This past year, recreational cycling boomed as people turned to bikes for exercise, socializing and relief during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sport’s surge in popularity has persisted into 2021, according to industry analysts. But, as the US reopens and the University of Oregon prepares to return to on-campus instruction in the fall, how likely is it that last year’s recreational cyclists will become regular bike commuters here?
Josh Kashinsky, UO’s Active Transportation Coordinator, expects to see more of the university community choosing bikes in the coming year.
“I’m anticipating an increase in ridership, actually, come fall,” Kashinsky said. Mass transit services may continue to have capacity limitations, and some people may still feel uncomfortable carpooling regularly, he explained. “I think people are going to adopt cycling a lot more,” he said.
According to research by the nonprofit organization PeopleForBikes, approximately 10% of American adults rode a bike for the first time or in a new way, such as for transportation, in 2020. A survey by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy found that summer traffic on public bike paths and trails in 2020 was 200% higher than in 2019. Industry analysts in the NPD Group documented surging bike sales across all categories, from high-end performance bikes to more affordable transit bikes.
Whether or not those new riders continue to commute by bike long term will largely depend on the broader infrastructure that exists to support cycling on and around campus. Earlier this year, UO received Gold-level Bicycle Friendly University certification from the League of American Bicyclists. But the streets riders take to campus are not always so friendly.
“The opportunity, absolutely, is there,” Planning, Public Policy and Management professor Marc Schlossberg, whose research focuses on sustainable transport, said. “At the end of the day, if we’re thinking about it as a societal shift, or a bump, or a slightly increased number of people doing this regularly… it all comes down to how the street infrastructure works for people.”
Building safer streets
To best support post-pandemic ridership, Schlossberg believes the city should have moved quicker to create protected bike lanes in the early months of lockdown, when car traffic was significantly reduced.
“Locally, I’m not impressed with the way the city has responded to changes in behavior during COVID,” he said. But, he acknowledged that city officials are often slowed by the bureaucratic process.
The City of Eugene opened one new protected bikeway along 13th Avenue in October 2020. The project was originally proposed seven years earlier by the UO’s Transportation and Livability Student Group, who observed that many cyclists were riding west on 13th Avenue past Hilyard Street, despite the lack of a westward bike lane on the one-way street.
“The good thing with the implementation right now on 13th is it is a generous amount of space; it’s physically protected; it’s two-way; you can get from campus to downtown on a logical corridor to do so. All of that is fantastic,” Schlossberg said. “What doesn’t work is the traffic signals. It does not optimize movement for people on bikes.”
Reed Dunbar, transportation planner for the city, acknowledged that the timing of the bike-specific traffic signals frustrated some riders. Bikes and cars move forward on separate green lights, a decision made to avoid conflicts with turning vehicles, Dunbar said.
Although that timing slows down movement, “folks who were not comfortable operating in mixed traffic with cars really like it,” Dunbar said. His department is working to improve the timing, which he called “a constant work in progress.”
The city plans to build similar protected bikeways on 8th Avenue, High Street and Lincoln Street within the next few years, forming a network in the downtown area.
“We’ve learned from other communities and other countries that the best way to get more folks on bikes is to make it feel like the shared use path system,” Dunbar said.
Building a supportive campus
Although renovating city streets is beyond the university’s control, Schlossberg also noted that UO, because of the size of its student population and workforce, “has a lot of capacity to influence larger transportation behavior.” He’s been happy to see greater coordination between the university, the cities of Eugene and Springfield and Lane County, since David Reesor became the campus’s transportation services director in 2018.
As campus reopens and students return, Schlossberg hopes to see more efforts to connect students to the community via bike rides, while reducing the barrier to entry for new riders — goals shared by the university’s Bike Program and the Transportation Services Department.
Together, the Bike Program and Transportation Services are “working hard to get folks to ride their bikes to work or to school, and to make it safe and encouraging to do so,” Sam Stroich, assistant director of the UO’s Outdoor Program and interim supervisor of the Bike Program, said.
The program provides a do-it-yourself workspace and repair assistance in the EMU, bike rentals and guided small group rides that introduce new riders to the shared use paths and bike routes around Eugene.
“Making it seem accessible is a huge part of it,” Eliza Lawrence, a student employee at the Bike Program, said. “You don’t need to have a really nice bike to bike around Eugene.”
Group sizes have been limited because of COVID regulations. As restrictions relax, Stroich hopes they’ll be able to have groups as large as 10 people again, up from just four.
He also hopes the EMU workspace will once more be the community hub that it was before the pandemic. The space has been operating at limited capacity since last spring, with repair stands spaced apart for compliance with physical distancing requirements.
“Traditionally, people would come in here and read their mail, eat lunch, take naps, read magazines, so it was very much a communal space that we’ve lost with COVID,” Stroich said. “We’re really about community. There’s some nuts and bolts — you gotta get your tire fixed, that’s not necessarily about community, so we do that too — but a lot of our program is about building community here.”
On the Transportation Services side, Kashinsky said that the campus’ current strengths for bike commuters include secure bicycle cages and lockers.
“We have a good deal of secure bike parking that, in some parts of campus, has gone underutilized,” he said.
But he also sees room for improvement.
“For instance, our bike lockers, which are the most secure option we offer, basically don’t fit any cargo bicycles,” Kashinsky said. That’s an upgrade he’d like to make eventually, when the parking revenues that fund Transportation Services return to pre-pandemic levels.
In the short term, Transportation Services will mark designated bicycle routes on campus this summer to improve navigation. “It’ll be a lot easier to find your way on a bicycle,” Kashinsky said. “It’s one of the small elements of encouragement.”
Sharing the ride
One other major asset for the campus is PeaceHealth Rides. The city’s bike share is under new management after Uber subsidiary Social Bicycles abandoned the program last June. It’s now run by Cascadia Mobility, part of the Portland based nonprofit Forth Mobility.
Cascadia Mobility CEO Brodie Hylton said UO has been “an anchor to the ridership success of the program.” Before the pandemic, roughly 80% of the program’s total trips began or ended at the university. Ridership fell dramatically during the pandemic, but Hylton believes it will rebound quickly with the return of on-campus instruction.
“We’re working in partnership with the U of O to get those numbers immediately back up as students come back to campus this fall,” Hylton said. The organization hired a new community outreach manager — Justin Sandoval, formerly of UO’s Outdoor Program — and plans to catch up on deferred maintenance, including updating the bikes’ electronic controllers and payment systems.
“Is bike share for everyone? Arguably it is not,” Hylton said, pointing out that cycling is not universally accessible. But, he explained, it can be one component of a broader network of alternatives to single-occupancy vehicles.
“Something we’ve seen over time is that, as bike share becomes a normalized way to get around, now that we’re 10 years into an American bike share experiment and three years into the Eugene version, it’s less scary to people,” Hylton said.
The long term view
All these factors — the Bike Program, the efforts by Transportation Services and the presence of PeaceHealth rides — contributed to the university’s recent recognition by the League of American Bicyclists as a bike friendly campus. And for some new riders, especially those whose route to campus doesn’t require riding on high traffic roads, a bike friendly campus might be enough to make commuting by bike a post-pandemic habit.
In the long run, Stroich said, “infrastructure is key,” and Schlossberg emphasized the same point.
“If our cities don’t make the changes to the street infrastructure that needs to happen to keep people’s stress levels manageable, then our old habits will just win. Not even just our habits — the way that we’re basically, in most places in this country, socially engineered to be car dependent to get around,” Schlossberg said. “It’s what the infrastructure has been designed to maximize.”