Some of us in transportation planning know that making our streets work better for people on bike is really about about creating communities that are more fun, sustainable, equitable, have more social trust, uses less land, have stronger economies, and more. Our streets are almost always the biggest source of public land in our cities, land that could be used to achieve a much greater set of positive community attributes than they currently do.  If you are someone who does not regularly reflect about all these connections that the simple street has to almost everything in our lives (that’s most people), then you likely think of the street mostly as a place that moves cars ideally as quickly as possible.

Moving something through a given place over a given time period is known as throughput.  In US transportation decision-making, throughput has become a bit of a funny thing because it is almost entirely focused on the throughput of vehicles.  When the road is congested or the traffic light red, it is really frustrating to drive, so naturally many have a desire to expand roads, turn bicycle infrastructure into car lanes (or if in Amsterdam or Utrecht, turn canals into streets) or ensure that traffic signals always prioritize vehicle movement over transit, bicycle, or pedestrian movement, all to relieve congestion and make it easier to drive.

But, why would we even want to maximize the throughput of vehicles through our streets in the first place? Certainly many businesses don’t benefit with cars zooming by at high speeds. Most of us parents don’t like our children walking or biking to school next to vehicles in such a system.  Having a drink on a street that is maximizing the throughput of vehicles is generally unpleasant as well – loud, dirty, and just a mismatch of speed vs. calm.

And the amazing fact of it all is that adding vehicle lanes to roads doesn’t even fix the problem that advocates say they will (that’s you Oregon Department of Transportation, Columbia river crossing champions, Eugene Beltline expansion advocates, and still every state Department of Transportation in the U.S. despite decades of evidence).  In fact, road expansion projects actually just make the problem worse because the congestion inevitably returns, and the opportunities to expand other forms of mobility are simultaneously reduced due both to use of land and budget.

For those in Eugene, we could spend money to have one minor improvement to a Beltline interchange or for the same amount of money, create one of the world’s most complete, integrated, safe, and comfortable cycling infrastructure – like riding on the river path, but on city streets where the places are that we like to go.  Almost all of our children could get to school independently by bike.  50% of all our trips could be done that way as well – happily and by choice because it would be easy, comfortable, fun, convenient, etc.  So we could have one Beltline interchange or extension that will be as congested and problematic in 5-10 years as it is now or we could build a system where 50% of trips are not by car, relieving some congestion on that very Beltline area while also liberating our children to be free to explore our city, including getting to school and the downtown library, which most cannot do right now.

Which gets me back to throughput.  For seventy years our streets have largely been engineered to maximize the throughput of vehicles.  But what if they were designed to maximize the throughput of people?  After all, our cars are parked 95% of their life and when they are used, they generally are only at 20% capacity.  Almost every car transports 4 empty seats almost every trip – why would we want to keep encouraging such waste and inefficiency?  Why would we want to have a community that allocates such an enormous amount of land to transport metal boxes of air and then store them as well?  (Did you know that each of our vehicles has more than 3 parking spaces waiting for them in most US cities?  One at home, one at work, and one at a place to shop – and of course, each car can’t be in all three at once.)

There is plenty more to say on this and plenty has been written elsewhere (here’s a nice article from Wired), but I thought a simple video from a single intersection in Utrecht for a single green phase of a traffic light would be better.  Imagine how crowded or how large the city streets would be if 95% of the people you see on bike in this video were a single driver of a car instead.  As a motorist, imagine how happy you would be to see so many cars not on the road. (Also – notice how quiet it is when the majority of movement is by bike!)  So go and watch the video again – wouldn’t you want your city looking like that?