Bringing Biking Culture to Silicon Valley…

New IPO foreign correspondent Shiloh Ballard provides an update on her mission to imbue Silicon Valley with Biking-tude.

Sunday afternoon I arrived in Amsterdam as a part of a bicycle study trip through Bikes Belong, a nonprofit that works to get more butts on bikes.  I’m with delegations from Marin, San Francisco and San Jose learning about how the Dutch achieve a 27% bike mode share.  (USA is at 1%)  The hope is that we can apply what we learn to our respective regions.

First and foremost, I was blown away by what they say is their top problem:  Bike parking. There just isn’t enough.  In fact, at the Utrecht central station, they have 12,000 parking spaces for bikes.  12,000!  And, it’s still not enough.  They are planning for an additional 8,000 spaces.

There is much to say about the Dutch commitment to bikes and the infrastructure is amazing, but I was most struck by what one of our hosts said regarding infrastructure and culture. His own opinion is that people focus on infrastructure while ignoring culture.  This was music to my ears.

He called this hardware versus software and in Holland, they do both.  Not only is the bike infrastructure (bike lanes, bike paths etc) above and beyond anything I have ever seen, the Dutch also start teaching their kids about bikes from the day they can pedal.  At one Utrecht school we visited, 95% of the kids walk or ride and it is a rare parent that picks their kids up from school in a car.  (I didn’t see any.)

Ultimately, the question is, how do we get more people on bikes?  Is it through the striping of zillions of miles of bikes lanes, cyclopaths, bike boulevards etc?  Or, even with that investment, will we still have a culture that chooses the SUV over the bike?  Although I understand the importance of infrastructure, I also am familiar with the glacial pace of planning, studies, city council decisions, securing funding and finally building the project.  So although we need to focus on the infrastructure aspect of bike friendliness, we can’t ignore the importance of cultural change.

That’s something we can all help with right now, today, without waiting for CEQA clearance on a project or the city budget to be in a position to fund bike projects.  I find that once people are introduced to biking with some very intensive handholding, they are quickly transformed into a believer.  It just takes helping them to find a good route, helping to acclimate them to a bike and even riding with them to work.  Bike to Work Day does just that and we ought to scale up those types of programs, as just one example.  Imagine if each year all of us fanatical cyclists took it upon ourselves to mentor one new non-cyclist a year…

I’m blown away by the biking culture here in the Netherlands and am certain we can take some of what we’re learning and apply it to Silicon Valley.