What can we do so that bicycles win over cars?

Disclaimer: My practical examples are inspired by Lisbon, where I live, and travelling around Portugal, may maps be with you!

A radical proposal

If there is a road, it must have a secure, physically separated track for bicycles.

Imagine that you can cycle anywhere in Lisbon, say from Terreiro de Paço all the way up to Gulbenkian safely, without having to drop cold sweat as some cars are speeding next to you, and some are tailgating you.

Or let’s dream bigger. Imagine you can take your bike safely, without having to compete with speeding cars, all across Portugal, from Algarve to Minho, hopping on and off the train if you so wish, visiting lesser known towns and villages — and enjoying their respective cuisines! With kids. Or with a tent. Or with a surfing board. Up to you.

Ironically, there are no technical or financial obstacles to this. The roads are already there, no new infrastructure is needed. All that is lacking are a few separators — which are banally cheap.

The reason why the world I am painting seems so outrageously unthinkable — and let’s face it, utopic! — is game theory and politics.

In order to fence 1.5 meters of the road for cyclists, politicians need to be sure that they are backed by the larger of the two competing groups — the car owners or everyone else — and that they get re-elected.

The real conflict between these two groups lies in the right to use public space. Let us examine its logic.

Public space inequality

Inequality in its broader sense has been a hot topic for every society since the advent of homo sapiens, yet a particular instance of it — public space inequality — is a recent phenomenon and is largely overlooked.

Our shared urban space — which is a finite resource — is unequally distributed among the citizens. The owners of private cars get to enjoy 80% of it as they park or move, leaving but a receding line of sidewalks to the rest of the society. In Lisbon even the pillars — the last line of defence separating the sidewalks from parked cars — are installed on the sidewalk itself, snatching yet another bit of space from the pedestrians.

What car owners can, others can not: in Lisbon, you can not claim a parking space for purposes such as storing your bike or planting a little urban garden.

Particularly in Lisbon, if you are a kid, an elderly or require a wheelchair, you are faced with a binary option: either you learn to manoeuvre within the remaining 20 centimetres of a sidewalk, continuously playing a life-size version of Super Mario where you jump over rubbish containers and dog gifts on the way to your destination, or you start using a car yourself.

Why you should own a car

From a purely egoistic perspective, there is every reason for you to own a car.

First of all, you immediately receive around six square meters of free public space next to your house — paid by everyone else.

Second, you get an unlimited licence to pollute the planet. For a few euros of decorative government tax per year, you can emit to your heart’s content. Every private trip you make affects the whole community’s lungs, yet rest assured, you won’t be taken to court for that.

Third, you can potentially go faster — much faster! — at the expense of others. Your car is built to make you 15 times quicker than a pedestrian, and 5 times quicker than a cyclist. You are always offered a straight, uninterrupted line to drive, while everyone else has to give way and sweat the stairs, disappear into the underground passages or cover endless city quarters to reach that safe crossing.

Fourth, if you get a tad distracted or exceed the speed, eventually running over a pedestrian or a cyclist, every newspaper will write that it was your vehicle that lost control, and sooner than you know everything is back to normal and you can go back to driving as usual.

Fifth, you become part of a privileged group that knows how to defend your right to space. The powerful car manufacturers are launching yet another million of ads right now, as you are reading this, about why everyone should own a car.

Finally, a little bonus: you can honk at the pedestrians and cyclists and call them names when they are on your way. It is what one does.

Owning a car is objectively a fantastic deal. Or at least it used to be.

The tragedy of commons

In the olden days, when only a handful of the super rich could afford to own a car, the advantages of driving were truly remarkable. The roads built at the public expense served the minuscule elite who could ostentatiously out-speed and out-comfort everyone else. With the mass production of motorised vehicles, first the middle class, and then the rest of the society gained access to the much desired luxury of car ownership, from a ferrari to a second-hand volkswagen, leading to the inevitable over-consumption of our limited common resource — urban space.

Especially in cities, with their ever increasing population density, the individual pursuit of car ownership, so violently advertised and so widely perceived as the apogee of freedom and wealth, has led to a congestion of public space, bringing the entire urban traffic to a halt.

Such depletion of a common resource where the collective well-being is destroyed by everyone’s individual desire to use it is what economists call the tragedy of commons.

Why is this tragedy of commons so largely overlooked?

When we need more housing, we take advantage of the third dimension and build houses upwards, ending up with cities made up entirely of skyscrapers. Roads are but two-dimensional, a notion well exemplified by the use of private helicopters in Brazil’s São Paulo. This fact of geometry, surprisingly, does not stop the car owners from demanding more and wider roads with more parking space — a “magical thinking” in action that implies there is a yet to be discovered law of physics that can miraculously expand confined urban space into infinity. What is going on here?

The sunk cost fallacy

Given that we live in a car-centric society where, on average, half of the population owns a car, the majority of people have already invested considerable money into buying a vehicle, and are paying a de facto monthly subscription for the privilege. An average driver has paid around 10 000 euros to own a car, and then pays around 250 euros each month in fees. If your average salary is around the 1000 euro mark, as it is in Portugal, then you have paid 80% of your annual salary to own a car, and then you pay 25% of your monthly salary in an obligatory and infinite subscription.

Even though you can sell your car and recover some of its rapidly melting value (a new car loses at least 15% of its value in the first year, and then another 50% over the next three years), you can not recover what you have paid for using it. Economists call such unrecoverable money sunk cost. If 25% of your income is guaranteed to leave your wallet every month to maintain your expensive purchase, what do you do?

The rational thing would be to quit and look for alternatives.

However, catching our own cognitive biases is not what we are good at as humans. Most probably, you do not think of your car as a sunk cost, as it is socially accepted that owning a car is a good investment. What you do instead is you ignore your expensive reality. Your next logical step is to demand more roads, more parking, and more car-defending policies. You probably feel that with everything you have paid and will pay, you have the right to the shared public space. You feel entitled.

Indeed, collectively, drivers have clearly shown to demand the utopia of ever expanding car lanes within the staunchly finite reality of urban space. This has demonstrably led to the current dystopia of vanishing sidewalks and savage parking on top of anything that is at least remotely flat.

Behavioural economists call such irrational investment or resources a sunk cost fallacy, a cognitive bias that leads us to throw good money after bad, continuing to invest the hard earned euros, effort and time into a rotten deal even though it would be rational to quit.

Collectively, we have invested so much into cars that it is painful to admit this has been the wrong path, which is but human.

Game theory

As we have seen, there are two groups competing for dominance over public space.

One group — the drivers — is well established, collectively richer, has a marketing budget provided by the car manufacturers, political representation and the pain of sunk cost.

The other group — those who walk, cycle and prefer not to use a car even if they still have one — is less organised, collectively poorer, politically underrepresented, and spends a lot of time complaining on Twitter. This group does have a clearcut moral superiority, however. It defends equality of space and stands for little to zero emissions. Playing in their favour, this group does not require significant new investment either, as pedestrians and bikes can recycle the existing road infrastructure.

If we look at Lisbon, official statistics show that 57% of its residents own a car. A portion of these people might have already understood how ruinous their car is for their wallet, and how much better their life could be without it. These are ready to switch.

On the other hand, among those who do not own a car there are those who wish they had one, but they can not afford it. The moment they can, they will. It is a matter of signalling and status.

Depending on which group manages to be more convincing, politicians will either follow the current trajectory, or legislate the change.

Tertium non datur

There has been objective progress in securing more bike tracks and integrating elements of soft mobility into the logic of urban transport. Lisbon is very different today from what it used to be just three years ago, when there were no shared bike services and hardly any bike tracks.

However, the battle for mobility requires taking sides.

Drivers expect speed and a no-obstacle environment. This is the result of a century of traffic rules that have focused on car safety, not pedestrian or cyclist safety. The most emblematic specimen of this line of thinking is jaywalking — the crime consisting in a pedestrian crossing the road outside of authorised points. Drivers have enjoyed absolute priority, and the recent changes to the traffic rules that give more rights to cyclists are predictably irritating and immediately broken in the absence of police.

Cyclists are by definition slower. The maximum speed an average bicycle can achieve is 20km/hour, which is hardly ever the case in an urban environment. The speed limit for cars in Lisbon is 50km/hour, and drivers tend to interpret it as the constant speed at which they should move. On narrow one-lane streets, where the current traffic code dictates that cyclists should take the middle of the road, this logically limits drivers to the cyclist’s natural maximum of 20km/hour. If the cyclist is climbing and is not particularly fit, this speed can go down to 10 km/hour or less. The drivers’ expectation of speed and no-obstacle environment is shattered. Unless such a cyclist takes the sidewalk, which is illegal under the current code, or stops and servilely gives way to cars, drivers inevitably get ill-tempered, tailgating, honking, and verbally abusing the cyclists. This behaviour is explained by traffic psychology research that suggests driving causes people to dehumanize others and behave more aggressively to those of “lower status”.

Timid policies that do not allow a rapid switch to safe, physically separated bike tracks result in drivers and cyclists competing for the same scarce resource. Drivers’ incentive is to go faster and have no obstacles to their speed; the cyclists and pedestrians give way or are killed.

The current practice of shared roads does not offer incentives for drivers and cyclists to cooperate; rather, it creates an ideal environment for conflict. No amount of well-meaning legislation can help make cyclists safe: in the majority of cases drivers can not be scrutinised and held accountable for breaking rules. If a 1500 kg car, that serves as a thick metal armour for its driver, and a 10kg bike, that exposes the entire body of the cyclist, are competing for the same road, the slightest unintended mistake by the most cautious of drivers turns that road into a highway to the graveyard for the cyclist. Anything above 30 km per hour is lethal. If we want zero collision deaths, we need to have zero chances of such collisions, and this is achieved only if there is a physical separator between the road and the bike track. Pedestrians and cyclists should never, ever compete with cars. We need to redistribute the space giving priority to the most fragile first.

We are at a critical juncture. As with slavery, we either allow it to happen, or legislate to abolish it. Unless we unequivocally choose soft mobility based on a combination of walking, cycling and public transport, we are collectively signing obituaries for a never ending list of innocent pedestrians and cyclists.

Tertium non datur. There is no third way.

What will not work

A comfortable way to avoid taking a position and try to appease all is to promise more public transport.

Public transport alone is not a solution. It provides a major mobility grid, but it does not solve the problem of the last mile. It also requires large public investment which usually takes time to get approved and built — at the expense of daily deaths.

Public transport only becomes a solution when it is combined with the person’s ability to independently travel the last mile. When major established routes served by public transport get complimented by individual private routes taken by bicycle, we finally get the desired mobility.

We can act immediately by closing off parts of the existing roads for cyclists, and making it obligatory for public transport to allow passengers with bikes.

But why bikes?

Every pedal step you take invites the back wheel of an average bike to spin twice — which corresponds to two meters. Most of us cover half a meter with each step, which means that with exactly the same effort we become four times quicker on top of a bike. In other words, a bicycle makes us four times more efficient without any extra fossil fuels burnt, while digesting the same lunch. In fact, bikes are the most energy-efficient way of travelling that has ever been invented by humanity.

Just because bicycles have wheels, they should not be compared to motorcycles, let alone cars. Bicycles enhance the natural movement of a human, whereas motorised vehicles substitute that movement with passive seating while depleting natural resources.

An average car weighs 1500kg. An average human weighs 62kg, which is 24 times less than a car. An average bike weighs 10kg, 6 times less than a human, and 166 times less than a car. So why is it that a light object that a ten-year-old can easily move is compared to a monumental piece of metal that requires two grown up men with special equipment?

You do not need to have a degree in physics to intuit that if you add some speed, a collision with 1500kg is likely to kill you, while 10kg is not. Indeed, in 2019 (I am not looking at the exceptional 2020) 472 people died in car accidents in Portugal alone, plus 2288 were seriously injured. In the absence of cars, no cyclist killed a pedestrian.

It is thus crucial to stop mixing honey and poison. It is a fundamental error to associate cars and motorcycles with bicycles. They belong to different categories. Motorised vehicles are moving arms. Bicycles are an extension of our own bodily motion.

This is why my initial statement: if there is a road, it must have a secure, physically separated track for bicycles. Currently, the Portuguese driving code states that bicycles are equal to cars, which is considered to be a big breakthrough in mobility thinking. Instead, this is a dangerous approach suffering from path dependency. It is trying to strike a compromise with a flawed system. Bicycles need to be separated from cars. Everything else is playing an unequal game with the a potential assassin.

Why is switching to soft mobility so slow?

In one word, safety.

In Lisbon, as in many other places, once secure, separate bike tracks started to appear, the cyclists appeared, too. Let us do a simple mental exercise. If you had a 10-year old child, would you let them cycle around the neighbourhood alone? Would you be comfortable with your 70-year old mother cycling around town? Would you be calm about your friend on a wheelchair going places in current traffic? If we think about the most vulnerable among us first, we’ll soon notice that the current infrastructure is a nightmare, and it is only logical that many potential cyclists are simply afraid for their physical integrity. While waiting for the paradigm to shift, many of them find it safer to drive a car.

There is a flurry of myths that are systematically used as excuses for not switching to a bike: having to carry heavy stuff, going medium distances, having kids, climbing heights and dealing with rain. They are all secondary and have existing solutions. The elephant in the room is, again, safety, and it is resolved by rebuilding our public space around secure, separate bike tracks that at no point compete with cars.

What can we do?

The switch to soft mobility is political.

If we want more people to take up cycling, we need to have a secure infrastructure that can only be built if there is political will. The change is, consequently, uniquely political, and can be achieved only if the politicians stand to lose the elections.

Soft mobility defenders need to become a well organised interest group that can effectively communicate its demands to the politicians. This requires collective action. Collectively demanding closing streets to cars, petitioning to turn parking spaces into urban gardens and terraces, insisting on separate tracks for bicycles. These are some of the immediate ideas to turn into actionables.

Crucially, activists need to share practical tips on how to overcome bureaucratic hurdles and enact change.

To be highly specific, here is the example of the practical knowledge that most Lisboners probably lack: if all the claims submitted through the online platform (Na Minha Rua) are repeatedly rejected, what should be the next practical step? Which associations can back up citizen’s demands for a car-free street? What practical things can we collectively do to finally manage to free Baixa Chiado — the emblematic heart of hearts — from its current four lanes dedicated to cars, and return them to pedestrians and cyclists? Can Lisbon, through the actions of its civil society, make the Portuguese capital truly the greenest city of Europe, the beacon of the future? Or should the most active and idealistic of its dwellers, who see that the hair-thin sidewalks are not being turned into safe squares, give up and move to Barcelona or Paris?

I wish someone had told me…

Switching to a bike is no easy endeavour. Apart from learning to stay safe, there are popular false beliefs that are not helping. Here are my personal top three.

It is not about racing and lycra

Intimidated by the look of elegant, focused, sharp-jawed gentlemen pedalling their slimmest of tyres in their most minimalist lycra pants, I had a wrong idea about cycling. I used to perceive it not as an efficient way of getting to places, but as a sport where you have to compete with others while wearing bright synthetic fabric. What I have learnt is that the best clothes for everyday cycling are the ones you already have. The race is also only in your head: one should go at their own speed, allowing the efficiency of the wheels to quadruple whatever effort we are able to put in.

It is not you, it is the bike carrying weight

I was convinced that carrying stuff on a bike would require an olympic effort. Little did I know that attaching my tent and carrying all my camping gear in the panniers (the bags you attach over the back wheel) does not translate into more cycling labour. It is the bike that carries the weight, not you! This was counterintuitive and life-changing. I understood that the trick is to never carry anything on my back, instead distributing all the weight across the bike bags, and then using the gears wisely to go anywhere I want. Singing along is optional.

Sweating is not obligatory

Another belated discovery I have made is that when you are on a bike, as you move through the air, you create the wind, and it is always in your face courtesy of the physics of relative motion. Algarve in late June is literally a breeze, unless you get off for a walk!

As for going up, well-oiled gears will get you there, just slightly slower.

The only sweat one has is that of a cold variety, when you can hear the cars tailgating you on the shared roads with no separate track for bikes. Have I mentioned we should physically separate the drivers from the cyclists?