Okay, there were actually quite a few key messages in Roger Geller’s event where he discussed how to create a cyclicised city from a 1% cycle city. Among them “Build it and they come“, “It CAN be done on a shoestring budget“, “You need data to convince the doubters” and “You need to push the politicians hard for what you want“. And he himself said that if he could only show one image, then he would show the starting image – a “bike corral” full of parked bicycles. Created because a local business owner had asked authorities to remove a car park for it in front of his shop to make space for bikes.
But among all those hopeful messages, one certain one resonated particularly for me. As with so many messages that one likes, it was one that confirmed my own thinking – but since I didn’t tell him beforehand what I wanted to hear, and since this guy has a pretty great track record (being the long-time cycling coodinator / cycle champion of a city that has moved from 1% cycle mode share to 6% (in some key surburbs, 15% percent) overall cycle mode share within 15 years)…
Well, with those caveats, I think the message is worth something even if I am biased.
The message? It doesn’t happen overnight. And you don’t get a cycle culture in one step, or even a few short steps. You don’t move from lycra sports / hardcore commuters being the only ones willing to ride to your grandmother ringing the bicycle bell in your front yard, the next year.
First you only manage to paint cycle lanes on 50km/h streets. Eventually, you build “bicycle boulevards” with 30 km/h speed limits and priority for bikes.
One of Portland’s key experiences is that increasing cycling numbers is always positive. Yes, even if they are initially mostly composed of fast-riding white males in sports gear. Even if the cycle facilities at first only consist of cycle lanes that are “just paint”. They create the base. Then you use that base as an argument for more. And for better. You never stop. You never give up. You don’t despair, and you don’t predict dark clouds just because your grandmother still hasn’t saddled up for her shopping trip.
You just continue the work on a better cycle future.
[Max is the grandly-named "Infrastructure Liaison" of Cycle Action Auckland. It was that or call himself "The Infrastructure Guy"]
One of the key things that was confirmed for me from Roger’s talk was that political will and leadership are central to really getting things going. In Portland they had Earl Blumenauer. In London they’ve had Ken Livingstone and Boris… pretty much wherever things are really changing you’ll find at least one or two key leaders who ‘got it’ and took action.
We don’t seem to have that in NZ or Auckland yet. In a lot of these cases, the required leadership seems to have arisen more or less by good luck. Once cycling is more widespread, leadership continues because there’s a political market for it. But before you get to that stage, what can be done to foster the kind of leadership we need?
Adrian, our “issue” here is that Len Brown and Mike Lee are both focused on rail (and PT in a more general sense, but really, RAIL). I don’t disagree with that, with the current government, they need to be focused to get anywhere with rail (though they will have it a lot easier once electric trains come in). But it means that cycling won’t be their “cause celebre”. They will make the occasional positive gesture, but it’s not in their blood.
However, I didn’t quite take away from Roger’s talk that one needed ONE key champion. I am not aware Portland had one such person. Roger talked about key support in key moments, correct. But that comes down to a series of support by various people over time. Who know whether that one politician doing the casting vote that created their state law requiring cycle and walking facilities to be built with roads – whether he ever voted for cycling again (or even got reelected?).
I agree that it would be so much easier if we had someone like Boris Johnson, or Enrique Peñalosa. But they are not necessities. They are usually boosters of existing trends. History is rarely made by single people, in my opinion, all example stories aside.
At the talk Roger Geller talked about their political cycling champion, their Mayor: Earl Blumenauer.
Read about him here:
http://www.cyclingmobility.com/interview-with-congressman-earl-blumenauer/
As the National Party has successfully truncated Auckland Transport from Auckland Council, we don’t have the ability for a political champion to push the cycling cause.
I suggest it will be people power that it needed. Image if a series of marches over the Harbour Bridge became like Bastion Point.
Except that Earl Blumenauer was never Portland Mayor – he LOST that campaign. Not wanting to diss this guys apparently quite substantial efforts for cycling – I just want to warn cycling fans and cycling advocates of the risks of praying for a hero to come save us.
We’ll have to do it ourselves (even if we disagree about the best course – doesn’t actually matter that much).
You’re right Max, according to Wikipedia… In 1987, Earl Blumenauer was elected to the Portland City Council as Commissioner of Public Works, a post he held until 1996.
And I agree that we are unlikely to get such an effective political champion (who made a point of dedicating 1% of the transport budget to cycling).
However what does “We’ll have to do it ourselves” entail if we want to see progress on cycle safety (rather than the steady stagnation/worsening of conditions) in Auckland?
Boris and Ken are/were pro cycling, no doubt but it was far from their primary focus for transport (which was congestion charging and buses). I don’t think that the fact that Len Brown is focused on rail is necessarily a huge issue.
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I think the message was not so much that you need one cycling champion in power, but you need at least one. And it doesn’t have to be the sole or even major part of their campaign, but it needs to be a significant part of it. We haven’t seen either of those things happening as yet.
You can try to do it ‘bottom up’, generating enough ‘people power’ so that leaders see there’s a market for doing things for cycling. That’s a long job though. If you do have a switched-on leader, my impression is that can speed things up a lot. One strategy might be to identify and encourage potential political leaders within our own circles- people who already ‘get it’ and also have leadership potential.
Stuff REALLY happens when there is societal consensus.
Also curious if that lovely sculptural crossroads above has been implemented…. ?
As Roger Geller said, there were a heap of reasons why Portland has been successful in making change happen. All credit to advocates in Auckland like Max who are working tirelessly to strengthen the foundations here – Auckland cyclists owe them big thanks.
But it’s worth remembering that in the early days, some pretty fierce action by cycling advocacy groups was a catalyst for change in Portland.
In the 1990s Portland’s Bicycle Transportation Alliance took Portland city to court, winning a test case to force the city to install bike lanes along some new streets (using the “Bicycle Bill” – the legislative requirement to spend 1% on cycling) This quite confrontational action was a political and public turning point. BTA itself became a force on the local transportation scene, and is now a big organisation with over 5000 members and 17 staff.
There were many reasons why Portland was fertile ground for that catalyst to happen.
Jeff Mapes book “Pedalling Revolution” is great reading into the mix of factors that has made bicycle movement happen in Portland and across the US. The political noise made by cycling advocates in NYC, San Francisco, and across the US is a big part of the story.
“who made a point of dedicating 1% of the transport budget to cycling”
Bevan, nationwide we currently dedicate 0.35% to cycling, but possibly it is more at a local level. Hard to know, as the accounting generally doesn’t provide that data (another thing to fight for!).
I don’t disagree with the idea that advocates need to be loud and clear, and if needed, protest in the classical sense of the word – like the Auckland Harbour Bridge protest that created the conditions in which you guys could continue work on Pathways, rather than have to go home defeated.
However, advocacy comes in different flavours, horses for courses if you will. I am more comfortable to work within the system than outside of it (and I strongly disagree with your comment about the “the steady stagnation/worsening of conditions” in Auckland. I think we have a slow but notable improvement instead – three steps forward, two steps back).
Many others in CAA agree with me, but by far not all (that is the tension in any group with more than 1-2 people…) – and of course outside of CAA there are advocates who consider us ineffective (hah!) or go as far as considering CAA traitors to the cause because we are willing to work with buraurcracy and politicians who remain difficult and often unresponsive to cycling needs – rather than repudiating them wholsale.
Political will at the top can make things happen, even if there isn’t societal consensus- e.g. the London congestion charge was deeply unpopular before it was implemented, but they did it anyway. Sometimes it seems to me that’s about the only way you get big progress in any kind of hurry.
On the other hand, even if you have political leadership on your side, it’s no guarantee of progress. Wellington doesn’t appear to be about to transform itself into Copenhagen, despite having a mayor who gets it. As people have pointed out, lots of other factors come into it as well.
A bit of background from the history files: back in the late 90s there was basically no support for cycling at any level. Political leaders weren’t interested in it, and they took advice from their bureaucrats who weren’t interested in it either. And neither was the general public. So it was almost impossible to get anything to happen.
So at the time we figured that as advocates we first needed to convince the bureaucrats that cycling was worth doing. Then hopefully the politicians would take advice from them and we’d get some progress. So we worked on the planners, engineers etc. and got some of them to start saying the sorts of things we were saying. We didn’t have time to work on the politicians as well anyway, because all this was done in the spare few hours a week of one or two people.
Towards the end of my stint as chair of CAA it became clear to me that we had made some progress- more projects started happening, cycling advocates started to get consulted about projects rather than just having to complain about them afterwards- but things were still getting stuck at the political level. The bureaucrats could support something, but if the politicians didn’t understand it and/or thought they might lose votes from it (because the public didn’t get it either) then that was the end of it. So we needed to work on the politicians as well.
Since those days CAA has gone on and done a lot of good work at both bureaucratic and political levels, got more traction as a result, and there are plenty of good initiatives happening. I guess what I’m saying though is that this sort of approach on its own gives change that is steady but slow. To get dramatic changes- i.e. getting cities that are actually cycle friendly over time scales less than many decades- seems to take strong leadership at the top (as well as all the other work by advocates and others). Maybe that sort of change does only happen by chance, when the right people and conditions arise, and in the absence of that we just have to be content with the pace of change we’re seeing now?
There’s gradual change and glacial change. In Wellington it is the latter.
I’ve drawn this comparison in the past, in that I look with awe at how fast the mobility movement got all that infrastructure (ramps, carparks, toilets etc). I’m do not understand the political process, but how did that happen?
Hi Nigel
Did they get it fast (real question – I do not have an idea)? And if you go to mobility discussion forums, do they still complain about places where they got nothing (I suspect they do).
But I think that compared to getting safe cycling getting mobility access may actually be a smaller and easier job, and one harder for politcians and bureaucrats to ignore without looking like villains. A cyclist can always ride on the road (even if he/she isn’t safe doing so). A mobility-impaired person can literally be “stuck outside”. That kinda sends a message that is hard to counter.
But overall, I think the mobility movement is not such a bad example – as far as I know, they had similar decades of advocacy, law changes etc… to go through to get what they want. Maybe at some stage the process started to really accelerate, but I bet there was a long hard slog before that where they felt nothing ever seemed to happen.
@Adrian – thanks for the historical context. I certainly wouldn’t say that I am “happy” with the pace of change. But there’s enough progress (some days, enough to really give me a buzz!) to not make me throw up my hands in the air and give up. If I ever stop being a cycle advocate, it will be due to exhaustion, not due to frustration, I hope.
@Todd – the image of the 4th Street Bicycle Boulevard is currently just a concept, campaigned for by LA’s cycling advocates – though I understand their local equivalent of Auckland Transport is making noises about starting to build it soon, so it’s obviously more than just a nice-to-have.
Various bicycle boulewards have been built in Portland, as well as in a couple other cities, and Roger Geller’s organisation and other cities that are part of the NATCO cities alliance are currently preparing a design guide update to their existing cycling design guidance documents. Also, he noted that Portland has numerous new bicycle boulevards funded (i.e. in their version of the transport programme for coming years), but not yet built.