Leading up to the signing of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) in 2021, PeopleForBikes joined a broad coalition of transportation advocates to ensure the opportunity to invest in safer roadways was not missed. Thanks to the commitment of advocates across the nation and partners in the federal government working towards the same safety goals, at least $50 billion in funding is available for communities to plan and implement new infrastructure over the next five years through a combination of competitive and formula grants. Although all of that money won’t go to bikes, nearly $13 billion could realistically accelerate the planning and construction of biking and walking projects across the country, dramatically expanding access to safe infrastructure for millions of Americans. 

Wondering if your local infrastructure project qualifies for one of the many competitive grant programs funded by the BIL? To break it down, we outlined a few of the key grant programs that bike projects are eligible for, as well as a selection of projects that already received grants from these programs. 

One of the most promising programs to emerge from the BIL is the inaugural Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) program, which was authorized and funded at $5 billion over five years. On February 1, 2023, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced the first round of SS4A awards totaling $800 million, all of which will go towards projects dedicated to making it safer to bike and walk in the United States. 

This round of funding will aid 473 action plans, providing support and funding to communities looking to create or enhance roadway safety plans to reduce fatalities. That’s 473 communities taking concrete steps to address our road safety crisis by making it more inviting and accessible to ride a bike, go for a walk, or take public transportation. We know that increasing access to modes besides driving not only saves lives but also reduces congestion and carbon emissions. 

This round of funding also supports 37 implementation grants, which offer communities funding for infrastructure projects that will make our streets safer for all road users. These grants paint a picture of what a protected and connected future for active transportation can look like when we have the political will to fund and build it. Below, we highlighted the most noteworthy bike infrastructure projects receiving funding from the SS4A program this year. Each provides a valuable source of inspiration as they progress toward implementation.

Pryor Street and Central Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia, will be transformed with a $30 million grant to include protected bike lanes and improved pedestrian facilities, better connecting the city’s Southside and Beltline Trail to downtown. 


A $27.2 million grant to Providence, Rhode Island, will allow the city to construct protected bike lanes, pedestrian safety improvements, and redesigned intersections along its Urban Trail Network. The city will also use this funding to replace flexible posts with concrete barriers along its existing protected bike lanes. 


The Louisville-Jefferson County Metropolitan Government in Kentucky received more than $21 million to improve 10 corridors for people walking and biking.


Fourteen miles of San Pablo Avenue — a key corridor in Alameda County, California’s high-injury network — will be improved for pedestrians and cyclists using a $15 million grant.


With its $21.5 million grant, the New York City Department of Transportation will reconstruct part of Delancey Street, creating a separated bikeway.


Missoula, Montana, will implement safety improvements along South Avenue and Clements Road with a $9.3 million grant. The project will include separated bicycle lanes, a widened shared-use path, and new sidewalks. 


In North Dakota, McKenzie County will use a $2.9 million grant to improve 21 corridors and 40 intersections for road users, including a new separated, shared-use path. 

While these projects are truly transformative, the best news is that this is only year one of five for SS4A grants. The program has $5 billion in total funding, and we urge cities and localities to consider applying for SS4A grants when seeking new funding for critical safety projects that help people bike and walk in their communities. The next Notice of Funding Opportunity for this program — with up to $1.1 billion in funding — is expected to be released by USDOT in April. Potential applicants can sign up on USDOT’s website to receive emails when it goes live.

Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) Grants

Distributed by USDOT, RAISE grants typically range from $1 million to $25 million and are an excellent opportunity to plan and build impactful transportation projects. This program allows applications for either planning, construction, or engineering and construction within single grant awards. The most recent round of funding applications, with approximately $2.2 billion in awards expected, closes in February, but communities can start planning ahead of the FY2024 RAISE grant cycle today. Last year, RAISE grants funded numerous bike projects, including trails, bike paths, improved crossings, bike bridges, and protected bike lanes. 

USDOT’s INFRA, Mega, and Rural Surface Transportation Grants

With more than $15 billion available over five years, the INFRA, Mega, and Rural Surface Transportation Grant programs support large, complex infrastructure projects, including  highways, bridges, freight, port, and passenger rail, as well as public transportation projects that are integral to such projects. Although stand-alone bike projects don’t appear to be eligible for these programs, larger multimodal projects that include bike components are. As with their other competitive grant programs, USDOT is expected to announce annual application windows until they distribute the total funding provided for these programs. 

The even better news is that those listed above are just a few of the federal funding programs available for bike projects. Bike infrastructure is also eligible for other federal funding programs including the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, Forest Legacy Program, Climate Pollution Reduction Grants, Tribal Transportation Program Safety Fund, Highway Safety Improvement Program, and Transportation Alternatives Program. 

PeopleForBikes recently joined more than 20 other advocacy partners (and sent our own letter to the Office of Management and Budget) to advocate for full funding for the Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program, requesting Secretary Pete Buttigieg propose  $200 million for the program in USDOT's Fiscal Year 2024 budget submission. 

We look forward to seeing more critical projects funded through these programs to improve safety and increase access to bike lanes, paths, and trails.

Scroll through the images below to see some of the most noteworthy bike infrastructure projects receiving grants from these programs' most recent funding rounds. We hope they provide a valuable source of inspiration and encourage municipalities everywhere to take advantage of the unprecedented amount of federal funding currently available.

Phoenix’s $25 million RAISE award will be used to construct a new bicycle and pedestrian bridge across the Rio Salado River.

The Massachusetts Department of Transportation received more than $20 million  in RAISE funds to design and construct separated bike lanes, bus lanes, and sidewalks along Route 1A, improving connectivity between Lynn and Boston. (Image credit: MassDOT, Lynnway RAISE grant application)

The Capitol Region Council of Governments’ $16.3 million RAISE grant will be used to engineer and construct two trails, filling in gaps and connecting the Farmington Canal Heritage and CTfastrak trails to one another. (Image credit: Gap Closure Trail Study, Capitol Region Council of Governments)

Washington, DC’s $10 million RAISE award for the South Capitol Street Trail project will be used to construct a 3.8-mile-long extension of the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail network. (Image credit: Anacostia Waterfront Initiative)

The City of Philadelphia received a $78 million Mega award for the Roosevelt Boulevard Multimodal Project, which will improve a deadly 12-mile stretch of Roosevelt Boulevard for people walking, biking, and using transit. (Image credit: City of Philadelphia, Roosevelt Boulevard Route for Change Program Final Report)

The Watsonville-Cruz Multimodal Corridor Program, brought forth by the California Department of Transportation, was awarded $30 million from Mega, part of which will be used to construct new bicycle and pedestrian crossings as part of the Coastal Rail Trail. (Image credit: City of Santa Cruz)

Although it is part of a larger highway expansion project, the City of Baton Rouge and Parish of East Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s recent $60 million INFRA award contains upgrades to the 3-mile long Scotlandville Parkway, including a new shared-use path. (Image credit: Sccotlandville Corridor Master Plan, Recreation and Park Commission for the Parish of East Baton Rouge)

Billions of Dollars Are Available for Bike Projects

It was the late 1990s and I thought we were so clever. We had just convinced the San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic to incorporate an innovative new design into its bike plan, a bold statement conveying “bikes belong” right there in the middle of the street. I had first seen a shared-use marking, or “sharrow” — a white bicycle painted directly on asphalt — in photos of Paris and Chicago, put there to help bicyclists get through intersections by indicating their path of travel. In 1993, James McKay, a bike planner in Denver, used it on a trial basis to emphasize a bicyclist’s right to ride in the middle of the lane. 

I was the young executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. We published a hard-hitting newsletter and organized leaders from businesses, churches, community organizations, youth groups, and more into a coalition that was giving unprecedented voice to the demands of San Franciscans for safer streets. Looking to those examples from Chicago, Paris, and Denver, we pushed to get an improved version of the sharrow design formally included in the city’s bike plan and approved for use by the state of California. Mayor Willie Brown famously painted the first sharrow on Grove Street outside of City Hall, getting some green paint on his fancy suit and laughing it off in his inimitable style. 

The City of Oakland, CA, experimented with this "super sharrow" on 40th Street in hopes that the symbol would be more effective if underlined by green pavement. It didn't work, and the USDOT did not approve the treatment.

San Francisco went on to paint thousands of these symbols all over its bike network, and hundreds of cities followed suit. I thought the sharrow would educate bicyclists to stay out of the “door zone”— the three or so feet of space adjacent to parked cars where motorists opening car doors and bicyclists could collide — and usher in a new era of safer streets, one where motorists would patiently wait behind bicyclists “taking the lane” because this painted symbol made it clear they had the right to do so. Where we couldn’t get a bike lane, I hoped this symbol would effectively convert the mixed-traffic lane into an adhoc bike lane when bicyclists were present.

It turns out that motorists really don’t like to wait behind someone on a bike, regardless of the paint on the street. Even Oakland’s experiment with the so-called “super sharrow,” where the bicycle path of travel is painted solid green, isn’t enough to get people on bikes to comfortably “take the lane.” Sharrow or no sharrow, most people on bikes dangerously hug the edge of the roadway, squeezing themselves into the door zone to avoid blocking car traffic.

Simply put, sharrows don’t do what we hoped they would. Studies back up that claim.

Early research in San Francisco and Florida showed evidence that behaviors changed slightly on streets with sharrows. For example, some bicycle riders positioned themselves a few inches further from the curb or car doors. A 2010 evaluation of shared lane markings in three separate cities again showed that the markings had some positive impact on behavior. Looking closely at the results, however, it was clear the changes were too minor to make a difference. After Oakland’s experiment with the super sharrow, the Federal Highway Administration announced it would not support future experiments, and Oakland does not plan to continue the treatment when it repaves the street. 

San Francisco still uses sharrows, but for the most part, city officials know better than to expect them to do much for safety. Today, beautiful sharrows point bicyclists along the circuitous path of the “wiggle,” where a right-left-right-left series of turns directs riders on a gentle grade between San Francisco’s steep hills. They are great for navigation and, perhaps, concentrating riders on certain streets — that’s about it.

Bright green arrows are useful for marking the zig-zag path that takes bicyclists across San Francisco while avoiding the steep hills.

It’s been more than 20 years since I had high hopes for the sharrow as a tool for safety. Today, we know so much more about what it takes to make our streets safer for bicycling. We need separate bike paths; we need protected bike lanes on busy roads; and where the lanes are shared, we need actual speeds reduced to 20 mph or slower. Sharrows don’t do any of that.

Sharrows do, however, accomplish something pernicious which I did not anticipate. They allow officials to take credit for doing something for bicycle safety without impacting car traffic, even though that something is next to nothing. It’s just pretending, and it’s worse than being honest about priorities. It’s insulting to the public to encourage bicycling by painting bike symbols on the street but doing nothing to actually make riding a bike any safer. 

Yes, good bike infrastructure can require tradeoffs that are more politically challenging than simply painting a symbol on the street. Now, at PeopleForBikes, I’m part of a team that has successfully helped cities build networks of bikeways that actually get more people riding safely and joyfully. We help city leaders with communications, organizing, and political strategies to overcome the challenges they will surely face in building truly effective infrastructure. 

We never suggest using sharrows to create a bikeway. We’ve learned our lessons. Now that we know better, it’s time to do more.

The Village of Ossining, located 40 miles north of New York City on the banks of the Hudson River, is indicative of a lot of other small, more rural communities throughout the United States. With a population of roughly 27,000 people, Ossining faces an incredibly high cost of living, leaving many of its residents underwater with rising housing costs and little in the way of affordable transit options — in fact, the average Ossining household spends 55% of its income on housing and transportation.

Introducing a new method of transportation came about organically. Ossining was working with the holistic planning firm Nelson\Nygaard on a mobility and parking study, the goal of which was to ease some of its downtown parking problems and improve curb management. When that project ended, the village — which prides itself on being a leader when it comes to sustainability — continued to work with the same consulting team, brainstorming ideas for new ways to expand its transportation network over relatively hilly terrain, all without contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Those sessions led to the creation of Project MOVER. 

MOVER stands for Moving Onto Vast E-Micromobility Replication, and the project’s goal is to dramatically expand access to shared and personal e-bikes for all residents. Not only will Project MOVER feature comprehensive support infrastructure, including e-bike charging docks, low-cost lease-to-own e-bikes, reduced fare shared e-bike trips, and additional bike parking but community-led training and marketing are also integral to the plan.

The Village of Ossining and its project lead, EIT InnoEnergy, were recently selected for a grant through the New York Clean Transportation Prizes program administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). One of just 10 projects selected(and one of only four in the electric mobility category), Project MOVER was awarded $7 million and will be eligible to compete for additional funding down the road. 

Project MOVER was designed to deploy e-bikes across three different models. The first is a classic bike share program where people can use a mobile app to find and book a bike, unlock it from a docking station, pay as they use it, and then return it to a docking station to charge. Another is through the use of bike libraries — individual employers or multi-family residences will have fleets of bikes available for their staff or residents to use around Ossining to conduct business or run errands. Finally, the lease-to-own program will allow folks that wish to acquire an e-bike for their exclusive use — and who can demonstrate financial hardship — to enter into a program under which they can lease the e-bike for a short time before transitioning to ownership. 

“We wanted to ensure that e-bikes are not out of reach for anyone in our community, and that is one of the core tenets of Project MOVER,” says Ossining Mayor Rika Levin. “I suspect that most of our adult community members will interact with Project MOVER at several points during the duration of the project.”

Levin predicts that for some, an e-bike will become their primary mode of transportation, while others will use the bikes to connect to recreational opportunities or to run errands when a car is less practical.

“I expect that, even for folks who don’t use the bikes themselves, this program will touch their lives — more bikes on the road, and infrastructure for bikes, makes drivers more conscious of their movements behind the wheel,” says Levin, adding that more alert drivers are always a good thing. 

Crucially, Project MOVER was co-designed with four local nonprofits — Hudson Link, Neighbors Link, Open Door Family Medical Center, and the Interfaith Council For Action — that represent folks often marginalized in community planning processes, including immigrant families, affordable housing tenants, and formerly incarcerated individuals. Ossining is surprisingly diverse for a small town, with a growing immigrant population that 

includes many low-income BIPOC residents. Not only was it important that this population had seats at the planning table from the outset, but they’ll continue to play an important role as the project is lived out, assisting in everything from the placement of charging stations to equipment maintenance to facilitating educational workshops and helmet giveaways.

“One of the most important issues we discussed in planning this project was not only the ability to pay but also, the ability to make payment,” says Levin, explaining that not everyone has access to a debit or credit card and not everyone feels comfortable uploading their personal data into a mobile app. “Fortunately, we have developed strategies so that even those who are unbanked can use the program, with the assistance of partners like Neighbors Link, who will assist in cashiering services.”

In addition to offering a cash payment option, Project MOVER will accept alternative forms of identification and accept offline bookings. Subsidized and free membership options will also be available. The project’s partners will deploy 1,000 e-bikes and 120 charging stations across four incubator communities, with bikes and stations spread out to connect residential areas with public amenities (schools, jobs, grocery stores, etc.), as well as transportation hubs like the regional train station. Part of the new infrastructure will also include a network of convenient and safe bike “boulevards” between key destinations, and many of the e-bike libraries are being established in partnership with local businesses hoping for increased customer traffic.

“Ossining is a socio-economically diverse community—many of our residents cannot easily afford a personal automobile, let alone the insurance, maintenance, and storage requirements that come along with that,” says Levin, adding that many who do own cars do so at the expense of a higher quality of life. “Pedal-assist e-bikes, readily and affordably available, will be a solution for many Ossining residents, while at the same time alleviating some of our parking woes and improving our health by making our community more walkable. It’s a win-win.”

Project MOVER doesn’t yet have a set start date but there are plans for a soft launch at Green Ossining’s Earth Day Festival in April. Once it’s off the ground, data will be a huge part of the project. The implementation team will track how folks choose to get around, as well as what they might choose differently with more options. Learnings from the initial deployment in the Village of Ossining will be shared through the newly formed Electric Mobility Incubator, a knowledge exchange platform for communities to access deployment blueprints and replicate the project in nearby communities.

The plan is to first expand to the towns of Tarrytown, Dobbs Ferry, and Croton-on-Hudson before scaling to include dozens of communities by 2030 (already, the project team has identified 20 additional municipalities within a 30-mile radius with similar mobility profiles). Hopefully, what the small Village of Ossining is doing with e-bikes will ripple outwards, proving a replicable framework for other underserved, car-dependent communities across the country. 

“I think a cultural shift is coming in which we all, regardless of immediate financial condition, will need to re-consider the practicality of using an automobile,” says Levin. “With gas prices ever fluctuating and climate change in our very midst, we in Ossining are working to change the culture around biking infrastructure and make alternative transportation the norm — and maybe even cool.”

This story was originally published on the Better Bike Share Partnership website. To learn about more ways to make shared micromobility more equitable, make sure and sign up for the BBSP newsletter.

Electric Bicycles Meet Equity in Upstate New York

When we talk about the great bike cities, we often look to Europe, and rightfully so — there are few places that can compare to the sheer scale and quality of bicycling in a place like Copenhagen, Sevilla, or, more recently, Paris. It’d be a mistake, however, to not consider Latin America, where places like Bogota and Mexico City have become leaders on the sustainable transportation front — and notably, have done so with substantially smaller budgets.

Mexico City has been a leader in bicycling since 2007 when it first launched its Muevete en Bici open streets program, which every Sunday, bans car traffic along seven city streets including Paseo de la Reforma, a wide avenue that runs diagonally across the heart of the city. The closure, which is more than 30 miles long and traverses six districts, brings — at its height — some 90,000 people from all walks of life to the streets where they’re free to walk, roll, and ride in solidarity and without fear. Still, it’s only in the last few years that the city has truly become a great place for people to bike every day of the week. 

“In the last 20 years, things went really slow because it was more or less like experiments — there wasn’t a complete picture of what kind of infrastructure [the previous administration] wanted,” says Salvador Medina Ramírez, the general director of planning and policies at Mexico City’s Ministry of Mobility. “There was a lot of bike infrastructure but it was not a network.”

Since 2019, when Ramírez started, the bike network has begun to ramp up, a change he attributes to a combination of political will, a faster build pace, and a more holistic vision for a connected bike network — one that’s truly integrated with the city’s existing transit infrastructure. Mexico City’s current head of government, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is committed to improving mobility in the city, and crucially, she sees bicycling as an essential mode of transportation. With official backing and funding, planners were able to move quickly to get more than 140 miles of new bike infrastructure on the ground between 2019 to 2022.

Photo credit: Mexico City’s Ministry of Mobility

When determining where to build, metro connections were prioritized and bike hubs were built alongside lane miles, ensuring people could travel by bike across one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas. 

“If you try to make all the trips by bike door to door, it would be impossible,” says Ramírez. “The integration with public transport is essential if you want to make people use the bike. If you don’t, they will change to other modes like cars or motorcycles.”

Today, being multi-modal in Mexico City has never been easier, with bike lanes connecting to the metro but also bus lines and the elevated trolley, alongside public parks and schools. Crucial to building those key connections is ensuring there is ample, secure bike parking — places with security cameras where you can register and leave your bike without fear of it getting stolen or picked over for parts. In total, there are 10 bike parking facilities throughout Mexico City, mainly near stations that are around the city center, with capacity for anywhere from 80 to 400 bikes.

At the end of many metro lines within Mexico City’s center, riders can once again bike, this time using bike share. Mexico City was an early adopter of shared micromobility — the EcoBici system first launched in 2010 and while it had a slow start, today it’s the largest in Latin America. Over the next few months, EcoBici will grow from 480 to 687 stations, and from 6,500 bicycles to 9,300. While the system doesn’t include any e-bikes (the financials of expansion didn’t allow for them), Mexico City is relatively flat. 

Until recently, EcoBici was government-owned, meaning the city was responsible for buying all the bikes and stations. While the model ensured that bike share was operated for the public benefit, it was costly. In 2021, Mexico City made the decision to solicit private investment in order to expand its Ecobici system. Looking to other cities for inspiration, including Barcelona, Argentina, and London, officials decided to sign on with Lyft to provide its assets and to seek sponsorships, all while ensuring bike share remained a government enterprise. 

“This is public transportation operated by a private company,” says Guillermo Ávila, Mexico City’s director of road security and sustainable urban mobility systems. “It needs to work as we believe it should work.”

For Silva and others working on bicycling in Mexico City, bike share is essentially an extension of its transit system and is treated accordingly. Case in point: Since 2013, Ecobici has been fully integrated into the TCDMX integrated mobility card, which is used for access to the Metro, trains, and buses in addition to bike share. While EcoBici doesn’t currently have a low-income program, an annual membership includes unlimited 45-minute rides for less than $28 a year. There are also plans to launch a more affordable membership program for students and older adults, as well as a cash payment system (for those unable to pay, there are also free bikes available to rent for up to three hours at a time via Bicigratis stands throughout the city). 

Ecobici, Mexico City's bike share system, is the largest in Latin America and continuously expanding.

Naturally, the city’s bike share system has grown alongside Mexico City’s network of bike lanes. The city is now focused on connecting places on its outskirts to complement the existing network, targeting poorer neighborhoods where bicycling is already the mode of choice.

“In the last few years, infrastructure has been spreading to parts of the city that needed the infrastructure most,” says Ireri Brumón Martínez, deputy director of cycling systems at Mexico City’s Ministry of Mobility. “Some districts already used bicycles but they didn’t have cyclist infrastructure, so the investments are going towards those parts of the city outside the center.”

To build out its network, Mexico City isn’t relying on just one type of infrastructure but has instead incorporated a variety of solutions, always accounting for local necessities. This strategy not only makes sense from a cost-benefit perspective but it’s also more equitable. Complementing its network expansion are government-backed programs that teach children and adults how to ride a bicycle, as well as separate courses for learning to use a bike for transportation.

Other programs for increasing access and building a culture of bicycling are often run by Mexico City’s bike advocates, a group of passionate cyclists behind many of the reforms playing out today. Chief amongst them is Areli Carreón, Mexico City’s designated Bike Mayor and one of the founders of Bicitekas, an organization that promotes the use of bicycles locally and lobbies for policy change.

“We have managed to have many truthful, awesome achievements during the past years,” says Carreón. “In 2020, we managed to change the constitution to include the right of safe and equitable transportation.”

Mexico’s “Right to Mobility” amendment is distinct in that it specifically details safe mobility as a human right, and Carreón sees the potential for it to forever change budget and policy decisions in Mexico City and the rest of the country. Having safe mobility enshrined as a constitutional right will help in holding folks accountable and setting the precedent for safe infrastructure that works for people of all ages and abilities, no matter their mode of choice. 

While the amendment was in the works before the pandemic struck, it was the lockdowns of 2020 that created the biggest opportunity for cycling in Mexico City. In May of 2020, Bicitekas pushed for the creation of a huge pop-up bike lane on one of the capital’s longest thoroughfares, Avenida de los Insurgentes. Made from recycled materials and erected in just three days, the 28-kilometer, two-way cycle lane resulted in an increase of bicyclists of up to 275%. Its success led to the creation of a permanent, high-quality bike lane on the avenue, a huge win for mobility in the city.

“Pop-up bike lanes installed during the pandemic were really well accepted,” says Ramírez. “It made it possible to put a bike lane, and if it was well-planned, it would be socially accepted without much problem.”

Adding to the shift in infrastructure and cultural perceptions that occurred during the pandemic were all the new riders that found cycling. In Mexico City, bike shops were named an essential service in 2020, allowing the sale of bikes to continue and helping usher in people that might not have started bicycling otherwise.

“One of the things that changed with the pandemic was people started to appreciate more and more doing activities in the street,” says Ramírez. “In most of Mexico, [biking] is really common but with the middle class, it was not so common, so that changed a lot.”

Today, everyone agrees that there’s still work to be done. Like many places around the world, wealthier, more tourist-focused areas still have better bike infrastructure and Mexico’s City’s network is far from complete. As in cities across the world, more safe, high-quality infrastructure and increased road safety are needed to bring more people to bicycling. Carreón cites a local study showing that a significant number of people would be willing to ride if those two things were addressed. To get there, however, she sees political will and engaging the private sector as a must.

“The private sector has just as much of a stake in the game,” says Carreón, speaking specifically of those that sell bikes and services. “They should take a step forward to help this advocacy work because they’ll benefit from it.”

Mexico City has a population of more than 8.8 million people — if just a small fraction took up bicycling (a great option in a place notorious for bad traffic and poor air quality), the transformation and impact on the bike industry would be tremendous. Even without private sector investment, Mexico City has made incredible progress toward becoming a great place for cycling. With a City Ratings score of 57, it’s a step above most places in the U.S. and constantly improving, thanks to a combination of political willpower, a focus on building a connected network and constructing high-quality infrastructure fast, integrating bicycling with transit, and investing public funds in bike share and other equity initiatives. 

“In Mexico City, we took into account three main things,” says Martínez, naming the government’s focus on infrastructure, access through bike share and transit, and culture, by way of the city’s open streets events and educational opportunities. “Those three things, they have to be connected. You have to do it all.”

How to Build a Bike City: Lessons from CDMX

With more protected bike lanes and low-stress bike networks being built across the country than ever before, we had a tough time picking this past year’s best new bike lanes. While numerous projects deserve recognition, we rounded up the top nine projects worth emulating. 

9. Marin Boulevard Bikeway
Hoboken and Jersey City, New Jersey



In November, Jersey City and Hoboken completed construction on the Marin Boulevard and Henderson Street bikeway, which was first called for in the “Let's Ride JC Bike Master Plan” as a way to better connect the two cities. The expansion of CitiBike into Hoboken also increased demand to ride between the two cities, says Mike Lydon of Street Plans, who worked on the project’s design. In 2022, CitiBike’s most popular route was between Hoboken Terminal and Jersey City’s Hoboken Avenue and Monmouth Street, which saw a total of 5,500 bike share trips. With the completion of the Marin Boulevard project, those rides can now be made entirely on protected bike lanes.

The bikeway is separated from traffic with plastic curbing and flexible posts, and it includes a textured painted surface that makes the bikeway more visible and improves traction. As a “quick build” project, the cities chose to move forward with somewhat temporary materials to expedite the project and improve safety, something that wouldn’t have been feasible with more permanent materials that require sidewalk reconstruction and drainage work, not to mention a longer timeline. According to Lyndsey Scofield, senior transportation planner of Jersey City, this approach “provides us with more flexibility to iterate on the design over time as we learn what works well and what could be improved.”

After being declared one of Rhode Island’s most dangerous streets, Providence worked with the local community to reimagine Broad Street with protected bike lanes, bus islands, and crosswalk improvements. While balancing the needs of local businesses, bus riders, and people walking and biking, Broad Street now serves as a key component of the city’s Urban Trail Network, improving safety and accessibility for some of the city’s poorest and most diverse neighborhoods to jobs and opportunities citywide, as well as access to three major urban parks and multiple regional trails. Space for the bikeway was created by removing a wide center turn lane, which also helped reduce speeding along the street. 

7. Green Lake Outer Loop
Seattle, Washington

By converting a state highway lane into a two-way protected bike lane, Seattle created a new connection between Green Lake — one of the city’s most popular parks — and neighborhoods to the west. It also improved safety along the notoriously dangerous Aurora Avenue. As part of the project, precast concrete jersey barriers, which were repurposed from a nearby bridge repair project, were used to provide ample protection from adjacent motor vehicles. They also helped accelerate the construction of the project due to their immediate availability. 

According to Brock Howell, a member of the local advocacy group Aurora Reimagined Coalition, one of the primary goals of the project was to provide families the ability to ride around the park’s entire outer loop. The group hopes these improvements are a first phase in what will eventually become a completely redesigned Aurora Avenue, which stretches more than 10 miles from the Seattle-Shoreline border to downtown. “We have more work to do to improve safety along the rest of Aurora Ave North,” says Seattle Department of Transportation Director Greg Spotts, “But we expect this project to lead to safer speeds near Green Lake.” 

6. Hub City Hopper Trail
Spartanburg, South Carolina

As part of the larger 50-mile Daniel Morgan Trail System, the Hub City Hopper Trail — an extension of the Mary Black Rail Trail — demonstrates the benefits of connecting trails to town centers and urban areas. The project makes streets safer for people walking and biking while expanding access to recreational riding opportunities. It’s a trend we hope to see more of in urban and rural areas alike. 

The trail extension is already attracting new development to Spartanburg: A 132-unit housing project, the Fitzgerald, was planned by developers, in part, to take advantage of the city’s investment in the trail extension. In a recent WSPA feature on the project, John Montgomery, chair of the Daniel Morgan Committee, noted that they expect “to continue to see development pop up around the trail, [including] more residential, more apartments, because people see the value in trails and connecting them and promoting health and wellness. It’s a real community builder.” 

In 2021, Spartanburg County received a $23.8 million U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) RAISE grant — one of largest grants awarded by USDOT that year — to install more than 14 miles of multi-use trails and a new bicycle and pedestrian bridge as part of the Daniel Morgan Trail System.

Although it was technically completed in late 2021, we couldn’t resist putting Bloomington’s new 7-Line protected bike lane on our list for 2022. With a population of just under 80,000 people, the 7-Line proves that protected bike lanes aren’t just for big cities like New York or Los Angeles. The project connects downtown Bloomington with Indiana University’s campus and aims to increase bike ridership by providing a safe, comfortable place for people to ride.

In 2015, after Bike Portland called on the city to address a lack of safe space for people walking and biking along Naito Parkway and Waterfront Park, the city responded with improvements that provide plentiful safe space for people walking, biking, and rolling along the parkway. According to Gwen Shaw of Toole Design Group, the adjacent Waterfront Park “became busy with festivals and visitors during the summer months, making the existing conditions of no sidewalk and a standard bike lane a challenge.” Now, with a sidewalk, bi-directional protected bikeway, and pedestrian refuge islands, Naito Parkway offers a complete street that meets the needs of this busy area.

3. Bigelow Boulevard
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The Bigelow Boulevard project, which was initiated and managed by the University of Pittsburgh, serves as an example of how institutions can invest in surrounding communities — to the benefit of both. According to Paul Supowitz, special assistant for strategic initiatives at the University of Pittsburgh, the project was driven by conflicts between various road users, congestion, and the need for better connectivity to the city’s bike network. 

Photo Credit: Matt Johnson, Montgomery County Department of Transportation

2. Capital Crescent Surface Trail
Bethesda, Maryland

When it was completed in November 2022, the Capital Crescent Surface Trail became the third project in Montgomery County to include a protected intersection. As part of a larger network, the project links downtown Bethesda to the nearby Capital Crescent Trail, an 11-mile paved and gravel trail that connects Bethesda with Georgetown and Silver Spring. According to Matt Johnson, capital project manager with the Montgomery County Department of Transportation, the two-phase project is part of a larger planning effort for the nearby Purple Line light rail project.

In April 2022, New York City announced plans to make the 34th Avenue Open Street permanent. (Photo Credit: John Surico)

One great way to make communities safer and more welcoming for people riding bicycles doesn’t even involve constructing new bike paths or bike lanes — simply remove cars from streets.

Although car-free streets have been a staple of people-centered spaces for decades, 2022 saw new examples come to fruition in communities across the country. San Francisco’s JFK Drive (which became permanent after voters rejected a ballot initiative to re-introduce cars), Beach Drive in Washington D.C.’s Rock Creek Park, and new car-free developments such as Culdesac in Tempe and Neighborhood Next in San Diego are all examples that advocates and elected officials should seek to emulate in their own communities. 

While many of these projects, including New York’s 34th Avenue, were spurred by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, cities are now moving to make them permanent, a trend unlikely to go away any time soon. Although some car-free streets were phased out of existence by many U.S. cities in the latter half of the 20th century, nearly all of those removals and declines can be attributed to other failed policies such as urban renewal, redlining, and auto-centric zoning. With these new wildly popular projects being integrated into low-stress bike networks, we think it's safe to say that car-free streets are making a comeback.

By all accounts, protected bike lanes save lives, and for the most part, they prevent the most dangerous kind of crashes: getting hit from behind. They don’t, however, keep cyclists safe at intersections, where most crashes happen. There are also a lot of nuances among intersections, with some designs being more dangerous than others. Understanding what works and what doesn’t is key to improving intersection safety and saving lives (as well as money — the average city spends around $100 million a year on road crashes). 

Knowing this, PeopleForBikes made the decision to support sophisticated research from MicroTraffic, a company that helps engineers proactively improve road safety by analyzing traffic videos to produce near-miss data and reports. For this study, the firm relied on artificial intelligence analysis of thousands of hours of video footage focused on signalized intersections. The analysis took into account a variety of situations to determine which designs were more or less likely to result in “right hook” crashes or close calls. 

A key benefit of this analytical approach is that it considered “near misses” and evaluated the actual behavior of road users. Without video analytics, engineers traditionally have to rely on the evaluation of crashes after they happen, leaving them with less meaningful data and often no reliable information about specific behaviors that may have led to the crash. 

After recording data from August 2021 to April 2022, MicroTraffic created a tool that can predict, with impressive accuracy, the rate of crashes and injuries people will suffer depending upon the infrastructure at any given intersection. The resulting report makes 10 recommendations based on design principles, all of which should reduce the number and severity of crashes where a protected bike lane approaches and crosses an intersection. This article summarizes the findings of that report.

By far, the most effective intervention was an exclusive signal phase for people on bikes. At such intersections, right-turning cars are held back for a portion of the green signal phase while bicycles and pedestrians cross. Then, bicycles and pedestrians are held back to allow cars to turn. Separating the signal phase reduced conflicts by a whopping 93%. Unfortunately, this treatment is rare because the tradeoffs are significant: both motorists and people on foot and bike experience shorter green phases and therefore longer delays. The report’s top recommendation was to examine those tradeoffs more carefully and choose to implement the exclusive phase more often. 

The rest of the report examined treatments that reduce conflicts where “permissive right turns are allowed,” or instances where cars are allowed to turn right even though people on bikes may be crossing the intersection on their right. Of the nine other recommended design principles, most aim to increase the visibility of people on bikes at the intersection and reduce the speed of motor vehicles at the potential conflict point:

Use paint and signs to alert motorists that they are crossing the bicycle path of travel. Treatments such as a green lane across the intersection or a “crossbike” (a crossing lane for bikes) adjacent to the crosswalk can reduce conflicts by as much as 36%. 

Design “tight” turns with small turning radii, forcing motorists to navigate their turn at very slow speeds. 

Reduce crossing distances by reducing the travel lanes on the cross street or widening the sidewalk and/or median.

Build separate right-turning lanes so people on bikes can predict whether an adjacent car is about to turn right.

Swerve the “crossbike” at the intersection to increase the distance between the turning vehicle and the crossing bicycle.

The report also made some more general recommendations, which will inform PeopleForBikes’ work advising and advocating for safer intersections:

Mixing zones, or combined bike/turn lanes, don’t work well. Researchers found that motorists typically do not merge into the bike lane across the dashed bike lane line as they are required to when an unprotected bike lane approaches an intersection. Instead, they stayed to the left of the bike lane before turning, exposing the bicyclist to “same potential right-hook conflicts as with a protected approach.” The report suggested that “designers are likely better off simply designing for full physical separation up to the intersection.”

Take extra caution when cyclist volumes are low. The data from this report is yet more evidence of the “safety in numbers” theory, which supports that people on bikes are safer there more people there are riding bikes. 

Take extra caution when downhill grades increase cyclist speed approaching an intersection. Grades steeper than a gentle, 2% slope resulted in an increase of conflicts as high as 47% in some cases.  

We hope city planners, elected officials, and decision-makers nationwide pay attention to the recommendations outlined in this study, helping design safer bike networks that are accessible to people of all ages and abilities. 

This Ground-Breaking Research Will Improve Intersection Safety

On any given Wednesday during the school year, you can find a pack of more than 150 kids bicycling to Alameda Elementary School in Portland, Oregon. The bike bus, as it's known, represents roughly 33% of the entire school and according to parents and onlookers, it’s a joy-filled, active transportation event that you can’t help but want to be a part of. In their free time, kids practice their bike skills to participate and on Wednesday mornings, they rally their parents to be on time.

This particular bike bus is the brainchild of Sam Balto, or Coach Balto to his students, a physical education teacher and safe streets advocate that leads the charge in a neon vest with pop music blasting alongside him. Passionate about safety and the well-being of our youth, Balto started his teaching career in Boston in 2015. That same year, he launched his first walking school bus, leading a group of ten kids along a route to school. He’s been passionate about Safe Routes to School and active transportation “buses” ever since.

“After that day, I saw the joy of kids walking to school and how different that was than all other days,” says Balto, noting the immediate behavioral change the students underwent. “I also realized that relying on volunteers [to run the buses] is not a sustainable or equitable model.”

When Balto moved to Portland, he started another walking school bus, again taking note of how successful it was but also what a great need there was for volunteers and other forms of institutional support. When the pandemic hit — accompanied by bus driver shortages and a desire to stay outdoors — bike buses took off around the world, with viral videos surfacing in Barcelona, San Francisco, and even nearby Hood River, Oregon. Inspired, Balto decided to form a bike bus for Earth Day 2022.

“We started with 75 kids and one route,” says Balto. “It was a huge success and we decided to keep doing it, so I reached out to parent volunteers to see if they could keep doing it for the rest of the year.”

Volunteers are a crucial part of any walking or bicycling school bus, as they help ensure the bus stays together, everyone moves safely, and that cars keep their distance. Once the parent volunteers assured Balto they were on board, the bike bus began to grow, adding another route and a bigger catchment zone to make it easier for kids and families to join. That first year, the bus grew from 75 to 120 kids in just six weeks.

“Because it was being done consistently, families were able to plan for it,” says Balto, noting that a weekly activity helps justify a parent’s investment from a time and monetary perspective. “Kids were asking for new bikes so that they could join.”

In 2023, the bike bus became a year-round weekly institution and has only been canceled once due to weather (and in that instance, it became a walking school bus). As a whole, Portland’s bike infrastructure is relatively good and the bus route primarily traverses low-stress neighborhood greenways. The element of critical mass and again, its predictability, have helped keep students safe and area residents prepared. In fact, most neighbors come out and cheer the students on.

For Balto, as with many volunteers that participate in bike buses, the outcomes make the effort worthwhile. Not only do parents report that kids look forward to school more on bike bus mornings, but they also share how bike buses help make everyone in the household more physically active. Others note how active transportation buses can help reduce truancy and increase focus and confidence amongst its participants, something that supports outcomes from research done by Outride on youth bicycling. 

“The biggest thing is just the joy that the kids have,” says Balto. “Not every kid will be on a sports team and have that experience, but the bike bus is like a team where everyone plays an important role.”

Coming out of the pandemic, parents have also really loved seeing their kids be a part of a community. The bike bus is not only a way for their kids to be active but also ensures they’re part of something bigger than themselves. When compared to driving your child to school — a largely solitary act that does little to get them excited for the day ahead — the bike bus always wins. Even with so many parents on board, however, Balto has long recognized the need to pay them for their time. 

Transportation funding, unfortunately, isn’t as flexible as many Safe Routes to School advocates (Balto among them) would like it to be. When Balto and others started looking into how they might reallocate unused funding to financially support and grow the bike bus movement, they realized they were up against tremendous barriers. To grow the movement and make it more equitable, the system would need to change. Introducing a state bill made the most sense.

Thanks to the videos Balto posted on Twitter and the attention his efforts were garnering nationally, he was able to connect with more experienced politicos. They in turn connected him with Representative Khanh Pham, who represents District 46 on Portland’s outer southeast side. When Blato and Rep. Pham met in September 2022, she was immediately receptive, agreeing on the spot to write a bill that would bring more flexibility to student transportation funds.

“Passing legislation to make it easier for students to bike, walk, and take transit to school is an initiative that solves so many overlapping challenges,” says Rep. Pham. “It's a public health initiative, it’s education policy, it's climate action, and ultimately it's community building by encouraging neighbors, parents, and students to spend time together.”

Coincidentally, another Oregon legislator, Representative Hoa Nguyen, whose district borders Rep. Pham’s, wrote an almost identical bill. Having been an attendant at her school, Rep. Nguyen saw firsthand how a walking school bus led to a 30% increase in student attendance. Nguyen also noted how teachers saw a significant decrease in disruptive classroom behavior from students, largely because they were able to expend some energy on their morning walk to school.

The legislators joined forces and ultimately decided to call their combined bill (HB 3014) the “Bike Bus Bill.” The bill itself is relatively basic: If passed, school districts across Oregon will have more flexibility with how they spend their state transportation dollars, letting them organize things like bike buses and walking school buses in addition to traditional buses and carpool lines. The bill would have the greatest impact on those households that don’t own a vehicle and that live close to their schools — too close for a bus route — but face dangerous obstacles in traveling safely.

The “Bike Bus Bill” will make it easier to organize bike buses and pay the volunteers that are indispensable to their success. (Photo credit: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

Last month, when the Oregon House Committee on Education held a hearing for the bill, Reps. Pham and Nguyen, Balto, and some 27 other advocates, students, and parents showed up to give live testimony in support of the bill. Rep. Pham drew attention to the “epidemic of traffic violence” our students, especially those from lower-income communities, are facing every day and how the bill would help them safely cross short-but-dangerous distances to get to school. Others pointed out that owning and maintaining a car is out of reach for many and how active transportation solutions can help cities meet their carbon reduction targets. 

“The first time I rode the bike bus I was overcome with a sense of community. I felt like I was biking on an ocean of joy. Every student should be able to feel what I did,” said Alameda Elementary student Isla, speaking at the hearing. “Safe Routes to School programming and investments are a cost-effective game-changer for reducing daily driving…the passage of HB 3014 will improve the climate and encourage people to get active.”

For Balto, the bill is a testament to the creative possibility bikes can offer and the power of community-led initiatives. “[The bill] is about providing a more direct service to school communities,” says Balto. “It really breaks through the noise and is all about the joy of children.”

The Bike Bus Bill continues to progress through the Oregon legislature — a work session is currently scheduled for the end of the month and it's hard to say when, if at all, the bill will become law. Whether it does or not, Balto will continue leading his bike bus every Wednesday and supporting others who want to emulate his efforts in their own communities. 

“I don’t really have a choice but to keep going — when kids want these things and are advocating for them, that’s student-led education,” says Balto. “They’re the ones picking what they want to see and do and we should all capitalize on that and support it.”

As she tells it, director and producer Jennifer Boyd fell into the transportation world. In 2018, she released “3 Seconds Behind the Wheel,” a documentary that follows the lives of eight drivers, monitoring their behavior for distracted driving. For her next film, Boyd thought it would be an obvious transition to move from distracted driving to figuring out why more than half of automobile deaths happen outside the car.

“Within about three seconds of doing real research on the topic, I realized that distraction had nothing to do with why pedestrians and cyclists were dying,” says Boyd. “It has everything to do with street design and the sizes of automobiles and speed and all of these things that many people don’t know about.”

Hoping to inspire others, Boyd decided to focus the film on activists leading the burgeoning movement for more democratic streets around the world. She began reaching out to advocacy organizations in the know and connecting with people fighting for pedestrians and bicyclists from New York City to Copenhagen. The activists she met make up the characters in her new documentary, “The Street Project,” which was released in the U.S. on August 25 and is currently available to watch on Amazon, PBS, and other platforms. 

Digging deep into the root causes of traffic violence — which affects low-income and minority communities at disproportionate rates — Boyd and her team engaged a diverse array of experts, including street historian Peter Norton, city planner Jeff Speck, and urban design expert Mikael Colville-Andersen. Their testimonials are interwoven with the story of folks like Dulcie Canton, who parlayed her experience of getting hit while bicycling into working for Transportation Alternatives, and Stacey Champion, a single mom that responded to inaction from the Phoenix City Council by going door-to-door with the hope of galvanizing others.

The film took four years to complete, largely due to the pandemic and the ways COVID-19 continued to shift the narrative. “The Street Project” shows viewers what’s wrong with American streets but also shows what’s possible in scenes from Copenhagen — which wasn’t always the bike Utopia we make it out to be — as well as U.S. cities where the pandemic ensured space was given back to pedestrians and bicyclists. 

“I realized how streets touch so much of our daily lives and our quality of life and our connection to other people,” says Boyd, noting that for many viewers, the film helps spark similar revelations. “I hear this comment all the time from folks: ‘I didn't know this was an issue I needed to care about.’ When those people come and see the film, it really opens up their eyes in a different way to this issue.”

Boyd is hopeful that longtime advocates and community leaders will be able to use the film as a tool to recruit more people to fight for safer streets. As a creative, extensively researched piece with compelling visuals, the film has the power to convey what an article or public meeting can’t, galvanizing support and helping to enact change. While public showings need to be licensed, organizations can charge for tickets as a fundraising event. Boyd also suggests organizations also use film clips, which can be licensed and shown as part of a community conversation around things like equity or safe street design. 

“Hosting a screening event can be a completely different experience than a meeting about the next action steps for the city council to take,” says Boyd. “The latter presumes that you're going to need to have an understanding of the topic to even show up, whereas a film is more inclusive.”

The main takeaway of “The Street Project” is the need for more and better bike infrastructure — how cities get there is dependent on government officials, advocates, and everyday citizens. We need widespread education about what works (namely, protected bike lanes and not just painted bike lanes and sharrows), how bike lanes can positively affect businesses, why reducing speed limits is crucial to creating safer streets, and how parking mandates do us all a disservice. With U.S. traffic fatalities at their highest levels in 20 years, the film’s timing feels fortuitous.

“With the pandemic, people realized overnight that their streets could change — so I’m hopeful,” says Boyd, adding that more and more people seem to understand how the way we’ve inequitably designed our streets has negatively affected certain communities on the edge, and as a result, all of us. “People are starting to see that there’s a better way of life.”

Interested in hosting a showing of the “The Street Project”? Find more information here.

In 2008, Tony Jordan’s car broke down and he decided not to replace it. Despite being parents to a two-year-old, Jordan and his wife adjusted to a car-free lifestyle in their Portland, Oregon, home, using Zipcar when they needed it but mostly relying on bikes, transit and their own two feet. A few years later, when he came across “The High Cost of Free Parking,” an 800-page book by Donald C. Shoup, Jordan was already primed to buy it and read the whole thing.

“The book really breaks down why we have parking requirements, how they're based on bogus science, how much it costs and what the impact on housing is,” said Jordan, who was working at the time as a software engineer. “As someone who had a car until not too far before and then read this book — it was something I had never thought about deeply.”

Few U.S. residents think that deeply about parking, other than to complain when we can’t find a spot. For those who own a car, parking can seem like an American right — an ever-present storage space, built free of charge, in the streets in front of our homes or when we drive anywhere in town. When it comes to other personal items, however, we don’t feel like our municipalities are obligated to help us store them. So what makes cars any different?

For one, our cities have long been designed around cars, making their use all but an inevitability except for in the few cities that boast robust transit systems, good sidewalks and complete bike networks. Most places in the U.S. also have had parking requirements — ratios of how many parking spaces each building needs to have — since the 1950s, and few people have the time to read a textbook on the topic. When Jordan finished “The High Cost of Free Parking,” he was able to finally make the connection between parking mandates and other objectively negative facets of modern American society.

“Free parking has had a big impact on a lot of the things — from climate change to housing costs — that aren’t going well,” said Jordan. “I found myself asking, ‘Why doesn’t anyone know this?’”

Jordan, who has a degree in politics and a background in organizing, began looking into Portland’s parking policy and was pleasantly surprised to find the city had begun eliminating parking requirements on certain corridors. However, when a handful of residents spoke up against the move, the mandates were eventually reinstated in 2013. That loss only drove Jordan to do more organizing and coalition-building around the issue.

In time, as things in Portland started to improve, Jordan set his sights on a national effort to help disseminate learnings and scale parking reform efforts across the country. The Parking Reform Network (PRN) quietly launched in March 2020 and has grown organically since. This year, PRN debuted a Mandates Map, which tracks parking reform initiatives throughout the U.S. and Canada. The group also operates a weekly newsletter, which culls parking-related headlines from across the internet, highlighting case studies, pertinent webinars and timely bills.

As this Parking Reform Network illustration shows, parking directly affects how much housing we can build.

Reading that newsletter, it becomes clear that parking reform is something that cities big and small are increasingly taking action on, from Sand Point, ID (pop. 8,692) to Ann Arbor, MI (pop. 121,093) to San Jose, CA (pop. 1.029 million). For Catie Gould, a climate and transportation researcher at the Sightline Institute, the growing groundswell of support to reform parking mandates isn’t surprising. “There’s a pretty broad consensus that parking minimums have been a disaster — one of the worst decisions made in North America,” said Gould. “And we’re just now starting to undo the damage.”

As Gould frequently touches on in her writing, required parking takes away from the buildable area of any given site, often resulting in fewer homes and less space for the playgrounds, gardens and walking paths that make communities more livable. Parking is also expensive for new developers to build — it can cost between $40,000 and $60,000 per parking space — which can increase residential housing costs for everyone and take valuable space away from the developable envelope of entitlement space. 

What’s more, fewer homes have led to a slew of other intersecting issues: a nationwide housing shortage, an increase in home prices and growing inequity. Lower-income families who drive less and use transit more inevitably end up paying for infrastructure they don’t need while drivers are subsidized for their car use. 

When parking is required, buildings are forced to spread further and further apart, decreasing an area’s walkability and leading to urban sprawl, which swallows more and more land to sustain the same population. This in turn pushes people to drive more, upping greenhouse gas emissions, while the ensuing traffic makes it harder for everyone to get where they need to go. Bigger impenetrable areas, like parking lots made of asphalt or concrete, likewise amplify the effects of urban heat islands, making a bad situation worse.

“Today, in most cities, it’s illegal to build downtowns in the way that we associate with them, with lots of buildings being close together,” said Gould, noting that these are often the places you bring visitors and that add to the charm of any destination. “Those places are now in non-compliance with the current code and that code is why our suburbs look the way they do.”

We also don’t need any more parking: By some estimates, there are as many as 2 billion parking spots in the U.S., meaning that there are eight parking spaces for every car. To continue mandating parking just doesn’t make sense. 

“All of the best data out there shows that parking is a terrible investment for a city,” said John Bauters, the mayor of Emeryville, California, a small Bay Area city that made the decision to institute widespread reforms. “For us, it made a lot of sense to not have some conscripted amount of parking be required, but instead to give developers, and housing developers in particular, the freedom to design and build something at a more affordable cost that provides a net social benefit to the community and does not further exacerbate our cost of living housing costs and climate issues.”

A better investment, in the eyes of Bauters and many transportation advocates, is a network of protected bike lanes and multi-use paths. His strategy in Emeryville has been to eliminate street parking, immediately turn it into active space and then show how much people use it. Less parking means more proximity — since most people only want to bike one or two miles, the more destinations you have in that radius, the better a place becomes for bicycling. That’s only possible, however, if you’re not required to build big parking lots.

“The problem is we have deprived people for a very long time of any meaningful alternative or choice,” said Bauters. “The reason people expect to move in their cars is that everything has been built for a car. If you want to get people out of a car — whether that be mass transit, walking, biking, scooting, skating, blading, whatever that is — you have to give people a healthy alternative.”

Bauters has seen firsthand how fast people are to adapt their transportation movements, mostly because they have no choice but to figure out how to get from point A to point B. Changing behaviors, however, starts with cities first changing on-the-ground infrastructure. One of the projects Bauters is most proud of is Doyle Street, which runs parallel to two streets designed for car traffic. With a redesign, southbound traffic and parking were eliminated on Doyle Street, essentially transforming it into a pedestrian and bike-friendly zone.

A shot of Doyle Street in Emeryville, California, where a pandemic quick-build was made permanent.

“You don’t have to close the whole street to get cars off of it, you just have to make it undesirable,” said Bauters, adding that in time, the street has become a place for safe movement with virtually no traffic. “We’re changing behaviors.”

Emeryville also launched its own demand-based paid parking program to curb driving. When it comes to prospective development, builders are always shown the city’s robust active transportation plan and, as part of their mitigation efforts, are required to pay into it or pay to build something that supports it. Other times, say if a developer needs more parking in order to obtain financing for a project, Bauters might allow them to add a second story to their parking structure but in exchange, require them to get rid of all the parking on city streets around the project, paying to turn it all into separated bike lanes. In a small city (Emeryville is home to less than 12,000 people), those sorts of negotiations are made easier but that’s not to say they couldn’t be done on a larger scale. 

“People buy into the vision because they actually find that their businesses and employees like it,” said Bauters.

In 2020, Seattle was the fastest-growing city in the U.S., with more than 740,000 people. In 2017, Seattle waived or halved off-street parking mandates for new housing near transit, which in turn led to more housing being built and more people moving in. More people in a smaller area leads to more businesses and money being spent, a reinforcing cycle. The revision also contributed to big changes in travel to downtown Seattle: Between 2000 and 2016, transit, walking, biking and rideshare jumped from 50% to 70% of all trips taken in the city. During that same time, drive-alone trips decreased from 50% to 30%. 

There are many great examples of what less parking might mean for a city and bicycling — just look to Paris or Amsterdam, places where leadership understands that the only way to increase space for bikes is to decrease space for cars. Recently, the Filipino capital of Manila introduced a bill requiring car owners to show proof they have off-street parking before registering their vehicle, a move that hopes to mimic the success of nearby Japan’s proof-of-parking law, which all but bans on-street parking. 

In the U.S., more and more cities continue to eliminate their parking requirements each week, and the issue has been making national headlines, thanks to a recent bill in California (AB-2097) that would reform parking mandates near public transit statewide. Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon also recently introduced Parking Cash Out Legislation, which would require employers to offer a parking cash out option to employees who are otherwise offered a parking benefit.

Getting people passionate about parking, however, is difficult, especially when driving is the easiest way of getting around and parking remains free and abundant. It’s a politically ripe topic and people tend to have a lot of very strong feelings, especially when it comes to parking on their neighborhood block. As a politician, Bauters is on the receiving end of a lot of folks’ opinions on parking — his strategy is to relate to people in the way they’re relating to him: with emotion. 

“I don't ask them to get out of the car, I don't tell them they're burning the planet, I don't tell them that they're a risk to everybody who's in a crosswalk — I don't blame them for anything,” said Bauters. “But what I don't do is I don't apologize for prioritizing everybody's well-being, not just theirs.”

It’s in the best interest of the collective good to start doing things differently, and that requires bold action when it comes to eliminating parking mandates and building the sorts of connected bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly networks that offer people safe, convenient alternatives to driving. 

“If you can only move in a car, people don't imagine or believe that they can do anything else,” said Bauters. “You have to take space back to give people the chance to do that safely — and the first thing that should go is always parking.”

Parking Reform is Key to Building Bike-Friendly Cities

After breaking a leg skiing, this rider’s e-bike has been instrumental in aiding both her physical therapy and mental well-being. 

There’s a growing body of research on the myriad of health benefits that electric bicycles offer, from improved cardio to helping people keep riding as they age. They can even quicken the recovery time of some injuries, my latest included. 

In early January, I suffered a broken tibia and fibula in my right leg from a nasty fall while skiing. Two months after breaking my leg and undergoing surgery, I’m more comfortable riding my e-bike than walking to get around. 

As I heal, I’m using my e-bike as part of my physical therapy. Biking is a low-impact activity and the small electric boost makes the work of going uphill easier for anyone, especially if you have a Class 2 electric bike with a throttle. My leg muscles, atrophied while I relied on crutches and sat on the couch for six weeks, are slowly charging back up with every ride. I could not be more grateful I brought my e-bike home in 2021.

It’s been less than a month since I’ve put weight on my right leg, and I can already ride my e-bike to physical therapy appointments, for small errands, to see friends and get out to enjoy the spring sunshine. Walking is also getting easier because I’ve been biking, loosening stiff joints and building up muscle.

I’ve lived in Washington, D.C., for nearly eight years, all without a car. I’ve always relied on my bike, shared micromobility, walking and transit to navigate the city. Getting back to that level of independent mobility is priceless. I also recognize I’m incredibly lucky to both own an e-bike and have access to connected and protected bike infrastructure right outside my door, since my safety feels more important than ever knowing that a fall or a crash could further damage my leg and set my recovery back — if not worse. 

Most physical therapy appointments start with a warm up to get your muscles and body moving. Limping in, I’m asked to spend a few minutes on a stationary bicycle before pointing to my helmet to show I’ve already biked there. Therapists are often shocked until I explain I rode an e-bike, and after a few questions about it, we get right to work poking, stretching and strengthening my leg. 

I’m no stranger to PT: I’m a high-energy, low-skill athlete with a dramatic falling habit. I tried playing soccer in an adult recreation league in the fall of 2017 but tore my left ACL in the first game. I was back on Capital Bikeshare within weeks, opting for a slow roll to most destinations instead of walking since it was less strenuous and more efficient. 

Inclusive Biking

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The Health Benefits of Electric Bikes

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