A Few Simple Designs Can Radically Reduce Travel Emissions in America
In Holland, the recent creations of safer bicycle lanes and bike-specific garages around transit hubs has proven to be an extremely efficient path towards lowering carbon emissions. Emily Nathan Ad Mag
“If you build it, they will come,” the old adage goes; and while the phrase can be metaphorically applied to any number of pursuits, its significance is quite literal within the context of American transportation. If you add lanes to a highway to dilute traffic and reduce car emissions, it’s been proven, the result will be more drivers. So why not use the power of this phenomenon, described in the industry as “induced demand,” to stimulate alternative methods of movement, coaxing people out of their cars and into–or onto–more sustainable options?
Recent years have shown what is possible in terms of creating integrated public transportation systems that decimate reliance on fossil fuels. Just look to Europe for inspiration: in Copenhagen, bikes have outnumbered cars for the first time since 1970; in Paris, mayor Anne Hidalgo has pledged €100 million (roughly $107 million) to make the city “100% bikeable by 2026.” And in Holland, where citizens cycle an average of nearly 2 miles a day, some 400,000 people combine bikes with trains for their work-week commute. If the majority of the world followed suit, our annual global carbon emissions would plummet.
The mayor of Paris has pledged to make the city 100% bikeable by 2026.
And yet, sustainable transportation networks are lagging drastically behind in the US, where mass-motorization, low vehicle taxes, and suburban sprawl have conspired to create a heavily car-dependent population. The result is a country with the highest per capita contribution to climate change across the globe. In the COVID-era, things have gotten worse: Since 2020, Americans have by and large avoided returning to buses, subways, commuter rails, and ferries, producing countrywide transit systems plagued by safety and operation issues that exacerbate an already diminished ridership.
“Transportation funding in this country is predominantly oriented towards expanding car-based infrastructure–but we need to invest in alternatives to come anywhere close in meeting our climate goals,” says Stephanie Lotshaw, acting executive director of TransitCenter, a foundation advancing sustainable transportation in the US. “Ultimately, it’s about encouraging people to see biking as a viable transportation method, and the only way to make that happen is to create safe, functioning alternative infrastructures.”
A glance inside Utrecht’s Central Station bicycle garage, which holds up to 22,000 bikes
For the Dutch, who are known for their biking culture and efficient rail system, putting the two together was a no-brainer. Bolstered by the government’s infusion of €441 million (roughly $472 million) into a targeted plan to reshape and expand bike-parking infrastructure, which they started in 2012 and have been implementing ever since in a seamless bike-and-ride system that has become the gold standard for simple, smart, and efficient urban transportation. Focused on the “first-and-last-mile” problem, which describes the dilemma of how to quickly travel the short distance from home to transit hub, and then from arrival station to destination, the Dutch solved safety and convenience issues for their already-biking population via automated, one-swipe bike garages complete with on-site repair services, and easy bikeshare hubs at major transit stations. (The underground bike garage at Utrecht’s Central Station, the largest facility of its kind in the world, holding up to 22,000 bicycles.)
But in the United States, to focus on parking for bikes would essentially be putting the cart before the horse. Building a critical mass of devoted bike riders must come first–and that is no easy task. Surveys have shown that safety is the number one roadblock preventing Americans from choosing a bike as their method of transportation, with a lack of parking as a close second. And even though the challenge is clear, most cities and towns across the nation lack acceptable alternative-transportation infrastructure like sidewalks and shoulders, let alone protected bike paths.
Luckily, a community of champions has emerged to help tackle the problem. Country-wide initiatives like the Bicycle League of America’s Bike Friendly America program, which incentivizes and rewards towns, businesses, and universities that make “bicycle-friendly” pivots, are working to change our mentality on a national scale. “We support little events in a community that can help people think about the possibilities of bike infrastructure, like bike rodeos in parking lots for parents and their kids, or bike-train-to-school programs,” says Amelia Neptune, program director. “And that’s how you start to build bike culture, the goal being: create more demand in the city or the town for decision makers to invest in bike infrastructure.”
Riders have easy point of entry and exit, making the program all the more approachable to the public
Over the past decade, major US cities like New York have worked to create pockets of bike-and-pedestrian safe spaces, through initiatives such as Mayor Bloomberg’s Green NYC and Mayor De Blasio’s Vision Zero traffic-safety program, closing streets to cars and installing protected bike lanes throughout certain neighborhoods. But the system is inconsistent at best.
There’s a whole shift that’s required in how we perceive bicyclists here: They should be exalted rather than treated as second-class citizens,” says Paul Steely White, a decades-long biking advocate who is currently executive director of Parks and Trails New York. “The federal government allow cities to allot as much as 50% of infrastructure money for bike and pedestrian projects, but the reality is that states are generally spending only 4%. The money is there, the flexibility is there, but there is such inertia that exists largely at the level of state Department of Transportations, where we’re still dealing with a 1950s engineering mentality.”
Nonetheless, there are microclimates of change emerging throughout the country. In the Bay Area, every BART station offers 1,800 on-demand, secure bike-parking lockers, as well as on-site repair services. Cities like Minneapolis are adopting “complete streets” policies, which dictates that all new design must prioritize walkers, cyclists, buses, and then cars–in that order–while Chicago passed a Cycling Strategy that includes a vision for 150 miles of new, “low-stress” bikeways.
Image 1-An Oonee Pod in Midtown Manhattan in March 2023. Photo:
Image 2-Access into the pods is simple for riders who use an app on their smart phone.
Until nationwide policy catches up, though, numerous revolutionaries are tackling the issues through private innovation. First launched in 2018 by Shabazz Stuart and Manual Mansylla, a New York company called Oonee has been developing “turnkey bike-parking infrastructure” for cities, called Oonee Pods. These secure units can be installed on plazas, parking lots, or extra-wide sidewalks–the newest model was debuted in March at the NYC Midtown Bus Terminal–where they are easily accessed by bikers via a user-friendly app.