Author's Forum: Bicycle City

Вот отформатированный транскрипт вебинара: Lauren Mayer: We're going to go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone to On the Park Bench, a Public Square conversation brought to you by the Congress for the New Urbanism. On the Park Bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in the new urbanism and allied industries, providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time. The webinar series is a platform for CNU members to engage, debate, and collaborate on pressing issues of the day. Today's webinar is Authors Forum: Bicycle City with Dan Piatkowski. And you can share your thoughts on #ontheparkbench at tinyurl.com/otpbfeedback. Early bird registration is open for our 33rd annual Congress. CNU33 will be in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 11th through 14th, 2025. This Congress will be one focused on progress and hope as we roll up our sleeves and work together to advance the new urbanist movement. You can learn more and register at cnu.org/CNU33. And now for today's webinar. Dan Piatkowski is an American academic and urban planner based in Oslo, Norway, where he is on the faculty at Oslo Met, Oslo Metropolitan University. Before moving to Norway, Dan worked in urban planning and bicycle advocacy, either as an academic or professional, in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Georgia. His journey to becoming an urban planner and bicycle advocate began in the early 2000s with a very brief stint as a bicycle messenger in New York City before finding his way to working at bike shops, riding all kinds of bikes, and getting active in bicycle advocacy. These days, Dan spends more time writing about bicycles than riding them. Dan's work is at the intersection of mobility transitions, human behavior, and technology. He is particularly focused on the potential of transport as a change agent to foster more sustainable and just cities. In addition to academic publications, in the summer of 2024, he published *Bicycle City: Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future* with Island Press, which we will be discussing today. And I am Lauren Mayer, Associate Director of Resources at CNU. As a reminder to our audience, please use the Q&A function to ask questions as they occur to you. And I'll go ahead and turn this over to Dan, and he will start today's webinar. Dan Piatkowski: Hey, Lauren, thank you very much. Thank you all for joining. It's wonderful to be here. Let me start by sharing my screen here. Okay. All right. To begin with, I guess I wanted to start by introducing myself a little bit more than that bio from Lauren, and getting into why I do what I do and why I wrote this book. So I've always been interested in transportation as a catalyst for urban change. And I think this conceptual model, that is the same model but applied with different modes leading to very different, drastically different outcomes, is really useful to me to think about transportation as a catalyst for urban change and how cities are shaped by the modes of transportation that we use. Ultimately, you know, this is kind of the foundation of my work. Most all of us are familiar with that model on the left of building cities around cars, where you induce demand and you continue to build cities for vehicles, and then sort of is this very negative feedback loop. And I think, I'm assuming most everybody who's here today is really interested in finding ways to turn the communities that they live in into this model on the right, in which we are using sustainable and active modes of transportation to make places for people and in which people can live full lives and live in sustainable ways. So this is really the foundation of my work and kind of the underlying theme of my book and what I'm going to talk about today. And as a personal side note, this is all sort of, well, this comes out of where and how I grew up. I live in Oslo, Norway now. I'm an associate professor at Oslo Metropolitan University. I work in kind of a big metropolitan city that's known for sustainability and everything else. But about a month ago, I was back in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. And this is the house I grew up in in Phoenix. That's the rental car that I got from the rental car agency. It was not the car that I asked for, but it is the car that I got. And it was kind of a crazy reminder of all of the reasons that I wrote this book and all of the ways in which I think the lessons still apply, but also how we have a lot of work to do and we have a long way to go. So now to get to this book, *Bicycle City*. So I wrote *Bicycle City* to describe the case studies and the strategies, the ways in which we can use a bicycle as a catalyst for better urbanism. And for today's presentation, I'm going to focus on four parts of the book. I'm going to talk about Oslo, Norway, and kind of my experiences here for the last three and a half years after moving from the US. Then I'm going to talk about the pandemic and the bike boom. I'll also talk about e-bikes and e-cargo bikes. And I'll talk about bike sharing and micro mobility. So first, to talk about Norway and Oslo specifically. So I think when a lot of people think of Norway, probably what you think about is mountains or fjords, maybe a winter scene. But if you're a transportation wonk, which I'm assuming probably most of you are, you also think about EVs. So the vast majority of vehicles sold in Norway are electric vehicles, and that's due to a wide variety of EV subsidies and incentives and whatnot. And this has kind of put like a veneer of sustainability on a country that is surprisingly auto-dependent compared to many of its European counterparts. This is the main highway going into and out of Oslo, and Oslo has historically been a much more auto-dependent place than a lot of Scandinavian cities. And what I want to talk about though today is in about 10 years, Oslo really transitioned from a place that people weren't talking about when it came to a lot of these conversations around sustainable urbanism and walkable, livable, bikeable places. But in about 10 years, Oslo was really able to turn things around. And I think that alone, coming from a position that was much more similar than a lot of the American cities that I've lived in, to in 10 years really be leading the way internationally, is an exciting prospect and one that I think we can all learn from. So this is a picture from the center of Oslo, very pedestrian friendly. Obviously, you have some historic buildings and whatnot. So, I'll give you a brief timeline of how Oslo transitioned into a very sustainable and livable place. So from 2015 to today, in 2015, Oslo did something that I think a lot of American cities would love to do: is gain control of all of their streets from, in Norway's case, in Oslo's case, the national government. But in most cities, I think, are really hamstrung by DOTs having control of their streets. Oslo was able to get control back of all of their city streets. They then initiated a bicycle plan. A few years later, building on the success of those things, there was a car-free livability plan put in place that involved a lot of changes to streets in the center of Oslo. And I'll show you some pictures of that in a second. But also at that time, as a direct result of the bicycle plan, in 2019, Oslo saw zero traffic deaths. They reached Vision Zero. And they did it predominantly with really modest infrastructure and mostly slowing down vehicles a whole lot and limiting the number of vehicles into the center of the city. They've since been named a European Green Capital. They've had an 80% increase in cycling. And there's a zero growth goal for car travel in cities across Norway, and Oslo is working hard to achieve these goals. In 10 years, Oslo has really turned it around, and that gives me a lot of hope for American cities. So this car-free livability plan, I want to talk about because it was really instrumental in getting the larger community on board with urban change and rapid urban change. So taking back streets from cars, you know, car-free livability. This is the city hall in Oslo. Essentially, this used to be a parking lot and a driveway. And now obviously it is not. And it was done so really cheaply, honestly. This is another one of the downtown streets in Oslo. Something, so, so this happened all over the downtown of Oslo, in which streets that tended to be narrow sidewalks, parking on both sides, and two traffic lanes down the center became this kind of car-light, much more pedestrian-friendly transition. Something crucial that happened though is the downtown of Oslo, very few people live there. So around 1,000 people live in the center of Oslo, but around 100,000 people come to the center of Oslo every day for work. And this was really important for this car-free livability plan because it kind of had taking these tactical urbanist kind of approaches and showing them to people in contexts in which they didn't have a lot of resistance to change. This is not in front of someone's home. So they were able to experience it and decide, do I want this in front of my home? And many people did. And so these transitions and these street changes tended to occur further and further outside of the center. This is a picture from what's called Ring Two, which kind of separates the inner suburbs from the outer suburbs of Central Oslo. And what you see is kind of a four-lane street transitioned into a slightly more bike-friendly, more walkable place, you know, really kind of what I would consider nuts and bolts traffic calming strategies or road diets or whatever you want to call them. Nothing about this is revolutionary, but what it is, is it's incremental and it's done in a way in which people can experience it and appreciate it. And it's led to some really fantastic outcomes. So that, I think, was really some of the important takeaways from Oslo as a case study of the last 10 years. But now turning to more sort of bike-specific topics. So in the book, I was really interested in studying the pandemic as it related to the pandemic bike boom and seeing what we could learn. You know, obviously, this crisis is a terrible thing to waste. What can we understand from the pandemic? And it's a short but important story, I think. Obviously, during the pandemic, people needed to get out. They needed to find ways to be active, social, and doing so when they were suddenly stuck at home. So a lot of people dusted off their old bicycles and got outside and went for a ride. And realized that their cities were wanting, their communities, their streets in front of their homes were lacking. And they called for change. And all over the world, all over the US, a lot of cities responded with some sort of temporary type of street change or street experiments, is one of the words used in the literature. And in some cases, this is where we get to the point of kind of divergence, I suppose. Some cities took these restrictions and stuck with them; others did not. The ones that did, though, have been incredibly successful in becoming better places. And they've really been able to kind of change the conversation. And what I mean by that is, so Paris has essentially in many ways become a car-free city. Well, at least parts of Paris have. And to talk about a car-free city five or six years ago, I think, was impossible. I think you would be laughed out of the room or thrown out of the room. But today, this is a viable strategy that's now achieved some really extraordinary outcomes. And we have the evidence and we have the data to support the fact that we can and should be doing this. And I think this is the most important lesson from the pandemic: is we can be bold, we can ask for big things, and we can actually get them. We can sort of cut through the red tape and make that happen. So now I'll talk for a few minutes about e-bikes and e-cargo bikes. They're sort of in the book, I separate them out into two different chapters because there's so much to say about cargo bikes in particular. But for the purposes of this short presentation, I'll talk about them a little bit together. The short story is that e-bikes are a game changer in so many ways and for so many people. And you can see that just based on the fact that they are so popular for so many people in so many places, in so many ways. So what do I mean by that? What e-bikes are doing is they're able to, I think, cut through some of the baggage that is traditionally connected to bicycles. Whether that be baggage around environmentalism, whether that be baggage around being sort of like a, what do they call it, a MAMIL, the Middle-Aged Man In Lycra, you know, being sort of like, or whether it's the scofflaw cyclist. All of these stereotypes around bicycles and around cycling are kind of removed from e-bikes. E-bikes have sort of become this separate thing. And that means that a lot more people are using them. And you can see that in e-bike sales globally. I think in a number of countries, they have surpassed regular bicycles. Something that's really important is they are dramatically improving the quality and usage of bike share systems. So if you're in a city where your bike share system is floundering, switching to e-bikes or upgrading to e-bikes, it will do wonders for usage of that bike share system. And with that in mind, they're expanding the use cases for bicycles in general. People who might not have thought they could or should ride a bike are now looking at e-bikes as a viable option for going longer distances than they may have thought they were able to, carrying more things than they may have thought they were able to. They're also expanding use cases across demographic groups for younger people, older people, people carrying lots of stuff, people carrying their kids around. All of this is leading to a dramatic growth in ridership of bicycles in general. I think that what's maybe most important from the perspective of trying to make change happen in cities is growing ridership can potentially equal more bike advocates, or at least more people who have informed opinions about how their city streets could or should be. And I think that that's a sort of an untapped area of trying to make change happen in our communities: is tapping into these people who are recognizing the need. So now turning to cargo bikes. So cargo bikes prior to e-assistance were definitely kind of a niche item. But now they are just popping up in so many different formats and in so many different sort of use cases. What I'll focus on today, though, is talking about two that I think are the most important for city change or for urban change. And that would be use cases for families and use cases for freight and delivery. The idea of the family cargo bike being the new SUV, the new urban SUV, is something that I think is very, very important, and it's something that the data suggests is happening. I know that when my family and I moved, we were from Nebraska, from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Oslo, Norway. We sold our SUV and moved to Norway and lived in a much smaller place. But I got a cargo bike and I started using that to take the kids places, and we used it year-round. And it was, in so much as an e-bike is a game changer, an e-cargo bike was a true game changer for my family's transportation needs. The big problem, though, with e-bikes and e-cargo bikes in particular, is the cost. And so one of the companies that I profile in the book is a company called We! Bikes in Oslo, Norway. And to get around the cost of an e-bike for families in some of the urban areas within Oslo, they've created a leasing service where you lease the bike. All of the equipment is included, all of the maintenance is included, and you lease it for, I think, you can do kind of a short-term few months or a long-term couple years. And they've even, I think, doing sort of a rent-to-own type of an option. What they're doing is demonstrating a new business model in which people can get rid of their cars and stay in the cities. A lot of times transportation problems are one of the factors, not necessarily the only, but one of the factors that young families leave cities. And so addressing that one aspect can help to alleviate some of those issues. But one thing that they found is when they're talking about cargo bikes for families, they really need to change the conversation. If this is going to be the new urban SUV, the conversation needs to be around how an e-cargo bike is a cheap car rather than an expensive bike. But this company is a fascinating case study, and they have a fleet of something around 300 cargo bikes currently, and they have a waiting list as long. So a waiting list of another 300 families waiting to get their cargo bikes too. So it's really a compelling case for how family cargo bikes are expanding in cities. Now to talk for a few minutes about freight and delivery by cargo bike. This is a picture of Jos Sluijsmans, and I always mess up his name, and I'm very sorry about it, Jos. He's the founder of the International Cargo Bike Festival, and he is a huge proponent of cargo bikes. I talked to him for the book about all of the new ways in which cargo bikes are filling all of these freight and delivery use cases. And there's so much recent research out there about how cargo bikes for freight and delivery are faster and cleaner. And one study actually estimated that there's a potential 50% replacement potential of urban freight by cargo bike. So that means removing half of the box trucks and the big vans crowding our city streets. So that means all sorts of benefits in terms of congestion, in terms of pollution, in terms of safety. But most important to me, if we're going to talk about using bikes to change cities, is that if cargo bikes are going to replace vans on roads, then maybe we should talk about how we're going to reallocate space on roads. And I think that as the bike lane fills up, we need to be thinking about that and how we can turn our cities into much more functional places. So the last topic I'm going to cover tonight is, sorry, it's night in Oslo, this afternoon for you all tuning in, is sharing and micro mobility. So I mentioned how e-bikes are such a win for bike share systems. So I don't think I have much else to say about that. But I want to talk about micro mobility because I think that's a really divisive topic. And that divisiveness also makes it really compelling, and it allows us to kind of have a lot of interesting conversations about the future of transport in our cities. So obviously, the rollout of shared e-scooters in particular was really rocky, and it follows this pattern that continues to destroy so many things: this "move fast and break things" mentality. But I think, you know, I go back and forth on how I actually feel about e-scooters, but this rollout, this very shaky rollout of e-scooters, and now we're many years into the presence of e-scooters, we're realizing that they're here to stay, and what are we going to do about them? So I wanted to put forth a couple policy recommendations and then talk about their value for cities, their quote-unquote value for cities, in a more conceptual sense. So because of this really problematic rollout, some places have fully outlawed scooters. Some places have dramatically curtailed their use. But other places have just kind of left it as sort of the Wild West and let particularly shared systems be used or be rolled out however they see fit. And that obviously leads to problems. I'm using another case study from Oslo, but there's case studies from, I think, all over the world of different potential ways in which we can, should, or even should not be using e-scooters. Oslo realized there was a huge problem with e-scooters creating accessibility issues in particular. In this picture, there are blind people who are struggling to get around these e-scooters. But there's lots of examples of this. In response to this, Oslo put in place strict regulations on the speed, hours of operation, the users in terms of age, usage in terms of times of day, and parking of shared e-scooters. They also have regulated fleet size and the distribution of these fleets to try to ensure a somewhat more equitable distribution of the shared e-scooters. And they've been, to my mind, they've been relatively successful in presenting a path forward for shared micro mobility systems, but it's one that requires relatively heavy regulation. And literally the only people complaining about that regulation, though, are the operators, which tells me that Oslo is probably doing something right, honestly. The other thing that I think we can learn from this, though, is I think it's an important test case. If we're going to be having increasingly complex multimodal shared systems, there needs to be some sort of regulation within this process. And it's also, to me, shows the potential for regulating things like autonomous vehicle systems and systems in which we're kind of are still rolling out, still being promised, but have not seen much of any regulation. Now, thinking conceptually about what's the value of e-scooters, I've thought a lot about this. One thing that I first thought of is all of the arguments against e-scooters sound a lot like the arguments against cyclists from just a few years ago, or arguments that are still out there. And they sound a lot like the arguments against skateboards that have been around since the 70s. And I think what e-scooters are doing is they're the latest interloper into urban spaces. They're the latest mode of transportation that our transport systems did not plan for, but in which there is clearly a demonstrated need for whatever they're offering. In the case of skateboards, it was largely gamification. And that means gamifying urban spaces, turning them into something more fun, more interesting, something in which they were not intended to be. Bicycles do this, but also offer arguably maybe more transportation utility. And e-scooters are doing this as well. And I think we shouldn't ignore this, particularly when the vast majority of e-scooter users are young people. And I think that there is so much opportunity when we think of providing more options for people to get around and for people to experience urban spaces in ways that make them think beyond sitting behind a windshield. So despite the fact that scooters maybe can cause some havoc and can be annoying, I think they really have a lot of potential for offering a new way for people to think about urban spaces and navigating them. And then the final note about micro mobility is that we really can't ignore it. And it's also getting harder and harder to define. It's really difficult now to say, what's the difference between a tiny car and an e-cargo bike? What's the difference between kind of some of these smaller scooters, smaller e-bikes, and then the shared e-scooter systems? We kind of have this whole range of things that keeps expanding and keeps getting more and more strange. But it means that it's meeting more and more use cases. And just like e-cargo bikes being used for freight and delivery, micro mobility is just crowding out the bike lane. And I think that that pressure will hopefully be another sort of leverage point at which we can change our cities for the better. So I think, maybe I'll close now with, first, coming back to this image. I've tried to present today and throughout the book, these case studies and these examples and the research and the evidence behind how we can use a bicycle as a catalyst for urban change. And then to get to this last image here, I wanted to close on this. So this is a picture of my kids, my two daughters. I took this last summer in one of the downtown streets of Oslo that was closed to cars as part of the car-free livability program. This was a direct outgrowth of the bicycle plan from a few years prior. But this is not a bike superhighway. This is a livable, frankly, like delightful urban space. And it's a space in which people of all ages and abilities can enjoy. And, you know, my kids and I rode down here on a cargo bike, parked the cargo bike, and walked around. And I thought to myself, this is fantastic. This is what I want the urban experience to be like for my family and for the people that I design and plan, do research around the built environment for. So to close, I think even though the book is called *Bicycle City*, I think the underlying point of it is that we're trying to make cities better with bicycles. But that's not really the end goal. We're not necessarily making cities better only for bicycles. We're using bicycles to make cities better for everyone. I will close with that and thank you for your time, everyone. And let me know if you have any questions. Lauren Mayer: Thank you so much, Dan. That was really awesome, super wonderful. As someone who's read the book, I highly recommend it, and we'll share again that discount code and the book at the end of the talk as well. So now I'm going to take this time to ask Dan a few questions and also for the audience, please use the Q&A function to ask questions as they occur to you, and we'll get to those next. So to start, obviously you're here with Congress for the New Urbanism. So my first question is, what do you see as the role of the bicycle and bicycle infrastructure in New Urbanism? Dan Piatkowski: This is, yeah. So a long time ago when I was a student, I did some research on new urbanist communities in Denver. And one thing that we found at that time, which is much less true now, but it was true at the time, was that the new urbanist communities were kind of islands of walkability in seas of auto-dependence. It's a bit of a forced metaphor. Apologize for that. But I think that the bicycle is really useful in creating a bridge between new urbanist communities that are walkable and are bikeable and other areas of cities that are vibrant and livable. The other thing that I think is, they're not just a bridge, they're also kind of, they can spur development and spur growth and spur change. And I think they can kind of spur the creation of corridors of livability and corridors of good urbanism. Because once you first have, once you have people on bicycles connecting to livable places, then you can have some infrastructure then that kind of slows down the traffic on these streets. Then that brings in more pedestrians. And when you have people, you have businesses crowding to that as well. And that's how you kind of create these corridors in a few, maybe a simplified version of these steps. And I think that that's probably the primary way from a big picture perspective that bicycles and bike infrastructure can help new urbanist communities, and that would just be connecting them and maybe allowing them to expand into the larger urban fabrics in which they're created in. Lauren Mayer: Yeah. Awesome. Yes. Love it. So, you know, all the different scales as well, I think that you were touching on that, you know, New Urbanism and the bicycle can help kind of bridge between those, as you called them, islands of New Urbanism and create corridors for a whole region as well. So very exciting stuff. The next question I want to ask, obviously during this presentation, you talk a lot about the different types of micro mobility: e-bikes, cargo bikes, and scooters. And I was just wondering about your experience with these modes and how your experience with them helped shape kind of this book or your kind of expertise moving forward. Dan Piatkowski: 100% it did. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I talked about it a little bit in the presentation of how crazy it was to sell the family SUV in Lincoln, Nebraska, moved to Norway, and we moved to Norway in January. So we moved to Norway in winter. A few months after getting here, I bought an e-cargo bike because we needed some way to get around, and it's so much more expensive to have a car in Norway, and there were license issues and all that stuff. But we needed a way to get around, and a way that we wouldn't have to deal with paying for parking and all the expense of a car. And so I got an e-cargo bike and I put studded tires on it and rode around the city in the wintertime with my kids. And the first thing that I realized is just the qualitative difference of the experience, even in freezing weather and snow. My kids were happy, which they never were in the car. You know, it was always a fight to get into the car, and the car was always this terrible experience. But riding around on the e-bike was just a qualitatively different experience for the whole family. And that really started me thinking about this potential. And then from there, I talked to We! Bikes, which is the company that I mentioned in the presentation, and learned how obviously it wasn't just me, there was sort of a whole world of people who were finding these same things to be true in their lives. But then I've also used micro mobility, particularly shared e-scooters, in a lot of cities internationally. And they're so interesting to me. I can't stand them. They annoy me in so many ways until I get on one of them and I'm riding it, you know? And I think that's like, that's like, that's the reason I keep thinking about it. It's like, when I'm riding it, I'm like, "Man, this is fun. It's convenient." It kind of fills this, this need that I didn't know was there, like when the bus route doesn't go where I need to go, or when for some reason I don't want to ride my bike somewhere. But then, of course, when I get off of those things and then I see people riding, cutting me off when I'm in the bike lane or parking them in the middle of the sidewalk, and it's super annoying. I can recognize both sides of that. And I think that's why it ended up being a whole chapter devoted to micro mobility in the book. Lauren Mayer: Wonderful. Yeah, that totally makes sense. As we were talking earlier about my own experience with e-bikes and being a little nervous until I finally got on one, it really is just such a great experience. Totally can help inform the way you interact with your city and streets and things like that. Yeah. Dan Piatkowski: Continue. Yeah. I was going to say, yeah, sorry, I forgot to mention just e-bikes in general. I'm like, so yeah, I'd never used an e-bike before getting that e-cargo bike here in Oslo. And Oslo is a really hilly city. And I just wouldn't have ridden the bike probably, or I certainly wouldn't have ridden a bike with my kids if it weren't for the e-assist, and it made me realize how much more useful an e-bike is for so many people in so many situations. Lauren Mayer: Absolutely. Yeah, it really makes hills a lot easier for sure. One other question I have for you is, when it comes to the future of cities, what is one thing you hope people take away from your book? Dan Piatkowski: Um, I think, I think the biggest takeaway is probably like, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I think a lot of times we get bogged down in processes that require us to figure out or pretend we figured out what the perfect solution is for Main Street or for a shopping center or for whatever development or something. And I think that that really loses sight of the fact that there's never going to be that perfect solution, but there's going to be probably a dozen really good solutions that are already out there. And so I think being a little bit more bold about trying those things, about, you know, broadening the conversation to things like car-free streets, you know, really trying to push that envelope, I think, is probably the big takeaway that I've been seeing. That I've been seeing as being successful because we also, you know, we know that there's going to be those people who will hate anything we try to do. And they're going to be loud about it. But they always have been and they always will be. You know, we can't, can't let that get in the way. And we also, I guess, sorry to maybe make this a bit of a longer answer than I meant to. Related to that is I think there's a lot of calls for, or I should say bad faith calls for, like more evidence of what the perfect solution could or should be. And those tend to be used to derail processes or to extend processes forever so that nothing ever gets done. And so I think trying to find ways to put something in the ground and get it out of the way or get it done quick is probably the big takeaway. Lauren Mayer: Awesome. Yes. Yeah, I think the longer answer was perfect. That's great. Yeah, we hear that a lot about, you know, the perfect not being the enemy of the good and the great. And so bringing together all these different components is a really important part of that. Hmm. We have a lot of questions in our Q&A. Thank you to everybody in the audience who has added questions to that, and feel free to keep adding. I'm going to kind of transition us over to some of these audience questions. A lot of folks are really interested in kind of about your experience in Oslo itself. So our first question here is from Lissa. And it also seems like a colder city than where I live in Oklahoma. How do we convince others that the cold should not stop you from riding e-bikes? Dan Piatkowski: That's such a good question, and it's such an important one because it just comes up all the time, right? So I'm from Phoenix, and there the argument is, "Well, it's too hot to ride a bike." I lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, and it's cold and windy there. And yeah, you know, but then on the other hand, the Twin Cities, I think, are pretty consistently ranked as the top of the heap in the US for bike-friendly cities. So maybe the first step is, or maybe the first comment is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the Norwegians have a, they have a saying that there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad equipment or bad clothing. And that, I think, applies to some extent. But in a more serious sense, I don't think that there is even a need for a ton of different equipment or anything like that. I think there's a need for people to understand that bicycles don't need to be a whole thing. Like you can just like put on your winter coat and your gloves that you would have walked to your car in, and get on an e-bike and just ride that. You don't need all that stuff. But people aren't going to do that unless they see other people doing that. And so I think maybe when we're talking about weather, having personal, maybe personal connections to people who have done this or are doing this, I think is really critical. But then I also, I think that bike shops do a really terrible example of not trying to sell people on every piece of equipment that they could have as opposed to what they actually need to get started. So, you know, for instance, for me to take my e-cargo bike and ride with my kids on it and feel safe doing so, I didn't need a ton of stuff, but I did need a new set of tires. That was the one thing that I think was like critical. But everything else is just sort of like optional. And so maybe finding a way to do that. And I think that that is the social aspect of e-bikes that I think we're starting to see more of. Lauren Mayer: Yes, as somebody who spent my college years in the Twin Cities, I was always shocked to see people on bikes, no matter below zero the temperature was outside. We have another question here from Tim. They're also asking, can you speak to the cultural component of Oslo's transformation? How have habits of drivers evolved? What is the change in the perceived risk of cycling around cars? And is there any sort of enforcement to make sure cars aren't speeding? Dan Piatkowski: Yeah, so, well, one thing that I think is crazy is even though Oslo, I don't think, has achieved Vision Zero since 2019, but every year, the number of bike and ped deaths is like in the single digits, like three, four, five, which obviously means there's still work to do, but it's better than a lot of American cities. But something that's really interesting is drivers are terrible everywhere, you know? It's really, there's not some sort of like enlightened Scandinavian mentality, I think, that like explains this or easily explains it. The difference, though, is when drivers are terrible and the speed limit is below 20 miles an hour, there's a lot more room for error without it being fatal error. And that, I think, is, it really, it really, it really made clear to me how much the Vision Zero approach, the systems approach, matters. And so then to a couple other parts of that question, so there is certainly enforcement in Oslo. There are, I think there are some cameras, and you do see traffic stops and that kind of thing. But there's a lot of really simple traffic calming strategies that just keep the speed limits low. So just speed bumps, big speed bumps that make it so that you can still go 20 miles an hour, or around the speed limit's like 30 kilometers, so it's like 18 miles an hour. So you have pretty simple infrastructure to keep the speeds low. But then I think the one cultural piece that is very important and is certainly a bit more unique to Norway is the people vote their political parties in, and there's a sort of these coalitions, these political coalitions of a few different parties. And the parties do a pretty good job of doing exactly what they said they were going to do and what their constituents wanted. And so in 2019, that car-free livability plan that came out of an election in which a city council came in saying, "We are going to get more people on bikes in Oslo." And they were voted in with that promise, and they achieved that goal, and people were willing to, were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt to try things to get there. And they were successful. So I think maybe that's the more unique piece. Lauren Mayer: Very true. And that actually leads into our next question from Amanda, who is looking to learn a little bit more about the conversations that led to the leaders and citizens deciding in Oslo to control the streets, claim control, and close them to cars. And if there was like any mess, like one huge step, or if it was lots of little steps. Dan Piatkowski: I think it was lots of little steps. These approaches, these car-free livability, these like traffic calming and sort of car-light street transitions, they were, I don't know how rapidly they were done, but they were done relatively rapidly. One of the people who was involved in the program described it as they used the "greedy approach." They weren't very discerning about where they were able to do things, but if they had the opportunity to do something in a street, they did it. And I think maybe that speaks a little bit to the question, although I don't think I'm quite answering it, but I think there is something useful there to be said that, again, related to that, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. They said, "Okay, if we can't do this street, we'll do the one next to it. If we can't put planters here, then we'll put benches here. If we can't, you know, do X, then we'll do Y." So I think that was pretty important. And I'm sorry, what was the rest of the question? Lauren Mayer: The other part was just about kind of the conversations that might have been happening and kind of how they started to claim control of the streets. There's, you know, anything in particular, because you said that they got it back from the country, I believe, from... Dan Piatkowski: Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, I can't speak to that because that was before my tenure in Oslo. That said, I think you can start by doing a Google search for Anina Hartman's article about how Oslo reached Vision Zero, and that would be a good starting point. Lauren Mayer: Yes. Great. And with that, we're going to transition away from Oslo a little bit. Kind of bring it back to America a little bit with the problems that the US is facing. And we have a question from Gabriel. Yes. Thanks, Daniel. Can you share more about enforcement and protections to put in place, especially in car-centric cities that do not have longstanding bike culture? Are there any cities in the US that are doing a good job of this? Dan Piatkowski: Um, I'm hesitant to say that like some cities are doing good and some cities are doing bad, especially because I haven't lived in the US for three and a half years now. And before that, it was pandemic times also. So any of my US knowledge is maybe not going to be the most timely. But I think you can't beat the classic Dutch approach to street design, in which if you have the greater the differential between speeds of modes, the greater the infrastructure need. So if you have really high-speed traffic, you have to have really high-quality separation from bicycles and pedestrians. That in itself is really important. Because the second part, that enforcement issue, it's really hard to do massive enforcement, particularly to do it without causing really massive blowback against you. And that's why things like traffic cameras really never seem to stick throughout the US. And also, you know, I mean, enforcement in general, particularly traffic enforcement, has a really dark history of being used for profoundly inequitable ends. So trying to move away from enforcement and think in terms of the Vision Zero approach and the systems approach, and designing systems in which enforcement is not necessary, is certainly the better option in the end. Unfortunately, it's also the more difficult and oftentimes the more costly option. Lauren Mayer: Yeah, the Dutch approach has definitely been referenced quite a bit. But yeah, I fully, I think you have captured a lot of the issues that we're dealing with in the US. That is really interesting about the kind of speed component as well. And that leads really nicely actually into this question from Kathleen: How do we protect marginalized communities from being displaced in these corridors of livability? How do we build in the value of allowing those who live in unlivable zones to stay if those zones are changed to livable corridors? This was asked kind of in reference to the work being done in Oslo and those suburbs, and then also how that might translate to work in the United States. Dan Piatkowski: Well, what, first and foremost, I think the problem of housing affordability is something that nobody's getting right. Oslo is struggling with it. Everybody's struggling with it. Some places are slightly more successful than others. In Vienna, they do really strong like rent control, and that tends to work pretty well. When I was writing the book, I really struggled because I started to go kind of go down a rabbit hole of exactly getting into this question of, if we're going to transform cities with bicycles, we're obviously, you know, we have to be talking about displacement and gentrification. Ultimately, because of just what a massive subject it is, I didn't really include it in the book. The short answer is, the short answer is increasing ownership and increasing buy-in of existing communities so that they share in the benefits. Doing that is the million-dollar question because there's lots of models of doing so, and some are more successful than others. But it's really an uphill battle in a lot of ways. And so I wish that I could be more hopeful about it. But at its core, making systems in which the people who are currently in places stand to benefit personally and be part of that change and have a say in that change, most importantly, I should say, is probably how to go about that. Lauren Mayer: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, as you touched on, this is a question that affects a lot of stuff in New Urbanism as a whole. Moving on to this question from Amber. So you talk a little bit in your book about the role of coalition building and how to bring people together that might not necessarily think of as people who would be in the same boat. But Amber is asking, how do you get fellow cyclists, maybe your classic more MAMIL type of cyclist, on board with and extending that kind of coalition to a broader coalition in a place that might be really hostile to transportation or cycling as transportation? Dan Piatkowski: Okay, so how do you build a broader coalition, but how do you bring on board maybe the hardcore cyclists? Is that the question? Lauren Mayer: Yes, into that coalition. Yep. Dan Piatkowski: Yeah, I mean, they're the hardest ones for sure to bring along. You know, they have the most enthusiasm to fight for bike infrastructure and things like that. But oftentimes, oftentimes it tends to be kind of a myopic vision, I guess. And so I think that there's, the way to go about it is probably to demonstrate that a rising tide floats all boats, that obviously everyone stands to benefit from that. Doing that in practice, though, is much more difficult because I kind of just, just kind of just insulted the hardcore bike advocates a little bit here. And I don't mean to do that because I think that people become hardcore advocates because they're sort of forced into a corner. And so they're in many ways also, as the question said, you know, victims of circumstance in that they're pushed into a corner in which everybody hates on them, but they just need a place to get on their bike and maybe get to work or something. So I think the act of simply building the coalition actually goes a long way to building empathy across and between groups. And finding these ways in which people can interrelate because I do think that people who get involved in advocacy often are always looking for creative solutions. And while they may seem really driven in certain ways, they can also direct that drive in other equally as beneficial ways or mutually beneficial ways. So I think just the act of coalition building goes a long way. Lauren Mayer: Absolutely. Yeah, that totally makes sense. These coalitions are important, and especially as we talked about earlier, as more people are starting to get on e-bikes, and the kind of folks that you see in bike lanes are getting broader and more diverse with their types of modes. And let me see here. Oh, and speaking of kind of e-bikes and bikes, Ryan asks, is there any data to suggest how e-bikes will replace bike-to-transit multimodal trips? Any trends that planners should consider? Dan Piatkowski: I don't know that they're, I'm not aware of any studies that are specifically looking at that sort of the last mile bike versus e-bike trip. That doesn't mean they're not there, but it does mean that I'm not currently aware of any. That said, I think we can kind of, we can kind of imagine based on the use cases of e-bikes that that last mile could become a lot longer, a lot further. So I think that in itself is certainly a potential, and I think that it can become a longer and further and everything else. But more than that, I think because it's an e-bike and because of what I talked about earlier of e-bikes reducing barriers to riding, I think that it can not only expand the catchment area, but expand the number of people who could be transit riders, just by nature of e-bikes being more friendly to non-cyclists or to people who may be sort of like, what is it, interested but concerned, I should say. Lauren Mayer: Absolutely. We have a couple questions here kind of, again, about the diversity of modes that we now see. So Duane asks, your discussion illustrates Oslo's successful urban transformation through modest infrastructure and strategic political alignment. But given the increased modal diversity and rising competition for limited street space, including cargo bikes, micro mobility devices, and e-scooters, what framework do you propose for resolving spatial conflicts between these modes in constrained urban corridors, especially in cities that lack Oslo's governance, consolidation, or political will? Dan Piatkowski: Wow. Thank you for that question. Yeah, that's, so Oslo is really interesting because Oslo was able to dramatically curtail the number of vehicles coming into the city. So I didn't really talk about it, but alongside the rest of the car-free livability plan was removing parking and making existing parking much more expensive. And also, you know, increasing tolls for driving a car into and out of the city. So just doing that dramatically reduced the number of vehicles coming in and out of the city to the point where like rush hour doesn't feel like rush hour in a real city, in a big city in Oslo. I kind of almost don't even notice it. That's how good, how good they were at getting rid of the cars. And because of that, now they're sort of just all of this real estate between buildings that can be used. And so they've avoided the messy battle of fighting over that space by just freeing up a ton of it. It's still a work in progress, and certainly we'll see how things go. But in a highly regulatory and in a highly regulated environment, that problem is not a problem. But of course, Oslo is such an outlier, such a unicorn in that sense. So what do we do in these other cities? And I think it's definitely messy, the solution. And I think the trick is just trying to keep it from getting dangerous. And it really can't happen, avoiding dangerous in terms of avoiding road rage, avoiding really high-speed modes interacting with low-speed modes. You can't really do that without some political intervention. But that said, I mean, that can be done at the city level, and I think trying to find creative ways to do that at the city level. And, you know, also trying to find creative ways to, you know, sort of ask forgiveness, not permission, in these situations, because I think it's sort of taking the tactical urbanist approach and applying it to transport. Is really valuable in letting people experience something and say, "Oh, this is way better," you know? So there's no hard and fast answer to that really profoundly important question. So thank you for the question. And I wish I had a better answer for you. Lauren Mayer: Thanks so much, Dan. It looks like we're right around 1 o'clock. If you want to go ahead and share that final slide of yours so folks can take a look and get your book and all that sort of stuff. Okay. I'll give you a second to get that. There it is right there. I will thank everyone for joining us today. A recording of this webinar will be available online within 24 hours. By registering for this webinar, you will receive that email with the recording link. Dan, if you have a few more minutes, we have just a couple more questions if folks want to stay on. So thank you for all those who have to leave right at one. We'll just be on for a few more minutes answering these couple questions. So back to some of our questions, Dan. Another one kind of related to our last one, which is, in your book, you talk a little bit about the different types of places that people bike. Specifically, you talked about gravel riding in Nebraska. And Veronica is asking, which modalities would you recommend for narrower corridors? Veronica is thinking specifically about compatible modalities in particular green spaces where vegetation may encroach or where structures may restrict or limit how wide a place could be. Dan Piatkowski: Oh, I'm glad you specified because when you said narrower corridors, I immediately thought, well, we should have the biggest, widest bikes we can because that slows everybody else down. But yeah, that's a very different situation that you're describing. I think in that sense, I suppose, you know, going with the like two-wheeled versus three and four-wheeled vehicles is always going to be obviously narrower. The possibility, though, is also there for lower vehicles like that are physically lowered to the ground. So if you're going to be having some of the cargo bikes that are more accessible to more people, they're three-wheeled and often they're a lot lower to the ground. So those are some possibilities as well. Beyond that, though, I don't know. I hadn't really thought about that particular issue before. Lauren Mayer: Yeah, absolutely. Well, for the next book then. And then we have another question from Dave about how has Oslo approached the bike parking issue? Dan Piatkowski: Oslo has done a pretty good job, but they've also, Oslo has a lot of bicyclists, but not a ton of bicyclists. So Oslo is really far from a place like Copenhagen or Amsterdam, where you really, you can't go anywhere without tripping over a bicycle. So what that means is that in a lot of situations, Oslo has decent bike parking. But in a lot of situations, it's sort of like smaller US problems, smaller versions of problems that you see in the US all the time. So you'll see things like, clearly an architect didn't want to have bike parking right in front of their building. So the bike parking is like in the back by the loading dock, and it's really crappy, and bikes get stolen all the time. So that certainly happens. Like Oslo has not figured it out by any means. But then there are other instances, particularly around transit, where Oslo's done, at certain stations, done a really good job of providing either highly secure parking or even parking that's like inside little kind of like storage lockers or those kinds of things where it's really secure and it's protected from the weather. So it really, it kind of is all over the map, but there are lots of good examples here of high-quality bike parking. But then, of course, like anywhere, if you look hard enough, you're going to find bad examples too. Lauren Mayer: Absolutely. Yeah, that totally makes sense. That was the end of our audience questions. So I know we only just went a few minutes over, but with that, I will wrap us up for today. Thank you so much for joining us, Dan. The book is *Bicycle City: Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future*, and a recording of this webinar will be available within 24 hours. So thank you so much, Dan. And thank you everyone for joining us today.