How Your City Can Use Cycling to Cope With COVID-19
Photo by Scott Heins
The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus has brought an unprecedented reliance on biking to cities around the world. While Italy and Spain have banned non-essential cycling, other cities have decided that cycling is a safer alternative to public transportation, and cyclists are taking the streets by storm. In the first week of the crisis, New York City experienced a 67 percent increase in bike share ridership and Philadelphia reports an astonishing 471 percent boost.
Cycling allows those providing essential services to get to and from work safely and with necessary social distance, and has allowed delivery workers to join the frontlines of essential service providers for people in quarantine. Now that lockdowns are likely to last months as opposed to weeks, academics, public health experts, and elected officials around the world are proposing innovative ways to make cycling safe and accessible for essential and non-essential workers for the duration of the crisis.
Photo by Scott Heins
Bike Lanes
With bike ridership growing, increased injury rates are already being reported. To decrease this burden on an already overwhelmed healthcare system, the easiest, most effective solution is temporary bike lanes, which have been shown to create safer streets for not just cyclists, but all users.
Bogota, Columbia has taken the promising steps in this direction. Mayor Claudia Lopez announced that the world-famous Ciclovia, a weekly shutdown of designated streets that bans cars and offers the public space for walking and cycling, would be extended to every day of the week. In full, the measure allocates an additional 47 miles of street closures, giving residents more incentive to bike as an alternative to using the city’s crowded bus system. These 47 miles are in addition to 310 existing miles of bike lanes.
Other cities are beginning to take note of Bogota’s success. Mexico City is considering a temporary fourfold increase in its bike lane network. In New York City, both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo have encouraged millions of New Yorkers who rely on the subway to bike instead. Since then, the City has also announced two pop-up bike lanes in Brooklyn and Manhattan and alluded to more bike lane announcements soon.
Photo by Scott Heins
Public Space
Other cities are taking less drastic but still notable action to increase public space and make social distancing easier to practice. With 70 to 80 percent of open space in many cities designed for cars only, and with traffic so dramatically reduced by quarantines, many officials are getting creative by repurposing street space for pedestrians and cyclists. Philadelphia, for instance, closed over four miles of Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive to cars to make room for the influx of bicycles. After a weekend of extreme overcrowding in New York City’s limited parkland, New York’s Governor Cuomo called for Mayor Bill de Blasio to quickly develop a plan to close streets in order to give New Yorkers enough space to step outside and still comply with distancing recommendations. On March 25, City Hall announced that four NYC streets would be made car-free.
Bike Repair
As governments around the world are implementing shelter-in-place orders, they have also forced businesses to close with the exception of those providing “essential” services. Pharmacies, grocery stores, car mechanics, and mass transit are often defined as essential. But some elected officials have also recognized the need for bike shops to be included. Philadelphia, Chicago, Amsterdam, San Francisco, and New York are just a few of the cities that include of bike repair in their definitions of essential.
Photo by Scott Heins
Bike Share
In order to further incentivize people to choose a mode of transit that lowers the risk of virus transmission and still allows people to get to their destinations, some bike share systems have eliminated payments. New York City recently announced free Citi Bike memberships to frontline workers, in partnership with Lyft. Rekola, a Czech ebike, scooter, and bike share system, is providing unlimited free rides in every city it operates and Pike Ride has extended the same offer to its residents in Colorado Springs.
In the coming months, cities around the world must recognize the importance of bike-friendly policies in the fight against COVID-19. If implemented quickly and widely, cities have an opportunity to encourage a mode of transit that minimizes transmission risk, provides essential workers with a safe mode of transportation, and allows for the use of public space while maintaining necessary physical distance.
These changes, made during an emergency, also have long term transformative potential. History has shown us that popular policies have a tendency to stick once a crisis subsides, like the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, which became a defining moment in the Netherlands, and created long-term societal change. To this day, the Dutch favor cycling over cars culturally and in policy decisions. Although these policy ideas and innovations have been introduced as temporary, there is potential for a cultural shift as their clear benefit is demonstrated.