Where It’s Easy to Bike and Drive, Brits and Americans Drive

Abstract

The provision of a dense network of car-free cycleways offers no guarantee that people will flock to them on bicycles. At least not in the United Kingdom and the United States. That is if the experience from “New Towns” can be extrapolated to other urban areas, which is not at all certain, of course. Columbia, a privately owned planned community in the state of Maryland, and the English “New Town” of Stevenage are examples of where providing for trips other than car trips might only work if people are discouraged from making those car trips by use of restrictions such as pay-per-mile usage fees or circuitous driving routes. Equality of transport-mode provision does not necessarily lead to equity in use—for instance, there are many factors that either encourage or discourage the use of bicycles, and we sometimes wrongly believe separation of modes leads to equality.

“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

—H. L. Mencken