A pet peeve of mine is how infrastructure-oriented, and therefore how mid-to-far-future-oriented, city cycling discussions tend to be. There are people on the road right now. City planners like to assume that all current cyclists are a distinct breed of weirdos and there are no marginal gains to be made by making marginal improvements. It will take grand action to get "normal" people to ride bicycles. In truth, regular cyclists are just the tail of a larger population of people who want to bike more and drive less, and who occasionally try. Every improvement to safety and convenience means more of those people will ride for transportation more often.

1. All streets are bike streets

This is already true for people who leave home on a bicycle expecting to handle all their daily business. Please consider that basically everyone who leaves home on a bike is forced to include some segments of "car" streets in their route. Planners like to imagine all of a city's cyclists moving around on the streets and paths they've specifically improved for bicyclists, like they've laid out a model train track and all the toy trains are running on it. If cyclists were restricted to traveling that way, it wouldn't be a practical means of transportation. Educate drivers and take cyclists into account in traffic engineering. Make cycling a little more tolerable now and you'll have more cyclists and more of a political mandate for infrastructure projects in the future.

2. Separated cycle tracks, not bike lanes

I hate the "not" here. I know the author is describing Amsterdam, but he calls his five points a "template," and "not bike lanes" doesn't belong on any city's template for becoming bike-friendly. Bike lanes are cheap and quick to install, so put them everywhere you can spare the space. I know they're not all that safe. I've been hit in one. At the same time you work on installing bike lanes, work on the grant and bond proposals that will let you build separated cycle tracks in the future. There's grass-roots interest in cycling right now in the United States. People want to bike, and they're trying, despite the lack of infrastructure. Focusing solely on expensive, high-profile improvements that are years out is a disservice to people who are taking to the roads right now, and it could leave a lot of them with a sour taste in their mouths as they struggle to safely navigate the streets near their work and wonder why there's so much excitement about projects that even if fully completed years from now will still leave them many blocks short of their work and other nonnegotiable destinations. Bike lanes might not have a place in the future, but none of us live in the future as of yet.

(I suspect planners and advocates feel pushed towards the most ambitious projects by career considerations, and I can sympathize with that. Everyone wants to be the most forward-looking. Everyone wants to have the highest hopes and standards. Everyone wants, when the future finally arrives in reality, to have been the first to get there in their heads. Everybody wants to be seen as valuing the least advantaged and most vulnerable people who will be the last (in perception, not necessarily in reality) to finally be brought onto the road by the most advanced evolution of infrastructure. Nobody wants to be associated with the suboptimal and downright dangerous compromises we will live with until then.)