World: What a Cycling Video Can Tell Us About Public Transit.

In which I review Evan Edinger’s London Cycling Video.

I have become slightly obsessed with Evan Edinger’s YouTube channel in the last while after watching his fantastic video about cycling in London. The video highlights things that transit advocates should more carefully consider when trying to push for better transit (what do people really care about?), but also the ways we can frame conversations about trying out other modes of transport — particularly in cities where driving is the norm. I want to go over it, and talk about the interesting points made both for cycling and for transit.

You really should watch the video, but to summarize, Evan talks about how he has become a pretty heavy bike user, choosing an e-bike in particular for a very large proportion of his travel around London, and when I say London I mean a pretty big chunk of the city.

I think it’s worth highlighting that the video starting with how cycling lets you get farther than public transport in an urban area is super powerful, and also how Evan talks about it as “opening the city”. So many people live in cities (most of us actually), but so often we feel disconnected — we might not see or experience much of these great places we live; talking about opening the city is naturally aspirational.

You’re probably wondering why this has anything to do with public transport, but I think theres so much to learn from this — obviously cycling and public transport are symbiotic (at least they should be — make sure to subscribe for a future post on that), but I also think the video is very telling.

Edinger is not a newbie to urbanist content, but it’s also not his main niche, and so I think the video has really broad appeal. Here’s a guy who mostly just wants to get around in the most enjoyable way possible, and his thoughts on it!

I want to break down why I think this so interesting into two main sections: the reasons cycling works so well, and the video itself.

What Transit Can Learn From Cycling.

The video is mostly just Evan talking about the various reasons he enjoys cycling as a way of getting around London, and I think these reasons are insightful.

Speed

For one, cycling is just a really fast way to get around a dense urban area, I’m always surprised that people don’t get this more broadly, but I think it makes sense when you think about it. A lot of people have cycled minimally in adulthood, especially if they’ve moved to a scary city where they may not have a bike and you constantly hear about cyclists being killed. When all your experience cycling is in your youth, you probably don’t have a great sense for how fast you can cycle, but also the distances you can cover.

For example, in middle school I used to bike to school quite regularly with friends from our semi-rural area to the suburban area where our school was. The rides felt long and annoying, but the distance wasn’t all that long (7 kilometres). You just don’t have a good sense of how competitive cycling is in an urban context when your last experience was probably not urban (if we’re being honest), with child legs, not adult legs, and almost certainly not with a phone acting as a speedometer.

In the last few years as I’ve been cycling more, I’ve realized that I can quite comfortably cycle at over 20 kph, and potentially a fair bit faster, and that means that many transit routes in my city aren’t even as fast as cycling… at any point (Toronto’s slow streetcars, this is you). But even when a route might be faster, if it’s not particularly frequent, being able to go when you want to go (like with a car) gets the bike close to a win, letting all the other good things about cycling push it over the line.

For transit, this is a real reminder that systems ought to double down on speed. Competing with cars need not be hard if your stops aren’t too tightly spaced (Toronto again suffers from this), but also if you make use of transit signal priority, dedicated lanes, and grade separation. It also is a reminder that people don’t like idling around waiting for a bus or train, so you better make sure that experience doesn’t suck.

Price

Evan also mentions the price, and naturally cycling comes out way ahead. I think in particular it helps that London has really expensive public transport, and while I regularly advocate against universally free fares, you do also need to make sure you aren’t charging super high fares to the point where people feel like they aren’t getting good value.

This probably also shows the value of a transit pass. Obviously with a bike you have to buy it, but you pay once and forget about that cost (bikes last a long time!), if more people used transit passes, there would be less of a visceral “yikes, do I want to spend $5, $10, $15 to make this trip?”.

Evan mentions bike insurance being super valuable to him to reduce the worry around bike theft, probably something more people should consider, especially if it will get them to make more trips!

Exercise

Naturally, part of the conversation is also the built-in exercise that you get from cycling, which is compared to walking. I can personally attest that this is deeply underrated. When you’re living in a place where you don’t need to drive around, not only do you get some light exercise (which is a really healthy addition to intense workouts), but you also just get out more. Walking in and of itself is therapeutic, but it’s a lot easier to get yourself up and out there when you’re in an interesting area.

Now, transit is not walking, but public transport does include a lot of walking. You’ve got to transfer between vehicles at interchanges, and get to stops and stations at the beginning and end of trips. I personally don’t like to mess around with non-rail transport in the core of Toronto, in part because it’s a bit of a mess, but also because I really like walking in the core of Toronto!

I think cycling is a bit different in that cycling for exercise is not really niche, I’d argue it’s quite mainstream while walking for exercise (like serious exercise) is uber niche. But, I think at the end of the day, it would be good to remind public transport users a bit more regularly that they are burning calories and saving the planet with every trip.

Joy

A lot of what Edinger talks about in the video is just sort of that cycling is ... fun. That he enjoys using it to get around London. I think this is deeply underrated, and true obviously of walking to an extent too.

People do sometimes act like speed and other important things (some of which we’ve talked about in this post) are irrelevant to transport, with is obviously ridiculous, but it’s also the case that other things matter.

Joy on public transport is obviously important, and honestly when I think about Toronto’s transit system, I think joy is one of the huge missing pieces. I don’t find there is a lot to love about the system. Sure, in pure utility terms it’s fine, and sometimes even good. But, I’m rarely impressed by the architecture, or the art (some art in the system seems to be actively negative — see Union station!), or the announcements (increasingly made by monotone computer voices). London ironically is one of the best systems for joy in the world in my personal opinion. You have the lovely roundel, painted trains, human announcements, tons of public art — much of which is excellent, super impressive large and often architecturally impressive stations, and perhaps most of all — a lot of above ground routes, giving you awesome views of the city, and in the case of the DLR letting you sit right at the front of the train.

Concerns

Evan did also mention some concerns with cycling, and they are worth noting, and it’s also worth considering where analogues to transit exist.

Safe routes are obviously a big thing when cycling in our imperfect — not quite Amsterdam cities, and while transit routes are hopefully all very safe, making it easy for people to find the best route is something transit systems should think so much more about. So many of them having fully surrendered to Google Maps, but there’s all kinds of trip planning considerations Google doesn’t include, and system-specific details that mean good internal wayfinding should be able to do things external apps cannot (London again does well on this).

Now, I think the video is interesting because Evan notes again and again that London is a safe place to cycle, and I do think in general it would be good for us to be a little more cogniscent of the dangers of cars. Driving is not super safe, and it’s bad for the planet and the city, and it makes you sedentary.

Why the Video is So Good.

Watching this video came at a perfect time because I had just seen the movie F1 with my partner (a big F1 fan). The movie was fun, and a great reminder that we tell such good stories about why cars are cool, and people who drive cars are so often also cool and very heroic.

I think too often public transport, pedestrian, and cycling advocacy takes the form of talking about sort of high-minded reasons that these things are good. Equity, climate, city-building, huzzah! But, too often we forget that people don’t only make decisions for these philosophical reasons. On one hand we should drill down as Evan does in this video and just talk about how not driving will save you money, and make you fit, and be fun. While on the other hand, we should think about how to paint these ways of getting around as being part of a great, aspirational life.

So often you’ll see content or people driving around and think — wow they’ve got their life figured out, or whatever, and I think the size of cars and the way they dominate spaces makes it pretty easy to make content that highlights this. But, if you can make videos about alternatives, or even just get people to think about how freeing not having to park, or worry about tickets, or having to pay for a million things is, you can start to make alternatives feel amazing in similar ways to cars. Of course, it can’t all be subtraction — public transport, cycling, and walking add actual experience of your city when you’re not supposed to be staring at a road and steering a car. They let you come across things and notice things in a sort of childlike way. This video highlighted that to me, and for that I love it.