Channelling human scaled modes to build repurposed street networks

Abstract

City leaders are pressed to consider how emerging transport technologies will change existing urban transport portfolios. New types of vehicles – automated cars, scooters, electric bikes – will continue to emerge in innovative new forms. Yet any new vehicles will need to integrate with existing transport modes on the streets, which are currently dominated by large cars and sport utility vehicles (SUVs). This leaves fundamental questions of how to appropriate space in streets to different forms of movement. Any transport planning decision, ideally, would ensure future conditions with high levels of accessibility (King and Krizek, 2020), while also stewarding the environment and promoting justice. This chapter posits how and why planning for bicycles and bicycle-like vehicles can be used as a guiding principle to enhance both mobility and cities’ overall welfare. We argue that many urban settlements, even most North American cities, belie their bicycling potential. They are closer to being set up for easy bicycling than most people recognize; a change that is much needed is based on designing streets differently. In this chapter we present a perspective drawing largely from North American contexts but with applicability elsewhere, to describe a rationale and strategy that underscores the merits of bicycle-like transport in future considerations and its feasibility. The last section outlines a strategy built on network development to seed changes that can spark a transport revolution in many cities across the globe.