The problem, of course, is that you can’t take on a 100 year old ingrained car culture by simply painting some lines on the street.  In fact, bike lanes may have the opposite effect; bike lanes draw unsuspecting cyclists on to busy streets without fundamentally altering the naturally aggressive flow of cars.  In my experience, bike lanes offer two dangers: 1) the expected intrusion of cars into the lane through turning vehicles and opening doors, and 2) the frequent disappearance of the lanes due to intersections and outdated roads with shoulders insufficient to maintain a bike lane.  We’re not changing the car culture here.  By accepting just a sliver of the road, we’re giving car drivers a reason to feel even more entitled to what’s left of the road.

Creating a bike culture necessarily involves chipping away at the car culture.  That means shifting privileges and accommodations normally reserved for cars to bicyclists.  A simple but effective solution is a sharrow, on which bikes and cars possess the same explicit rights and responsibilities, including the right to ride in the middle of the road.  This video highlights the use of bike boulevards, which represent an even more proactive solution than shareways.  Bike boulevards are streets where the rights of bikes and pedestrians officially outweigh those of car drivers.  Car use on these streets is actively discouraged.   The proliferation of these types of intentionally mixed transport streets should further erode the sense of entitlement by car owners, and force them to share the burden of planning a route that avoids needless interactions between cars and bikes.

The holy grail for most bike commuters is a physically separated or dedicated bikeway of the type highlighted in the video from New York City.  Separate bikeways eliminate most of the hazards posed by cars and allow for the use of dedicated signaling for cyclists at intersections.  Signaled interactions are always problematic for cyclists given that the timing and protocol of most lights is designed for car traffic.  Cities like Amsterdam have separate signals for bikes, leaving no room for interpretation by any other vehicles sitting at an intersection.  Plus, the creation of an extensive network of dedicated bikeways in built-out cities would recapture road space from cars.  Such a step would be a further blow to the country’s car culture.

Of course, a plan is needed to tie all of this together.  No city would build a network of roads and leave glaring gaps that force cars to back track or go off the road, yet that is exactly how most cities manage their bike networks.  Portland pioneered this effort in the 1990s and now Seattle has stepped up with a recently unveiled plan of its own.  This Seattle Weekly article from last summer, which details the city’s wildly inconsistent bike infrastructure, is a primer on understanding why cities with bike-friendly ambitions need a master plan.   The city’s new master plan is intended to address these many flaws.

So what does a true bike culture look like?  My guess is that it looks a lot like the scenes from the above video.  Copenhagen is considered one of the most bike friendly cities in the world and, not coincidentally, Denmark has one of the most forbidding regulatory frameworks for car ownership in the developed world.  Taxes on new vehicle purchases more than double the cost of the vehicle.  The country counters its anti-car stance with massive financial support for not just the bike network but public transit in general.  As the Copenhagen example illustrates, a bike culture doesn’t come easy.  But we gave the car 100 years of unending support to establish its preeminence.  The least we can do is devote the next 10 – 20 years to the bike.