Perspective of the Passengers: The Bicycle Rider

This post is a continuation in my 'Perspectives' series, which will be written in the first person by a fictional commuter from the future - when autonomous transportation has fully matured. The purpose is to illustrate the ideal future, in which all the opportunities have been seized at the right moments to create the best public transit system possible. My hope in writing these speculative fictions is to demonstrate the possibilities that autonomous transit vehicles will open up for us - and hopefully inspire us to make real steps towards preparing for a similar future.

***

Which is the future of bicycles - crazy new designs (Above) or modest but technical improvements like electrical assistance and belt drives (Below)?

Alright, by now I’m sure you know the drill. My name is Bart. Hi. I’m not from your time. I’m from the future! And instead of all the other cool things I could tell you about the future, I’m here to tell you about how I get to work. Snore...

And don’t worry, I get it, even if I think this whole project is a bit weird. The most repetitive trip we make is our commutes to and from work or school or whatever, and so by making the commutes more efficient you can cut a disproportionate amount of waste out of the transportation system. Makes total sense. And it’s always the dull and uninteresting things that make a big difference in our lives. Like, for you guys in the 2010’s, you probably think that phones are the coolest and most liberating thing you’ve ever seen, right? Like, before 2000 phones were just boring appliances like anything else, but then came cell phones, and then “smart phones” and then it was totally life-changing and super exciting to talk about phones. About phones. In 10 years those things go from dumb appliance to your sign of high-tech street-cred.

Now, I’ll be honest and say that even in my time - 2043 - the morning commute doesn’t get any more love from the public than it did in your time, but I think you get my point. In a short amount of years the commute to and from work goes from a dumb habit that no one wants to even talk about ‘cus it’s so boring, to defining your whole lifestyle and world-view and all that. When cars started driving themselves, people went all crazy about what it means for your freedom and individual responsibility and your carbon footprint and everything else people argue about. They’re still arguing in my time, but not so much anymore, because people have pretty much changed as much as they’re going to. The trends have stabilized, in smart-person-speak.

Some people take Commuter Trains. Some people take Light Rail. Some people take a bus or carpool or even sit alone in their own private taxis. But as for me and everyone else who knows what’s good for them, we ride our bikes.

Future bicycles

Bikes come in some amazing shapes and sizes these days. There are the old-school cyclists who still ride bikes with a metal chain and a bunch of gears. Never gets old, I guess. Then there are guys like me, who replaced the metal chain with a belt and never looked back. Belt drives last longer than metal chains, don’t stretch, don’t need grease or oil, and don’t get all jammed up in a derailleur because they don’t work with a derailleur - they’re either single-speed bikes or use a transmission inside the rear hub. Some transmissions still have numbered gears, but most – like mine – are Continuous Variable Speed transmissions, which adjust the ratio of input and output without using fixed gear settings. This stuff already existed in your era, so don’t act all surprised about it.

 Examples of better bicycle technology available in the 2010's include the Nuvincini Continuously Variable Planet Drive (Above) which is a gear-less transmission contained within the hub of a bicycle wheel, and a belt drive (Below) as sold by IKEA.

Also stuff from your era – electric bikes. These things were just starting out in the late 2010’s, and by my day they’re very affordable and commonplace. In fact, a majority of the bikes I see in the city are electric bikes, and for good reason too. These bikes work by capturing the kinetic energy of the rider’s pedaling action, and then release it as needed to smooth out the energy requirements of the ride. Like, when you would usually apply the friction brakes the bike captures the energy with regenerative braking, then uses that energy to get you up to speed again when you start pedaling. Or when you go down a hill, that excess energy is captured and stored until you need to go up the next hill. So basically you never need to pedal any harder than is comfortable, and you never need to break a sweat. This is super important, because who wants to show up to work all sweaty? I don’t mind it, but my coworkers do, and they let me know it.

And it’s not just body odor that is solved with the electric bike. A lot of people used to be really concerned that they weren’t fit enough to ride a bike, for fun or for commuting. Electric bikes take fear out of the equation, because anyone with an electric bike can ride for miles and miles, not just the spandex and granola crowd. So like, before electric bikes you’d only see a certain type of person commuting on their bike – young, fit, energetic, fearless, and handsome. You know, like me. But now you can charge your bike overnight and it will do most of the work for you, and so anyone could be a bicycle commuter, and any type of bike frame could be a commuter bike. I have a co-worker who rides six miles to work on her beach cruiser, complete with chopper handles and a banana seat. Totally impractical on its own, but because it’s also fitted with a robotic back wheel that turns it into an electric bike, it works.

I look at it this way – It’s sort of like how people used to drive different types of cars. Sports cars, commuter cars, sedans, coupes, pick-up trucks, jeeps, hummers, rock crawlers, tanks, etc. People had their made-up reasons for “needing” that sort of car, but in the end it was all about personality and style. With autonomous cars squeezing driving out of commuting (and long-distance travel, errands, going out on the town, and generally anything non-recreational), there is practically zero personality left on the highways anymore – and all of it has gone to bikes. Totally cool.

Electric bikes are also important for one other big reason: Self driving bikes.

Yeah, I know you guys used to laugh about this. Here’s an April Fool’s Day video Google made in 2016 about self-driving bikes, and I’m sure you all laughed at it and said ‘who would ever think up such a stupid idea?’

 And yeah, if you think about it like the google video portrays it, it does sound totally stupid. So here’s how self-driving bikes really work:

They only self-drive when nobody’s on it.

Bikes are small, light pieces of equipment. Most weigh under 35 pounds - batteries, motors, and computers included. And most adults weigh over 100 pounds, and a lot of us weigh over 200 pounds. It’s all muscle, baby. So to think that a little bike that weighs between a third to a sixth of what its rider weighs could actively balance and steer the rider around is obviously wrong. It’s like you trying to give a piggy-back ride to a fully-grown walrus – or cow or whatever. Make up your own metaphor and laugh at it all you like. I do.

But once nobody’s on it, it’s a whole new ballgame. The bike is very light for a fully self-contained vehicle, and the motors and gyroscopes don’t need to be very powerful in order to make it move or stand up. And because nobody could ever be on it while it self-drives, it doesn’t ever need to go that fast either. Self-driving bikes rarely go any faster than walking speed (4 – 5 mph), and so there’s plenty of time for the computer to cope with obstacles and navigation.

What this means is that it is entirely possible for an owner of a self-driving bike to ride it to his or her destination like it’s a normal electric bike, and then just leave it standing outside - no kickstand or anything. The bike will have charged its batteries while the rider was pedaling, so it will have a full enough charge to go off on its own and find a bicycle charging station. These are usually found in old parking garages or old parking lots which have since been repurposed as autonomous (car) taxi staging areas, because most staging areas already are designed to recharge the electric taxies.

If this seems like a luxury to you, consider this picture:

Yeah, it’s not from ‘Murica, but if we Yankees got just as serious about our bikes as the people in Belgium, we’d have the same problem with bicycles we used to have with non-autonomous cars – too many parked vehicles:

There used to be bike-share ‘stations’ situated around urban areas, where rideshare bikes would just sit on valuable sidewalk space until someone decided they needed a bike to rent for an hour or whatever. These were convenient if you were going someplace near another bikeshare station (a fact you would have to have known beforehand) because you’d have to return the bike to a similar station. Sure it was called sharing, but you couldn’t just leave it lying around wherever. This little fact meant that bikesharing suffered from all the same problems as transit did in in the non-autnomous era, of only connecting a few limited stations with each other (as opposed to actually serving an area). They were the areas that the statistically average person would need to go to, but no one is statistically average.

A bike-share station -  full of bicycles which are, at the moment, unneeded - taking up valuable sidewalk space in downtown Salt Lake City in the mid-2010's (Above). A map of bike station locations, which were the only locations where shared bikes could be rented out or returned (Below)

Now, when you need to rent a bike for just an hour or two, there are apps you can use to summon a bike, and the bike will make its way to you in a matter of minutes. You’ll still have to ride it like any other electric bike, but once you’re done with it you can just step off of it and leave it there, and the thing will go back to wherever it came from. And it probably doesn’t take me explaining it to you for you to figure out that this makes bike sharing much more popular than it was in the 2010’s. But I will explain it to you anyway because I’m not sure you’ve imagined just how popular it really is. Imagine bike ‘bike to work day,’ and double that. Now double that again, and that’s how many people are on bikes all the time in Salt Lake City. (I realized I could have just said quadruple it, but that isn’t as effective as what I wrote. #LiteraryDevices) (That is how you use hashtags, right? I’m trying to speak a dead language here, so cut me some slack!)

Navigation Apps are also a huge reason as to why these robo-bikeshares are so much more popular than bikeshare stations. These apps know your destination, your preferences in mode and travel routes, pricing options of various modes and routes, and are tapped into the ‘internet of things’ so that they are aware of both present and future traffic. So when these apps suggest that you take a bike, do it from this company, and it will be shorter and cheaper than all these other options, people usually listen and comply without thought. Before vehicle and bike sharing, people had to make their own irrational decisions about how to get places and what route to take. Now nobody (nobody work speaking of, anyway) makes big choices about how to get places and what routes to take, and nobody has their own private car just lying around waiting for them. Apps and computer logic reign supreme, and the amount of wasted time and effort in the world is at an all-time low.

Street Design

“So,” you may ask, “if bikes are so much more popular, how do you address the added demand for bicycle infrastructure?” ‘Well!’ I respond, ‘That’s a fantastic question! I was hoping you’d ask that exact question so that I could answer it!’ (Or at least the guy who assigned this essay to me hoped I would answer it, so I can only assume you’d be the type of person to ask it.)

The answer is not more bike lanes. With human-driven cars banned from most residential and urban neighborhoods, painted lines are no longer needed on the roads – so bike lanes would be sort of a waste. Basically, we keep all the same traffic rules that we used to keep in our cars, but now we do it on our bikes. Slow traffic keep right, pass only on the left, don’t go out into the middle of the road, and yada yada. This may sound like complete chaos, but hear me out:

Have you ever heard of the Naked Streets Movement? You'd remember if you had - It's got a name you can't forget, which is the whole point. Naked streets, aside from being a fun phrase to say, are streets that aren't cluttered with all kinds of traffic-control devices like painted lines or excessive signs. Like, ask yourself why do we paint yellow lines down the middle of streets when we all know we're supposed to keep to the right? Or why do we post speed limits when its proven that we blatantly ignore arbitrary speed limits and drive/ride at the speed that makes us feel comfortable? Of course, when I say 'why do we?' I really mean 'why did we?' because in the year 2043, we no longer do those things. And here's why: these traffic control devices were a regulatory solution to a design problem; they were bandages on a patient that needed surgery. People's behavior on these roads was based on the design of the roads themselves, not how some signs or painted lines told them how to behave. You cannot change human behavior through regulation, only by environment. You want people to go no faster than 25 miles per hour? Make a road that is so curvy, so hilly, so narrow, so poorly-paved, or so crowded in by roadside environment that people will be terrified to go any faster.

Or you can just outlaw human-drivers and then program robot cars to go no faster than a set speed limit. That's what we did, and it was cheaper.

But the message of the naked streets movement came through, even as - or rather, especially as cars were transitioning to full autonomy. Autonomous, connected vehicles do not need painted lines to coordinate traffic flows. They don't need warning signs to tell them how to behave. Striping out lanes for cars became a total waste of money, and so many cities just stopped doing it. And then came the next thought - why separate out special spaces for bikes and cars with paint, when bicyclists ignore traffic control devices even worse than car-drivers ever did?

Yeah, our reputation proceeds us. Local governments knew we cyclists were not going to follow traffic laws any better now that we were the only humans left on the roads than when we had to share roadspace with distracted and dangerous human drivers. And since autonomous cars need to be both in the middle of the road (where they can go fast) and also pulled all the way over to the curb (where they pick up and drop off their passengers) it was clear that there would be no real advantage of striping out a 'safe zone' for bikes in the way that traditional 'bike lanes' would work. Instead, it would be safer to remove the security that painted lines would offer to cyclists, and to let them think through their situations out on the open road.

 Which road is safer? Do signs and stripes (Above) actually make a difference in safety or only in liability? Do roads without signs or paint (Below) make users pay more attention to driving?

And so that is what we do. Our streets consist of two curbs, some width of asphalt in between, and yield signs at the intersections if our street is of lesser priority than the one crossing it. And we figure it out. It helps that our bicycles cannot go more than 25-ish miles per hour, so any accidents we have won't be all that severe, and it especially helps that all the cars we could collide with are computer-driven, meaning it is almost always the bike hitting the car now (much safer than the other way around) when that type of accident happens. It doesn't happen nearly so often as you may think.

Of course, this is only for the side-streets. Main urban arterials, such as State Street, are like mini-freeways: designed only for cars and trucks, with amazingly-high speed limits, often built with grade-separated junctions at the busiest intersections, and no space given to bicycles at all. If you need to get to a specific destination on State Street on a bike, you'll only use State Street for the last block of your journey. Main Street, which runs parallel to State Street just one block to the west, is considered a local street, and so is designed for both bicycles and cars. Often, there are more bicycles than cars on Main Street, because the cars are behaving in exactly the opposite way - sticking to the car-oriented State Street until the very last block. The difference is that cars will operate in mixed traffic for their block-long journey on Main Street, whereas we bicyclists must ride slowly down the sidewalks of State Street for the last block. Not a big deal, really, but it rubs some purists the wrong way. Be grateful for what you've got, I say.

All this follows the design philosophies of the 'superblock', where all non-local traffic is pushed to the outside of a multi-block conglomerate, leaving the smaller inner streets to be used for local traffic and pedestrian uses. Again - I feel like I'm repeating myself in this essay an awful lot - this is not a new concept. It was around in your day, only you people haven't put these ideas into practice yet!

 The Superblock model, as developed for Barcelona, Spain, in the 2010's. 

My Commute by bike

So, yeah, my commute. Let's talk about that.

I ride from my house in South Salt Lake to a street called 6th East. Or 600 East, if you prefer. The Mormon Street Grid system confuses outsiders, so I'd better explain that a street with the words 'east' or 'west' in the name actually runs north-south, and that the 'east' or 'west' refers to how close it will get to Temple Square at its closest point (6th East is 6 blocks east of Temple Square).  Like every other street in the grid, 6th East is perfectly straight for miles and miles, and travels uninterrupted from the sprawling suburban blocks of the valley straight into Downtown. But 6th East is a particularly great street for cycling, for 2 reasons. The first reason is that 7th East is another urban arterial car-only street, meaning a lot of bicycle traffic is pushed over to 6th East. I enjoy riding with a lot of other people; I like seeing who's riding and why, how far they're going and what kind of rides they've got. The sense of community is great - and it also helps that the larger the group of cyclists waiting at a stoplight, the faster the light will change for us (traffic signals have finally become smart enough to recognize people, not vehicles). This makes it faster to get across the many east-west running arterial streets, such as 21st South, 17th South, and 13th South, which have traffic signals.

The second reason that 6th East is so great is where it ends. 6^th east ends at the south entrance of Liberty Park, at the intersection with 13th South. After entering the park, you need to make a hard right and go counter-clockwise around loop on the park’s perimeter. In the old days when people thought it was OK to leave their cars lying around unattended (parked) for hours and hours everywhere they went, this loop was a road for cars to drive and park on with a wide sidewalk for pedestrians, cyclists, roller-skaters, and everyone else to use on the side. In my day, now that cars can drop off their human cargoes and drive off, this loop has been re-purposed into a strictly pedestrian facility. The road is for everything with wheels, such as skate boards, scooters, roller blades, skate-skis, and bicycles, white the sidewalk is for everything without wheels (walking and speed-walking, essentially). Some people use this for their morning exercise (once around the track is just under 1.5 miles) but many people are like me and use it as just another link in the route to work. I ride from the south end up to the north end - and there I pull out and get off my bike, because the bike part of my commute is over.

 The circuit around Liberty Park when cars were allowed to drive and park on it.

Bicycle Garages

Despite the amazing convenience of self-driving bikes, I and many other people had decided not to buy one. They’re too expensive and aren’t necessary for people who like to have their own bike and not share it. The only problem is that if your bike isn’t self-driving, then it isn’t self-parking either. So where to leave your bike? If you have a generous employer, perhaps they will pay for a place to keep your bike. Or you could pay a high rent for a downtown bike storage locker in the basement of some building. Or, you could do what I do, and leave your bike at a public bike garage and ride a streetcar the rest of the way into downtown.

At the north end of Liberty Park, an unassuming single-story building with a flat solar-panel roof sits beside the end of the Liberty Park streetcar line. This building has wide doors with a prominent security camera fitted overhead which scans the faces of everyone entering the building. If the person entering the building does not have a membership, or leaves with a different bike than he or she entered with, the on-site security is notified immediately. This building is the Liberty Park Bike Garage, one of three public bike garages funded by Salt Lake City’s “Denser Downtown” initiative. It’s sort of like a public library, except that instead of having shelves of books owned by the library which card-carrying citizens can check out, the bike garage has shelves of bikes owned by card-carrying citizens who ‘check them in’ while they take the streetcar into downtown to work.

Bicycle garages have existed for a very long time. Here’s one from the city of Delft in the Netherlands, which is much more extensive than the Liberty Park Bike Garage but shows that we haven’t really invented anything new in Salt Lake City:

 Like the Delft Bicycle Parking Facility, the Liberty Park Bike Garage uses two-level shelves filled with staggered-height bicycle drawers. These drawers slide in and out of their shelf and are counter-balanced, so as to require very little strength from the rider. No locks are needed, as the on-site security is extremely efficient at discouraging and catching all theft. Instead, just as with the autonomous bike, you can simply leave your bicycle on the shelf and head out to the streetcar platform without worry.

Salt Lake City has three bicycle garages, each located on a TRAX line. The first one constructed was by the fairgrounds on North Temple Street and the Jordan River. It was built there because that is where the Jordan River Parkwaytrail system intersects with the TRAX Airport line at the Fairpark station. The bike racks in the area were totally inadequate, and the city planners decided to try something new. The Fairpark Bike Garage – designed identically to what the Liberty Park Bike Garage would one day be – was such a success that two new facilities were planned, and two new streetcar lines would be extended out to serve them. These became the Jordan River Bike Garage and the Liberty Park Bike Garage, with similarly-named TRAX lines connecting them with downtown. Together, these three facilities capture the incoming bicycle traffic from the north (Fairpark), the west and southwest (Jordan River), and the east and southeast (Liberty Park), and convert the many hundreds of individual vehicle-trips into succinct, well-contained TRAX trips. TRAX cars depart every minute or so for downtown – mostly to the MAIN line, but also to the University and the three main east-west lines through the downtown area (on 7^thSouth, 4^th South, and 2^nd South).

Crude map of where the 3 Salt Lake City Bike Garages are located in relation to Downtown. Check out THIS interactive map for a closer look.

Riding on the TRAX Streetcar Grid

My commute takes me along the 4^th south line, creating the following series of destination markers on my TRAX car:

Route markers displayed on a TRAX car traveling from Liberty Park to Salt Lake Central Station (Above), and a key to the routes defined by single letters (Below)

 If these make no sense to you, check out the essay submitted just before mine. To everyone else who paid attention, you’ll see very clearly that my car will travel along the Liberty Park TRAX line until reaching 700 South, where it will continue north on the “N” route to 400 South. There it will turn west and follow 400 South on the “F” and “E” routes, until it reaches Salt Lake Central Station. After that, the car will get a new set of orders from UTA headquarters based on real-time traffic demand – but by that point I will have gotten off at my stop and won’t be around to care.

Most people don’t think this way anyway, myself included. All I need to know is that my stop is located on the “F” route, so that’s the only marker I look for. Same for going home after work – All I need to look out for is the “LP” in a pink rectangle meaning the Liberty Park TRAX line. It’s a pretty decent system, I think. It combines just the right amount of specific destination information without needing to spell out the name of every TRAX station along the route every TRAX car plans to travel.

My streetcar ride usually lasts about 10 minutes. That’s long enough that after my ride I prefer to sit down – which is usually pretty easy to do since Liberty Park is the beginning of the line and the TRAX car hasn’t had a chance to get crowded yet. 10 minutes is just the right amount of time for me to scan through my morning emails and alerts on my mobile screen before arriving at my job. This is actually a much larger selling point than it may seem to you, because you don’t live in a time when everyone rides in cars rather than drives them and can look at emails and messages whenever they want. Bicyclists have tried a variety of ways to become just as connected as people in taxis and trains – such as augmented reality glasses and special mounting devices for their mobile screens on their handlebars – but nothing really compares to being able to give your full attention to what you’re reading. Before I began using TRAX to get the last 2 miles through downtown, I would get into work, holding my bike, and be totally ignorant of what my car-riding co-workers knew from their morning news and messages. I used to have to spend several minutes getting up to speed for the day and wouldn’t be able to chat with people about work assignments as I walked in in the same way that my car-riding co-workers always did. This phenomena of ‘arriving blind’ became a well-known disadvantage of being a bicycle commuter.

Well, no more! I decided that my time could be better spent and that biking didn’t need to have any disadvantages taxi-riding didn’t have. So, rather than ride 6 minutes through downtown directly to my workplace (where I used to rent out a bike parking spot), I got an access card to the Liberty Park Bike Garage for a small fee (which also includes TRAX fare into downtown), and spend 10 minutes on the train doing useful work. Yeah, it takes a little longer to get to work, but in that time I can be doing work I would have had to do at work anyway, so I might as well get it done before my time becomes extra valuable.

And it looks like many other people agree with my choice. I’ve been hearing talk of building a second bicycle garage in Liberty Park on the other side of the TRAX station, but this new one would be 2 levels tall to account for all the future demand. It’s a great idea, and couldn’t come soon enough. Bicycle garages and good transit connections are just as important as self-driving and electrically-powered bikes are for making bicycles attractive means of transportation to the lazy public. People only want to do things that are convenient for them. Can’t blame them for that – but if one little detail makes them uncomfortable, such as needing to exert themselves pedaling, needing to pay high prices for downtown bike parking, or even needing to navigate crowded downtown streets not meant for newbie riders, then they fall back to their old comfortable taxi-riding ways and never look up again. Cycling in the age of autonomous vehicles isn’t about safety or efficiency or any of that – it’s about making cycling totally convenient by replacing as many unpleasant parts as possible with technological comforts.

Conclusions

Not everything in the future is automated or robotic. We humanoids who live here (here as in the future) are just as human-y as our species has always been. Cars used to be a way to be individuals in a society – an owned transport that portrayed your personality as much as it conveyed your body. But with cars going the way of the robot, something new had to take its place.

I can’t lie – it was called the autonomous taxi. People change with the times, but not by very much. But even though most people are driven to work in driverless cars, more people than ever before are ditching the car and hoping on bicycles as one barrier to convenience falls after another. In the same way that cars were revolutionary for their time – everyone can learn to drive! – bicycles are now experiencing the same thing. Anyone can use a bicycle to get anywhere, no sweat, tears, or blood. It’s a great way to stay physically active, mentally alert, and become more aware of your surroundings – both in places and people. Bicycling will always remain its own special little community within the larger transportation world, but we’ve gone from being the exclusive spandex-and-granola-eaters-only club to being an inclusive, come-as-you-are-and-we’ll-love-you-anyway club.

And that’s the true beauty of any technological leap, I think.

Share this post