HISTORY: How Bikes Got Sidelined From American Streets - Business Insider

Headlines are quick hits from media outlets from Missouri and around the world. Follow the headline link for the full story. The source of this headline says:

Walk the streets of many major US cities today and you'll find cones, bollards, and barricades creating space for pedestrians and cyclists that, before the pandemic, belonged to cars. It's an urbanist's dream, but it's come at an immense cost.

When COVID-19 hit last spring, cities from Oakland to Philadelphia scrambled to meet the needs of a public abruptly uprooted from its daily routine and forced to physically distance. Taking advantage of a steep drop-off in car traffic, transportation departments began closing streets to give people more space to roam while designating temporary bike lanes to accommodate a pandemic-era surge in cycling.

And although the pandemic highlighted some cities' ability to innovate, it also forced the US' longstanding lack of good biking infrastructure into the spotlight.

After all, people didn't start biking when the pandemic began; it's been on the rise for years. And although lots of American cities have decent bike lanes, scores of cities outside the US — most famously European metropolises like Copenhagen and Amsterdam — have spent decades building out highly developed and widely utilized biking networks.

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HISTORY: How Bikes Got Sidelined From American Streets - Business Insider

MoBikeFed comment: As the article points out, U.S. cities have been putting more effort into creating bicycle infrastructure and networks. But as a country - and Missouri as a state - are not yet quite at the point where we need to be.

Read the full article for ideas about where we are and what we need to do to get there.