Jeff Chiu/AP Photo
A man and child ride bicycles on 42nd Street, which was closed to traffic, in Oakland, California. Oakland was the first city in the state to launch a “slow streets” program in April 2020 when it closed 74 miles of city streets to cars to create a safer outdoor space for pedestrians and bicyclists.
As the COVID-19 pandemic exploded across the country last summer, bicycle and pedestrian traffic surged as many anxious people sought alternatives to buses and trains. The boom created an opportunity for current and rising urban planners to test-drive policy changes that could make city streets safer for both alternatives. Given the cultural and historical differences in their approaches to traffic management, it is not surprising that European and American cities took divergent paths to accommodating the new walkers and cyclists. The resulting programs sped up bicycle infrastructure improvements in places like Paris; but in the United States, the long-term impacts may be more limited.
In Europe, the policy changes appear to have primarily targeted those who could no longer safely access public transit options. These changes included the widespread adoption of pop-up bike lanes that made busy streets safer. Many European cities already utilized pop-up bike lanes to encourage commuting, so the significant increases in bike ridership that occurred are likely to outlast the pandemic. Paris went the furthest to meet the COVID-19 demand for more routes, constructing about 30 miles of pop-up lanes. Bike ridership jumped 70 percent in the spring of 2020. Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who led the cycling revolution in the city long before COVID-19, made them permanent.
In the United States, however, only a handful of cities implemented changes to accommodate new bike and pedestrian activity. Only a subset of those cities achieved results consistent with advocates’ hopes, and even fewer have implemented lasting reforms based on these experiments. “There wasn’t an explosion of pop-up infrastructure in the USA,” says Bill Nesper, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. “One of the most telling things for me was that in the places here that did make new investments in bicycling infrastructure, bicycling was already part of the culture,” he says.
Yet even in the places with long-standing commitments to bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly streets, the pandemic-induced changes were modest. In Minneapolis, which is considered one of the most bikeable cities in the country, the local initiatives mostly targeted residents who had taken up recreational cycling and walking, rather than commuters or other long-term users. Its signature pandemic program, “Stay Healthy Streets,” closed several city streets to vehicle traffic to promote exercise and increase the number of outdoor gathering spaces in communities.
Local activists expressed ambivalence toward the now-defunct program. According to Ashwat Narayanan, executive director of Our Streets Minneapolis, a local pedestrian and bicyclist advocacy group, the city’s connected, upper-middle-class residents likely lobbied for many of the neighborhood routes that were ultimately closed off to cars by the city’s initiative. Narayanan indicated that many transportation activists focused on other goals when the pandemic began, such as automating walk signals across the city to lower the spread of disease and make streets more accessible for disabled residents.
Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender acknowledges that inequities in access to safe, high-quality infrastructure is a long-standing issue in Minneapolis—but the problem, as always, is funding. The city does not have the financial resources to make substantial investments in bike infrastructure, while the state legislature is sometimes hamstrung by some Republican lawmakers who don’t necessarily value those investments. She argues that taking the next step toward making Minnesota cities walkable and bikeable relies on more forward-thinking state and federal investments as Congress considers new infrastructure allocations.
“Governments need to be thoughtful and visionary right now,” says Bender, who is an avid cyclist. “Sometimes I hear people say we should wait till the things get back to normal and then decide how to do transportation. No, the way that we build infrastructure influences people’s decisions, [and] we have now adopted really strong citywide plans.”
In Washington, D.C., where bike infrastructure investments are also above average by American standards, the “Slow Streets,” program implemented last year closed some streets and reduced speed limits and restricted streets to local car traffic and emergency vehicles on others. The program ended earlier this year after a mixed reception from residents and a lack of clear evidence about how effective the closures have been at promoting safe walking and biking. Only a few of the streets targeted by the program remain wholly or partially closed.
One of those streets, Beach Drive, is subject to an ongoing dispute with the National Park Service, which oversees large stretches of the road. The road, which hugs Rock Creek Park as it runs from the northernmost part of the District to Connecticut Avenue in the heart of the city, is set to remain closed until at least the fall. The Park Service is now studying whether to extend the closures on Beach Drive, and the agency’s ultimate decision about the road’s future may reflect how committed the Biden administration is to empowering cities to pursue policies that prioritize streets as public gathering spaces rather than as congestion generators.
According to Nesper of the League of American Bicyclists, cities need financial and political commitments from the Biden administration and Congress. But the organization maintains that the bipartisan infrastructure package falls short of the type of policy changes and investments needed for transformative change, such as mandates to prioritize new biking infrastructure over additional car lanes, adequate funding to reconnect communities that were severed by highways, and robust safeguards on funding meant to increase safeguards for bicyclists and pedestrians who share roadways with automobile traffic.
However, the league has described the bill, which provides $6 billion in new grants for safer streets and increases annual allocations for the Transportation Alternatives Program, the primary source of funding for bike and pedestrian infrastructure, by about 60 percent, as a “step in the right direction.” Nesper remains optimistic that bicycle advocates will continue to have a seat at the table as the administration lays out what “building back better” means for America’s cities. “You know, we think building back bicycle-friendly is part of that,” he says.
This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.
