Today, Explained - Let's fight over bike lanes

Episode Date: June 15, 2025

A caller asks why it's so hard to make biking safe in LA. We bike around different US cities to get the answer. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Colleen Barrett, engineered by Matthew Billy, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo of a cyclist in a bike lane intersection in Washington, DC by Kevin Carter/Getty Images.  If you have a question, give us a call on 1-800-618-8545 or send us a note here.  Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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moving news, helping you build financial literacy and security. Don't miss it. Subscribe to Prof G Markets wherever you get your podcasts. Again, that's Prof G Markets. We delivered a petition and it was people speaking up or paved roads. The friction was pretty much immediate. All LA knows is cars. Good morning. Good morning. Who are you? I am Jonklin Hill and I am the host of Explain It To Me. Amazing. I'm Miles Bryan. I'm a producer with Today Explained and Explain It To Me. And we're not in the studio, right, JQ? We're out here on the streets of Washington, DC.

We sure are. We absolutely are. On this beautiful sunny day in June. And I have asked you out here for a bike ride. Yes, doing something which oddly enough, despite my childhood, is outside my comfort zone. I don't really bike in the city because I'm so scared of getting hit.

Like I have not been on a bike in like since 2018. Ooh. Yeah, but let's find out. Yeah Yeah let's just take a little warmup test out these DC bike lanes. Those are the e-bikes right? Wait wait wait. Oh my god. Are you okay? I'm good. I'm good. It's clearly been a while but I still got it. You're shaking but you're moving. Exactly. We're moving. How's that feel?

It feels good. You really do never forget. I'm not the first person to forget how to ride a bike. You're finding your bike legs, your sea legs. Yeah. Oh yeah, here's our bike lane. Now follow those bikers. Well, we's our bike lane. Now follow those bikers. Well we have the red now.

Oh we might have missed the... We might have missed the traffic loss. We might have missed the light. Yeah. No this is fun. I'm glad I'm doing this. Because like, yeah girl, why don't you get on a bike more? You can go ahead of us. We're moving pretty slowly. Yeah, I'm a novice. We did miss the light again. That was fun.

Okay, Miles, riding a bike again was so much fun. I got to do it more. It was so great getting back in the saddle. But why did you take me out of my natural habitat of podcast studio and put me on a bicycle? Well, I wanted to just hang out and ride bikes. I like riding my bike. I thought it'd be fun for us. But also, and probably more importantly, we got a listener question about bikes and bike lanes. A guy named Colin called into the show and he said,

Hi, my name is Colin. I live in Los Angeles. And I used to live in Boston where I was an avid cyclist. But since living here, it's been really hard to find safe places to cycle. So I was wondering if you could look into what cities have made that transformation to a bike unfriendly, to a bike friendly city, what they had to do specifically to get there, and what could be the path for a place like Los Angeles or other large cities. Like why do some cities like DC have good bike infrastructure? And why do some cities suck at it? How'd that happen?

Yeah, okay, so you, after our little field trip, you kept cycling around to get this explained, right? I did, and I want to start at the beginning, which took me to K Street in downtown DC, to the offices of one Bill Nesper. I'm the executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. And what, Bill Nesper, is the League of American Bicyclists?

The League of American Bicyclists is the national grassroots cycling organization that has been around since 1880. We have been representing the interests of bicyclists since that time. Bill told me about three important turning points in the history of bicycle infrastructure in the US. The first one was all the way back in the late 19th century. Oh my gosh the 1880s. In my head you know they were riding those bikes that like the old-timey kind where it's a big wheel in the front and a tiny one in the back. They were riding those bikes. The bicycle kind of was invented throughout the 19th century. There were these primitive versions, the ones with the giant wheel.

But the bike really took off when it reached a form that we would recognize it in. It was known as the safety bike. It had two wheels and it had pedals, popularized in the 1880s. And it was trendy. It was like a leisure activity. It was a way to get around. But these early cyclists had a big problem. At the time, America's roads were pretty gnarly.

Almost none of them were paved. And so the League of American Bicyclists, though back then it was called the League of American Wheelman. Okay, cool name alert. Yeah, extremely cool. They didn't change it into the 1990s, which I thought was funny.

Anyway, the League quickly became one of the main backers of what was known as the Good Roads Movement, which was a push for more paved roads to ride around on. And so we actually, early on, we delivered a petition. It's still actually at the National Archives. It's really cool. There's a giant petition. It's like on this eight-foot wheel that has 150,000 names.

We delivered it to Congress in 1893, and it was people speaking up for paved roads. And that speaking up worked. It helped push the federal government to create the Office of Road Inquiry, which eventually morphed into the Federal Highway Administration. Oh, that's cool.

But when I think of the Federal Highway Administration, I admittedly think of cars. Yeah, bicycle advocacy literally paved the way for car dominance that made bikes an afterthought for many years. Ooh, dang, wow. Mm-hmm, a little bit of a self-own. And actually the next big development in bike infrastructure in America is when the's dominance started to slip in the 1970s with the oil crisis. We must end our love affair with the big car. We must walk or use bikes rather than drive.

If you've taken to riding a bicycle because you believe the government has an energy crisis on its hands, I can tell you that if you don't go about it sensibly, you can have your own personal and private energy crisis. Biking had been picking up as a leisure activity after World War II. Davis, California actually created the first bike lane in 1967 but the oil crisis was an economic incentive to get people out of cars and back onto their bikes and this is when you see American cities and towns start to put out plans for how to become more bike friendly how to have some bike infrastructure And it wasn't always the towns you would think of now like Bill told me about bike plans in Boise in Indianapolis

Cheyenne Wyoming like oh my goodness. They were saying the types of things that you want that we would want to see in communities doing it today Is that when we get to the crux of our story when bike lanes first became a thing? Yes, in some places, but not universally or nearly to the extent they are now. So most cities that created a bike plan during this time, they just put up a sign on a residential street that says, like, bike route or whatever. And they did this because signs were cheap, you know, building bike infrastructure, like putting paint down or even building protected bike lanes like we saw in DC. That costs a lot of money. And the financial picture didn't really change until 1991.

What happened in 91? Oh, JQ, the passage of the 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, which the real heads know as ICE-T. Okay, that's funny because that makes me think of Law and Order SVU. Bum bum. ICE-T dedicated a slice of the federal transportation budget to biking and walking projects for the first time. And communities apply for this so they have those bike plans that we talked about. 80% of the funding is coming from federal sources and 20% is coming from a local match. So it's a huge part of making it possible for communities to build the streets

that they need. In 1991, the year IST passed, the Fed spent about $17 million on biking and walking projects. In 2023, they spent over $1.2 billion. It's a big deal. Okay, um, shout out Uncle Sam. But if bike lane development is dependent on federal funds, why do different cities have such different bike infrastructures? You know, why is DC pretty good and LA is, um, less so? Well the federal funding made bike infrastructure in the U.S. possible, like it's the cornerstone, but it's also just the starting point. To understand a city like D.C.'s success, we gotta zoom in a bit.

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Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders. Shop now at NoFrails.ca. Okay, Miles, before the break, you told me you were going to explain what DC specifically has been doing right on the bike infrastructure front. Yes. To figure out that story, I pedaled over to meet another bike guy.

Let me do the quick tour first. Yeah, give me a, tell me, now we're here at the... Yes, to figure out that story, I pedaled over to meet another bike guy. Let me do the quick tour first. Yeah, give me a, tell me, now we're here at the... So, I think we moved into this space in 2010. Colin Brown, he's the comms director at the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, or WABBA. When I started, there were all desks here. Now there's bike parking for a dozen people, I think. Colin moved to DC from Pittsburgh in 2008.

Back then then DC had 36 miles of bike lanes and no protected bike lanes. In 2023 it had 74 miles of bike lanes and 35 miles of protected bike lanes. Oh wow. Yeah you know Colin told me the recipe for DC success is one part natural advantage, one part far-sighted planning, and two parts smart political plays. Okay, I love local politics. Tell me more about that. I will, but I'm gonna start with the wonky stuff. So because DC is its own jurisdiction, you know, it's not in a state, there's just one Department of Transportation. And in most

cities, there's actually the City Department of Transportation and the State Department of Transportation. the state Department of Transportation And I know that's insanely wonky, but it actually ends up being pretty important. Like the city DOT is usually more bike friendly and interested in putting in bike infrastructure. Whereas the state DOT is generally more focused on car traffic. In cities like Los Angeles or Philly, the state DOT controls some big roads within the city and they're reluctant to do anything that will slow cars down. So DC gets to skip that problem.

Whew. Okay. On to the story. In 2006, DC elects this exciting young mayor, Adrian Fenty. Millions of people have walked these streets, from the most powerful to the poorest. But only one man has walked all these streets. Some people say I spend too much time responding to my constituents. I tell them there's no such thing.

You remember him? Oh, yeah, he was mayor when I was first in college. Right. It's 2006, 2007, right before the dawn of the Obama era. You know, hope and change is in the air in D.C. And ambitious mayors like Michael Bloomberg in New York and Fenty in DC get super excited about making their cities more friendly to pedestrians and bicyclists. This is our first protected bicycle lane. Fenty, who was a bicyclist himself and really sort of excited about what

biking could mean for transportation in the city. I think that set the scene for this sort of rapid growth in the bike network between 2010 and 2020. So Fenty championed the creation of new bike lanes. He also shepherded the launch of DC's Capital Bike Share program, which like you checked out a bike from for a ride, right? Oh yeah. It was pretty easy. Oh, it was very easy. You just download a little app, you go do, do, do, do, and the next thing you know, you're riding around. And it was pretty cheap, right? I think my ride totaled in about like $2.16. I didn't even bother expensing it

because why do I need $2.16? Right, and that's actually the far-sided part. Other city bike share programs are often run by private companies and they want to turn a profit. So they they charge more. DC's bike share is public and it keeps its prices cheap. And Colin told me that with the advent of e-bikes, especially like that's got a lot of DC residents on bikes for the first time. And that has really changed the way that people,

a lot of people think about who's biking, right? It's not just like weirdos like me. I'm not a, I don't wear spandex, but I like, I'm quickly, I ride by and I'm like, clearly a bike weirdo. It's like your neighbors are there, you know, just like hopping on a red bike and going somewhere. Full disclosure, JQ, I'm also a bike weirdo and I do wear spandex, but I rented a bike share in DC when I was visiting and it was really fun and easy.

Yeah, there are a couple in my neighborhood and I see people hopping on and off them all the time, especially around the metro. But you said local politics is involved and DC politics can get a little messy. I'm surprised by how like, kumbaya this all is. Yeah. I haven't told you the whole story yet. Ah, okay. Collins says the effort to put in these bike lanes, you know, it gets off to a strong start,

but it gets bogged down pretty quickly by political blowback. Like critics say the bike lanes slow down traffic too much. They take away all important parking spots. They're just kind of annoying. The friction was pretty much immediate. And the critics had a potent tool for resistance, the city's advisory neighborhood commissions. I hadn't heard of these before, but they're these hyper local elected bodies that can't do much other than veto liquor license applications and block changes to the streetscape.

The ANC would say like this is, you know, it's gonna remove too many parking spaces. We don't want to support it. Or like, can't you go around our block to somebody else's block? And then that you have that conversation with a different ANC commissioner. And the ANCs are a very DC thing,

but the dynamics here play out in basically every American city. You know, bike advocates push for changes. The political class, which is usually older, more likely to drive, they push back. Yeah, that's so interesting. The major road, not too far from me, is very, very busy. And there was a big bike lane fight over that. How do bike advocates win over ANCs?

Well, Collins's bike advocates tried to convince reluctant commissioners, but they didn't have a ton of success. So they figured, hey, if we can't beat the system, might as well become the system. There was a recognition like this is a barrier. Let's run for office. Collins's bike advocates have won a ton of ANC seats over the last decade.

Now they're a major source of instigation for new projects. Like in my neighborhood, our ANC is like beating the drum for two different protected bike lane projects. Huh, okay, cool. So the bike advocates are the winners of this story, it sounds like, but I assume they're losers too, right? You know, I've lived here for 16 years and I know there are lots of people

who are still mad about bike lanes coming. On one hand, you have people who are upset at the loss of street parking, but also they're kind of like this canary in the coal mine when it comes to gentrification. You know, if I see bike lanes coming, I know my neighborhood is about to get way less black. Yeah, I wanna introduce you to one more person in DC.

There's a thing called the Washington Area Bicycle Association. Oh yeah, I talked to them, yeah. They had become a powerful lobby and they had made inroads into the Department of Transportation. So basically they had co-opted it covertly into doing their will. Oh, okay. All right.

We got a hot take up in here. Who is that? That's Jeremiah Montague Jr. I am the president of the Woodridge Civic Association. I'm a former ANC commissioner for this area that we're in. I'm retired, so they say. I'm at a mountain Woodridge, which as you probably know is a quiet neighborhood in the far northeast of DC. It's mostly single family homes and it's mostly working class and black, although young white

people are moving in now because it's affordable. Colin from Waba, he actually lives around here. Jeremiah has been battling with Washington, DC officials and bike advocates to stop plans to put bike lanes on a busy thoroughfare called South Dakota Avenue. They see that as a means to manage the traffic, and, but they don't really care about what inconvenience it does.

We have a lot of older people who they don't, we don't have, like when you go down, you came from DuPont Circle, where buses and stuff and the subway and this stuff, we don't have that. So most of them are conditioned to, I get to wherever I need to go by car. Jeremiah has a bunch of reasons for why he thinks bike lanes here will be bad. They'll send traffic into the neighborhood. There'll be a loss of parking.

People won't use them. But I think it really boils down to who gets to control how the neighborhood grows and changes. People like him, or people like Collin. The ones that have most recently moved in are the ones that are more adamant about I want this, this is going to change. Not I want or what do you think? It's going to be this way. And I think that's what galls people the most.

You know right now DC's Department of Transportation is still studying options for South Dakota Avenue. It's not clear when or if bike lanes are going to come in here. But I think it's important to hear from Jeremiah because, like you said, you know, there's lots of people who feel the way he does, even in bike-friendly DC. Cities trying to figure out their bike plans are going to have to figure out how to navigate this tension. And DC, which in some ways is a model, still hasn't entirely. So that's DC.

But what about Los Angeles? I'll ask Miles when we're back on Explain It To Me. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card. And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter Mastercard and get up to

$2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash VI Porter to learn more. Okay, Miles, we've talked about big national changes that set the stage for bike infrastructure. We've talked about what DC is doing right and where it could still improve. But our caller asked about LA. Did you ride your bike all the way across the country to find out what's going on over there? Sadly, JQ, I did not. I asked our boss for a couple weeks of travel time, but she denied the request. But I did work the phones and I got some help from our colleague Abhishek Artsy who lives in LA.

And there is some exciting stuff happening with bike infrastructure in Los Angeles right now. But before we get into that story, I wanna give you some context. LA, as I'm sure you know, is physically huge. It's way bigger than DC. And it's also like the ultimate car city, right? Like car culture in LA are basically

synonymous and that means that culturally bike advocates have a much steeper climb there like Avishai went out to a party celebrating the opening of a new bike lane in his neighborhood and you'd think a gathering like this would bring out like the bike optimists right here's what he heard what are your thoughts on lanes? I like the idea of making this place bikeable like Davis is ideally, but for Los Angeles, that's totally unrealistic. The streets are too busy, the freeway's too busy. Do you find it to be safe to ride a bike in Los Angeles?

Not really, people don't respect nothing. I used to live in Pasadena and bike like 100% of my trips all on bike. It was really frightening after a while like someone in a car one time like threw like a cup with ice and some liquid at me and so after that I just was like I don't feel like it's worth it. All LA knows is cars. Oh my gosh why would someone throw that that is so rude. Oh my goodness. And I will say part of the reason that I don't bike as transportation

is because I'm afraid of getting hit by a car. People in LA, I feel like they have a right to be frightened more than me, it sounds like. So the vibes there are bad. What are bike advocates doing out there? Right, it's quite the challenge. I promised to tell you about the exciting stuff happening, not just the hard stuff.

And to do that, we have to talk about and with one guy, Michael Schneider. I'm Michael Schneider and I'm the founder and CEO of Streets for All. And about 10 years ago, I did something very unusual for this part of the world. I gave up my car

and got on a bicycle to get around and wound up going car free. Schneider's in his 40s, he has three kids. He's handsome and tan in a very LA way. Now he's a bike advocate, but he's a former tech executive. He kind of seems like a tech bro. When the Great Recession hit, he was working for a couple of startups,

developing apps like one he described as Facebook for moms. One of them went under, the other one was on life support, and I couldn't afford my car lease anymore. I thought it was temporary. I thought I would recover and get a new car and be back to where I was. And instead, I fell in love with an alternative lifestyle I never knew existed. I started biking around, I was never in traffic, I never had to look for parking, and I felt like I had hacked my city and couldn't believe it was a legal and fun way to get around that I had just never known.

So Schneider falls and he falls hard. Like he bikes his three kids everywhere. He has never owned a car again, he says. And by 2019, he's into bike advocacy. And he has the same question our caller had. Why doesn't LA have better bike infrastructure? And then in very tech bro fashion, he finds what he thinks is one weird trick to fix it. I discovered that LA had something called the Mobility Plan 2035. They passed it, City Council passed it in 2015, and it was full of great stuff. It had thousands of miles of safety improvements for pedestrians, for cyclists, optimization for transit riders. It would dramatically improve the city. And I was like, man, this is great. So basically, City Council already passed this plan. All we have to do is ask the council offices to

implement the plan, and we're good to go. Spoiler alert, they were not good to go. Oh my gosh, what happened? Why not? Well, Michael says he soon learned that just because city officials say they want to do something doesn't mean they're actually going to do it, like especially if it involves taking away parking, slowing traffic down, stuff that's annoying to at least some of their constituents. Okay, that sounds very similar to the ANC situation in DC. So what did Michael do?

Right. He and his coalition, like the DC bike advocates before them, they figure out persuasion alone isn't going to cut it, right? Like they need to see some real political power. And so they turn to a very California method to do so, a ballot measure. They call it Measure Healthy Streets, L Streets LA or Measure HLA for short. It was anytime the city does road work, they should be forced to implement the plan they already adopted. That's all Measure HLA does. It's not our plan, it's the city's plan. We're just forcing them to follow it. The plan was on the ballot in Los Angeles in

the spring of 2024, so a little over a year ago. And it won. It won overwhelmingly. Oh, my gosh. How did they how did they pull that off? First off, they had a lot of cash. Michael said he and a small group of deep pocketed activists kicked in like four million dollars to fund the whole thing. But what I was really interested in is how they convinced bike wary Los Angeles to support a bike lane measure, right?

Like that seemed crazy. And I asked him about it. We never mentioned the word bicycle in the campaign. We also never mentioned the word bus. We made it all about safety. Oh my gosh, kind of sneaky, but they did pull it off. Yeah, like they hit the ball. And their strategy was smart.

LA has a terrible amount of car crashes and pedestrians being hit by cars. And that's what their campaign ads focused on. That's what they talked about. On November 27th, my son was going to school. He was crossing the road and the driver hit my son, killing him. When our kids and our families and our neighbors

can't get to school safely, we son, killing him. When our kids and our families and our neighbors can't get to school safely, we've got a real problem on our hands and we can do better than that in LA. I don't think there's enough bike advocates in almost any North American city to pass a bike-specific ballot measure on its own. I think you have to reach out and explain the benefits to the larger population.

It can't just be about bikes. Oh, wow. That's really interesting. So does this mean that LA is currently building a ton of bike lanes now? Uh, no. The politics of this ended up being more intractable than Michael and his allies thought. Because measure HLA is only triggered by work on city streets. If workers aren't repaving or fixing a street,

they don't have to do anything for bikes. So that's kind of what the city's doing right now, like not much. And the street repairs that are happening, the city's claiming are exempted from HLA for various technical reasons. It's sort of a stalemate. Okay, so it sounds like they're kind of in the situation they were before. Yeah. And you know, I talked to a source on background who knows the bike scene in LA

really well who said, Michael's move fast and break things approach has been very successful in some ways. But if he'd slowed down and gamed out these political problems before getting HLA on the ballot, it might have been more durable and impactful, like they might not have run into these issues after it passed. But, you know, Michael says he's confident his side will eventually win this standoff. Like bike advocates are already bringing one lawsuit against the city and they're pushing forward in other ways.

OK, got it. So hopefully our caller Colin doesn't have to wait too long for his bike lanes. What are your big takeaways from this reporting, Miles? You know, if you're a bike advocate in car town USA, what lessons should you take away from all this? You know, I see two big lessons. Grab the levers of political power as much as you can and grow your coalition. In DC, bike advocates found political power in those hyper local elected councils. In LA, they used a ballot measure in those hyper-local elected councils. In LA, they used a ballot measure. But my takeaway there is that it's not enough to just make a good case.

You need some actual sway. And then grow your coalition. That might be through getting more people on bikes or just emphasizing the aspects of bike plans that appeal to non-cyclists. But there just isn't enough spandex guys like me to change policy. Mmm, got it. Well, okay, I admit that this story, and especially our ride around the neighborhood, made me a little more bicycle curious.

You know, I think I might bike to my local bookstore this weekend. This is the beginning of your journey, JQ. In a couple of months, you know, you're going to be wearing spandex, you'll have clip-in shoes, you'll have the little sensors, maybe even a bike computer. Just you wait. Yeah, I'll probably start with a helmet, though. Safety first. This episode was produced and reported by Miles Bryan.

That's me. It was edited by our executive producer, Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Colleen Barrett, and engineered by Matthew Billy. I'm your host, Jon Flanhill. Bye! Stay safe on the road, y'all.