Unfortunately, for those of us in the U.S., bike infrastructure is seriously lacking. Not a single U.S. city made it onto the top 20 list of the Copenhagenize Index 2017, billed as the “world’s most comprehensive inventory and ranking of bicycle-friendly cities,” but also one of the few lists of bike-able locales.
With five times as many bikes as there are cars, Copenhagen is considered the biking capital of the world. It’s a city where 17 percent of families with kids even have a cargo bike, with a large storage section attached to the front. (Image courtesy of City IO.)
So, why is the U.S. so far behind the rest of the world in terms of bikability and what can it do to improve? In addition to compiling existing research, we spoke to Ken McLeod from the League of American Bicyclists to learn more.
The State of U.S. Bike Infrastructure
As we learned in our coverage of high-speed rail infrastructure, the U.S. has been a very personal-vehicle-obsessed nation since large business interests influenced infrastructure design in the middle of the last century. McLeod explained that, just as the federal government’s priority on interstate highways thwarted the development of mature railways, so too did walking and biking get neglected.
“Certainly, if you look at our federal transportation policy, our big push was for the interstate highway system and then arterials and collector roads to funnel people to that [highway system],” McLeod said….