Biking in cities can be complicated, and map apps can only help so much
Biking in cities can be complicated, and map apps can only help so much
Like many countries during the pandemic, when people were feeling cooped up indoors, the U.S. had a bit of a bicycling boom. In 2020, bicycle sales were up by 46% from the year before, and U.S. roads accommodate more than 51 million cyclists today.
However, even if you own a bike and your city has the infrastructure for it, navigating a city on a bicycle can be a challenge. Unlike drivers, cyclists have to take hills, dirt roads, biking infrastructure and more into account when planning a route.
Laura Laker is a freelance journalist in London writing about active transit and the author of the upcoming book, “Potholes and Pavements: A bumpy ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network.” She joined Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal to talk about why using Google Maps as a cyclist isn’t always a smooth experience, and what Transport for London is attempting in pursuit of easier navigation for riders. A transcript of their conversation is below.
Kai Ryssdal: What’s it like riding a bike in London?
Laura Laker: It’s kind of a mixed experience. So the last few years, cycle routes have really, really increased massively in the city. And that’s kind of been a process that started maybe 10 or 12 years ago, but it’s still quite patchy. So we’ve got some great cycle routes. I live in East London; I can cycle almost 12 miles to the Royal Albert Hall — which your listeners might have heard of — which is all on protected cycle lanes pretty much or low-traffic streets. But there’s still definitely very scary roads in the city. And it really is a patchwork depending on where you live.
Ryssdal: Right, so depending on where you live and where you want to go. So you dial up Google Maps, or whatever your navigation tool of choice is, and then what happens? And that’s what I want to talk to you about.
Laker: Yeah, it’s kind of a mixed picture. And again, it depends where you’re going and where you start. But yeah, routing for cycling is a tricky thing, right? Because some of it’s on the road [where] there is no particular cycle infrastructure, some of it’s even on pavement where you’re allowed to cycle. And routing apps really struggle to deal with this complexity. Add to that the fact that different people ride different bikes. You might see someone in a wheelchair with a handcycle, and you might see these great big cargo bikes coming around London, and we’ve got very old streets with a lot of cobbles. It really kind of adds to the complexity because certain routes, certain people can deal with certain barriers [that] some smaller bikes can get around, but larger ones can’t. And so a routing app is basically having to deal with all of this complexity, plus directness and speed. And it certainly doesn’t work for everyone, and it certainly doesn’t work in every situation.
Ryssdal: What does it look like when you dial up a bicycle route on Google Maps or whatever? What does it look like? I mean, does it tell you, “Oh, here’s a big hill, look out,” or, “These are cobblestones”? Or is it all just, you know, like, you pull it up in your car, and it points in the right direction, and you go even though it might not be the best road?
Laker: It doesn’t actually. There are apps that do. CycleStreets is one of them and they have a base map onto which they can basically crowdsource information from their users who are quite keen on helping other cyclists build and find good routes. But in terms of Google Maps, what you see now — and the improvement that they made that I was writing about — is partly to do with just the data they have on where the cycle routes are. Because I don’t think they were finding those routes before. They were finding the main roads because they’re faster, but they’re unpleasant to cycle on. You’re really having to dice with traffic. And so now you’ve got actually, in the similar way that you would have if you’re driving, you’d get data in a colored line on your route saying there’s congestion, you get a colored line which is green saying there’s a protected cycleway. So that’s really helpful for people when they’re trying to decide, “Can I cycle it? What’s it going to be like? What’s the best route for me?”
Ryssdal: Right on that issue of, you know, “dicing with traffic” as you say, you and I were talking before we turned the microphones on, and I shared that, while I am a bike rider, I mountain bike because I’m not going to ride on the roads in Los Angeles because it just scares the bejesus out of me. And safety is a real thing when you’re planning a navigation route for a bicycle.
Laker: It is and I’ve visited LA briefly once.
Ryssdal: Did you ride a bicycle?
Laker: I mean, I tried to be a pedestrian, but I think I was one of maybe three people walking. Yeah, I saw the volume of cars. And my taxi driver actually said, you know, his family had four or five cars. And I think that’s probably normal there. But, you know, your experience just goes to show, if there isn’t the infrastructure, if you’re having to deal with motor traffic, then it doesn’t matter how good your routing is: You’re not going to cycle. And most people aren’t going to cycle. And, still in the UK, I’ve been cycling in London for a good 15 years, and — at first — I was very much in the minority and especially as a woman. And I’m still in the minority, but it’s definitely becoming a much more popular, much more mainstream thing. Transport for London, the body that runs the transit in London, released some statistics recently that in 2023 daily cycle journeys in London hit 1.26 million. There’s now as many people cycling as a third of the tube network equivalent or a quarter of all bus passengers. And so, in terms of efficient use of road space and efficient investment, because, let’s face it, cycling is far cheaper to build than a new tube line or a new station or a new road — it’s a fantastic investment. And I really think it’s one of those fantastic things that’s mostly benefits for our city.
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