The Future of the Bicycle

about how you want to ride your bicycle. But yeah, if you followed that lyric long enough, you would have heard about how I went to ride my bicycle on That's that's that's actually from Bicycle Race by Queen. What a Way? Yeah, Jones will was never my scene and adult like Star Okay, then I just don't know my stuff at all, and I can't sing like Freddy Mercury song. I know why I tried. I don't even know what

song book. You guys are talking about what Queen arena rock band Queen, I know the band, im my gosh, So day we're gonna be talking about the future of operatic rock music, and you know, I wish, but we're actually going to talk about something that a listener has requests. A couple of listeners have requested, Yeah, I don't say I wish like this isn't a cool topic. I think this is okay. This is from our listener Richard, who wrote to us and said, I really enjoy your podcast.

Would you consider doing a podcast on the bicycle as a future form of transportation? I think it would be fascinating. For example, how about the electrical assist bicycles becoming more popular with aging population. Well, the cities of the future look more like Amsterdam in Holland with well developed bicycle infrastructure, for more like Los Angeles or Atlanta, Georgia, extremes in the opposite direction where the car remains king. Well, thank

you for that question, Richard. We decided we'd take you up and talk about the future of the bicycle. And we can speak to that last point from personal experience, because the three of us live in Atlanta, Georgia. Yes, and it's true this city could definitely be more bike friendly. Yeah. Yeah,

some parts of it are getting better. About that the kind of small towns within Atlanta, But lots of places I okay, Well, I find driving terrifying around Atlanta, but I find the very idea of being on a bicycle in the same places just completely out of the question. It's yeah, it seems really scary. There are actually a ton of issues at stake here, and it's one of those things that I hear is actually an issue throughout the world, not just in Atlanta. It's one of the

things we noticed. But uh, there's the issue of the driving culture in Atlanta, which is definitely king uh if Atlanta's got a lot of sprawl, it's kind of like l A in that sense, and that everything is spread out and it's not easy to get to various areas of Atlanta without having a car. Um, the public transportation system is not is not a world class. It's not all bust. It's not what you would kind of like

Los Angeles. You can get to some places pretty well on Marta, but it's sort of in a plus shape. So anything right along that plus shape is good and then you can you know, on the train, you can take a bus to get somewhere else. But yeah, they're definitely much better public transportation systems around. And also another element um is just the the bicycle culture and how uh not all bicyclists are say, you know, adhering to

the rules of the road. But I mean, so one of the issues we want to really talk about, though, is what can we do on the other side, right, not just bicyclists need to make sure that they obey the rules, because part of the problem is that the deck is stacked against them here. Yeah, the rules are certainly not set up for for them to work. Well, yeah, it's they are trying to fit within an infrastructure that

was designed for a completely different mode of transportation. So we want to really look at what are ways that we could change things. What what's the future of the mode of transportation in places like the United States? How could it be more like other places in the world where we see bicycles being used by growing populations of commuters and uh, and you know what's the How can we set ourselves up for success? Is really what we're

looking at here. Yeah, so let's look back first to the olden bicycles, all right and figure out where these came from. I was actually curious because I didn't know when the bicycle was invented. I was looking it up and there's actually a cool article on Live Science about this called who invented the bicycle? And according to them, it was a German inventor named Carl Drace or Carl von Dre d r A I s. I guess there'd

be sort of a French pronunciation dre. Well, if it's Vaughn, then it would be Germanic would be dra unless he pronounced it weird. Yeah, so uh, I'll get on the phone. You keep going, okay, yeah, you go find out. But anyway, the the idea here is that he probably made the first two wheeled bicycle in eighteen seventeen, and his own term for it was the Louth machine, which is German for running machine, which is great. It's a machine that runs,

except it doesn't run. It uses wheels, and it was actually a modification of an earlier four wheeled human powered vehicle, which I think actually predates the bicycle. I think the reason it was called a running machine was not because the machine itself ran, but because in order to operate it, you had to push yourself along the ground with your feet no pedals, right right. It was a little bit like a two wheeled flintstones car, yeah, or like a

like a really big skateboard. It's just you'd straddle this thing and use your feet to push yourself along, or like have you seen those balance bikes that kids have today? If you got on the belt line in Atlanta, you'll see a lot of kids who are out with their parents and they've got their bicycles. And it's a little tiny bicycle without pedals on it, and it's short enough that the kid's leg can reach the ground while they're sitting on the seat. It's essentially a modern version of

what we're talking about here. Yeah, they were also called hobby horses. They were made from wood. The wheels were solid wheel, so it was not the softest ride you can imagine. I read that one. I bet they were so comfortable. I read that they used a leather saddle nailed to a wooden frame. Nothing luxury. But my favorite example from that article did they come with a monocle holder? I'm sure they did. My favorite example from the the article there was a there was a list of illustrations

dated from the late nineteenth century. Was the auto bicycle auto as an O T T O. And it looked like a Victorian woman who had wheels attached to her. It's just just like two big wheels and to either side and two smaller wheels in front. So it was just ah for your wheeled Victorian lady the auto bicycle. Um, I guess you're if you're like whale bone undergarments are strong enough, and I you know, the wheel and axle was quickly followed by the bone corsets. So, um, yeah,

I know it was. It was one of those those illustrations that just I know what it was. It was the obviously the platform that she would be sitting on or standing against or whatever was obscured by her large Victorian dress, but it just made it look like a wheeled Victorian lady. Um. So I wondered, what's the difference between a bicycle and a velocity? I will tell you that difference. So by the teen sixties, that's when we

see the entry of the velocipede. And this was the first type of bicycle or or two wheeled human powered vehicle to actually have pedals and a fixed gear system. Uh. There's controversy about who was the first person to actually suggest this. A German inventor named Carl Kech claimed he was the first to modify a hobby horse by pedals, but a French inventor, Pierre la Lament, said that he was well, he patented it He was the first one to a secure patent in eighteen sixty six, and a

lot of other people immediately got in on it. In fact, I don't know that that patent offered any protection whatsoever, because from what I could tell, everybody immediately started trying to make these things. Um. Now, these had steel wheels and uh no suspension, so very bumpy ride if you're on one of these things. They were often referred to as bone shakers because they were not terribly gentle. Now, the main difference between that and the modern bicycle two things.

One is that we don't have solid steel wheels anymore, or we have the rubber wheels that allow us usually aluminum, I would imagine, Yeah, usually you don't want. You don't want something that's going to make the bike super heavy. Um. And also we don't have we tend to have some sort of tension absorbing system so that it's not as as rough on us. But to smooth out the ride when we have these velocities come out on the scene, one of the things they would do, the manufacturers would

do was make larger and larger front wheels. That's where that image comes from. Yeah. Yeah, well also you you don't have to work as hard. Um, it's just one rotation of the pedal in order to push the bicycle a lot further. That's true. Yeah, because you're you're pushing your your rotation of the petals is at the center of the wheel, and of course the circumference of the wheels much larger. So one little rotation of the petals

is one big rotation along the wheels outside. So you do go a lot further for a for a simple crank of the petals. Uh. But it also smoothed out the ride significantly. Those were the two big reasons. Apparently young men took to racing them in the streets of Europe. Um became something of a menace, and really wasn't that practical. They were the common term for these were the penny fig things. Uh and uh they got so ridiculously big

and setting that high up is not really conducive to safety. Yeah, no, it's I can't even imagine what it was like getting on one of these things. I mean, once you're in motion, that that some tripical force really helps, that gyroscopic effect really helps you stay upright. But coming to a stop or or getting started, I can't imagine how challenging that

was without falling over. I mean, this is coming from a guy who hasn't ridden a bicycle since he was a kid, and I remember it took me a while to get the hang of that particular part of the riding a bike myself. That's when John Kempt Stanley came along. He's the one who created the tension absorbing front wheel that allowed actual bicycles the way we consider them today

to begin to be manufactured. Now, this was still very much in the early days, but a lot of people credit him as the father of the modern bicycle for that invention that made it actually possible to have normal sized wheels and not a bone shaking experience, and that

still wasn't quite gentle at this point. Probably not, I'm sure that that kind of thing, and then probably also the introduction of like variable gear bikes and things like that is what made bicycles as popular as they have been in you know, the past century, as we've known them today. Sure, I mean that in the freewheel invention, that's the invention that allows you to coast where you know, you pedal and pedal and pedal, then you just stop

peddling and your wheels can keep ongoing. That's different from fixed gear, which we'll talk about a little bit later. It's kind of interesting, but it's really kind of I'd say that was a big advance as well. It was one of those things that allowed people to use these in recreational ways here in the United States, and in fact, I would think that here in the US, recreation was the largest use of bicycles, not as a vehicle for commuting for most communities. It's not true everywhere. Some cities

are very bicycle friendly. Portland, I think it's the law that you have to own a bicycle and then talk about it at length. That might be based upon my viewing of Portlandia all weekend long. However, how if we were to look at it's popularity worldwide, that's pretty complicated stuff, because, as it turns out, there are not a lot of authorities that collect and curate statistics of bicycles. We're gonna come back to this a couple of times in this podcast,

but there are some inescapable facts. One of those is that bicycles are an incredibly popular means of getting around in various parts of the world, like in China, where four thirty million people own bicycles, So you know, it's larger than the entire population of the United States. Four thirty million bicycle owners in China. It's like if everybody in the United States owned one point three bicycles. Yeah,

something like that. And according to the two thousand ten Earth Policy Institute, they had a report that said that bicycles are the quote biggest means of individual mobility for hundreds of millions of Chinese end quote. Not to suggest us that it's the primary method of transportation or mobility for all of China, but for hundreds of millions, it

is the primary one. Uh. Now, going back to that fixed gear, this is the kind of bike that this is the first type of bike I had as a kid, a fixed gear bike, which is the kind where actually it wasn't technically fixed gear because it didn't have a break stop to it, but you use the you know, as you move the pedals, the wheels move, and as the wheels move, the pedals moved, so you can't coast.

You can't just you know, stop pedaling and keep moving. Um. But it does mean that when you apply pressure to the pedals, then it stops the wheels from turning, and that's how you can break. And in a true fixed gear bike or fix ee, you could even pedal backwards and have the bike move backwards, although that is not recommended by people by people who want to live, it's apparently very difficult to learn um or at least tricky. Okay, but here we are today, and there are very obvious

advantages to bicycles. I mean, there's some disadvantages to I mean, we all know that you can't travel as far as quickly in a bicycle as you can in a car. Uh Well, I mean maybe in some condition conditions, depending on traffic or something like that, you could, but if you're talking about moving at high speed, that's sort of a setback. You probably can't haul as much cargo or as many people and things like that. But on the other hand, there are tons of advantages to bicycles. Uh.

There are a much greener option than cars. I mean that pretty much goes without saying. There are zero emission in in the everyday use. For furthermore, they're they're very much smaller and more lightweight, so right, you can fit more of them on a road, you know, Like they're lower traffic density, So you can get the same number of people through a thoroughfare on bicycles much faster than you could in cars, just because they're not surrounded by

a huge bulk of metal that takes up space. Same thing for a storage and parking they take up less space there too. These are all important considerations. They also promote healthfulness, right, that's true fitness activity, Like if you're you're traveling back and forth place as well, are you going to be basically passively sitting the whole time or you're going to be moving getting your heart rate up? I lift weights while I'm driving. Now, is that why

you've had so many accidents? Are you talking workout accidents? Are you talking like car accidents? I'm talking about all those times we heard about when she threw a dumbbell out the window of her car at another driver and road race accidents, um, but accident anyway. So there are obviously lots of advantages to a bicycle based transportation infrastructure. It just makes for a much nicer place to live in a lot of ways, and it makes for you know,

a healthier body, greener environment. It's also one one other thing to point out before we move on one. Other consideration is that it's less expensive toning and maintaining a car. I mean, certainly once you factor in gasoline and insurance all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, I mean huge advantage there. It's not even close. And if your bike breaks down, it's a little bit cheaper than right. But if you look at most American cities today, they're not really geared

towards bikes. Are they geared? That was like a pun Oh I didn't even do that on purpose. I almost pointed out too, I'm so probably Lauren, you got it before I did. They don't really cater to the cyclist in the way that they cater to motor vehicles. Some places in the world, like the Netherlands, or like probably places in Asia too, are designed to cater particularly two cyclists. They've got infrastructure designed that protects cyclists and encourages people

to ride bicycles. Other places not so much, like the places Richard pointed out, maybe Los Angeles or Atlanta, even if they're getting better than they used to be, they're not exactly the Netherlands. So I was wondering how it got like this, and I found an interesting story that was in a November article for Wired, written by the writer Adam Man, and he made an interesting point about how roads in the United States are engineered and how

this affects the kind of traffic they cater to. So Man claims that in America, a bunch of social and economic trends after World War Two, like and he gives the examples of suburban planning, interstate highway development, and movement of the middle class out of cities, caused cities to change the way they designed roads, specifically changing them to

be more focused on accommodating cars and trucks. And now in the United States, most states use a standard for evaluating roads that's called level of service, which essentially means how many cars can I cram through this intersection in a given period of time. Now that's good if you're a driver, I guess, because it means you and less time clogged up in traffic trying to get where you're going.

But obviously, relying mostly or entirely on a metric like this is going to come at the expense of other considerations, like how the road serves foot traffic or cyclists or public transportation. And Man points out that optimizing roads to make auto travel easier creates a situation known in economics

as induced demand. So as we constantly work on making roads easier and easier to drive, it simply encourages more people to drive cars because it's easy to do so, and that creates a positive feedback loop that requires us to optimize roads for even more cars because more people are driving them. Yeah, here in Atlanta, you know, we'll we'll probably be referring to our city quite a bit

in this because we've seen this in the city. You know, we've seen uh, big projects where you're you're looking at budgets for transportation and a lot of it gets earmarked

for things like widening roads or highways. Highways and particular the Atlanta highway system is ridiculous, but uh, you know it's it's what you really need, these twelve lanes and uh and also the things that each driver needs about four lanes to themselves, right, you know, because because you know, it's important that you be at least five lanes over from your exit when you realize you need to get all the way across and then you've got to cut

across all those other lanes. So uh, yeah, that's ridiculous and obviously there are plenty of studies that show that if you add more capacity to roads, that capacity gets filled. It doesn't it doesn't alleviate traffic. It just means that you have more cars in that same space demands. Yeah, so it's you know, we we've seen this many times here in our city. Um, and the important thing to

remember is that there are alternatives. Right. We've actually seen other cities kind of incorporate new strategies that have had measurable and quantifiable results, and not just improvements for for cyclists, right, No, No, these improved months for cyclists. I would argue our improvements for everybody. So I want to look at one No, really, I want to look at one particular example. And I say this as somebody who's not a cyclist. I mean I could be interested in becoming a cyclist, but I don't.

I'm not personally staked in this right now, me neither. Actually I don't even own a bike. I own a bike helmet. I'm not sure. Well I don't bike, but no helmet. So yes, we have one person who can legally ride a bicycle in our city. Well, I own a unicycle. So you you, Maverick, But you were about to say, I'm just kidding. I don't own a unicycle, but I do have some facts about what's been going

on in New York City. So a big thing that I think is going to be crucial in the development of bike friendly cities in the future is the addition

of protected bike lanes. So you've been out driving before, while not you, John, but you've probably been out riding once or twice, and even in road A lot of roads around here don't have bike lanes at all, right, A lot of them that do have bike lanes essentially have what what I would look at and say, that's just insulting because it's just like a you know, foot wide stripe that's sort of painted along the edge of the road in the rightmost lane that's kind of partially

in the gutter sometimes and and may or may not involve, you know, getting your elbows lopped off by someone going even the normal speed for that roadway A lot of times to riding over storm drains like like it doesn't even clear the storm drains sometimes A lot of times to me, it doesn't look any different than if there were just a cyclist riding as far as he or she could to the right in the right lane, so

that I don't really see another lane. That line is a force field that protects the bicyclist from any cars that could end up swerving into that traffic. Right, that's no, but there could be such a force field, not so much a force field, but maybe say in physical matter. So in two thousand seven, the City of New York

started adding protected bike lanes on some roads. And contrasted to the type of lanes we were just talking about, these are lanes for bikes that are set apart from motor traffic by barriers or parking spaces, like parallel parking spaces between the bike lane and the driving lanes, painted buffers, street lamps, planners, and trees, and other non driving zones like it might be just a raised curb, almost like a median, but just a very thin one that separates

the bike lane from the car lane, right. And so they started in two thousand and seven. Now they've got more than thirty miles of these things in the city, and in September, the New York City Department of Transportation released to presentation showing some of the results, and one important finding is that these protected lanes definitely did cut down on legions with injuries, and encouraged more people to bike on the road. So that's two improvements right there.

Just to give a couple of examples, on a stretch of ninth Avenue in New York between sixte Street and twenty third Street, they eliminated one traffic lane and added a protected bike lane offset by a parking lane and a buffer area with some trees in it, which you know, that's kind of nice anyway. Tree In this stretch of road, Crashes with injuries were reduced by fort and bike traffic

volume increased by sixty simultaneously. That's awesome. That is incredible because you know you're talking about you know, you have a lot more bodies involved here and yet fewer actual incidents. That Yeah, that's that's a really great story. Yeah. Just one more example on Columbus Avenue, and this was between street and street. They didn't eliminate any traffic lanes. They

just narrowed the ones that already exist. Did They added a protected bike lane again, it was offset by a parking lane and some some planners with trees in them. Crashes and injuries fell by and bicycle volume increased by and they had stats like this in the presentation for a bunch of different stretches of road. I just wanted

to give a couple examples. Now, hang on, Joe, if if you were to go and say, remove a lane like in that first example, you gave, sure bike traffic increases, and yeah, a few people managed to get there successfully without being hit because of that. But doesn't that end up really impacting the car traffic. I mean, if I'm

a motorist, aren't I gonna be totally cheesed off. You might be cheesed off, but you wouldn't have justification for it, because, believe it or not, it actually had a positive impact on the flow of auto traffic. Uh So, in many of these roads, the travel time was unchanged, and it looks like in a lot of cases the protected bike lanes actually read deuced travel time on that section of road. I didn't see any speculation as to why exactly this was.

I don't imagine at least some of those people would otherwise have been in vehicles that would have increased the traffic, and instead we're in bikes, which removed them from those lanes, and therefore that that would that would at least partially offset it. Yeah, that brings up the volume thing we were talking about before. If you can get some of the people traveling this this route from cars, two bicycles more can go on the same stretcher road without congestion.

But anyway, the numbers were For example, on eighth Avenue in New York, travel times were reduced by an average of four by adding the protected bike lane, which is crazy. I mean, it seems like making your city more bike friendly in this aspect is a total win win. Well, what about what about a situation where I mean, okay, so so you've got all of this extra space between the road and the the retail shops they're lining the street. How do how do businesses feel about this? Awesome? Actually,

and this is the next win. So actually it's a win win win. So the New York City protected bike lanes helped confirm something that actually already been observed in the past. This wasn't new to this research, but bike lanes boost business. Stores and restaurants that are along roads that have bike lanes and bike traffic receive more customers

and make more money. Just one example, again, we're looking at ninth Avenue here, so this is West twenty three West thirty first Street in New York between before they added the bike lanes and then the two year mark after they added them, the area of shops on this street section saw a forty seven percent increase in combined sales. And Okay, so that might just mean, well, maybe the

city is having a strong year economically. So they compared it to two other sites that were similar but without the protected bike lanes, and those sites only saw a forty three percent and twenty three percent improvement in the same time period. So there's a lot of evidence to indicate that encouraging bike traffic. I think the same is true. Foot traffic in front of retail areas is good for

the local economy. More people our patrons of your businesses when they're passing in front of it on bicycle and on foot. So this is actually key in my opinion, because if you can get business owners pressuring local politicians to make these kinds of changes on the promise of attracting wealth and indirectly increasing revenue, you have a much

better chance of actually seeing cities change. Yeah, that's one of those things where you have to make I mean, it's it's just true with politics you have to make a good business case for for what you want, you know, the change you want to see enacted. And sometimes that might be in some in some areas, like in Portland, that might be the environmental impact where you can make that kind of argument, and that's going to to work

in that community. Other places like Atlanta, you you know, you might have to find a few other things to convince people to put in a bike lane for once. I think it's such a good case that. I mean, based on everything I've read, I couldn't find what the drawback was except I mean, I guess you have initial construction costs and the inconvenience on the road while you're while you're making these changes, and so yeah, there is

that drawback. But as far as I can tell, once you've actually made these changes, it's a win win win. It's good for everybody, and everybody seems to like it. This is also just a way to make your streets nicer.

So if you imagine what it actually looks like on the street when there's a sidewalk and then a bike lane and then a buffer area between the bike lane and the traffic, there is much more of a sort of peaceful sidewalk atmosphere, you're not right up against cars that are knocking you over with wind as they pass three ft beside you at fort or you're also you're not encountering bicyclists who are riding on the sidewalk because

the road is way too freaking scary. Right. So, these protected bike lanes, I think really are the future of American city infrastructure. If we want to encourage people to ride bikes, we need these protected bike lanes, not just because they make it safer and do all this other stuff, but because they encourage more people to ride bikes by

making biking less stressful. Right, So, let's talk about some of the improvements that we could see in this because even in the one the examples you were siting in New York, Uh, those bike lanes, while a huge improvement over the sort of things that we see in other cities, there still are some proposals to make them even more safe in the future, right right, Well, because having protected bike lanes doesn't solve all the problems, it definitely makes

biking safer and less stressful while you're sort of moving along the link of a surface street. But what happens when you get to an intersection right, especially if you have to make say a left turn something if you're a if you're a cyclist, I think a lot of the fear is coming from a right turn because a car turning right might not see you right and it's

trying to cut right. But if you are making a left turn as a cyclist, you're cutting across the two lane, the lane of traffic that's immediately to your left, plus any oncoming traffic that's coming the other way. Yeah, So I mean it's either way. You have to worry about motorists turning right. If you're turning left, you have to worry about everybody on the road. It's it's it's you know, intersections are tough, right, And so this is where the

idea of the protected intersection comes up. I I was reading about this earlier and I thought that this was just great and really beautiful. So it's inspired by the design of intersections. Again in the Netherlands, a very bike friendly country. A Portland based urban planner named Nick Falbo came up with this design called the protected intersect, and and it could be used in American cities. And there's really nothing all that fancy or high tech about it.

It's just kind of some smart design. That's pretty much all it is. What are the what are the integral elements here? Okay, So imagine your standard traffic intersection where there are rectangular streets coming up to it. They each end, you know, four corners, and then there's an intersection box in the middle. That's where the crosswalks are. Yeah, and the crosswalks are right at the edges of the box. That's sort of the old way. This has several different things.

First of all, what you're going to have to imagine are these things that he calls corner refuge islands. So imagine the box again. So at every corner of the box, imagine there is centered on that corner, another smaller box that includes this island he's talking about in the corner of the box that extends into the big intersection box following me at all, it's it's sort of like a little bubble if you can imagine like like kind of like a little bubble coming off of the sidewalk area

a little bit further out into the intersection. That's kind of what it looks like. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Even at each corner. Wherever you'd be turning, there's a bubble of sidewalk and protected area that extends into the intersection right, so that the bike lane, the protected bike lane that you are in. So when you're when you're writing and it's immediately to your left, that's

separating you from the cars. It actually extends into the intersection just a touch, so that when you make your right turn, uh yeah, but you can go straight there's an opening, but if you make a right turn, you're never exposed to vehicle traffic. Yeah, So any car making a right turn there or coming the other way, it's going to have to turn around the outside of this island curb area that's between you and it constantly. So that's one protection. The next one is is the forward

stop bar for cyclists. This is simply the idea that the place where cyclists to stop at the intersection and wait on the traffic light is much further ahead than where the cars have to stop like a yeah, And so this ensures that cars see where cyclists are right they're not and they're not in the blind spot, they're not immediately off to the right where you know, they may not notice because they're looking the motorists is looking ahead,

not directly to the right, that sort of thing. Right, The next thing is set back bike in pedestrian crossing. So this just means that instead of the crosswalks being right at the edges of the intersection, they're set a little bit back from the intersection. And this has several advantages.

One of them is just that let's say you are going through a crosswalk and somebody is turning right into the crosswalk while you're going, Well, they're not going to be just turning into you blindly, because the crosswalk is set back far enough that they will be facing you directly. By the time they get to it's right, they will have already completed the turn and be moving straight again, so they have to consciously make the decision to run you down. Right. Yes, the next would be and this

is the last one, bicycle friendly signal phasing. And this is just how you control the stop lights there, having separate lights for bicycle traffic and for auto traffic, and and also controlling the phases of them separately. This is kind of like how some intersections have a a walk phase for pedestrians, that is that allows people to start crossing before the traffic for cars changes, so it'll hold everyone like a four way stop, it will hold everyone

has stop while the pedestrians are able to cross. I've seen that in a couple of different intersections. Most of them are not that way, but if you are, yeah, and if you get a chance, I really recommend looking this up. I think it looks really cool. You can check it out at Protected Intersection dot com. I think it's a smart idea that the creator did admit. There's basically one major drawback to it, UM, and that's that because of this bubble formation, that's a terriff protected area

for both pedestrians and cyclists to hang out in. UM, you're you're modifying the way that cars are going to have to turn in the intersection is going to be a much sharper turn, and so you know, like a like a two seater isn't going to have that much trouble, but a large truck might, which might mean, UM that you'd have to either change the way that trucks are built or or change the way that cities allow trucks

to drive around in them. Right, you'd either change the truck's route where it's going, or you might change I don't know how good truck drivers are at what they do, but just what sizes of trucks are are built and us so, I mean you could see this easily becoming an issue. Let's say that you you are moving from one part of the city to another and you rent a trailer to to haul your stuff. I mean that would alone would make it very differ Like what about

a school bus. Those things can't turn for anything, right, So then I guess, yeah, there's a question. It's well, does the inconveniencing of large trailer trucks, uh, you know, does that offset the benefit provided by this kind of system. I don't know, but it seems like a really good idea to me. Yeah. I'm not a civil engineers, as someone again as someone expert, as someone who's a pedestrian and and soon to be cyclists, uh, you know, these

sort of things really appeal to me. I mean, anything that increases the safety of folks in general, and at the same time is promoting a healthier lifestyle and more green method of getting around, reducing traffic. I mean, all of these are are definitely incentives to look into stuff like this. On top of everything we've said, I think there's one more piece of news we came across that makes it look actually looks good for bikes in cities. Yeah, this would be going back to that level of service

you're referring to earlier. Right, that was the idea that roads are measured in performance by how many cars they can get through them in a given period of time. And generally speaking, civil engineers don't didn't like to see that number go down for any reason, right, They didn't

want to see it become less efficient. And in some states, like in California, this ended up becoming a matter of policy, where as a rule, the city of Los Angeles, for example, wouldn't consider any kind of proposal to any sort of transportation project if it meant negatively impacting the level of

service of the intersections nearby. And that would mean that perhaps there'd be some projects that in the long run would be incredibly beneficial, but in the short run might have a negative impact on a particular intersection for you know, however long it's going to take for the project to complete, and those projects would not even be considered, despite the fact that there might be a real benefit in the

long run. But recently, the state of California decided that level of service would no longer be the guideline for makeing these kind of decisions. That, yeah, that there they can make changes now that in the short term might make life a little more complicated for folks who have to navigate through that intersection, but in the long term could stand to benefit people in immeasurable ways. Right, you can have a longer view of the improvement of your

traffic infrastructure right now. First of all, one of the interesting things and this is one of those. It almost it seems really informal to me, like there are a lot of informal news reports about how millennials are giving up the car. They're not interested in owning cars, They're not interested in having that automobile. That's not how they define independence, by Gali, The way they define independence is the fact that they can access the world's knowledge using

a device in the palm of their hand. Whereas I think, well, maybe it's also because of crippling student debt and the inability to afford a car and maintain a car. But yeah, it's tight genes. It gives them idea exactly. There are a lot of factors that go into whether or not people of the in the millennial's age range, which is late teens to mid twenties. UM, why why there seems to be a larger population of them who are not getting cars, not owning cars, buying cars. What are the

actual numbers on that. I don't have numbers for you, Joe, I do. Oh that's good. Uh so. So basically, according to research that was done by the p I r G Educational Fund and the Frontier Group, which it should be said, are like pro green kind of entities. That being said, though, UM, they found that Americans in general drove less from two thousand one to two thousand nine UM. Like the population increased by ten percent and driving simultaneously

decreased by one percent. And that's the first decrease that we've seen in recent decades, like basically going back to the nineteen fifties. However, people ages sixteen to thirty during that decade drove the least uh twenty of percent less than that same age group did in the nineteen nineties. UM. And as of eleven, they found that only six of Americans ages sixteen to twenty four even had driver's license UM, which is the lower percent lowest percentage in the past

fifty years. Now, you can also look at that decade and see another trend, which is at fuel prices were increasing fairly steadily. So it's one of those things where again, uh the the factors that determined why people were doing this, why this this particular generation was doing this, are varied. Some may very well be making it as a lifestyle choice. They want to live close to where they work, close to where they play, and all of that means that they don't have a need for a car. That could

be part of it. But some of them may be doing it because they are environmentally conscious and they want to be very eco friendly. Some may be doing it simply because it's the financially viable means for them to get to where they need to go. Um Boiling this down to a simple answer is I think a mistake, because life is never that simple, especially when it gets to something about why humans do something in a particular way.

It's always complicated. But there are a lot of uh these a lot of these factors are all coming to play at the same time, and we are seeing this kind of shift at least right now now. Granted as we're recording this, gas prices are are significantly lower than they had been for quite some time. So it could

be that we see a reversal in this trend. It maybe that has nothing to do with the generation at all, and that this ends up just being a little blip in the long term uh history of the United States Americans in their cars, because we do have a very car centric um culture in many parts of the United States. Uh So, it's just something to keep in mind. And the one other thing to keep in mind is that when we're talking about millennials and this adoption of bikes,

is that we're largely talking about the United States. That's the same thing as not. Trends are different, probably quite different. Yeah, And in China and India, a lot more younger people are interested in buying cars, and there are a lot more people in those countries than there are in the

United States. So globally, the story is not that young people are are issuing automobiles and and we're not going to see cars except for long distance travel in the near future, or it's all going to be cars sharing and no one's going to own a car. That's not

necessarily going to be true across the world. Okay, Well, so We've talked about how the cities of the future might change to become more bike friendly and why that sort of seems at least to be hopeful likely to happen, and possible trends in how people are feeling about cars and bicycles. But what about the bicycles themselves? Right? Could the bicycle as a machine actually change in the future or is that pretty much gonna stay exactly how it's

always been. It's it's a pretty simple machine, right, I mean, it's pretty effective the way that it is. What what could we do to improve it? Well? Uh, rockets? Yeah, yeah, that's that's good. I like where you're going. Okay, that's good, that's good. What what if what if we double the number of wheels on a bicycle, put it in a frame, cover that frame and metal sheeting, put a motor in it, and run it on fossil fuel, right, so you don't have to pedal, you don't get wet when it rains. Yeah,

I think it's gonna catch on. It was certainly has I you know, we can just look at the window and see. Uh. Now, there are actually lots of different ways that bicycles could evolve, and many of them are kind of in the mind of the millennial. I mean, it's the idea of having this connected device. It's just that now it's also a device you ride on, not just you know, the stuff that you're carrying on your person.

But some of the more simple improvements are ones we've seen over the last couple of decades, such as electric bicycles, which is not a new idea. Is that different than an electric motorcycle. Yes, an electric motorcycle does not require any sort of pedaling at all. In fact, there's usually no sent no actual pedals, whereasn electric bicycle can at least be switched to manual pedaling if you want it. So there are two different ones. But we're seeing not

just electric bicycles, but electric assist bicycles. By these are bikes that have an electric motor that help kick in and give you a little extra boost so that you don't have to exert yourself quite as hard on difficult terrain, for example, or a really tall hill, which I think would make people who live in San Francisco extremely happy. Um, Now,

like I said, they're not new. There are patents that actually date from the late nineteenth century, so that's the same century that we saw the bicycle itself be invented by That was at the beginning, but towards the end we started seeing patents being filed for battery operated bicycles. However, that being said, as far as I could tell, there wasn't like a lot of production for electric bicycles early on. There are a lot of patents, but that doesn't necessarily

mean people made the stuff that they came up with, right. Um. However, if you look in the mid twentieth century, you start seeing some of those designs actually work their way into production. Um. But then it was even just a tiny niche of the overall bicycle market, right It wasn't like it was the common element. I mean, I never had a bike that had any kind of electronic assist to it. I

had just regular old, you know, human powered bicycles. But we're starting to see the market grow rapidly today, particularly in regions such as Europe and Asia, but we're also seeing it start to grow in the United States. We're seeing a lot of interesting innovation in that spot. So

the pedal assist versions. You have a motor that kicks in once you hit a certain threshold and it ends up taking over of the work so that you know you're still doing In most cases, you're still doing some work as you're peddling, but the motor is taking over any uh any excess so that you don't have to pedal extra hard in order to get over that hill

or whatever. Some other ones that like a true electronic bicycle where the motor can provide full propulsion, might have throttle control, so it would essentially be like you know, a pedal or more likely something that's in the handlebars that allows you to control the throttle and write it more like it was an electronic motorcycle, and then you can switch to manual by easing off the throttle and

starting to pedal. Uh. And there are a lot of really cool products that allow you to turn existing regular old bicycles into e bikes, although not all of them are are actually available on the market, but they're you know, coming out soon, like the the fly Clie smart wheel and the Copenhagen Wheel. Have you heard about these? Both of these are super cool. Copenhagen wheel was developed I think by M I. T. And uh fly Client was developed. I want to say it was Eastern European company that

made that, but both of these are similar concepts. They are replacement wheel for the rear rear wheel of your bicycle. So you would, you know, dismantle your bike, take the rear bike wheel off, put this wheel in its place. You gotta get a little greasy, Yeah, you gotta get a little greasy, and then you replace the drive system, which I'm imagining would for most of these bikes is going to be a chain driven bike. There are other types of drive trains for bicycles, but chain is one

of the most popular in common. Uh. And there's the fly wheel. It stuff as motorized. It's inside the hub of the bicycle wheel, so it looks like a regular wheel on the circumference. There's spokes that lead in, but then the hub is much larger, like dinner plate sized as opposed to a little round circle the very center and that flywheel is what kicks in and gives you the pedal assist. Uh And uh, you know, it's depending

upon which version you have, you have different options. Like the fly cli has a Bluetooth connection that connects to your smartphone. That and that you can set what your top speed limit is going to be. Because these things can let you go pretty fast, like in excess of thirty miles per hour on a bicycle. Um, but you can set that that speed in your app and say, I don't let me do that. That would be dumb of me. I don't and I don't trust me, so

you make sure I don't do that. But there are other ones, like I know, the Copenhagen wheel in particular, is supposed to allow you to set a specific threshold for physical exertion and say this is how hard I want to pedal, and anytime you encounter terrain that would require you to pedal harder than that, it automatically kicks in so that you are constantly peddling at the same physical exertion from beginning of ride to the end, no matter what kind of stuff you encounter. So even if

you hit a really steep hill, you're okay. I love that idea because Atlanta does have quite a few hills, and I have a feeling I'm going to need all the help I can get. Um. But these are just, you know, kind of concepts of stuff that allow you to convert your existing bike into that. And I don't think the Copenhagens available yet. But the fly Cli had a Kickstarter and I think for five fifty bucks you

could get one of those wheels. So it's almost it's like, depending on what kind of bike you get, it's about the price of a bike. So you're just you're doubling the price of your of your bicycle at that point. Um. And of course that's just like a middle run, uh, metropolitan style bike. They can get pretty expensive if you're very serious about this stuff. Then there's the bike of the future the future. Yeah, it's called the Denny. So that sounds of futuristic. Well there were there was no

I did read about this one, and it does sound cool. Yeah. This this was part of a design competition. There was a design competition. It began way back in like twenty eleven, I think, and there were a bunch of different groups that were all interested in designing what would be the bicycle of the city of the future, Like what what would be the elements that you would want to include. And some of the bikes were I mean, all of

them are really cool ideas. All the ones that made it to the finals and then were voted upon, uh, we're all nifty And some of them had things like GPS sensors so that if someone took your bike, you could totally find out where your bike was. Uh. Some of them had uh you know, very lightweight materials that were printed in by a three D printer, so like lots of neat stuff. But the Denny was kind of an e bike on steroids. So it had a motorized front wheel, not the rear wheel like the Copenhagen or

the fly Client, but same sort of concept. Pedal assists that could kick in and help you out. Uh. Had a had an automatic shifter to control the gears that was puterized, so you never had to worry about shifting gears. If you wanted full manual control, it would shift gears automatically to give you the best experience for whatever, you know, situation you happen to be in. Uh. It cuts down on splash back if you're running riding your bike and

you're hitting puddles or it's raining. Um. Instead of having a fender, which is why most bikes that are designed for that kind of travel that's the way they handle it, it actually had a little, uh little thing that stuck out behind the rear wheel with bristles to break up the water droplets. As they get kicked up. So yeah, so yeah, you don't have this big fender covering your back wheel, just this these little bristles that it's almost like a little broom that breaks up the water. And

apparently it's really effective. Smart. Yeah. Uh, I'm really curious to see how many times I show up to the office with like a a streak of road grit down my spine from riding the bike and and and weather that was not so great. Um, I'm hoping it's not frequently. It also had handlebars that could come apart, detached from the bicycle and act as a bike lock, So not only are you locking your bike, but you've removed the handlebars. So it makes makes anyone stealing the bike less likely

to do so because it's now they can't steer it. Um. And that was kind of interesting. So it was the one that actually won this design competition. There was some coverage on it in in mid two thousand and fourteen, and um, I haven't seen it's supposed to go into production because the winner of the competition was supposed to get like a a production of these. Don't know how many are going to be made, and I don't know

how expensive it's gonna be. I have a feeling it will probably be outside of my price range for a bicycle. It would be hard for me to justify that expense to my wife, like, you have a bike, Uh, it works well, but it's not like you're getting a car. That's true. Well, if I did get a car, she'd say, now, this was a colossal waste of money. Don't have a license.

What were you thinking? You know, speaking of not driving cars, I had one more thought about how the future of bike friendly cities could look even better than it does so far, and that's autonomous vehicles. Yeah. I think self driving cars as they enter the market, On one hand, they will be a very tempting technology to take advantage of. So well, I mean, yeah, of course I want to ride in a self driving car. I can do whatever I want while I'm riding. I don't have to worry

about all that my nails or right. But it's also, as we've talked about many times on here, I think we're all three pretty convinced that self driving cars are going to be massively, massively safer than human drivers. The fact that the Google cars alone have been on the roads for more than a year and only have been involved in two accidents, both of which were driver fault, not human fault. Yeah. Yeah, that tells me that this is this is a good pathway, and I think they're

only getting better. Yeah, I think. And also, I mean almost all accidents are caused by humans human fault. Sure, they're there are things that could have been avoided if people had been better drivers. Sure, and the cars that are driving themselves are better drivers than you are. This is yet one more factory that I think is going to increase the safety of cyclists on the road and just generally decrease the stress I imagine. Yeah, cars can be way more aware of what's going on around them

than a driver can. I mean, just human limitation. Right, I'm not even saying that there are people out there who are terrible drivers. The best driver in the world cannot have three D and sixty degree awareness of his or her surroundings like an autonomous car with the right

sensors could. Sure. Sure, And I mean, you know, as people get more used to see eeing bikes on the road, I think that that drivers are going to be more cautious about it, um more used to it and incorporating some of these infrastructure changes would would definitely help and you know, getting bikes out to a place where a car can see them before they make a turn or

something like that. Um. And and giving the bikes a safe lane in which to ride, which is not you know, at the at the car's elbow, um, because cars have elbows now it is the future. Well um. And also on that same on that same pathway, uh, making the roads safer for bicyclists and and allowing for these kind

of things and keeping them outside of the lanes for cars. Uh, ends up being less stressful for the motorists in general because they're no longer trying to you know, they're no longer complaining about that guy who's weaving through the traffic lanes because they're on a bicycle so they're going right between two line lanes of cars or there, or it's someone who is running through a a stop sign or a red because now we've got an infrastructure where, because

the support being there, bicyclists don't there's there's not any incentive for them to break rules, right right. But but hypothetically, you know, as as good as this could be, yeah, I think that automated cars could could do a much better job of it just by virtue of what they are. Yeah,

I feel really good about the future of bicycles. Actually, I didn't know what I thought before I started researching for this episode, but the more I've read, the more I feel like, Yeah, I think the future for bikes in cities is very strong. Yeah. Yeah, So thank you so much for writing to us, Richard. This is a

really fun topic to dive into. And if any of you out there have a similarly fun topic that you would love us to tackle something that's future oriented, and you should get in touch with us too and let us know what you think and we'll be, you know, doing a lot more of these kind of episodes in the future. So to get in touch with us, you can rise an email that addresses f Winking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can always drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. At Twitter

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