This guest blog is brought to you by SVBC members Arnout Boelens & Nicole Zoeller Boelens.

As residents of Palo Alto for just over three years now, my wife and I have enjoyed a car-free lifestyle; relying on our nine bicycles to commute to work, run errands, and enjoy the incredible recreation that the Bay area has to offer. And, while we’ve generally found the cycling infrastructure to be good enough for daily life, now that we’re expecting our first child in April and are preparing to cycle with a newborn, we’ve become more aware of the roads without protected bicycle lanes and/or high speed car traffic that exist on our most frequented routes. We’ve always been interested in bicycle advocacy and recently took our first step towards learning how we can actively improve cycling infrastructure for our community and growing family.

On December 7th, we attended the SVBC workshop on data collection led by Copenhagenize Design Co., a bicycle urbanism consultancy firm and are excited to share a bit about what we learned.

During the workshop, we learned that in North America the metrics for road design are almost exclusively based on how many cars can pass through a road per unit of time. This means pedestrians and bicyclists are completely invisible in many legislative and urban design processes. In this workshop Copenhagenize laid out the case for making pedestrians and bicyclists visible by collecting data on their numbers and movements and telling stories based on this data.

One of the most helpful frameworks we were given to tell these stories was in how to describe each type of cyclist as a Conformist, a Recklist, or a Momentumist. On one end of the spectrum, there is the Conformist. This person strictly follows all the traffic laws; would never run a red light, fully stops at every stop sign, etc. On the other end of the spectrum there is the Recklist; the cyclist who happily runs red lights, rides against traffic, and speeds on sidewalks. In the middle, between these extremes, sits the Momentumist; the cyclist who is inclined to follow the rules, but sometimes breaks them to maintain momentum and to stay safe. While non-cyclists seem to think that most cyclists are Recklists, actually analyzing typical video footage of urban settings suggest that the Recklist form only a very small percentage of the cycling community (usually less than 5%). Most riders are Momentumist and by properly designing roads and intersections they can organically become Conformist.

After the presentation we split up into smaller groups where we got to analyze video footage ourselves from Copenhagen, one of the cycling capitals of the world, Barcelona, or Montreal. Then we were asked to create and tell our own stories about what we observed. In each of these cities we could confirm that the vast majority of riders were Momentumist and Conformist and we discussed ways in which the particular intersections could be improved. Especially in Copenhagen, it was clear how many more people could travel down a road by bicycle than by car, using only a fraction of the space. One of our key conclusions was that the infrastructure for cyclists was so well-designed that it made most cyclists a Conformist by default.

We thought the workshop was very well put together and it inspired us to start thinking of where this kind of data collection and storytelling can be applied to the issues we see on our own cycling routes in Palo Alto. We’re excited to put what we learned to practice and begin directly advocating for infrastructure improvements with City Council in the coming months.

We would like to thank SVBC and Copenhagenize for organizing the workshop, and to Corning for providing a venue. We sincerely look forward to future events that help us become more effective advocates – helping create safer roads that invite more of our neighbors to join us on a bicycle.