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PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK PETERSON, REDUX
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By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
In the old days, before March 2020, I used to bike to work at National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Taking the bike instead of my car saved me sitting in traffic, which I despise, and paying to park downtown. It saved me running for a bus that came at infrequent and unpredictable intervals. The ride was less than four miles, and on the way in it was mostly downhill, which made the decision to ride each morning a little easier. Plus, all that biking, especially the uphill slog home, allowed me to skip going to the gym and still feel entitled to my wine and chocolate.
And oh yeah, it was better for the planet too.
The pandemic shut down my commute, like that of so many others, but it has inspired millions of people around the world to jump on bikes for the first time in years, Ilana Strauss writes for us this week. Most of that riding was recreational and probably didn’t displace much carbon pollution. But cities around the world are making lasting changes to their streets to encourage biking, in what may prove to be an enduring silver lining of COVID-19.
Fear of being maimed or worse by cars is what keeps many people from commuting by bike, surveys show. European cities don’t kill nearly as many cyclists as American ones; the fatality rate is five to 10 times higher in the U.S. than in countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, urban planners Ralph Buehler and John Pucher reported last year. But in Europe too urban biking used to be much more lethal—and much less common.
“Americans have this image, ‘Oh cycling is just paradise, and it’s always been paradise in Europe,’” Pucher tells Strauss in this week’s episode of Overheard, the National Geographic podcast. “Wrooong. Not true!” After World War II, European cities were overrun by cars too. It’s just that since the 1970s many have made concerted efforts, spearheaded sometimes by concerned citizens, to reclaim their streets for unmotorized people.
American cities are now following that trend, a few decades behind. Minneapolis is a leader, Stephanie Pearson writes for Nat Geo; its 5.5-mile-long Midtown Greenway (pictured above), which follows an old railway corridor, is lit at night and plowed in winter, and it’s often a quicker way across town than driving. In Minneapolis and other cities, however, the key to bikeability isn’t a gorgeous greenway or two. It’s a connected network of bike paths and lanes that make it possible to ride from any point A in the city to any point B, safely and easily.
New York City has added more than 60 miles of paths and lanes during the pandemic, Chicago around 30, Buehler and Pucher reported last spring. Washington hasn’t seen a surge like that, but it has seen a steady expansion of its network. The percentage of commuters traveling by bike in D.C. went from 1 percent in the late 1990s to 5 percent in 2018, Strauss writes.
I noticed the change myself. On some mornings, when I entered the final straightaway to the office, there would be a whole motley peloton of us rolling down 17th Street, fanning out as if we owned the road, as if we were Tour de France riders leading our chase cars down the Champs-Elysées. As we crossed Massachusetts Avenue, some of us would stand up on the pedals, pumping furiously to make the light at Rhode Island. For this aging boomer in cargo shorts and a goofy helmet, that sprint was a little morning jolt of childhood joy. You may think you can’t recapture that in your grown-up workday but think again: It’s just like riding a bike.
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