Cities of the World - Bike Lanes

A discussion on sidewalks invariably leads to a further discourse on bike lanes.  More so in the Philippines where riding bikes is not as popular as it is in many other countries where it is as common as walking.  In fact, except for the bicycle part, it is exactly the same as walking.  When the first bicycle was made, it was referred to as a walking device or a walking assistant.  And the body motions that the ride makes while pedaling resembles walking, only that your feet do not touch the ground.  And you move faster, of course.

At the outset, let us define the two entirely different reasons why people ride bikes.  First is it is a mode of transportation in the same manner that riding a motorized vehicle is, and also walking for a purpose other than exercising one's muscle.  On the other hand, biking is one kind of exercise and becoming more popular at that, either in leisure or as a sport.  Others argue that you can do both at the same time - riding a bicycle from home to work and reaping the benefits of a good exercise while doing so, but that's a bonus.  Most biking enthusiasts use their cars in going to work.

In an article we wrote March 1 of last year, we talked about the concept of person-trips and “modal split.”  The modes of transport maybe classified in two ways: according to purpose and according to type of vehicle (including none, which is walking).  The two classifications are interdependent - the choice of vehicular mode is dependent on the purpose.  Purpose modes are home-to-work, school or church, personal/family matters, or social/recreational.  Vehicular modes are walking, habal-habal, trisikad, tricycle, multicab/FX/megataxi, jeepney, V-hires/GTs, minibus, bus, LRT/MRT, taxis and private cars.

The question is - which purpose mode is best served by bicycles?  We need to reiterate at this point that the bulk of city person-trips and hence, the determinant of traffic congestion levels in the city are home-to-work trips, causing the usual peaking characteristics that we have - the morning and afternoon peaks, plus a slight peak at noon.  I dare say that we solve that and we eliminate 90% of the problem.  The next question, then, is if we provide bike lanes, what percentage of home-to-work trips would actually shift to bikes?

Allow me to exaggerate here … if you live in Minglanilla and work in MEPZA, would you actually consider biking to work if the government builds bike lanes from the south to Mactan?  Probably not.  Biking from home to work in our context faces two barriers:  first, workplaces, on the average, are too far a distance to bike, and, our tropical-pacific climate is hot and humid, and not conducive for a typical office worker to bike to work.  Mind you, we're not saying nobody will do this - there will be a lot who would.  In fact, even now when we don't have decent bike lanes, we have a decent number who rides bikes to work . . . on a particular day in 2009, we counted 688 passing through the CIT skywalk (Streetlife, March 5, 2012).

That's just one screening point in the south road.  We can do the counting for the rest of the city, and then we can do a survey on people's preferences to project what would be the likelihood of people shifting to bikes for home-to-work trips.  That's not rocket science.  Then we will know whether it's worth the cost of building hundreds of millions of pesos worth of paved lanes splashed all over the city.  It's all a matter of economic rate of return (EIRR).

Or we can do build bike lanes in places where they are needed, and for purposes people will readily use bikes for.  This corner supports and advocates bike lanes, but for more beneficial purposes - one, not necessarily along major roads as suggested, and two, not for sporting purposes.  The latter is good and beneficial to one's health, but we should discourage using taxpayers' money for people to exercise when there are other more important needs.  We can use bike lanes for exercise, once they're built, but we should not demand from government to build the lanes so that we can exercise.  (to be continued)