Posted Oct 17, 2020, 5:29 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
Posts: 52,200
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How Seville Became a City of Cyclists
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/10/...y-of-cyclists/
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- In just two years, we transformed a city with almost no cyclists and seven miles of bike lanes, to a city where bikes have a central role in the urban mobility system. While Seville, Spain, with around one in 10 trips made by bike, is still far from the cycling mobility figures of Amsterdam or Copenhagen (though more residents of Seville walk than in either of those cities), by rapidly building out a complete bike network, we managed to make cycling significant for everyday transportation and in the culture of the city. — The secret to our success was treating cycling like a system of transportation, building an entire network of connected lanes, instead of a few disconnected lanes year after year. And getting it all done at once before the political winds changed. By making cycling omnipresent in the urban landscape, we taught residents to see cycling as a means of transportation. Or to say it another way: If you build it, they will come.
- The call for cycling infrastructure had the political support and the political will required for a wholesale commitment to cycling. The first step to making that political will into reality was to design a comprehensive cycling network. Network is the important word here to improve cycling as a mobility choice, we needed to treat cycling infrastructure as a system of connections, like roads or train tracks. — We broke the design of the network into phases, and the first phase connected major “trip attractors” in the city, such as work and educational centers, public transit hubs, and recreational spaces, such as squares, commercial streets, and green areas. — This was done during the elaboration of the City Masterplan and included a parallel citizen participation process. The result of this first phase was a nearly 50 mile-long network, but we did not plan these lanes at random. Rather, the network was defined by continuity, cohesion, visibility, and comfort.
- First and foremost, the network was designed to connect “trip attractors” and residential areas of the city through a continuum of bike lanes. The design of the bike lanes was very similar throughout the network (green, bidirectional, seven to eight feet wide), so that cyclists, and people in general, could easily follow and recognize them. The network also followed the main streets and avenues of the city, and therefore was quite visible. — As a general rule, detours and multiple street crossings were avoided. All in all, the whole network was designed to provide comfortable bicycle riding for people with no previous cycling experience, and space for the network came from car traffic roads and parking lanes. In this way, every aspect of the network’s design served our goal of moving people from cars to bikes. Despite the detail of this design, we built quickly, and this was critical to our success. This first phase was constructed in less than two years during 2006 and 2007.
- This transformative mobility shift did not occur in isolation. While a network of bike lanes made it possible, these numbers were aided by a concurrent installation of a public bike share system along the bike network. Also, the building of functional cycling infrastructure was accompanied by a more comprehensive move toward sustainable mobility in the city, including the pedestrianization of important areas and restrictions on car traffic. This transformative mobility shift can also not be separated from the political will. — Political will is the key factor in developing sustainable mobility policies, but this political will must manifest in decisions regarding where to build infrastructure and how to manage the mobility system. It takes more than a pro-bike government; it takes making decisions based on how to achieve a real and significant change in mode share. From a technical point of view, the knowledge needed to make things happen already exists, and there is no need to wait.
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