Google Maps Bike There…for a safer, healthier, happier world. :-)

The term ‘road diet‘ doesn’t make much sense in most cases — not literally, not figuratively. And it’s bad marketing and bad politics, and most importantly, it helps produce bad results — that is, bad streetscapes that don’t allow for biking. We need to find a new, better, more-accurate term so we can get to thinking correctly about how best to use our streets.

The graphic above comes from the FHA website. The width of the road before the ‘diet’? 44 feet. After? 44 feet. Not much of a diet, is it?

The only time a road diet is actually a road diet is when sidewalks are (re)widened, which presumably actually does put the ‘road’ part of a road/street on ‘a diet’.

We need a term that describes the process of fixing a road so that it becomes whatever we want it to become. So, for instance, when a road diet adds bike lanes, can it still be considered a road diet? If you only or mostly care about cars, or think they should be given priority, then I suppose you could still call the adding of bike lanes a diet — so, of course, I would never call it a diet. If you are giving people the ability to ride their bikes to work so they don’t have to pay to travel by car/bus/train/taxi, is that something that is accurately described by the term ‘road diet’? No.

We might as well call it something that brings to mind a type of ‘expansion’ or ‘widening’ of the road instead of a narrowing — because we’re expanding the range of modes of transport that can use the street, we may be widening at least the sidewalks to give walkers a little breathing room, we could be widening the bike lanes or protecting them with painted or physical buffers/barriers, etc.

Now for the bad marketing aspect of the term. The term focuses on removing cars from the street instead of allowing bikes to use the street. This, in turn, accomplishes two things:

1. Generates tremendous opposition for current and future projects, and
2. Sacrifices biking as a potential future mode of travel.

If by ‘road diet’ you actually mean ‘car diet,’ then I suppose the term makes some figurative sense — even if the actual road width is not decreased, but drivers (those who hold most political power) can see right through the term — they think we’re being dishonest, which raises their hackles even more, etc. It’s a full-on disaster even before we get out the door.

One of the reasons tremendous opposition is generated is because the term is not an accurate description of what is happening on a road going through this process, and so the term becomes unnecessarily inflammatory — when the actual process can manage to do that all on its own.

Another bad marketing aspect of the term is that it focuses on and presupposes the absolute right of cars and drivers to use the road exclusively instead of the inherent right and priority that non-motorized transport users can, should, and hopefully eventually will enjoy. Moving about under one’s own power, freely, safely, comfortably, conveniently, with dignity intact, is a human right. By designing the current roadways in their mostly-malignant fashion, the auto/oil/rubber industry has used government to effectively prevent citizens from walking and biking to their destinations — they’ve made us dependent on cars and (motorized) public transport to move around, to go to our jobs and school and church and the supermarket and our doctor’s office and to visit our friends — this is not a dignified situation and it cannot stand. We’re going to use the government — a very flawed institution but one that can still be subjected to popular/democratic control — to wrestle away some street space from the corporate motorization interests.

Allowing people to walk and bike on every single street (with very few exceptions, like pedestrian-only streets) is required and inevitable, because being able to move around under one’s own power is a human right, but it is also still beneficial for various other reasons, like ‘livability’.

Whatever term we decide to use should make it clear that the road is going to undergo some process which will make it better, more livable, which will improve it, which will expand its capacity — either in the transport of people and goods or in some other capacity (like increasing living/play/work/leisure space) — and this ‘increasing of good things’ will be beneficial to most people.

Further, when we position this process correctly as something that must occur to re-establish everyone’s right to move about freely under their own power, we will be bringing with us an unassailable logic and feeling of expectation and inevitability that has carried similar social movements to victory.

The term ‘road diet’ helps lead us down a path of thinking that is exactly what Jane Jacobs warned us not to do — focus on ‘removing bad’ instead of ‘increasing good’. She saw that such a strategy would, and should, fail.

She saw that ‘removing bad’ would generate tremendous opposition for current and future projects, but also that having a mindset of ‘removing bad’ would actually produce bad results — like we have with BRT corridors around the world (producing dystopian landscapes), like we had with pedestrianized malls in the US (most of which failed miserably), etc.

After seeing myriad streetscape projects around the US completed over the past few years that are detrimental to bikers, and that sometimes even institutionalize the prevention of biking altogether, I’m convinced that we advocates are suffering from some poor thinking. We have not listened to Jane Jacobs, and I believe that is to our great detriment.

Jacobs advised that we concentrate on ‘increasing good’ — like increasing safety for pedestrians, increasing the ability to walk and bike, improving air quality, increasing diversity, increasing the beauty of a plaza, increasing ‘vitality’ and ‘workability’, etc. If, in the service of these goals, it becomes necessary to ‘decrease bad’ — like remove cars — then so be it, but the goal in and of itself should not be to remove cars.

The relevant Jacobs quote can be found here:

Attrition [of automobiles], too, must operate in positive terms, as a means of supplying positive, easily understood and desired improvements, appealing to various specific and tangible city interests. This is desirable not because such an approach is a superior persuasive and political device (although it is), but because the objects should be tangible and positive objects of increasing, in specific places, city diversity, vitality, and workability. To concentrate on riddance as the primary purpose, negatively to put taboos and penalties on automobiles as children might say, “Cars, cars, go away,” would be a policy not only doomed to defeat but rightly doomed to defeat.

So, as you can see, Jacobs actually makes the argument that the ‘marketing’ (“superior persuasiveness”) and political power (“superior…political device”) are not the main reasons we need to think clearly/correctly about how to deal with roads — it’s because thinking clearly/correctly is the best/only way to get a good final result.

We’ve seen the pro-mandatory bicycle helmet people use the tragically-flawed logic of ‘decreasing bad bike injuries’ — they’ve actually decreased the overall health of entire populations, including the most vulnerable — children. This is not smart, not fair, not good for livable streets, not good public policy.

When any road undergoes this process, we need to be asking basic questions like:

1. Will walking and biking become safer? More dignified?
2. Will biking become possible?
3. Will a simple, unbuffered bike lane move us significantly in the right direction? What types of vehicles will be sidling up to bikers? Huge, ginormo-buses like with part of the the Cleveland BRT line? We know this is not good enough to allow people to bike.
4. Is the middle/turn lane really necessary? Must we have on-street car parking on this important travel corridor? Is it necessary, after this process is complete, to still have 50 feet of street width dedicated to cars (parking plus travel and turn lanes) and only 10 feet dedicated to bicycles?
5. Is anything we are about to do in the process (like raised medians) going to prevent the future expansion of the bicycle facilities on this street — to include, say, bike lanes, buffered bike lanes, separated/protected bike lanes/cycletracks?

I’ve been wanting to write this post forever, but was reminded with the release of the latest Streetfilm on ‘road diets‘. Featured in the film is Dan Burden — an old-school walking advocate who too often dismisses biking (often, just by ignoring it) as a real transportation choice. It’s important that we continue to insist that pedestrian/walkability advocates also advocate for the cyclist/bikeability — and not just in name/theory/show, but with the expectation that cities and towns will be (re)designed in a such a way that biking will become a viable option for getting around for most people. Bikes should be given the next-highest priority of all transport modes, right after walking. I don’t blame Burden for coming up with the term ‘road diet’.

And, when I say ‘biking’ and ‘bikes’, I really mean ‘all human-powered transport which might be better-suited to bike lane travel than sidewalk travel’ — so if people want to skate, rollerblade, or even run in the correct direction in the bike lane, then more power to them.

If someone says:

We want to create a walkable, transit-accessible neighborhood.

Then we should correct them:

We want to create a walkable, bikeable, transit-accessible neighborhood.

First walking, then biking, then everything else, in that priority order.

Check out a search for “road diet” on Google News to see how it’s commonly being applied.

Contest ends at the end of this upcoming Thursday, April 21. I’ll pick a winner, but obviously this doesn’t mean I, we, or anyone will actually use it instead of the current term — we’ll all have to figure that out together.

All ideas, including very bad ideas, are welcome.

And if it turns out that we’re unable to improve on the term ‘road diet’, then we’ll move on, but I think we should at least try to find a better, more accurate, more appropriate term.

I’ll PayPal over some cash to the winner — I’ll need an email address (which I’ll have access to if you leave a comment). Feel free to also send in ideas to my direct email: peter@googlemapsbikethere.org . If you don’t need the cash, then use it for your bike organization or some other charity. There are lots of people doing good work out there.

Update: Wanted to add that the word ‘diet’ is about the most universally-hated word in the history of the world. I’m thinking that telling a bunch of entitled, relatively-powerful people (drivers) that we’re about to force them to go on a diet is not the smartest political move. Ironically, if people actually had the opportunity to walk and bike places, so many people both here in the US and, increasingly, around the world, wouldn’t be so tormented by the word ‘diet’.