Every City’s Cycleway Network Should Be As Dense As Road Network, Says American Academic

“People on bicycles want to reach all destinations in a city just the same way that people in cars want to be able to reach all parts of the city,” says American academic Marcel Moran.

“A city’s bike network should be equivalent to the road network,” he told me via a Zoom call.

“The challenge is not where bike lanes should go, but where shouldn’t they go? And there are very few places we shouldn’t have safe bike infrastructure.”

The University of California Berkeley doctoral candidate is a specialist in people-friendly city planning. He has mapped every single one of San Francisco’s 6,399 intersections, pinpointing which have crosswalks. And he has just published a paper on the pop-up “Corona cycleways” of Paris, plotting how planners plugged gaps in the French capital’s growing network of bike lanes.

He believes cities should design for people, not cars, and is unapologetic that this would be considered by many to be an activist’s stance.

“UC-Berkeley has a strong history of the activist planner,” he stresses.

“There is an acknowledgment that the scholar wants to build a better world.”

He has an apt analogy to explain this logic: “Let’s say I was studying food insecurity; no one would be surprised if I said I was anti-hunger and pro food security. My [academic] goal would be for there to be less hunger in the world.”

Translating this to the field of transportation, he says car-centric planning has been harmful, leading to, among other things, chronic air pollution, runaway climate change, and pedestrian deaths, and therefore his academic work has fixed on what he calls “ABC” — “Anything but cars.”

The downsides of mass motoring are “alarming trends that need to be solved,” he urges.

“I see cars as responsible for what ails a lot of city life.”

As a cyclist, transit rider and pedestrian, Moran fights against car-centrism, and doesn’t feel that is any more biased than motorists in a city clamoring for more space on roads.

“When an expert on a city’s board of transportation argues in favor of a bike lane at a public meeting, someone will say, ‘well, aren’t you a cyclist? Don’t you have a conflict of interest fighting for this bike lane?’ But isn’t it suspect for a car owner to be arguing against a bike lane because that serves their interests?”

Moran is a member of the San Francisco bike coalition and appears at city hall arguing in favor of bike infrastructure.

“The advocacy and the scholarship [go hand in hand],” he says.

His recent paper on the Covid bike lanes of Paris—published in Transport Findings—analyses the growing connectivity of the city’s bike network.

“Paris is a useful case study because it hasn’t previously been considered a bicycle haven, but its rate of change has been dramatic. Its starting place, not that long ago, is quite similar to where many cities find themselves; where there’s some level of bike infrastructure but many gaps and many shortcomings.”

Moran believes that “what Paris has done in five or six years is attainable for any city.”

Instead of interviewing planners, he mapped what they had built in Paris, including during lockdown. Unlike in other cities, none of the Covid bike lanes—known as “Coronapistes”—have been subsequently ripped out. Instead, more bike lanes are being added, especially in strategic locations.

And Paris isn’t doing it by stealth, smiles Moran.

“Half of the coronapistes replaced general traffic lanes,” he says.

“To give space to any mode of transportation, you have to take it away from another mode, and that’s what Paris is doing.”

Paris, he adds, is providing “transportation equity,” a stated aim of Anne Hidalgo, the city’s socialist mayor.

“Hidalgo has said look at who owns cars in Paris; it’s largely men. Most Parisian transit riders are women. She has felt comfortable making changes [to Paris] because she is fighting for the rights of non-car-travelers, who are often lower-income, more often minority, and more often women.”

Cycle ridership is on the up and up in Paris.

“The stats show that cycling is increasing,” says Moran.

“It’s also getting more demographically diverse,” he adds.

Paris, wrote Moran in his study, is now a model for “how other cities can rapidly re-allocate street space to more sustainable travel, and speed the installation of existing bike plans rather than proceeding via a more incremental and delayed approach.”

And Paris isn’t fixated on length but quality, says Moran.

“Paris isn’t just increasing the length of its [bike] network but also increasing the density of this network.”

Connectivity is key.

“What matters to [cycle] riders in terms of their willingness to bike in a city is not the overall length of a bike network, it’s how interconnected each lane is,” says Moran.

“In 2020, Paris made new connections from the periphery to the city center, adding long bike lanes but then also filling some really meaningful gaps.”

And there’s little shunting of cyclists onto back streets. Paris is building bike lanes on major thoroughfares because that’s where people want to go.

“Paris said we’re going to choose our primary streets [for the cycle network], which provide the most direct routes between major points of interest,” says Moran.

The city is giving cyclists access to the “grand real estate” that only motorists previously enjoyed. And that’s precisely how it should be, he nods.