How Suburbs Can Accommodate Cyclists
By Ryan McGreal
Published September 22, 2006
An article on Oregon Live asks whether car-oriented suburbs can change gears and accommodate cyclists.
Predictably, it starts with the improbable cyclist braving a car-clogged highway, describing himself as "crazy" to commute by bicycle, and then delves into why most suburban dwellers drive everywhere.
However, it also touches on what has to change to encourage more people to consider using their bikes.
- More Connections: even where bike lanes exist, they are sporadic and discontinuous. To make biking more viable, those routes need to connect.
- Slower Traffic: Many far-flung communities link to other places via high speed arterial roads and highways that are dangerous and intimidating for cyclists.
- More Direct Routes: the heirarchial structure of suburban streets, rather than the grid structure of city streets, means cyclists often have to go far out of their way to reach even nearby (as the crow flies) destinations.
- Less Convenience for Driving: as long as driving is highly convenient, with free parking at every destination, most people will still choose to drive.
Most of these problems flow out of the heirarchial structure of suburban street plans. At the very least, a city that takes cycling seriously needs to stop building suburbs that are mazes of windy lanes and culs-de-sac, or else insist that multi-use paths provide shortcuts so cyclists can bypass those long loops to nowhere.
That's easiest to accomplish in subdivisions that haven't been built yet, but existing developments must also be retrofitted to accommodate cyclists to produce the connectivity that's essential to a viable bicycle infrastructure.
Ryan McGreal, the editor of Raise the Hammer, lives in Hamilton with his family and works as a programmer, writer and consultant. Ryan volunteers with Hamilton Light Rail, a citizen group dedicated to bringing light rail transit to Hamilton. Several of his essays have been published in the Hamilton Spectator, and he occasionally blogged for OpenFile Hamilton. Ryan also maintains a personal website and has been known to post passing thoughts on twitter.
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