Bike Networks Now!

“There is rarely ever any negative feedback on these projects.” Bet you’ve rarely heard those words associated with a bikeway or street safety development project. But in Indianapolis, because of the city’s enlightened tactical urbanism program, it’s become the norm. Every city transportation official should study the Indy program. And every city have their own tactical urbanism program. In this second episode about Indy, we speak with Chris Davner, the city’s tactical urbanism program lead, and LeAndre Level, Indy’s Vision Zero leader.

Why isn’t tactical urbanism more common? On the grandest scale, it was good enough for New York City in the redesign of Times Square. Why aren’t we using this to figure out how to make streets better all the time? Indianapolis hasn’t quite done that, but they are one of the few cities with has a formal Tactical Urbanism program.

In this conversation, we’re headed to Blacksburg, Virginia, the home of Virginia Tech. In previous episodes, we’ve investigated the state of biking in big metropolitan areas – Denver, New Orleans, Houston, Portland. Blacksburg, by contrast, is a college town with a population of 45,000. When school is in session, the population almost doubles. So what’s it like trying to get around this college town on a bike?

On this episode, we’re headed to Portland, which is to many people the Xanadu of American bike cities. If I only had a quarter for every time someone, talking about biking, has wistfully started a sentence with, “In Portland…” What is the reality on the ground in Portland? It’s ranked 8th for cities its size in the PeopleForBikes City Ratings. Is its reputation deserved? And why have recent times seen decreases in ridership?

In this episode, we're headed to Houston. If you’re like, “Biking in Houston?!” that's exactly why this is one of the conversations I've been most looking forward to. Houston is the punchline in a lot of national conversations about cars and sprawl—the fourth-largest city in the country, defined in the popular imagination by freeways and heat and distance. The city rating from PeopleForBikes for Houston is a 17 out of 100. No less, the bike movement persists.

My guest today has spent years building the tools that let us actually measure whether that is indeed true. Martina Haggerty is the Vice President of Infrastructure at People for Bikes, where she leads the great bike infrastructure and the city ratings initiatives, which score hundreds of cities on how well their bike networks actually connect people to the places they want to go. They call this the bike network analysis, and we'll dive into that in a moment.

My guest is Andy Boenau, the director of transportation for the city of Richmond and the author of the Substack Urbanism Speakeasy, which he's been writing since 2013. His 2024 book is called Neighborhood Character: 365 Daily Affirmations for Defenders of the Status Quo. A recent post he wrote, "Here's Why the Status Quo Keeps Winning," caught my eye, and I wanted to have him on to talk about it and his work broadly.

Andy refers to himself as a "plangineer" and a "propaganda artist" — we'll get to that in a bit — and jokes about converting readers to the all-powerful bike lobby. He's irreverent, satirical, and, I think, deliberately provocative toward the planning and engineering establishment, even though he's a career insider. I thought it'd be great to talk with him about challenging the status quo, especially because, as a director of transportation, he sits in the seat of someone usually charged with defending it.

One of the strangest ironies is that cities already have many of the techniques described above. We have the tools to create complete networks, but we don’t use them. It’s also quite clear that we’re not getting enough people on bikes. Yet we persist with the status quo approach to building bike networks.

After a decade of observation and advocacy, I’ve become convinced that endless conflict to build bike networks is a failed strategy. It’s the bike equivalent of trench warfare: unacceptably limited progress and massive costs in time, money, and pain.

Bill Nesper is the Executive Director of the League of American Bicyclists, the voice of bike advocacy at the federal level. We talk with Bill about where bike advocacy needs to grow, getting people on bikes to experience “the good life,” and building a more mainstream movement.

This is a podcast trying to figure out how cities can produce complete bike networks, make bike riding a real transportation option. And true to form, this is a different kind of episode oriented around our work here in Denver to get the city to build a complete high-comfort bike network. We think it can be done in a short period of time for a budget that pales in comparison with the normal costs.

Instead of me asking the questions, paradoxically, I've asked one of Denver's best reporters, Paul Karolyi from CityCast Denver, to come on the show and just hammer me with questions about VAMOS, our initiative. VAMOS is a plan that tries to draw on the most important lessons we have learned about what works and what doesn't in the creation of bike infrastructure — most significantly with VAMOS and the way that it is imagined.

This is an audio snapshot of what the Vibrant Streets Pilot Program would be like.

You’d step out your door, hop on your bike, and ride to the nearest demonstration project location. This would be on a weekend – that’s as long as the initial pilots would last.

You would ride a mile or so down a quiet residential street made even quieter with no high speed cut-through traffic. And that would be because small sets of cones on the street placed in strategic locations would make it so these streets were for local drivers only. There would be other people out riding bikes – kids on small bikes, adults on trikes, folks on beach bikes cruising along comfortably. Occasionally, you might see a neighbor driving the last block or two to their house, and parking in front of their house. But that would basically be all the vehicle traffic on those streets.

We’ve now done 10 episodes of the podcast in our quest to understand why bike transportation still isn’t possible for most people in most cities. They’ve been pretty high-level conversations about the bike movement broadly. Over the next five episodes, we’re going local. We’re going to try to learn as many things as we can about how the bike movement is doing in cities across America by talking with the folks who know those cities best – the advocates who are trying to make bike transportation a practical reality. We’re starting in Denver, where Bike Streets is based, and my guests on this episode are two advocates whose work I have a lot of admiration for, Jill Locantore, Executive Director of the Denver Streets Partnership and Rob Toftness, co-founder of the Denver Bicycle Lobby.

Once we’ve deployed digital infrastructure and made it possible for people to find chill routes using the infrastructure that exists today, we turn our attention to upgrading on-the-ground reality.

The place to start is with the creation of “atomic units,” design elements that have the potential to scale. These features must:

1. Create safe, high-comfort riding environments.

2. Be low-cost so network scale is a possibility despite our limited budget.

3. Take very little time to build.

4. Be loved by neighbors for how the change improves the neighborhood.

Examples of low-cost atomic units include:

• Diverters built with signs and pre-formed concrete that prohibit “rat-running,” cut-through traffic on neighborhood streets.

• The conversion of underused sidewalks to multi-use paths.

• Pavement markings that make it easy to follow a route, especially when you have to make complex transitions, like riding from a street to a sidewalk to a park trail.

For a map to evolve, it needs a publishing mechanism that’s up to the task of illuminating a bike network years before it’s formalized.

Once a city identifies its Best Available Network, the next step is to use digital infrastructure to light it up so people can go use it now. The ramifications are incredible: within six months, any city can have a complete, navigable bike network.

My guest is Carter Lavin, author of the book “If You Want to Win, You've Got to Fight” — a guide to effective transportation advocacy. Carter has worked on a wide range of transportation advocacy projects, from rail to bus service to bikeways. As co-founder of the TransBay Coalition, he helped secure a billion dollars in extra funding for transit. Rather than talking in the abstract, I'd like to explore Carter's ideas through the lens of a specific Bike Streets advocacy initiative we've been working on for years called VAMOS. So the arc of this conversation will orbit around that plan.

The point of building bike infrastructure is to get people to ride bikes. So it seems obvious that we should set straightforward goals for every project: X daily riders and an increase of Y systemwide. This is the North Star we need to guide our work and challenge us to doggedly pursue meaningful results.

But few projects have these kinds of goals. Even fewer projects are evaluated relative to goals like these after construction. And even fewer projects undergo iterative changes to make them perform better.

This is a conversation with August Ritter, Managing Director of Global Portfolio Management at The Nature Conservancy, where he oversees a 150 million dollar global conservation fund across 79 countries. In 2021, August brought me on as Entrepreneur in Residence to lead an early-stage team working on a new strategy and bring modern innovation strategies to the table.

August is a leading light in bringing modern innovation practices into big, complex organizations. And this isn’t just a widget factory. TNC is the world’s largest environmental organization.

August launched TNC’s India program – an experience that was eye-opening from an innovation standpoint; we’ll get to that in a moment – he managed TNC’s partnership with the startup incubator TechStars, and is a founder of The Agility Lab, a TNC initiative to make its conservation teams more entrepreneurial and more effective.

As August has said, conversation needs to, “do more, a lot better, and a lot faster.”

One of the most surprising qualities in exceptional innovators is an ability to carefully manage risk, which comes in the form of time and money.

This preoccupation with risk management is counterintuitive. In popular perception, entrepreneurship and innovation is about making big bets. That’s certainly one approach: OpenAI expects to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers and hardware in the next five years and doesn’t expect to be profitable before 2030.

In scenarios, however, where we’re constrained by reality and our time and money aren’t infinite, we need to carefully manage those precious resources.

Read the chapter.

In this conversation, we’re gonna flip the script. A few weeks ago, I got an email from two 8th graders, Cooper and Hugo, who were working on a school project about how they can help get better bike lanes in the area.

I love it when young people care about civic issues – during the 2020 pandemic election, I co-led a project with some local high schoolers and Princeton students to recruit young people to be poll workers and we ended up with more than 30,000 people joining across the country. I suggested to Cooper and Hugo that we record our conversation as a podcast episode. They’ll ask me some questions. And I’ll ask them some as well. I think this is especially important because, at its essence, this is a conversation about young people who are the present and future – and who don’t have the right to vote and shape policy – looking at our city – the city they live in and will inherit – and saying this isn’t good enough.

And I take responsibility that I and the other adults around me haven’t made it good enough for them. If you can’t bike because it’s not safe enough and you can’t drive because you’re not old enough, there are significant limitations on your freedom.

It’s also fundamentally a question we should all be asking: what does it take to have the city, the country, and the world we want?

In 2011, Eric Ries published “The Lean Startup,” a thunderbolt in the startup community, that explores why so many innovation projects fail and how to increase the odds of success.

Ries concludes, in essence, that innovation projects fail because they don’t use the scientific method.

The approach to innovation we propose on the following pages draws on three primary sources of inspiration. This book is a mashup of three texts from disparate fields that, in aggregate, can transform our hamfisted approach to innovation in the public right-of-way and make bike transportation a practical reality for millions of Americans.

Bike lanes have failed in America because they’re not safe enough and they don’t connect.

The solution, at least in the abstract, is simple: build safe, complete bike networks. And not just at some theoretical point in the future. Now.

Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and author of Abundance says it best “We should be able to deliver dramatic changes to public infrastructure quickly.” We have to reject the assumption that a complete bike network is a 30-year, multi-generational project. Every bike master plan must have a realistic plan of attack that answers the question: How are we going to build this in the next few years?

In “The Martian,” Matt Damon’s character Mark Watney, stranded on Mars, looks at the camera and says soberly, “In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option. I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.”

Bike infrastructure is a means to an end: making bike transportation a practical reality for millions of people. This is a complex behavior change problem, and to have a shot at being successful, we need an innovation methodology that’s up to the task.

Empiricism and the scientific method embody the most powerful approach to innovation ever developed, but they’re collecting dust on the shelf. That needs to change.

This is a conversation with Kevin Mayne, who has been described as “the voice of the bicycle industry.” For 14 years, he was CEO of CyclingUK, the largest advocacy group in the UK. In 2012, he became the Director of Development at the European Cyclists’ Federation. And from 2019-2024, he was the Founding CEO of Cycling Industries Europe, CIE, an industry group that represents more than 50 bike companies in Europe. Before becoming the voice of the bike industry, Kevin held senior leadership roles at Cadbury Schweppes, Coca-Cola, and Kraft.

Over the last few decades, there has been a clarion call from voters to make American cities navigable by bike. But despite billions of dollars in investment, no American city has made biking go mainstream, let alone made it a dominant form of transportation.

The bike transportation high-water mark in Portland was in 2014. According to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey – a deeply flawed count – 7.2% of Portland residents commuted to work by bike. Notably, this figure only represents people who commute to work, so it’s a subset of the population. It doesn’t mean they rode every day, and it certainly doesn’t mean that 7.2% of all trips were taken by bike. Since 2014, there’s been a precipitous and sustained decline in ridership. The 2024 edition reported more than a 40% decline since 2014.

In correlation with growing investment, rates of bike transportation should be increasing. After all, riding a bike is affordable and convenient. More than half of trips in cities are less than three miles – an optimal distance for a bike ride. You can cover this distance in about as much time as it takes to drive a car, you don’t have to hunt for parking, it’s inexpensive, and it’s healthy.

Why is bike transportation still not possible for most people in American cities, and how can we make it a reality?

Despite decades of voter support for candidates who’ve run on the promise of affordable, healthy active transportation and billions of dollars of investment, bike transportation is still not a practical reality in American cities.

On the 2025 Copenhagenize Index, the global ranking of bike-friendly cities, the top American city was Portland, which ranked a paltry number 35 globally.

America Thirty-Fifth!

Why are we so low? Simple: our cities aren’t bike-friendly.

This is a conversation with Ruth Oldenziel, an emeritus professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology and an expert on the history of technology. Ruth is the program leader of the Cycling Cities Project, a research initiative to understand what has worked and what hasn't to make bike transportation a reality in cities across the globe. I wanted to talk to Ruth about that research, how some European cities have succeeded and others haven't, and to dispel the notion that the Dutch are genetically predisposed to create bike-friendly cities.

Elizabeth Adams is the Deputy Director of Public Affairs at Transportation Alternatives, the juggernaut advocacy powerhouse in New York City, where she's been involved in everything from bike transportation to bus rapid transit to congestion pricing. What we're here to talk about, however, is something almost absurdly specific: a specific bike facility that I am obsessed with. It's in Brooklyn on Berry Street near the Williamsburg Bridge. I don't know if a podcast episode has ever been devoted to a somewhat nondescript bike facility, but as you'll hear, this is amazing transformational bike infrastructure. It has potential to scale quickly and inexpensively beyond anything else that I have seen anywhere.

As much as anyone I know, Sara Studdard has cracked the nut on how to get cities to move fast in the construction of bike infrastructure. Sara is a partner at City Thread and developed the Accelerated Mobility Playbook, a roadmap that helps cities make big progress on bike and mobility projects in general in 24 to 36 months. Sara has worked with cities like Austin, Providence, Pittsburgh, and Denver to build bike infrastructure at a pace that previously was not imagined to be possible. I want to understand what Sara has learned, what the playbook is all about, and how they get cities to move quickly.

Avi Stopper chats with Mike Lydon, author of "Tactical Urbanism" and one of the 100 most influential urbanists of all time alongside, according to Planetizen.

We go deep on tactical urbanism, where’s it’s worked and why it hasn’t become the dominant paradigm in planning. We dive into the challenges cities face implementing this approach from leadership turnover to fatigue, and how a new generation of transportation planners is embracing the promise and experimental spirit of tactical urbanism.

In this kickoff episode of Bike Networks Now, host Avi Stopper chats with Randy Neufeld, one of the founding fathers of bike advocacy in America and former executive director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation. Randy brings his trademark energy and unique perspective on why bike transportation remains impractical for most Americans.

We talk about the cultural and practical barriers that prevent cycling from going mainstream, from the simple problem of bike locks to the complex challenge of creating comfort in a car-dominated world.

Randy shares the inside story of the Green Lane Project, which helped institutionalize protected bike lanes across American cities, and discusses his current work developing "Good For Us"—an initiative to create alternative communities for people seeking to live more active lives.

And we discuss conventional planning approaches and applying startup-style innovation and the scientific method to building bike infrastructure.

This episode sets the stage for exploring the central question in these conversations: how can cities make bike transportation a practical reality for people of all ages and abilities?