A couple months ago, I wrote about Bikes Belongs’ project to get 6 cities some good, protected bike lanes. This week, Bikes Belong announced which 6 cities would get that support. They are: Austin, Chicago, Memphis, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.
“The two-year, intensive technical assistance program is intended to help these cities develop protected on-street bike lanes and make this type of bike infrastructure a mainstream street design in the U.S.” Streetsblog writes.
“The program attracted a total of 42 applicants, said project director Martha Roskowski, from ‘established leaders such as Minneapolis and Boulder’ to relative newcomers like Wichita, Miami, and Pittsburgh.”
As noted in study after study (including my master’s thesis at UNC-Chapel Hill, which was a first-of-its-kind cross-cultural study of bicycle ridership and specific bicycle facilities in Montgomery County, Maryland and Delft, the Netherlands), people desire protected bicycle paths and higher ridership is linked to such facilities.
Hopefully, this project by Bikes Belong will really propel the US forward in this arena.
Here’s a video on the project:
For more information, check out the Streetsblog post or the Green Lane Project.
Image: cyclists on a protected bicycle path / bicycle road in the city of Groningen in the Netherlands (taken by me — all rights reserved)
