How to Turn Cities Into Biketopias? Make it Harder to Drive There
Since its implementation on January 5, congestion pricing has had a major impact on New York City. Most obviously, it has eased vehicle traffic in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. It’s increased foot traffic around the borough, which in turn aids the city’s brick-and-mortar retailers. It’s nudged people to ride the subway more, which helps reduce crime on the trains. With an average charge of $9 per passenger car and upwards of $21.60 for large trucks during peak hours, congestion pricing has also been a financial boon to the city, netting $48.6 million in its first month—well above the $40 million originally projected.
Of course, the news of the program’s sudden and overwhelming success has been overshadowed by President Trump’s announcement that he will shut the program down, an effort many experts believe will be in vain.
Congestion pricing has also made life easier for one of the most populous groups found on New York’s streets: cyclists. Whether for commuters, delivery workers, couriers, or recreationalists, the program has made some of Manhattan’s most historically dangerous places to ride a little more welcoming.
Recently, while scrolling through my social feeds, I saw myriad videos, reels, and posts from old friends in New York, Central Park–based race teams I follow, and some of the city’s notable bike influencers, all touting a similar idea: Suddenly, thanks to congestion pricing, riding a bike in Manhattan is more fun, less stressful, and easier than ever before.
“Biking in the center of the city, you needed to wear this mask of aggression,” says Anna Berlanga, a Bronx-based organizer with Transportation Alternatives, a New York nonprofit that advocates for biking, walking, and public transit. “But since congestion pricing, I don’t need that mask. I can just rely on my little bike bell. It’s not like it was before.”
A Queens-based bike courier who goes by the mononym of Quentin echoes Berlanga’s sentiment, noting how New York’s streets suddenly feel more spacious than ever.
“There’s just a lot more elbow room now,” Quentin says, admitting that part of him misses the traffic, as the gridlock often made his job more exciting. “The Avenues, especially through Midtown, just seem wide open, and you can tell there are so many less cars on the road.”
But it’s not only couriers enjoying the City’s less trafficked streets. Though the city’s bike-sharing platform, CitiBike, has yet to share ridership information from January, there simply appear to be more people on bikes than at comparable times in years past.
“Even in this unusually cold winter, we’re seeing more people biking since congestion pricing took effect,” says Ken Podziba, president and CEO of the advocacy nonprofit Bike New York. “But the real excitement will come with warmer weather, as we witness a dramatic shift—fewer cars and more bikes filling the city streets.”
To Podziba’s point, what might happen when the temperature ticks up? Will Manhattan suddenly look like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris, or Oslo, the latter two of which recently joined the trend of centering bicycle transport in their urban design? And if ridership skyrockets, will the city take the lead from its legion of bike riders and implement more and safer means for people to traverse the city via bike?
The first city that typically comes to mind at the mention of an urban biking center is Amsterdam. Renowned for its hundreds of miles of bike lanes, its protected bike infrastructure, and its cycling-happy residents, many of whom travel within the city almost exclusively by bike, the Dutch capital is an international beacon for bicycle-centric urban planning.
However, what you may not know is that the Dutch city’s focus on bicycling infrastructure is a relatively recent phenomenon.
In 1971, after a few decades of postwar boom, 3,300 Amsterdammers were killed in traffic accidents. Four hundred of them were children. In the aftermath of that bloody year, a variety of advocacy groups began staging citywide protests, fiercely opposing the city’s growing dependence on cars and urging lawmakers to better consider bicyclists and pedestrians. Serendipitously, a few years later, during the 1973 oil crisis that saw the price of oil quadruple, the Dutch government shut down several city streets on Sundays, urging citizens to enjoy traffic-free motorways.
By the 1980s, towns and cities across the Netherlands started to slowly introduce special bicycle-only routes, which led to networks of city-wide bicycle paths. Today, the Netherlands counts some 30,000 miles of bike paths spread across the country’s 12,900 square miles, while more than a quarter of all trips in the country are made by bicycle.
Similarly, the early-’70s oil crisis hit nearby Denmark just as hard, leading that country to adopt car-free Sundays. Through the subsequent years, the Danish Cyclist Federation exploded in popularity, which led to grassroots efforts around the nation to embrace a cycling-focused future.
By 2011, more than 20 percent of all trips in Denmark’s capital city of Copenhagen were taken by bicycle. That same year, city leaders adopted the City of Copenhagen’s Bicycle Strategy, an infrastructure and engagement plan that runs through the end of 2025 with a focus on making Copenhagen a world leader in urban bicycling. The plan rolled out many facets, the most notable being a goal of having 50 percent of trips to work and school taken by bike. With nine months remaining in 2025, cycling accounts for 45 percent of those trips within the city. Meanwhile, half of all children in Copenhagen ride bikes to school.
And while Amsterdam and Copenhagen have several decades of evolution behind them, there are plenty of more recent examples of major cities pushing bike riding to the fore.
In 2015, Paris instituted the first phase of Le Plan vélo de Paris, which used a €150 million ($162 million) investment to double the amount of bike lanes in the city. Additionally, it offered subsidies to Parisians purchasing ebikes. By 2020, ridership in the French capital increased by 47 percent, which led mayor Anne Hidalgo to announce the second phase of the plan: another €250 million to create 180 kilometers (111 miles) of bike lanes throughout the city and the addition of more than 130,000 new bicycle parking spots. At the time of the announcement, Hidalgo said her goal was to make Paris 100 percent cyclable.
By April of last year, bicycles in the city surpassed cars as residents’ primary means of travel within the city, with 14 percent of trips taken on bike, compared to 11.8 percent in cars. The gap between those numbers only grew during rush hour, when 18.9 percent of trips were taken on bike and 6.6 percent were via car.
Meanwhile in Oslo, ridership has increased more than 80 percent since the 2015 implementation of the city’s Bicycle Strategy, which aimed to increase the amount of bicycle trips in the city to 16 percent by 2025. One major element of Oslo’s bicyclization—one that shares much DNA with congestion pricing—was the prohibition of gas-powered vehicles in the city’s center since 2019. Today, the city’s streets are quiet and lightly trafficked, which no doubt encourages more people to travel by bike.
On a recent trip to the Norwegian capital, I saw bike lanes packed with commuters, recreational cyclists, and entire families loaded on cargo bikes, all despite the fact that it was early January and the temperature was barely above 0 degrees Fahrenheit.
Jody Rosen is a journalist who, in May 2022, published Two Wheels Good, an exhaustive and deeply reported history of the bicycle. In the book, Rosen examined several world cities and their relationship to, with, and on bikes. He says that if New York City wants to follow the lead of these European cities, there needs to be a move away from the car culture that is so ingrained in the American experience.
“People like to think that New York City is some kind of satellite city of Europe, but the reality is that New York is as American as it gets, and it’s part of a car country, and to wean this country off of cars is going to be very, very difficult,” says Rosen, who is a regular bike rider in and around his home of Brooklyn. “Car culture is very entrenched in New York.”
Rosen points to a combination of political will, activism, and the recognition that the city, despite all of its bikes and bikers, is still woefully underprepared when it comes to bike infrastructure. Still, Rosen, a New York City native, sees more people on bikes in New York than he ever has before.
“There is a lot more cycling in New York than there was 20 years ago, say nothing of 40 years ago,” he said. “But there’s still a long way to go.”
Rosen also notes that one element those European cities all focused on was making it difficult to drive in city centers. Whether by scaling back parking spaces, charging residents more, or, in Oslo’s case, making it illegal to operate most cars in the city, putting the hurdles in front of motor vehicles opened many doors for bicycling, which is exactly what congestion pricing seems to be accomplishing.
Perhaps congestion pricing is the first big domino to fall in New York’s next bicycling evolution. Perhaps, once the weather warms up and people start riding bikes through quieter, less trafficked streets en masse, the city’s population will realize that a bike-centric city almost exclusively has upside. Perhaps, in a generation or less, New York’s streets will look a lot more like those in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris, or Oslo.