Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition Bicycle Summit and the Failure of
Vehicular Cycling.

Attended the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition Bike Summit
https://bikesiliconvalley.org/summit/ yesterday. The keynote was
entertaining, but very strange, and had nothing to do with bicycling,
but the event improved from there.

The most interesting thing was to hear two different transportation
planners, in separate presentations, lambast the “vehicular cycling”
movement, as an impediment to increasing the number of transportational
cyclists. As we now know, the vehicular cycling movement was a dismal
failure in terms of increasing the bicycle mode-share, but for years
transportation planners bought into the idea of treating bikes like
cars, an idea which was promoted by people like John Forester. “Here’s
what happened when one city rejected vehicular cycling,”
http://shifter.info/heres-what-happened-when-one-city-rejected-vehicular-cycling/

The statistic that they both harped on was the 1%/7%/5%/60%/33%
breakdown, from a Portland study
https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/158497. 1% of
people will cycle no matter what, whether or not there is good
infrastructure, bad infrastructure, or no infrastructure—these people,
like Jay, are referred to as “Strong and Fearless.” 7% are “Enthused and
confident, and will cycle with just a minimum of infrastructure such as
sharrows and “bike routes.” 33% of people will not cycle no matter what,
no matter how good the infrastructure might be. 60% are “interested but
concerned,” and would do transportational cycling if there was good
infrastructure, with the percentage increasing as the infrastructure
moved toward Class IV. As infrastructure improves, collision, injury,
and fatality rates fall dramatically, partly due to the infrastructure
and partly due to the increased number of cyclists.

The Class IV infrastructure had a lot of appeal to the “interested but
concerned” group for several reasons. They felt safer in protected
bicycle lanes, not only because of the physical barrier from vehicles,
but because there was no way for vehicles to block the bicycle lane for
parking or loading/unloading (which is also a big pet peeve of mine!).

The bottom line was that to get more “butts on bikes,” cities have to go
after the 60% of “interested but concerned.” We need to follow the
example of the Netherlands, where bicycle infrastructure is directly
responsible for the 38% trip share for bicycles. Silicon Valley, which
is flat, and has mild climate, is particularly well suited for this
transformation
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord.


The whole event seemed to be a lot of “preaching to the choir,” most of
the people there were already transportational cyclists and planners
that understood what was being talked about. I rode there with my city’s
Public Works director. In my city, we have a chance to move a lot of
projects forward since when I was elected I replaced a termed-out
council member who was not interested at all in increasing
transportational cycling. We’ve already pushed through several stalled
projects.