other products may stay in the environment.19
Most human-powered mobility networks are limited only by small budgets or immutable transit policymakers who refuse to adequately support them. To reduce uncertainty in planning and funding, municipalities should require that any new real estate development or urban infrastructure project include funding to connect it with a human-powered mobility network.
Cities also need to guarantee that pedestrians, cyclists, and riders of “little vehicles”—skateboards, skates, scooters, hoverboards, and other forms that the future may bring—are kept safe while on the move. All too often, transportation lanes that should be differentiated overlap. Walkers and riders compete with cars, trucks, and buses for a slice of the road, and compete with one another—attempting to share a designated narrow and unforgiving space. In the United States in 2017, there were nearly six thousand pedestrians and 783 cyclists killed in crashes with motor vehicles.20 This marked a 31 percent increase since 2008. Safe, comprehensive strategies should be requirements of today’s cities, and are critical components of human-powered mobility networks.
Improvements for Pedestrians
Simple modifications, such as adding or improving crosswalks and sidewalks, can make cities more pedestrian friendly, but cities can also benefit from innovation. Vancouver, Canada, for example, is becoming one of the world’s most pedestrian-friendly cities. One of the steps it’s made toward this goal was its installation of two hundred detailed maps around the city. The maps provide direction and note the location of attractions, drinking fountains, and public bathrooms. Vancouver’s work to become more pedestrian-friendly will likely lower the number of cars on its roads, and thus the city’s carbon footprint. It has a stated mission to become the world’s greenest city by 2020.21
In the United States, an example of pedestrian-friendly innovation is New York City’s High Line. The High Line opened in 2009 and expanded in increments through 2018. Today it’s a 1.45-mile (twenty-two-block) elevated walking path made from an abandoned railway. It is exclusively for pedestrians, with bicycles, skateboards, skates, and scooters prohibited,22 and runs above street level along the west side of Manhattan. In 2015, the last year with publicly available data, 7.6 million people walked the High Line. More than 2.3 million of them were residents of New York City.23
The High Line has proven so popular that other cities have made plans to build similar infrastructure. In 2016, Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit that founded, funds, and maintains the High Line, launched the High Line Network to support and advise similar park projects in other cities. There are currently nineteen projects in the network, including Philadelphia’s Rail Park and Washington, DC’s 11th Street Bridge. Another city with an innovative pedestrian-only stretch is Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne’s 2.5-mile-long Tan Track loops around its Royal Botanical Gardens, and provides easy pedestrian access to shops and restaurants located within Melbourne’s central business district. Like the High Line, it is for pedestrians only and enjoyed by locals and tourists alike.
All cities should have their own pedestrian-only walkways, and there is room for great creativity here—whether selecting an unusual place for a walkway, such as an abandoned railway, which Chicago and Atlanta also did, or using new and developing technology to make something futuristic. In Amsterdam, the technology start-up MX3D used robots and 3-D printing to build the structure of a steel pedestrian bridge, which is set to cross one of Amsterdam’s oldest canals. The company’s description of the project states:
MX3D equips industrial multi-axis robots with 3D tools and develops the software to control them. This allows us to 3D print strong, complex and gracious structures out of sustainable material—from large bridges to small parts.24
As 3-D printing evolves, it can be used to create more pedestrian-friendly infrastructure from sustainable, repurposed materials. Outdoor Cities keep modern technology in mind, constantly considering how it can protect the environment and further people’s connection with the outdoors.
Improvements for Cyclists
Cycling is an excellent form of exercise, can be instrumental in pollution reduction, and is increasingly popular. From 2014 to 2017, the number of cyclists in the United States increased from forty-three million to forty-seven million, and from 2014 to 2018, the number of bike-sharing programs nearly doubled.25 The increase in the number of cyclists can be attributed to the rise in bike-share programs, which allow riders to commute by bike without having to own their own, and offer designated bike parking spaces.
The “bike-share boom”26 has been an international phenomenon. The first version of it was in Amsterdam in 1965, but was ultimately shut down after bikes were stolen and damaged. Thirty years later, in 1995, Copenhagen created a bike-share program, though it had the same problems. A year later, a system was invented at Portsmouth University in the United Kingdom to address the problem. Portsmouth’s system makes users swipe individualized magnetic stripe cards that allow the bikes to be tracked and their users to be known. In 1998, Rennes, France, became the first city with a citywide bike-share program. Shortly after, there was one in Lyon, France, and then they began to boom in big cities: Paris; Barcelona, Spain; Washington, DC; Montreal, Canada; Hangzhou, China; Mexico City, Mexico; Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and elsewhere.
As of May 2018, more than sixteen hundred bike-share programs are in operation worldwide, providing eighteen million bicycles for public use.27 In the United States, there are more than one hundred bike-share programs. A report from the National Association of City Transportation Officials states that there were thirty-five million bike-share trips in 2017, a 25 percent increase from the previous year.28 Many cyclists now rely on these platforms to get around.
Some cities have met the needs of cyclists better than others. Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Portland, Oregon, are considered some of the most bike-friendly cities in the world, meaning that biking is encouraged and city infrastructure was designed with cyclists’ safety in mind.29 In the United States, the League of American Bicyclists’ “Bike Friendly Communities” ratings gave high marks to Portland, Boulder (Colorado), Davis (California), Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago.30
Chicago Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein told me that Chicago has 248 miles of bike lanes. This encompasses protected lanes, buffered bike lanes, and marked share lanes, and Chicago hopes to raise this to 645 miles by 2020.31 Gabe said that the 2020 vision came about thanks to a partnership between Chicago’s Department of Transportation and citizen activists. In his words, “Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, and the people who know each neighborhood best are those that bike, walk, and drive them on a daily basis.” Gabe said that the city of Chicago envisions a network of bike lanes and bike trails that will boost the quality of life of its citizens, and that the plan is based on three guiding strategies:
1 Provide a bicycle accommodation, a pick-up/drop-off rack, within a half-mile of every Chicago resident.
2 Provide a greater number of bikeways near residential areas.
3 Increase the amount of bicycling infrastructure where ridership is high, and establish infrastructure where ridership is lower, but has the potential to grow.
How cities care for bike-share programs can extend to other sharing programs we have today or those that are yet to be developed. The first scooter-sharing program launched in San Francisco in 2012, and today they can be found throughout the US. The world’s largest ones are in Berlin, Germany, Madrid, and Paris. A report from the National Association of City Transportation Officials noted that riders took 38.5 million trips on shared electric scooters in 2018, eclipsing the 36.5 million trips on shared, docked bicycles (three million trips were on dockless bicycles).32 Scooter-sharing programs are dockless and allow users to pick up and drop off a scooter at any safe place on a public street within the city’s service area. Like bikes, scooters release
