike, and rode up and down my street at a leisurely pace one morning rush hour to capture the current experience for cyclists on film.

The councilor, to her credit, looked a bit shocked when we showed her the footage of impatient drivers tailgating me, or squeezing past at speed. Our case was possibly helped because the most aggressive van, shown driving about an inch from my back wheel, carried the very obvious logo of the council itself.

Will this achieve anything? At the time of this writing I genuinely don’t know if it will. The scheme is still mired in seemingly endless consultation. But we might have helped change a mind. And that’s the important bit.

More widely, a good message for activists is to frame the arguments beyond just bike lanes, or reducing car use. With road space in cities necessarily finite and the era of knocking down buildings to provide more room for cars now well and truly over, there’s no escaping from the fact that new solutions are needed to congestion and pollution, as well as the other problems that come with urban living.

Chris Boardman—the British Olympian and Tour de France cyclist–turned-campaigner for cycling—says he has a standard rejoinder to those who tell him they oppose the construction of new bike infrastructure. “If anybody wants to object I totally respect that,” Boardman says. “But I would say: if you’re going to object you must give me a viable alternative. I think that’s a fair way to have any kind of debate or discussion.”²³

In the Netherlands, the head of the country’s cycling organization, the Fietsersbond, says she likes to put the question in a similarly broad way. “I don’t usually ask people about traffic or bike lanes,” says Saskia Kluit. “I ask them: what sort of environment do you want? Because there’s not a single person who will raise his hand and say, ‘I want to live next to a busy car road.’

“So you will have everybody saying, ‘Oh, it would be nice if we had more trees, it would be nice if we had less traffic, it would be nice if we had more space.’ And when they’ve spoken you can say, ‘If you want to achieve that, then we need to take car spaces, have a separate bicycle track, and then we can have more trees to make it nice.’ And then everybody’s happy.”²⁴

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For politicians the message is clear: Be bold. Build the lanes. Block off the backstreet car cut-throughs. Don’t take half-measures, as they will end up pleasing nobody. And remember, if you show sufficient vision and push through some decent cycling infrastructure, then it will be used, and by more people than you can imagine. The same is true for all changes to give streets back to people, whether on foot or on two wheels.

Janette Sadik-Khan recalls the moment when she first realized that the political risks of making New York less car-dominated were going to pay off. It was August 2008, and the city was experimenting with one of her earliest projects, the so-called Summer Streets program, where almost seven miles of central roads were closed off to cars for three Saturday mornings in a row, so people could cycle, run, meet, or do whatever they chose. The idea was not new—Bogotá introduced its equivalent, La Ciclovía, in the 1970s—but it was entirely untested in New York.

“I remember, hours and hours before it opened, being out on the streets with my team and looking around, thinking, ‘What if no one shows up? What if this is a disaster?’” says Sadik-Khan. “I remember being truly relieved when I saw people walking and biking, and kids out there playing. We had three hundred thousand people coming to play, and cha-cha, and take basketball lessons. It turned out New Yorkers knew exactly what to do with their streets.”²⁵

Such boldness is all too rare when it comes to rebuilding streets such that more than a minority who drive cars get proper use of them. There is a good argument that it should no longer be even seen as bold or daring, just obvious and necessary.

Paul Steely White believes it is high time cycling infrastructure becomes viewed “not as an optional amenity that is open to local veto, but really as a necessary public safety improvement that we now make in these modern times.”

He argues persuasively: “It would be akin in the time of cholera saying, ‘We’ve got this engineering approach that involves separating our water from our sewage, and it involves digging up the street—what do you think about this? Are you okay with this?’

“There’s a way to design streets now that kill many fewer people and are much fairer, more equitable, and more efficient, and we’re just going to do it, dammit.”²⁶