“Human Behavior Trumps Infrastructure”

Rasmus Duong-Grunnet (Gehl) said this on our cycling tour of the bicycle snake in Copenhagen. The point is – if you don’t make it work and make it easy for people to use – they won’t, or they’ll do something outside of the intent of the designer. Relatedly, bikes need to be able to connect effortlessly and decisions must be made to make the bicycle the preferred mode of arrival rather than an afterthought.

In both the Gehl and Copenhagenize lectures, I was struck by the concept of adapting infrastructure for human nature. This concept is common in thinking about “desire lines” – or where people walk on paths when the provided option isn’t intuitive. But they gave a few examples of watching human behavior and adapting the infrastructure to suit it, even if it is not in alignment with design guidelines. James at Copenhagenize gave an example of bicycle slip lane that helps people commute from the north side of town to work downtown. They noticed the behavior, put in a pilot to study it, then made changes in line with the observed behavior to relieve the pinch point in the commute.

Both Andreas and James mentioned how important pilots are for getting support when there are critics and skeptics. James joked that it was even easier when you do pilots in the summer when everyone is on vacation! Overall though, it’s important to measure the before and after to be able to communicate the results.

The approach to study and make changes seems to reflect Danish sensibility – they use guidelines but don’t make rules unless needed. As long as people treat areas with respect, they’ll let you do it. But if something becomes a problem, they’ll make new rules about it. This extends to the design of the roadways – the Danish approach is simple; it’s not over-engineered with a ton of paint or specialized signals. In Copenhagen, they follow a typology that takes into account how many cars and how fast. When the cars are <10 mph, it’s a shared space. When cars are 20 mph, they use painted lanes and parking protection. Faster, they use the most common design – the curb separated cycle track so it’s clear where you belong. The use very few signs but use design to make it clear. Finally, when cars are over 50 mph, they use a buffered bicycle track with a barrier or a fence so the modes never cross. In addition, they use traffic calming to signal how fast cars should be going. I appreciated something James said about bikes – they’re fast moving pedestrians, not cars. We wouldn’t tell pedestrians to “share the road” and walk down a car busy with streets, and we shouldn’t tell bicycles to do that either.

A few design features that were fun to hear about and see in action:

Designated cyclist phases with the pedestrians – have different stop bars to pull the bikes out of the cyclists blindspots. Bikes aren’t a big threat to pedestrians so they don’t need a separate phase.
Use bike boxes to facilitate bunching and let bikes get through an intersection. Can get 100 bikes through in 45 seconds; probably 6 cars
Small elements of design – like making cars come up to level of pedestrians instead of making pedestrians come down into the space of cars which is harder to see.