CHAPTER 9
Two-Wheeled Technology
“It Was Really Cool, but We Didn’t Know What to Do with It”
Strava is a hugely popular app that uses GPS signals from phones or other devices, allowing people to map and upload their bike rides, and then compare their endeavors to those of other users. The San Francisco–based offices of Strava are much as you might imagine for the city’s booming tech industry. In one section of the airy, concrete-floored space, engineers type code, full-ear headphones drowning out the surrounding chatter. A mezzanine floor formerly earmarked for extra desks is instead used for yoga classes. Everyone drinks endless cans of the flavored fizzy water stacked inside huge fridges in the kitchen.
In a quiet corner of the building is a tier of raised wooden benches built into a sort of small semicircular amphitheater. This is where, every few months, the company holds something called the Strava Jam—at which any employee can throw out ideas, however unlikely or untested. It was that meeting which saw the accidental beginnings of one of the more fruitful recent collaborations for high technology and everyday cycling.
Strava holds huge amounts of data, on who cycles where and when, from around the world. But at first, the company had no idea how to make this useful. Then engineers at a Strava Jam came up with the idea of building heat maps—overlaying the bike data onto digital street plans to visualize the numbers riding. “At the time it was really cool, but we didn’t really know what to do with it,” admits Mark Shaw, the company’s chief technical officer. “So we just released it to the public on our website.”1
Most of those who saw and played around with the early heat maps were just curious to see where people rode in their own town or city. But one Strava user browsing the heat maps worked for Oregon’s department of transportation, and a thought struck them: could this be useful for planning bike infrastructure?
Collecting data on cycling use had previously been pretty basic, recalls Sheila Lyons, head of cycling projects at the transportation department. “It was very haphazard, two-hour counts done once a year,” she says. “Volunteers, sitting on the street corner because they wanted better bike facilities. Pathetic, really.”2 Prompted by her Strava-using colleague, Lyons’s team got in touch with the company and, in 2013, the department bought a year of cycling data for the state. Thus was born a spin-off business, Strava Metro.
This was all largely unexpected, explains Michael Horvath, one of two former Harvard University rowers and relatively veteran fortysomething tech entrepreneurs who cofounded Strava in 2009. “We’re not city planners,” he says. “But one of the things that we learned early on is that these people just don’t have very much data to begin with. Not only is ours a novel data set, in many cases it’s the only data set that speaks to the behavior of cyclists in that city or region.”
Strava Metro now works with around eighty places around the world, handing over data at relatively low cost—Oregon paid $20,000—or free to universities and charities. Planners in cities including Glasgow, Reykjavik, Stockholm, and Brisbane can now chart bike usage to see where lanes or other facilities might be needed, and then gauge how many more riders arrive once they’re built. “It helps show the return on investment, on the tax dollars being used by authorities for things like cycle lanes,” Horvath says. “They want to be able to show this was money well spent, or to learn that there was something they could have done better.”3
The findings are not always what planners expected. In Oregon, Sheila Lyons’s team found one carefully designed piece of cycle infrastructure at a busy intersection was heavily used by cyclists heading in one direction. But when riding the other way, almost all of them cut through a parking lot and a side street to avoid it. “It was an indication of an issue,” Lyons says. “Bicyclists had figured out that the lane in that intersection was a bit dicey.”
The Strava team themselves were initially worried that the information could be a bit skewed, as users of the app tend to be disproportionately enthusiast cyclists, who ride relatively fast—those who record the quickest time for a section of road get the title King of the Mountain. But when the files were compared to cities’ manual bike counts, it turned out that once within a town or city those with Strava, typically 5 percent to 10 percent of the total riding population, take much the same routes as everyone else. “At first we weren’t really sure what we had,” says Shaw. “Was this just performance athletes? But what we found is that when cyclists are in the urban core they optimize for the same kind of things as everyone else. They’re not trying to race across the city, they’re trying to get there in one piece.”
Strava holds a vast amount of information—downloading all the information for a big city like London takes two weeks—and the company is only beginning to understand what it could be used for. Innovations currently being worked on include real-time analysis of cyclist numbers for traffic planning, and the mooted ability to automatically send a warning to the phone of a driver who is approaching a Strava user on the road.
All this is not without a vested interest for the company, notes Michael Horvath: better analysis means improved bike routes, which in turn should mean more riders to download the Strava app. “We’re not a philanthropy,” he says. “But we are interested in the impact, what it can do in these cities to encourage people in these modes of transportation. We see that as a good return on our shareholders’ investment.”
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Sadly, new technology and cycling are not always such a good fit. A few years ago I tried out a prototype high-tech cycling jacket in a video review on my newspaper’s website. Two things were notable about this jacket. First, it was constructed from the most retina-scorching Day-Glo yellow fabric you can imagine. “It’s not only the brightest thing I’ve ever worn, it might be the brightest thing I’ve ever seen,” I noted, accurately, at the time.4 But the main selling point was a series of built-in LED lights, operated via a small battery pack in a pocket. As well as flashing white lights at the front and flashing red lights at the rear, if you raised an arm to show you planned to turn, a sensor would set off some orange indicators. A satellite could probably track you from space.
This was pretty innovative at the time. The jacket has gone on to sell in the thousands and has even won awards. But watching the video again made me feel a bit depressed. It exemplifies what has become a tide of advanced products that approach cycling from entirely the wrong perspective. In this instance it is a focus on the effects of poor road safety for cyclists rather than the causes. Build decent lanes, stop cyclists having to share limited space with speeding vehicles, and suddenly a flashing, battery-operated coat seems absurdly over-the-top.
This isn’t to blame the jacket manufacturer. I’m not expecting them to build bike lanes single-handedly. But I do worry that such products, in supposedly seeking to overcome the perceived dangers of cycling, in fact end up exaggerating them. As we’ve seen before, riding a bike in many places is less safe than it should be but is also much safer than many people believe. And so if you’re a noncyclist and every bike rider you see is lit up like a particularly garish Christmas tree, the message is pretty clear: stay away.
It’s notable that the company that makes the jacket I tested also manufactures specialty work wear for the construction and petrochemicals industries. These are places that are, necessarily and unavoidably, perilous at times. Cycling shouldn’t be like that, and for the most part it isn’t.
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If you browse the various cycling-related products seeking investment on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, it’s easy to get a sense of the scale of this new industry built around a combination of poor road design and the overstatement of the perils this brings. There are cycling tops with LEDs sewn into the seams, ultrareflective beanie hats, bolt-on bike indicator lights controllable from the handlebars of your bike, even gloves with orange blinking lights. You can buy lights with combined HD cameras in case someone drives into you. These are all symptoms and exaggerations, not answers.
Elsewhere on Kickstarter you soon reach that other category of bike-related inventions: the solution in search of a problem. I somehow can’t imagine I’ll ever need a bike light that can receive downloads from a phone, or cycling glasses with a digital display, or a bike where you can swap between various-shaped tubes in the frame to change the feel of the ride. Yes, many such innovations are aimed more at the enthusiast, but I’m still not convinced. It all seems so overcomplicated.
That’s not to say I’m a Luddite. While the very basics of a bicycle might have remained unchanged since the 1880s, new materials and inventions make modern machines astonishingly more lightweight, speedy, strong, or just about whatever you want, if you can pay for it. Should you want to ride fast or climb lots of hills, carbon fiber frames are a big advance. For those venturing farther afield, disc brakes are a revelation. Even for someone just pottering down a decent cycle lane, the experience is hugely improved by virtually puncture-proof tires and better lights. Modern bike lights are a particular revelation for anyone who began cycling in the era of clunky, brick-weight, C-sized-battery-powered behemoths which gave a pitiful yellow glow from a single incandescent bulb. Rechargeable lights now fit into a pocket, and the main issue is trying not to dazzle or hypnotize drivers with the multiple flashing LEDs.
So all praise to innovation. But sometimes the benefits come in less obvious ways—for example, the advent of bar-code keys for cycle-share systems, or improved batteries in e-bikes. Elsewhere cycling can be the almost indirect beneficiary of other tech upheavals. The imminent arrival of driverless cars and automated traffic systems is likely to reshape our cities in ways we can barely imagine, but around which the bike seems likely to play a crucial role. The revolution has arrived. It’s just not always the one you expected.
But How Do You Move a Fridge?
Technology also plays a big role in answering one of the most common arguments you hear against making over more of a city’s road space to bikes. The point generally goes something like this: “But what about a sofa or a fridge? How do you expect to get them delivered with only bikes?” There are two responses. The first is the more obvious—no one beyond a few zealots is proposing a complete ban on trucks and vans. The other answer is perhaps a bit surprising. Some modern cargo bikes, especially those with electric assistance, are plenty big enough for a fridge, and the very biggest might even stand a chance with a sofa. Neither is necessarily what they’re best at. It’s mainly to stress that cycle freight is more flexible than many people believe.
E-bikes are a particularly interesting area in the way they can broaden the possibilities of cycling. As we saw in chapter 3, they can help older people stay mobile even beyond the age where they feel unable to drive. They are virtually as emission-free as a normal bike, and the way they work—the electric assist only starts up when the rider begin pedaling—relies on at least some exertion, so brings important health benefits.
It’s worth quickly stressing what we mean by “e-bike.” In most of Europe and the United States, these are modestly powered electric-assist machines where the motor is started by pedaling, and the powered speed is limited to about 15 to 20 mph. The situation in China and some other Asian nations is very different. Chinese cities are awash with rapid, throttle-operated, electric two-wheelers, often called e-bikes, but these are really more like electric mopeds. Their weight and speed mean they can and do intimidate, injure, or kill people. In Beijing, where there are now an estimated 2.5 million of them, electric bikes account for almost 40 percent of pedestrian injuries.
While powered bikes have been around for many decades—my grandmother used to get around her home city on a converted bicycle that had a tiny two-stroke engine attached to the back wheel—electric assistance only emerged in Japan in the 1980s. These early e-bikes tended to be expensive, with a limited range and basic batteries that needed regular replacing. Battery technology has since improved this beyond measure: some modern e-bikes can now go almost one hundred miles between charges. They are now huge business, especially in Germany and the Netherlands, where around 20 percent of all bikes sold now have electric assist.
This technology is helping drive a new type of bike-based freight business. When I visited Outspoken! Delivery, a pioneering cargo bike company in the traditionally bike-friendly English city of Cambridge, they were about to take delivery of their biggest e-cargo bike yet, a behemoth with a cargo bay almost the size of that in a small van. They let me try out what was their biggest machine at the time—a slightly smaller, electrically assisted three-wheeler. While still more or less big enough to carry that hypothetical fridge, it felt intuitive and straightforward to ride, with even the relatively small motor, meaning it was easy to start off from traffic lights.
Cycle freight also comes in smaller, more nimble forms. I watched one Outspoken! rider, Ben Cartwright, load dozens of packages into a large cargo box on a nonelectric, two-wheeled, narrow, and tandem-length machine. “It’s really easy to ride,” said Cartwright, who at the time had just completed a PhD in archaeology at the city’s famous university. “You get used to it pretty quickly, and it’s still small enough to filter through traffic.”5 Cartwright reckoned that even with the smaller cargo bay requiring intermittent returns to base, he easily delivered more packages in a day than someone in a van.
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It is in fact arguable that freight bikes could end up having as much of an impact on towns and cities as will all types of bicycle used for everyday transport. The era of Internet shopping is another technological development with likely, if inadvertent, spin-off effects for cycling. The Amazon era has left roads in many places clogged with vans delivering large numbers of laughably tiny packages that could be much more simply delivered on cargo bikes. Some see this change as inevitable. “Retail is moving online and the number of deliveries being made is going through the roof,” says Sam Keam, who runs another British e-bike delivery company, ReCharge, in the seaside city of Brighton. “But there’s no road space for that to happen. The only way you can grow urban economies is by changing the way you manage logistics in a city.”6
As ever, the biggest steps are being made in more cycle-friendly nations in continental Europe. Vienna has a successful start-up business delivering healthy meals with a fleet of branded cargo bikes. One company in Prague promises its bikes can deliver a takeaway meal inside seven minutes of its being ordered.
The Swedish city of Gothenburg, meanwhile, is specifically targeting cargo bike distribution as a way to make its streets more pleasant and human-friendly. It is currently testing a strange-looking contraption called the Armadillo. With four wheels, a roof, windshield, and doors, it resembles a high-tech golf car. But under the bodywork is a lightweight metal frame and pedals, with assistance from an electric motor. This combined power helps the Armadillo tow one or more laden cargo boxes on wheels. The idea is that traditional vans and trucks take goods to a freight consolidation center on the outskirts of the city, and the Armadillo does the final mile or so. City authorities are also testing out the vehicles to carry staff like housing officers and health inspectors between appointments.
Modern cargo e-bikes are sufficiently flexible and popular that there is even an official EU-funded project, Cycle Logistics, to boost the trade. Susanne Wrighton from an Austrian think tank involved in the scheme says it’s not only about convenience: “It’s also a matter of more and more cities recognizing that this can really improve the quality of life for people who live in the city.”7
Cars Are an Outdated Solution
These days, few self-respecting modern metropolises are complete without a public bike-share system. There are hundreds around the world, varying in size from about three hundred bikes (Madison, Wisconsin) to sixty-six thousand (Hangzhou, eastern China). The bikes themselves are often not hugely high-tech. The Bixi-type models pioneered in Montreal and now also used in London and New York are vastly sturdy and feature the sort of hub-based gears and brakes which would be familiar to a 1950s cyclist, even if the built-in LED lights might surprise them a bit. But before the arrival of modern innovations to track the bikes’ use and let people pay for them automatically, such systems never really had a chance to take off.
Their spiritual precursor was Amsterdam’s White Bicycle movement, devised in 1965 by a small group of anarchists who acquired some donated cycles, painted them white, and left around the city, unlocked, for all to use freely. The story is chronicled by In the City of Bikes, a meticulously researched book about Dutch cycling culture by Pete Jordan, an Amsterdam-based US author.8 This project was seemingly more influential for the future than useful at the time. While some living in the city then claim to have seen hundreds of white bikes in use, there were in fact never more than a few dozen, most of which were barely ridden at all and soon vanished.
According to Jordan’s version the entire scheme would probably have been forgotten but for the fact that police decided to confiscate the bikes under an old law that made it illegal to leave a bicycle unlocked in the city. This in turn sparked protests during which, in a hugely Dutch detail, anarchists unscrewed the tops of metal bike bells to hurl at officers.
The organizers’ aims seem nonetheless prescient in retrospect. Their manifesto, which asked in vain for city authorities to buy twenty thousand white bikes, called the car “an outdated solution.” It argued: “Cars are a dangerous and totally unsuitable means of transport within the city.” Even though the system itself fizzled out almost immediately, the myth gradually expanded, propagated by stunts such as someone donating a white-painted bike to John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their 1969 “bed-in” at the Amsterdam Hilton.
Lovely as such free-for-all schemes might sound, human nature appears to work against them. In the early 1990s, the local government in Cambridge, England, took fifty bikes from the police pound, painted them green, and left them at racks around the city for people to use and return. They all vanished on the first day. “It only needed one hundred people out of Cambridge’s one-hundred-thousand population to foul it up,” lamented Simon Sedgwick-Jell, leader of the council at the time, who was widely mocked for the idea.9
The one exception was La Rochelle, a small, tourist-heavy city on the west coast of France. In 1974, its mayor, Michel Crépeau—a colorful figure who held the job until his death in 1999 and once stood as a radical left candidate in the national presidential election—introduced the Vélo Jaune, or “Yellow Bicycle,” scheme. These were left on racks by the harbor, for people to use and return. Amazingly, enough of them did for the system to last for decades—it still exists, but users must now show ID and pay if they keep a bike for more than two hours. The only other long-running scheme was Bycyklen in Copenhagen, which lasted from 1995 to 2012. Here, users left a twenty-kroner (about $2) coin deposit. This was the first system to use specially built bikes, without standard-sized parts that could be easily transferred to another machine.
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Even such minor successes, however, were based on significant effort—Bycyklen’s system was only sustainable because the bikes could be used in just a small part of the city center, with police vigorously fining riders who strayed. It took the advent of accessible digital technology for the idea to spread, which it then did, at speed. The first such system, Vélo’v, was introduced in the French city of Lyon in 2005, and still operates. It uses a dedicated card and a PIN key to release bikes from their docks. Two years later came Paris’s Vélib’, which now has almost fifteen thousand bikes and is arguably the system that showed how bike sharing could reshape a big city, proving hugely popular with both locals and tourists. Since then, progress has accelerated. Montreal’s influential Bixi system debuted in 2008, along with a pilot scheme in Washington, DC, and the now-vast system in Hangzhou. In 2010, systems began in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, as well as a now-very-popular one in London. New York waited until 2013 for its Citi Bike, which has also proved a big success. All these rely on low-key but sophisticated technology, linking bank cards or PIN keys to secure deposits and automatically deduct fees.
And the effect has been huge. I vividly remember the buildup to the London bike share, a project begun under one mayor, Ken Livingstone, but launched under his successor, Boris Johnson, meaning the machines are known universally to Londoners as “Boris bikes.” There was much skepticism before the system launched, largely based on the notion that tourists and cycling novices would climb aboard and get immediately squashed by marauding buses and trucks. That didn’t happen. Instead, as tends to be the case with such systems, the Boris bikes helped to humanize the city. The bright blue machines (now red after a change of sponsor) trundle about, occasionally ridden by serious commuters or unsmiling businesspeople, but more often by families of grinning tourists, friends heading between bars, sometimes even people cycling around in the sun for the sheer fun of it. These were recognizably everyday riders.
When I interviewed Bradley Wiggins, the first Briton to win the Tour de France, he said he often uses the London bike share system when staying in the city. Wiggins said he had never at that point been recognized, let alone challenged to a sprint to the next red light, but stressed he tried to keep a low profile. “I’m quite sensible on the road, being who I am,” he said. “I tend not to jump lights, I tend not to ride all over the road, or whack cars and things. Because I’ll be the one in the Daily Mail the next day.”
Dani Simons from Citi Bike in New York recalls a similar public trajectory for this system, which now regularly clocks more than fifty thousand rides a day. Initially, she says, quite a few apartment block boards objected to having docking stands nearby. This soon changed, she recalled: “You’d go back later and speak to the doormen, who became some of our best ambassadors, and they’d be showing people how to use it. It was amazing to see that shift happen so quickly. We went from a place where people were freaking out about having stations by them to one now where they’re asking, ‘Why can’t we get a station here?’ I fielded so many questions from people saying, ‘Why is it here?’ Now I go to parties and people just say, ‘When’s it coming to my neighborhood?’”
Simons argues that the system has helped cycling in the city seem more normal and everyday. “It’s not just an amenity, like when a bike lane was put in it was an amenity for people who used bikes,” she says. “When you talk about bike share as a piece of the public transportation infrastructure that changes it. It’s not just for recreation, it’s really becoming part of how people travel around. Also, you see the people using them look just like everyone else in the New York community. They’re not wearing spandex or racing the wrong way down the street. They’re people like you.”10
If Anyone Tells You They Can Predict the Future, They’re Lying
It seems obligatory when writing about tech-based developments to assure the reader that, whatever the dizzying pace of change so far, they’ve seen nothing yet. And it’s the same here. As I noted in the introduction, it’s one of the paradoxes of the modern story of the bicycle that such a very simple, 140-year-old design appears so adaptable and suitable to twenty-first-century life. This is, of course, particularly the case for shorter distance travel, including trips that link up people to other forms of transport.
Dr. John Zacharias, a Beijing-based academic and urban planner who has lived in China for decades, believes cycling could make a return in the country in part through bike-share schemes, allowing people to connect to urban rail stations. “I have this feeling it’s going to take off—bike sharing with metro systems,” he says. “Just now the walking distances don’t allow the metro systems to penetrate very far into residential districts. A bicycle-sharing system extends that by about three times.”11
Anand Babu, meanwhile, is imagining bikes having a key role to connect with a more high-tech transport system—high-speed driverless cars. Babu, formerly head of special projects for Google, is now chief operating officer of Sidewalk Labs, a new and vastly ambitious Google spin-off that has as its modest intention to reshape cities through the conjunction of clever planning and high-tech solutions.
Sidewalk Labs has so far devised LinkNYC, a project to turn New York City’s defunct pay-phone booths into digital hubs, where people can either access Wi-Fi or, if they don’t have a smartphone or similar device, find information directly. Next to come is Flow, a more ambitious if so far slightly vague project, run with the US Department of Transportation, to help urban areas monitor and manage traffic and parking more effectively.
These are early days, and Babu concedes the company’s urban planners occasionally have to remind its tech experts that cities prefer to change more slowly than computer systems. “I think there’s a critique of technologists when they approach the domain of cities that they treat it like any other software problem,” he says. “We’re trying to avoid that.”
Babu stresses that looking into a metaphorical crystal ball and describing the city of the future is fraught with difficulties, so anyone who claims they can predict what will happen in the coming few years is “probably lying.” He adds: “There are a lot of very interesting combinations of scenarios that might unfold here.” He does, however, predict that in transport terms there are likely to be big changes in what he calls the “20–100 mph range,” taking in cars and what might replace them, and the “10–20 mph range,” covering cycling and other short-range travel modes.
Not surprisingly for someone whose parent company is at the forefront of developing driverless car technology, Babu expects such creations to be in use soon. They could have a huge and immediate impact, he believes, especially on spread-out US cities, where some suburbs have become neglected, in part because of the time it takes to travel to and from them. Since existing cars would take time to be replaced, Babu says, the near future could see lanes of freeways reserved for driverless vehicles, transporting people between distant points at high speed. “There’s a potentially transformative step-function benefit that you can enable for people, well before those human-driven vehicles are aged out,” he explains. “As a metro, within five to ten years you can say, anybody can get to any point for a relatively low cost. That’s a big deal.”12
This big deal would ease pressure on crowded inner cities. The moment people can get from a suburb rapidly, reliably, and at low cost, these suddenly become far more attractive, for both living and businesses. In turn, the gradual demise of private cars would make the suburbs more walkable and bikeable, and thus increasingly pleasant places to live.
How would this happen? As with bike schemes, it would be through sharing. One of the big appeals of automated cars for technologists is that they have the potential to be much more efficient than the current, human-driven variants. Even if you’re a regular driver, chances are your car spends 90 percent or more of its time sitting idle outside your home or in a parking space elsewhere. Car club systems do exist, but it still involves making sure your local vehicle is free, walking to the designated parking spot and driving off. Self-driven cars, the futurists believe, could be like a universal and less exploitative version of Uber—the click of an app summons the nearest free automated car. No more private cars—and this is the big hypothetical step—could see the number of vehicles in most cities fall to 10 percent or 15 percent of what it is now. Bingo—lots more space in which to move, and to live, and to cycle.
Where precisely does the bike fit into this brave new world? Babu believes there is “tremendous latent demand” for people to live in communities based around walking and cycling, something currently thwarted by the sheer number of cars. Thus, as he sees it, the modern suburb (or inner city) would see people hop onto a bike for local trips, or to get to the next, more rapid form of transport. “You could potentially move to a model where these suburban cities, which were so reliant on individual vehicles, could become incredibly well-connected metropolitan areas, where you could get anywhere within thirty minutes, plus a first mile/last mile of walking or bike connection,” he says. “You’re in a high-speed, shared-vehicle majority of miles, but then the last mile or first mile you embrace a wide amount of innovation around all sorts of personal vehicles, whether self-powered or electric powered, to connect.”
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It might seem a bit far-fetched, this slightly Truman Show vision of quiet, picket-fence suburbs, the roads populated by commuters pedaling or whirring past on bikes and e-bikes to connect with a twenty-minute dash to the office. But driverless technology is already here. Car insurance premiums are predicted to plummet in the next couple of years as existing crash-avoidance and sensor-triggered braking systems become more widespread, eliminating many of the everyday bangs, bumps, and scrapes that have for decades been part of urban driving.
Similarly, you might be a touch wary about a tech behemoth like Google supposedly taking an interest in cycling. Bikes are fairly basic things, for the most part. But they can and do appeal to the technology industry, in part because they are so efficient and adaptable, characteristics the tech sector sees as its own. This is not just theory. In 2015, Google announced plans to try and ease terrible road congestion around its headquarters in Mountain View, California, by getting together with the local county government to plan and build a network of useable and safe bike lanes. The initiative started, Babu explains, after Google and other local employers did a study of car commute patterns and found 20 to 30 percent of trips were under five miles, perfectly achievable on a bike, especially given the agreeable local climate.
“They’re now embarking on a really aggressive campaign that involves dedicated bike lanes, subsidized bikes, and e-bikes, targeting that population,” Babu says. “It will take away road real estate from others in some cases. However, if you can move that many trips to more effective mechanisms like bikes, it unblocks everyone else. That’s how they’re starting to message the trade-off—if you can move these shorter distance trips to bicycles, yes, in some cases you’re taking road space, but that benefits the remaining drivers significantly.”
Slightly less promising, from my point of view, is another prediction from Babu: that the fast-falling cost of carbon fiber could allow the rapid construction of elevated bike superhighways, which could even be translucent. “We think there’s a model within the next five to ten years where you can do extremely low-cost, very, very lightweight, small-footprint elevated bike paths,” he says. As I mentioned in chapter 5, I’m not especially a fan of such plans to remove cyclists from the streets, however well intentioned. Cycling is not just about people getting around. It’s about them stopping, interacting, shopping, mixing. Being human, in other words.
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I can, however, forgive this of Sidewalk Labs. In a strange sort of way, these grandiose dreams of carbon fiber bike flyovers are oddly reassuring. Why? Because it shows the people who are likely to reshape our cities are thinking about cycling. And this wasn’t always the case.
Think back fifty or more years to when the predecessors of Babu and his colleagues, in this case municipal planners, were cutting miles of urban freeways through city centers. These were people like Robert Moses, the “master builder” of New York City, whose automobile-dominated idea of urban life was hugely influential both across the US and elsewhere.
His British near-equivalent was Professor Colin Buchanan, commissioned by the government in the early 1960s to investigate what could be done to stop towns and cities being choked by motor vehicles, the number of which had doubled in a decade. Buchanan’s eventual report, 1963’s Traffic in Towns, became something of a sensation, even being published as a paperback book that remains in print.
Buchanan, a civil engineer and town planner, was by no means a disciple of the car, once describing motor traffic as a “destructive lava, welling out from the towns, searing and scorching in long channels, and ever-ready to invade new areas.” His report was notable in part because it warned that urban dwellers would not accept unlimited amounts of vehicles among them, given the impact this would have on people’s lives. “We are nourishing at great cost a monster of great potential destructiveness,” he wrote vividly.13
But for all this, Buchanan clearly saw no alternative to the private car. His report was based entirely around ways to cope with more motor traffic, not whether there was a way to avoid it. This is not to Buchanan’s personal discredit. It was the era when more or less every arm of government was planning for a car-based future. Also in 1963 came an official report into Britain’s still-huge rail network by another famous technocrat, Sir Richard Beeching, which saw almost a third of the country’s rural train lines ripped up.
But it is nonetheless notable to compare Buchanan’s vision of the future with that of Babu’s when it comes to cycling. “It would be very expensive, and probably impracticable, to build a completely separate system of tracks for cyclists,” Buchanan wrote after briefly considering how bikes could fit into the new era of roads. Looking ahead to a hypothetical future, he added: “It must be admitted that it is a moot point how many cyclists there will be in 2010.”
Buchanan was one of many bureaucrats and politicians in that era to write off the bike. But it is a persistent, adaptable creation. And now, it seems, the bicycle’s time has come again.