Understanding bicycle lanes

When Ms. Melanie tagged me in a bike lane picture she posted on Facebook, and asked, "When will we have this in Cebu?," I simply commented, "when we fully understand why we really need them." A lot of friends did ask me if I can have a more definitive answer, but I begged off, especially on FB where we can only post comments, and not really explain issues which need a lot of discussion. It was a picture of a bike lane in Washington D.C., separated and protected from a city street, which definitely is not a highway or any road resembling that.

The difficulty in discussing issues about bike lanes nowadays, and I stress "nowadays, in this day and age," is because many tend to lump them into a question of whether we agree or disagree, support them or not. And we close our minds to the reality that almost everybody, if not everybody, actually agree and support the whole idea! I yet have to meet anybody who says bike lanes are bad. It's when we start talking about bike lane issues that some sectors accuse others of being on the opposite side of the fence. To them, to talk about anything other than "Let's have bike lanes," is anathema and needs to be annihilated.

Having established that risk, let me try to dissect the issue as academically as possible. First, we need to understand that there are two advocacies that exist today, separate and distinct from each other. That's the advocacy of institutionalizing the bicycle as an alternative mode of transport, and the advocacy of encouraging bicycle use for both utility and recreation. Mixing the two will place us in a quagmire and is really detrimental to the cause. As far as government is concerned, the first advocacy is placed entirely within its mandate.

Going deeper into the idea of bicycles as a mode transport, we need to look at the "functions" they are used. In our column published on March 1, 2012, we defined functional modes as "home to work, going to school or church, attend to personal and family matters, or do social and recreational activities. If we try to study countries and cities where bicycle use is significant (Japan, Europe, etc.), we find that people use bikes for three purposes: home to work, going around the neighborhood - buy bread, newspapers, etc., at places very near your house, and home to the train station (or any other station of a public mass transport system).

It's important to understand that the use of bicycle for home-to-work trips is not really that popular, even among biking fanatics. Try to find a Japanese in Tokyo who uses a bike to work and you might end up with a figure less than 1%. Except in really very rare cases, the modal share of bicycle trips in any city seldom go beyond 5%. That's because people will always choose public transport as the better choice, and indeed, by any analysis, it's the most efficient. However, it's also because of this that the share of bike use to and from stations is tremendously high! In many modern cities with excellent public transportation, bike use is exceptionally high, and the two modes are almost inseparable.

This is the reason why worldwide, the advocacy of biking always includes a demand for two bike infrastructures: the bike lane, and the bike storage (or parking facility), the latter almost always referring to parking at the stations. A demand for bike lanes is not complete without the complimentary bicycle parking facility, mostly at station. The latter makes the biking and commuting in public transport efficient and seamless.