Cyclism & Sustainable Urban Design Strategies to Increase Bicycle Ridership

28 pagesCyclism as an ideology should be taken into serious consideration by every resident of Earth. Questioning current beliefs concerning urban planning will help educate human kind and biofuel the Sustainable Revolution. This research paper provides reasoning for why bicycles should be treated as the new means of primary transportation. On average bikes are two times more efficient than other primary means of travel, compared to bus, car, and walking. Bikes require substantially less space than the Single Occupancy Vehicle, or SOV (which this report will generally use as an opposing factor). The primary issue for increasing ridership is that a large percentage of the human population may be interested in biking, but concerned due to safety. Rightly so. In the United States riding a bike in the urban setting in not yet supported by current social culture. This social culture may only be altered by educating people, providing the infrastructure for bikes, and encouraging ridership as a primary goal aimed at a sustainable future. Some successful ways of increasing safe riding in the urban setting are repainting the streets for bike lanes, permanent infrastructure improvements, or implementing the most revolutionary urban retrofit the Multimodal Tri-Split (MTS). The MTS involves cutting dedicated motor vehicle streets to 1/3 existing conditions, and converting the other 2/3 into dedicated cycle and transit routes. This may only happen in conjunction with another currently socially unacceptable idea, urban densification. Altering cultural believes about SOVs will be a major hurtle. This research will be intended to convert all non-followers of the bi-cycled machine to Cyclism