Designing Bicycle Cities

Title of Website: Good.Is

Author: Eric Wicks

Date: January 26 2010

“Planning clearly-marked urban biking systems can help us educate car drivers and decrease cycling accidents.”

The life cycle of cities from small town to metropolis, planners had to answer the question of how to accommodate the transportation needs of the growing population
Booms correspond with the rise of automobiles and the oil industries, not the biking surge we’re experiencing now
Planners are now faced with the task of retrofitting new concepts and ideas to existing infrastructure
Austin (Texas): opportunity to make the right transportation decisions where other cities have failed
Problem: public perception – people don’t see biking as a serious mode of transportation, and they feel bikes don’t belong on the road, drivers consider the road “theirs”, both sides can benefit from “ours”
What a person knows of cycling is learned from their community, so a city that is designed to accommodate only one mode of transportation is bound to inspire a certain myopia