Jennifer Toole has been a transportation engineer and designer for over 30 years. She is a big fan of multimodal transportation systems – but most of all loves to promote cycling. By Jared Green (first published in The Dirt).
Maryland, USA. April 2021. “Our transportation system kills 40,000 people a year in crashes and injures hundreds of thousands more, and is responsible for more than a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions,” says Jennifer Toole. That’s grim reading.
Toole, CEO of Toole Design, believes that all her company engineers, landscape architects, and planners – now spread to 16 offices - have an ethical obligation to develop designs that improve the safety, health, and welfare of the public.
Urban cycleways do not have to follow roads - an can be much more scenic too. Courtesy Toole Design.
Part of this is by promoting, and making the use of bicycles more attractive through smart urban planning. A task which, as she points out, needs some work.
“Most people just don’t feel safe bicycling, which is the greatest disincentive. We spent nearly a century in the US building a transportation system that essentially caters only to people who are driving motor vehicles,” she asserts.
She maintains the best thing cities can do to promote cycling is make it feel safer. She notes that a common negative issue is interconnected networks and bike facilities that are separated from traffic – but that come to a sudden stop when they get to major barriers.
“This is a big problem right now: we have a lot of bikeways that might get you part of the way to where you want to go, but then you get to a big intersection or an interchange and the bikeway just ends,” she says.
Toole also maintains that urban motor vehicle speeds need to be reduced so that when bicyclists and motorists do meet, it’s in a safe and controlled way. “Plus we need to provide high-quality, secure places to park a bike once riders get where they are going. None of this is rocket science,” she adds.
She cites places like Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Melbourne that have successfully increased the percentage of cyclists by investing in infrastructure that makes cyclists feel safe; “and, in fact, bicyclists are now safer in those places,” she adds.
One thing that has definitely given cycling a boost, says Toole, is the e-bike.
“I am really excited about e-bikes because they eliminate another major disincentive to cycling: hilly areas, with long, difficult uphill climbs,” she says. “When you look at a normal bike trip, it’s usually someplace between 1-2 kms in length. An e-bike trip is typically longer than a normal bike trip though, because you don’t have to expend as much energy to make the trip.”
“E-bikes are a bit faster than regular bikes though, so that means that even more than before, pavements are not the right place for them. They need their own space, separated bike lanes, shared-use paths and bike boulevards.”
Everybody cycles in Amsterdam - just because they do. Courtesy City of Amsterdam.
She says that although one of the reasons cited for an uptick in cycling – for health – is often talked up, the health card is not something planners need concentrate on.
“It’s more about providing ways for people to introduce (cycling) into their everyday life without thinking about it,” she asserts. “When you go to The Netherlands and ask people why they are riding bikes, they almost never talk about (health) or the environment. They are riding a bike because it’s the most efficient way to get where they want to go. We need to make bicycling the logical choice — the no-brainer choice.”
Flush streets lead to slower traffic and safer transport options. Courtesy Toole Design.
One of her favourite options to making cycling that no-brainer is to build Flush Streets. These are thoroughfares to do away with separate zones for cars, riders, and pedestrians.
“These are the kind of streets that have been built all over Europe, where there’s just one street surface,” she explains. “The benefit of making a flush street — so they are all one level, no curbs — is that it really promotes a feeling that pedestrians are the highest priority. People don’t have to go to an intersection in order to cross the street.”
The other big benefit with Flush Streets, she notes, is that everybody slows down. Cars can still travel down the street and park, but drivers don’t feel comfortable going fast down a street without kerbs and pedestrians walking where they feel like it.
“This is due to a well-known concept in traffic engineering: when you introduce an element of uncertainty, everyone slows down. There’s fewer traffic signals or traffic signs. It all helps make motor vehicle traffic go slower,” she says. Which is good for bikes, good for pedestrians – and good for the environment too.
Toole is not only a cycling missionary, she is an optimist too. “There is generations of work for landscape architects to fix all these streets and make them greener and safer on a scale that we’ve never done before,” she says.
“We were sort of stuck in the past; this new way of designing streets is going to give us so much more room to work.”
“It’s a really exciting time to be a landscape architect.”