Bicycle usage has surged since the pandemic, increasing by 37% overall in the United States and nearly doubling in large cities like New York.
But there’s a lot of room for improvement. According to the US Census, the only commuting method less used than buses in the United States is biking—with only 0.5% of workers aged 16 or over regularly partaking.
Communities are therefore looking to make biking safer and more accessible for residents, in part citing the belief that “if you build it, they will come.” City councils are making investments toward bike infrastructure, sharing systems, events, and e-bikes, to name a few—though these efforts have met with pushback, notably from residents who find the costs or the risk to the availability of car parking unacceptably high.
Join us as we cruise through tens of thousands of hours of government meetings from Lethbridge, Alberta; New Bern, North Carolina; and other cities in the United States and Canada, going beyond the national and into the local in pursuit of what could be the future of transit.
- Research, writing, recording, audio production: Yiu-On Li
- Music: “Insiders” by Joe Crotty, licensed under Creative Commons / Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) https://soundcloud.com/joecrotty
- Thumbnail art: Quill Sang
CivicSearch was created and is maintained by Doug Beeferman, and lets you search city council discussions by place, time, and words and phrases like “pickleball” and “don’t quote me on this.” We’re a noncommercial collaboration with Northeastern University that helps to demystify local government, so that policymakers and citizens alike can peer behind the curtain of bureaucracy.
Original article: https://civicsearch.org/feature/cycling
