Portland to become North America's Copenhagen?

The City of Portland, OR is setting itself a very lofty, yet attainable goal: to achieve the same level of bike ridership as Copenhagen. Right now Portland is tops in North America for bike ridership, with about 8% of all commutes by bike. By comparison, 37% of commutes in Copenhagen are by bike (and of ALL trips taken, 55% are by bike). They've done it by gradually taking away parking spots for cars (about 3%/year, which drivers don't even notice on an annual basis) and adding separated bike lanes along major arteries. Portland has already started implementing the same strategies and it's obviously working.

Bikes: Viagra for the Urban Landscape

There are a few complaints from drivers that come up of an over against making more space for bikes:

• Bikes aren't paying for the space they use like cars are.

Well, in fact, cyclists also pay income and property taxes like everyone else which end up building our roads, and not all cyclists are poor. In fact, with the cost of a good bike these days, it's hard to be a poor cyclist. What about the gas taxes and insurance cars have to pay? It's been well documented that those additional fees don't come close to covering the actual cost of driving, and that driving is heavily subsidized by the government (and our general tax base) - roads are expensive to build and maintain, have to be repaved every 10-15 years, vehicle accidents are a major cost for emergency and health services, cars emit air pollution that causes health problems that we are only just beginning to understand, and by discouraging walking/cycling they contribute to an overweight society, adding further burden to the health system. Plus there's the water pollution issue from all the oils and fluids dripped onto the roads, along with the salt used to clear them in winter. In addition, about 10 bikes can drive in the same amount of space as one car - think of how much more green space we could have without having to pave so much of our land for cars. Check out The True Cost of Driving.

• We get winter here and lots of rain, so you can only bike for a few months of the year - so why are we wasting the space for bike lanes?
  

True, we do get winter. But so does Copenhagen, and it's colder on average - they get (gasp!) snow. It's also further north, meaning they get even less daylight on those winter days. There's no reason we can't bike as much as they do, if not more so - it just requires a re-thinking of the way we develop our cities and the way we live. If there is anywhere that the climate argument against promoting cycling doesn't hold up, it's here on the west coast. The average high temperature in Copenhagen from December to February is 3 degrees C. Compare that to Vancouver at about 6 degrees, Seattle at 8 and Portland at 9. Sure, there are going to be days when biking just isn't going to work, but for those days there are alternatives. And on the days that are cyclable, each bike has just removed a trip that may have been done by car - meaning those who do drive have more space.

• Removing lanes for bikes means traffic gets worse - all those cars are sitting there are spewing more pollution than if they could move quickly.

I used to believe this as well, but it's actually not true. The reason is that overall, the number of people driving is reduced because of the congestion, and people start travelling by other means. The inverse is also true - adding road capacity for cars doesn't solve the congestion, it actually encourages even more people to drive, thus compounding the problem. After a certain amount of time, the widened road is even more clogged than it was before, because more people are willing to take a chance that it isn't busy. This fact has been studied exhaustively.


To wrap-up, some interesting facts:

Car emissions kill about 30,000 people each year in the U.S.
(American Lung Association, Oregon Traffic Commission, Association of Commuter Transportation, American Automobile Association, and City of Eugene.)

The energy and resources needed to build one medium-sized car could produce 100 bicycles.

95% of a car's energy goes towards moving the car itself, and only 5% to moving the passenger.

External costs of driving. The estimated annual external cost of driving (including air pollution, climate change, imported oil security, congestion, accidents, noise, etc.) is $126.3 billion.(E Magazine, 2005)

It costs about $50 to build and maintain one space in a bike rack and $500 for a bike locker, yet one car parking space in a typical parking structure costs about $8,500. An underground spot in a downtown Vancouver condo tower costs about $30,000 to build.

90% of children who lived within a mile of their school walked or biked to school in the 1960's. Only 31% do so today. (Salon, 2004)