By JAMES KROHE JR.

Peddling possibilities: the bike option

The footpower needed to peddle a bicycle doesn't cost much, nor docs it create any pollution problems. But, unlike Europeans, Americans have never gotten enthusiastic about bicycles as a major mode of transportoin. Why? Cheap gas; laziness and our national love affair with the automobile

Partial support for the energy scries has been provided through a grant from the Office of Consumer Affairs of the U.S. Department of Energy. Opinions and conclusions expressed in the article are solely the responsibility of the author.— Editor

TO THE average American the bicycle is principally a toy. To many Europeans, the bicycle is a vehicle, an accepted and sometimes preferred mode of urban transportation. The bike does not pollute, it is easy to park and it does not consume expensive oil. Adopted in less affluent eras because it is cheap, the bicycle has recently enjoyed renewed attention from transportation planners both in the U.S. and abroad.

Why, then, are not more Americans aboard two wheels? No one knows for certain, but the number of Illinoisans who regularly use bikes for routine work and shopping trips has been estimated to be as small as 1 or 2 percent. (The 1980 U.S. Census included bicycling among its commuting options, and so should provide the first detailed picture of bicycle commuting in the U.S. These data have not yet been released.)

If Illinoisans don't ride, it isn't because no one has suggested it. For years the federal government had allowed the expenditure of highway funds for bike projects if the latter were "integral elements" of road projects, and in 1973 the regulations were further loosened to allow spending of such funds on separate bike and pedestrian projects. But bicycle advocates always faced competition for such funds from powerful road interests, with the result that less than 10 percent of the allowable funding has ever been spent on such projects nationally.

The federal government further recognized the potential for bicycles in the mid-seventies when it began to write provisions for bicycle funding into a variety of its environmental and transportation programs. For example, Section 141 of the U.S. Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1978 authorized $80 million in exclusive funding for bikeway construction and certain related projects on a 75-25 federal-state matching basis. This money was to be allocated in four $20 million appropriations, to run through fiscal year 1982. Section 141 thus was hailed at passage as being to bicycle commuting what the Federal Land Grant Act of 1862 was to higher education.

In addition to the new Section 141 funding, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) underwrote bicycle safety instruction programs through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Beginning in 1975 USDOT also required that states include both bicyclists and pedestrians in their transportation management plans. Nor did Washington confine itself to giving advice. Several agencies, notably the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), installed showers for cycling employees, and in 1979 the General Services Administration (GSA) called for expanded bike parking at the roughly 10,000 buildings owned or leased by the federal government, all in order to (quoting the GSA) "promote bicycling as an alternative method of commuting for Federal employees." In 1981 the comptroller general recommended that federal employees be reimbursed 4 cents a mile for official travel by bike.

Congress' small push

With the specter of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo still haunting Washington, the bicycle also figured in federal environmental and energy thinking in the late '70s. Section 108(0 of the U.S. Clean Air Act specified 18 traffic control measures which may be used by local authorities to reduce transportation-related air pollution, and included bicycle commuting on the list. Congress, in the 1978 National Energy Conservation Act, mandated USDOT to develop a comprehensive program to boost the use of bicycles, which the act described as "the most efficient means of transportation."

That program was outlined in a 1980 report titled "Bicycle Transportation for Energy Conservation." USDOT set a goal of putting up to 2.5 million bikers on the road by 1985, who together would save an estimated 77,000 barrels of oil every day. To achieve this goal, the program proposed a new Auto Use Management Program which would (among other things) integrate the bicycle into more traditional transportation planning and boost the federal share of such projects to 90 percent from 75 percent.

Yet the bicycle remained more talked about than used, and the golden age of urban bicycling which seemed to loom so brightly just three or four years ago never arrived. For one thing, the federal commitment to the bicycle was more apparent than real, even before the recent cuts in USDOT and USEPA projects made by the Reagan administration. (It may be worth noting that while Jimmy Carter rode a bicycle at Camp David, Ronald Reagan rides a horse.) Although USDOT authorized $20 million for the first year of the Section 141 program, Congress actually appropriated only $4 million, and in subsequent years hasn't funded it at all. Illinois' share of Section 141 funds, which was spent on projects as diverse as "public awareness" programs and sewer grate replacements in three cities,

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amounted to roughly $92,000 — approximately what Illinoisans spend on gasoline every eight minutes. And the Auto Use Management Program was to have been funded with proceeds from Carter's windfall oil profits tax, which survived only slightly less long in Washington than did the ex-president.

Illinois' wobbly course

For its part, Illinois has not exactly rushed in where Washington fears to tread. As far back as 1974 the General Assembly voted to make it legal to spend up to 1 percent of the state's motor fuel tax revenues on bike facilities. But as was the case under similar federal programs, bicycles usually lost in the competition for available road money. As a result, the state since 1974 has spent only about a half million dollars of its federal highway aid funds on bike projects, with proportionately low allocations from state coffers. (California, by contrast, has spent as much as $3.5 million per year for bike projects.) Unlike several other states, Illinois does not have a full-time state bicycle program coordinator; instead, the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) has a part-time bicycle coordinator in each of its nine district offices who handles bike programming in addition to other chores. The coordinators' work consists largely of providing information and advice to local agencies. It is not onerous; one coordinator estimates the bikes consume only 10 percent of his work week.

"I'd like to say that bicycle planning fits in with everything we do here but I can't," says Bill Bennett, a special programming specialist with the IDOT. "It's hard to justify building bike paths when the roads are full of potholes, and bridges are falling down from disrepair. It doesn't do any good to build something that will get used by two vehicles a day." Bennett, who rides a bike himself, concludes, "If at some point bicyclists reach a large enough proportion of the population, the funding of bikeways and other projects becomes a very valid proposition." Bicycling thus is caught in a sort of Catch-22: More people don't use bikes because of a lack of facilities, and there is a lack of facilities because more people don't use bikes.

Riding a bike in a world made for the automobile poses problems which nonriders scarcely know exist. There are seldom secure places to park a bike, for example, and it is not unusual to see signs on office buildings announcing, "No dogs or bicycles allowed." Street departments install sewer grates which are perfectly designed to snag a bicycle wheel. Bridges are built with no place to ride a bike.

The fact that the bicycle is not taken seriously as a vehicle is reflected by the Illinois Motor Vehicle Code. Until 1981, riders were obliged to remain on the right-hand side of a roadway, which made left-hand turns awkward in busy traffic. (The rider was obliged to dismount and walk his or her machine across intersections, a provision which riders regarded as the equivalent of the turn-of-the-century requirement that motorists be pre-ceeded by a pedestrian carrying a warning lantern.) It was to bring the bicycle laws more fully into conformity with custom that the General Assembly recently passed S.B. 462. That act liberalized the ban on carrying more than one person on a bike to allow adults to carry infants on approved seats, for instance, and made it legal to abandon the right-hand side of the street on one-way streets or in order to make left-hand turns. The law still requires that when a so-called Class I bikeway is available — a separate right-of-way reserved for bikes, usually running parallel to an existing street — bike riders must use that bikeway rather than the street, even though such bikeways often become crowded with strollers, roller skaters and other miscellaneous nonmotorized traffic. Indeed, the Motor Vehicle Code does not recognize the bicycle as a vehicle at all but as a "device," even though the bicycle rider carries essentially the same responsibilities as the motorist. The rights and responsibilities of the "serious" bicyclist are still imperfectly understood. Motorists remain ignorant of bicyclists' right of access to most streets and roads, and bicyclists often routinely disregard traffic signs, Although many cities (chiefly in the Chicago suburbs) offer clinics in the rules of bike-riding, these are typically aimed at very young riders, and in any event are limited in their impact. The written examination required of all prospective Illinois drivers does not in-elude a single question about the motorist's responsibilities when sharing the road with a bicyclist.

Local system obstacles

Local governments can't do much remove the legal obstacles to safer bike use, but they can do a great deal to remove some of the physical ones. In-deed, in the absence of a strong federal or state commitment, it is left to localities, often responding to local in-terest groups, to make bicycles work. An example of what can be done may be found in Champaign-Urbana. The centerpiece of the C-U bikeway system is the University of Illinois campus Begun in 1946, the UI system was among the nation's first. Today an estimated 40 percent of the universities students ride bikes along 6.5 miles of bikeways, of which roughly 60 percent are the Class I type.

What makes C-U unique in Illinois, however, is not the university but more recent attempts to link that system to municipal bike systems in the school's host cities. C-U has an active bike lobby; both the Champaign an the Urbana city councils have bicycle advisory committees. In the 1970s both cities developed rudimentary bike systems, consisting mainly of Class III bikeways — a bike route on an existing right-of-way, marked by signs. Then in 1977 the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission drafted a new bike plan for the greater urban area which offered local officials a phased program by which those existing routes would gradually be linked and certain traffic obstacles circumvented or redesigned. Urbana is gradually replacing dangerous sewer grates in the city, and the C-U bikeways map is being updated.

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Predictably, funding remains an obstacle to expanded local bike systems. Urbana has adopted a policy requiring that new local road construction projects incorporate Class I bikeways whenever feasible. Since such projects are typically paid for with both federal and local funds on a 75-25 basis, adding bikeways raises overall project costs, and thus the size of Urbana's local share. Added costs also mean that the city's allocation of federal road aid will be spent sooner than if the bikeways were not built, thus forcing local officials to delay or Modify other projects.

There are often political problems as well. A recent decision to add such class I bikeway to a new street serving an expanding residential district was opposed by local biking interests, who objected to thus being forced off the road. The path was subsequently redefined as a general purpose path, leaving riders with the option to use it or not.

Planners are at work to make Chicago a pedallin' town. The Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC) pursues a bike program which is typical of those in larger U.S. cities. NIPC has conducted studies which showed that facilities to encourage bicycle use (such as storage lockers installed at commuter train stations) are the most cost-effective "per ton of pollutants prevented" of the various mass transit reforms. NIPC has published a bike route map of the six-county Chicago metropolitan area, adding the bicycle as a planning element in the region's long-range transportation plan, and preparing a guide for by local governments in the installation of bike facilities. As NIPC staff member Suzan Pinsof explains, "Because there are no specific funds for bikes available, we are encouraging people to include the bicycle in their normal transportation planning process"(for example, arranging to nar-row the traffic lanes during routine street lane repainting so as to free extra pace for a bike lane on one side of the street.

However, in Chicago, like most of the rest of Illinois, bicycles seem more for planning than for riding. Says Pinsof, "After the big push for bike commuting in the early 1970s, it's sort of petered out here.'' The City of Chicago gives bikes low priority, apparently because of reported decreases in the number of bike riders on the city's designated bike routes. Pinsof points out that these official routes are considered too perilous by many riders, who travel on side streets or the lakefront bike path instead, where they are missed by the city's vehicle tabulators.

In short, there may be more bicycle commuting in Chicago than meets the official eye. The recent cutbacks in mass transit service in the region have yet to result in any dramatic increase in bike usage, but Pinsof thinks there still is potential for growth. "Schaumburg has a fairly ambitious bicycle element in its comprehensive plan," she notes of the fast-growing suburb. "It will be interesting to see if usage eventually increases there. If it works there, it can work in a lot of other places too because Schaumburg is the quintessential automobile town."

Autos still win

It is agreed that planners and traffic engineers and employers can make bicycle commuting safer and more convenient. But can they ever make it safe and convenient enough? Is the refusal of Americans to take to two wheels a governmental problem, or a social one? In many ways the urban bicyclist in the 1980s resembles the pioneer automobilist of 80 years ago, who drove his car on muddy roads having no traffic control system and shared the road with drivers who often were careless or poorly trained. (Ironically, it was pressure from bicyclists that led to the paving of early roads in the first place.) Yet people drove anyway, leaving government to catch up. The same has not happened with bikes.

The explanation lies partly in economics. The bicycle is undeniably cheap to ride. But so — relatively — is driving. In spite of OPEC, gasoline prices in real terms did not match the 1960 price until well into 1979, and since then the real price of gasoline has declined again. Low gas prices combined with the switch to more gas-efficient cars means that the daily commute remains affordable to most Americans. Planners and other government officials argue the case for the bike on other grounds, noting that every person on a bike means measurably less air pollution, noise and traffic congestion in cities. Unfortunately, Americans' priorities remain more personal than public, and there is little rush to sacrifice convenience for the sake of these broader social goals.

Also, there is the ineluctable fact that automobiles are faster (for longer distances anyway) and more comfortable than bicycles. Many adults remain fearful of riding a bike in traffic, or believe (as was noted in a recent report by a consultant to the U.S. Department of Energy) that cycling is "unprofessional in appearance." Weather is another drawback, as is the fact that most Americans are lazy. It is a quirk of the culture that people conscious of the need to get more exercise will drive a car a few blocks to a gym or fitness salon rather than ride a bike.

It seems unlikely that Illinois will ever come to resemble the Netherlands, where an estimated half of the population use bikes regularly. If it does, it will probably be because of a drastic rise in the price of gasoline which makes the customary automobile commute unaffordable or because of cutbacks in supply, such as the one that prompted the first back-to-the-bike boom in 1974. As long as U.S. gasoline remains the cheapest in the western world, people will be able to afford to drive cars and, just as important, will be able to build houses and stores and offices in places accessible only by cars. Meanwhile, the bicycle seems destined to remain in the garage with the rest of the family toys.D

James Krohe Jr. is a contributing editor to Illinois Issues and associate editor of the Illinois Times in Springfield; he specializes in planning, land use and energy issues.

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