11 Reasons Bike Lanes Are Controversial, and Why They Shouldn’t Be
Protected bike lanes have found themselves at the center of a culture war.
Yes, that’s right. Bike lanes.
I’ve seen it here in New York City, where a loud, small neighborhood group stalls fight against bike lane installation, like this group that even spent money on ads against a bike lane in Queens.
I’ve heard about it in Toronto, where they’re even thinking of tearing up bike lanes, which their city’s data shows will make traffic worse.
Worst of all, the current U.S. Secretary of Transportation said they’re pausing all federal funding for bike and pedestrian infrastructure. (But of course, they’ll somehow find tens of billions of dollars available for highways.)
This is all nuts because protected bike lanes are a win for everybody. They give people a healthier, economical option to get around. They can take cars off the road, reducing traffic and resulting in less air pollution.
We should be encouraging biking as transportation.
In today’s article, I’m going to look at the data and bust the 11 common myths and talking points against bike lanes.
Explanations For Why We Don’t See The Value of Bike Lanes
Why is there so much misinformation about cycling as transportation? Here are some ideas.
We’ve Built Our Society Around Cars
We’ve built our society around cars, which means this is the lens through which most of us view transportation. We’re so used to traffic and car violence that we don’t question it. It has become invisible. We are like fish who don’t see water.
This also means we fail to see transportation through the lens of those who don’t drive, which is a third of the U.S.
Many of us can’t imagine the needs of a cyclist because they’ve never taken a bike to work.
The Propaganda of Big Industries Clouds Us
There is a lot of propaganda around the idea of cars being a symbol of freedom. The fossil fuel and automobile industries have spent billions to make us think that we should have more and bigger cars with wider roads.
They have for decades bought politicians on both sides of the aisle. Today, their influence over right-wing political “think tanks” and foundations like The Heritage Foundation stand out. This is the group that wrote Project 2025. These ideas are what the current regime is now implementing.
The United States is Anti-City
Finally, I think culturally, the United States has an anti-city slant. This isn’t a new idea. From Jefferson to FDR who displayed disdain for cities and a preference for rurality, to the “white flight” of the mid-20th century, to today’s political rhetoric that portrays cities as dangerous, crime-ridden places, our culture has a bias against urban living and urban solutions.
Bike lanes are seen as a “city thing” that doesn’t belong in “real America,” even though cycling infrastructure benefits communities of all sizes and political leanings.
These are just my ideas and I don’t have research to support them, but the point is our society has created a storm of misinformation about cycling as transportation.
Perception: Bike Lanes Take Away a Car Lane and Therefore Make Traffic Worse
When we install protected bike lanes, the space carved out to make them means either taking away a car lane or a parking lane. When you take away a car lane, the logic goes, that will worsen traffic.
But this often just isn’t what happens.
Sadly, even the current Secretary of Transportation either believes or is pretending to believe this.
Reality: Bike Lanes Give Another Option, Which Means Fewer Car Trips
When you build protected bike lanes, more people bike. This has been shown over and over. For example, one study, Lessons from the Green Lanes: Evaluating Protected Bike Lanes in the U.S. looked at the effects of protected bike lanes across five U.S. Cities. (I like this study because it covers many cities and settings.)
In their intercept surveys of bicyclists, they found that “10% would have made the trip by another mode” if it weren’t for the protected bike lane.
The same study looked at the hard data. They found that the protected bike lanes increased ridership by 21% to 171%.
When More People Bike, Fewer People Drive
This means there are fewer cars on the road. This means less traffic.
And that’s exactly what happens.
A study on The Role of Walking and Cycling in Reducing Congestion found that on some protected bike lanes, like an Upper West Side bike lane in New York, car travel reduced from 4.5 minutes to 3 minutes.
In other cases, traffic stays about the same. Of course, there’s nuance to this. A poorly designed bike lane that people won’t use but takes away a car lane could make traffic worse.
The important point here is that if you build great bike infrastructure, more people bike and fewer people drive.
This is why Sean Duffy’s tweet is so outrageous. Until they took away a car lane to make more space, the bridge didn’t have enough space for all the cyclists and pedestrians. It’s weird to call it a “war on the working class” when walking and cycling are both more economical options than driving.
Perception: Bike Lanes Take Away Parking Spots, Which Makes Parking Harder
The same logic applies to parking.
Reality: Bike Lanes Reduce Car Reliance, Therefore Reducing The Need for Street Parking
Yes, you may take away parking spots by building bike lanes, but more biking and less driving mean less demand for parking.
Perception: Bike Lanes Make Streets More Dangerous
First, it’s important to distinguish between bike lanes and protected bike lanes. I’m talking about protecting bike lanes, where there’s a barrier between cars and bikes.
I think the logic of this argument is that neither drivers nor pedestrians like having to worry about cyclists.
We live in a car’s world, so changes to that framework are jarring. We’re not used to e-bikes flying by.
This talking point may also not be as widespread an opinion as I think. The Lessons from Green Lanes study asked drivers how they perceived safety before and after they installed protected bike lanes.
- 37% thought driving safety had increased
- 30% thought there had been no change
- 26% thought safety decreased
- 7% had no opinion.
Many drivers prefer protected bike lanes from a safety perspective.
Aside from the perceptions, the facts show that protected bike lanes make streets safer.
Reality: Protected Bike Lanes Make Streets Safer
Data from the New York City Department of Transportation has shown that protected bike lanes reduce total deaths and serious injuries by 18.1 percent, and pedestrian deaths and serious injuries by 29.1 percent. For seniors, the risk goes down by 39%.
Separated bike lanes nationwide, according to U.S. Department of Transportation stats, decrease cars crashing into cyclists by 53%. This makes sense because so many crashes happen when cars try to go around cyclists and into another lane.
Data across 12 large cities published in the Journal of Transport & Health found that cities with protected bike lanes had 44% fewer deaths and 50% fewer serious injuries than the average American city.
Perception: Bike Lanes Are Always Empty
One of the most common complaints you’ll hear from bike lane opponents is that they always seem empty. “I drove past that bike lane five times today and didn’t see a single cyclist!” the argument goes. Critics point to these seemingly vacant lanes as evidence that bike infrastructure is a waste of public space and tax dollars.
Reality: A Lack of Congestion is A Sign of Efficiency
This misunderstands what efficient infrastructure looks like.
Cyclists, unlike cars, don’t have to sit and wait in traffic. This means you might see fewer cyclists at any given moment because they’re not sitting there waiting. But the total number throughout is what matters.
This logic applies to bus-only lanes. A bus lane that moves 50 people every few minutes in vehicles that pass quickly might look “empty” most of the time, but it’s moving far more people per hour than a car lane packed bumper-to-bumper.
The efficiency shouldn’t be measured by how congested the infrastructure appears, but by how many people it serves and how effectively it moves them.
A protected bike lane can move more people in less space than a car lane. That’s just geometry.
Perception: The U.S. is Too Sprawled for Cycling As Transportation
This is the “We’re not Copenhagen!” argument. It’s true, we’re not. The U.S. is very sprawled, and it’s a big problem, and it no doubt means that in many areas it’s harder to make effective bike infrastructure.
Instead of talking about where it won’t work, let’s talk about where it will.
Reality: 56% of Trips in the U.S. Are Under Three Miles
According to National Stats, 56% of trips in the U.S. are under three miles, and 28% of trips are under a mile. As sprawled as we are, the majority of our trips are within biking distance.
That means even in “sprawled” areas, there’s potential.
But let’s not even look at the sprawl. Let’s look at the cities. In New York, the fight for bike lanes and transportation that prioritizes non-car trips is as tough as anywhere, as congestion pricing debates have shown us.
Second, we’re not Copenhagen, but our big cities are comparatively dense.
New York has a population density of 29,300 people per square mile.
San Francisco has 18,630.
Cambridge, outside of Boston, has 18,500.
Huntington Park in LA County has 18,200.
All of these are above Copenhagen, with a population density of about 18,000 people per square mile.
Sprawl is a problem, but it’s not what’s keeping our cities from being more bikeable.
This is not just for big cities
I don’t have the data to support this. However, even in suburban and rural areas, I’m sure there are popular 1-3 mile routes where there would be demand for cycling if it could be made safe with protected bike lanes. It’s not about connecting an entire small town. But maybe from downtown to the school, there should be a bike lane. The Bike Bus movement demonstrates the demand for this.
Perception: Bike Lanes Are “Woke”
The current regime and the Department of Transportation have lumped bike lanes in with their war against “woke ideology.”
Duffy, the head of USDOT, wrote in March, “The previous administration flouted Congress in an attempt to push a radical social and environmental agenda on the American people.”
Since then he has ordered a review of all green infrastructure grants, which includes all federal bike lane funding.
Reality: Yes, More Biking and Less Driving Means Children In Poor, Urban Areas Will Have Less Asthma, Lung Disease, and Learning Deficiencies. Also, Climate Change is Real and We Should Be Fighting Against It.
The propaganda on this is dizzying and deafening. Let’s dissect exactly what this refers to.
Right now, we know that excess cars in cities lead to high levels of air pollution. We know that air pollution “particulate matter” directly leads to increased levels of asthma, lung disease, and learning deficiencies in children.
One of the ideas of encouraging cycling and walking with “green infrastructure” is to encourage people to get out of their cars, so we can have clean air. Right now, children often have health conditions simply because of where they were born.
This is the type of thing activists refer to when they say, “environmental justice.” It’s the idea that, no matter where you were born or how much money you have, breathing clean air is a right, not something reserved for wealthier classes.
Helping kids breathe, according to Duffy, is “a radical social and environmental agenda.”
That’s on a local level. On a broader level, we know that excess cars and their emissions are destroying the environment as we know it and helping lead to a mass extinction event.
It’s asinine that the federal government wants our children to, *checks notes*…
- face more extreme heat,
- flooding,
- drought,
- wildfires,
- and the widespread destruction of crops and wildlife.
Perception: Bike Lanes Cost a Lot. “Who’s Gonna Pay For It!”
Another one of the most common objections is that people don’t want their tax dollars going to it.
Reality: Bike Lanes, Compared to Other Transportation Investments, Are a Great Deal. They Also Save Society Money Elsewhere.
According to the Urban Institute, in 2021, state and local governments spent $206 billion on highways and roads. In 2022, the federal government spent $52 billion.
And no, this isn’t paid for by the gas tax.
As the Congressional Budget Office writes, “Historically, most federal spending for highways has been paid for by revenues that are credited to…the Highway Trust Fund. For more than two decades, those revenues have fallen short of federal spending on highways, prompting transfers from the Treasury’s general fund to the trust fund to make up the difference.”
These hundreds of billions of dollars make it so we’re going to be stuck in traffic and with heaps of concrete covering our cities for generations to come.
This doesn’t include other subsidies that go to driving, from fossil fuel subsidies to favorable insurance terms, which I detail more in this article on the hidden costs of cars.
It’s not clear how much we spend on bike infrastructure, but it’s obviously a lot less. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) provided approximately $3 billion per year (for five years) that can be used specifically for pedestrian and bicycle safety infrastructure. So that’s $3 billion, sort of, compared to $52 billion.
On a specific level, one mile of protected bike lane in ultra-expensive New York costs about $600,000 per mile.
Meanwhile, reconstructing an existing lane of urban highway costs about $7.7 million per mile, according to Federal statistics, as reported by Strong Towns.
Protected bike lanes are a better deal for taxpayers, and we should spend more federal money on them.
Bike Infrastructure Saves Money on Healthcare Costs
As reported in 2016 by Reuters Health, protected bike lanes provided “a better return on investment than some direct health treatments,” like dialysis. Cycling is good for us.
This means less of our money and resources go to healthcare.
Better bike infrastructure also means fewer crashes at the hands of cars. We know that car insurance often doesn’t cover the full costs of car violence, which means these costs get passed on to taxpayers.
Bike lanes save lives.
Bike Infrastructure Will Save Money on Environmental Destruction
Of course, bike lanes alone will not halt the effects of environmental destruction. But they do play several roles. They take cars off the roads. They also allow us to prepare city environments for increased flood risks. Instead of using so much public space for roads, we can add more green infrastructure that can absorb rainwater and combat the urban heat island effect. The former means lower chances of floods, the latter means lower electric bills in the summer.
We Should Be Paying People to Bike!
From a strictly economic perspective, we should be subsidizing and investing in bike infrastructure more. Why do we have subsidies for electric cars but not electric bikes? Why do we spend hundreds of billions on roads and not make cycling a safe option on those roads?
This piece in Momentum Magazine lays out this argument.
All of this aside, they provide a public good. Protected bike lanes give us an option to get around that’s good for our health and costs way less money than driving. That’s what taxes are for, in theory. They are to provide public services that are good for society and its people.
Perception: Cycling is For Wealthy People and “Elitist”
The urban dweller who bikes to work conjures a certain image of a white city elitist.
Critics paint cycling advocates as out-of-touch urbanites who don’t understand the transportation needs of “real Americans.”
Reality: Protected Bike Lanes Support Low-Income Communities Most
The data tells a completely different story.
In New York City, according to Transportation Alternatives report Spatial Equity, districts with more people of color typically have lower levels of car ownership. And areas with lower levels of car ownership had…
- Slower buses
- Higher asthma
- Worse traffic (those driving through caused most of the traffic)
In other words, districts with people of color and lower levels of car ownership, “suffer the harms of car traffic despite not owning cars.”
These are the communities that need other options the most.
In New York City, the average car owner makes twice as much money as those who don’t, according to Hunter College stats.
The average cost of car ownership is now $1000 per month, according to AAA statistics.
In New York, those who live in public housing or who are on food stamps can get an unlimited use Citi Bike membership for just $5/month. This is especially helpful in areas that aren’t as well connected by public transit, which again will likely be lower-income areas.
The “elitist” framing gets it exactly backwards. What’s elitist is designing society around private car ownership, a transportation system that costs thousands of dollars annually to participate in.
Perception: Bike Lanes Hurt Businesses!
If you take away parking or a car lane, then the people who drive to the business won’t come, the logic goes. But it doesn’t hold up.
Reality: Bike Lanes Help Businesses
As Rachel Quednau discussed in her article, How Bike Lanes Benefit Businesses, from New York to San Francisco to Seattle, bike infrastructure led to more sales receipts for local businesses.
One explanation for this comes from the Lessons from the Green Lanes study. They found that “nearly three times as many residents felt that the protected bike lanes had led to an increase in the desirability of living in their neighborhood, as opposed to a decrease in desirability.”
When you don’t design streets around cars, the streets feel safer to walk and bike, so more people spend time there. You accommodate all users.
Perception: Bike Lanes Cause Gentrification
Gentrification is a complicated word, and try to dissect it in this article on solutions to gentrification.
The perception here is simple. “Gentrified” neighborhoods have also installed more bike shares and bike lanes in recent years.
Reality: Bike Lanes Do Make Places More Desirable, But They Don’t Cause Gentrification
There’s a lot that goes into this. So much so that it go its own article.
First, historically poor areas have worse sidewalks, virtually no bike infrastructure, less green space, and a number of other obvious injustices.
They’re more car-dependent with worse transit, as I already mentioned.
Any new development often comes with conditions of investing in some kind of improvement. That could be a public green space, a wider sidewalk, or a bike lane.
It’s not the bike lane that’s causing gentrification. They’re often a condition for developers set by community boards, the ones who fear gentrification.
It’s a real fear, and out of the scope of this article, but it’s not the bike lane that’s driving displacement.
The end stage of this logic would be that working-class city communities shouldn’t do anything to improve their neighborhood, because that would make the neighborhood more “desirable,” and then wealthier people would move in.
(And yes, I’ve heard this among some New Yorkers who want their streets to be “more violent again.”)
That’s not the answer to real concerns of displacement.
There’s also the argument that people in these communities don’t bike and don’t want bike lanes.
My response to this is simple: of course they don’t bike. The streets aren’t designed and aren’t safe for biking. The success of New York’s $5/month Citi Bike membership for those in public housing or on food stamps demonstrates that people, regardless of race and class, would bike if it were a safe, affordable, accessible option.
Perception: It’s Too Hot/Cold To Bike Where I Live
“You can’t bike in New York! It’s too cold! I can’t bike in Arizona! I can’t bike in the North Pole!”
Reality: In Many Instances, People Adapt
Of course, you’re not going to bike in a snowstorm. (You probably won’t drive either.) You also won’t bike if you live in Arizona and it’s 110 degrees outside.
But two points:
- The seasonal ebbs and flows in ridership don’t mean it isn’t still useful infrastructure
- In most places and most weather conditions, people adapt. Edmonton has a strong cycling culture. Austin, Texas has a growing number of bike commuters, despite extremely hot summers. In most of the U.S., treacherous roads are a bigger deterrent than the weather.
What Did I Miss?
Use the comments below to chime in!
If you disagree, I recommend you follow me on TikTok. I go live a few times a week to talk and debate. You’re more than welcome to share your perspective. It’s through these conversations that I feel like I’ve come to understand these issues a lot more.
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