The Kansas City cycling revolution

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1:19Welcome to Kansas City, Missouri. I'm Richard Hollingham. And I'm Will Grant. And for the BBC World Service, this is the Kansas City Cycling Revolution, a story which starts with an email. Dear Mr Hollingham, I am writing to you for help finding a recording of a story you did for the BBC in 2008. The story was about what it was like to cycle in Kansas City, which at the time was ranked the worst city for cycling in the US. That story is our origin story. That's Amy Scrivener from Bike Walk KC, who got in touch a few months ago. Her organisation was set up to promote cycling and walking and it turns out that since our 2008 show, the city has invested tens of millions of dollars in cycling initiatives and infrastructure.

2:07In this edition of the documentary from the BBC World Service, we're back on our bikes to discover how things have changed and what other communities around the world can maybe learn. When we last pedalled across Kansas City 18 years ago, It came at the very bottom of the League of American Bicyclists list of bike-friendly cities. The roads were built for cars with little provision for cyclists. We were nearly run over, we got punctures and narrowly avoided being robbed. We were told if we planned to cycle across the city, we'd better get our affairs in order. So this time we're hoping for better.

2:47Hello. We're going to get rolling here in just a minute. Thank you to everybody for coming. We have some esteemed guests with us tonight. Please give them a warm welcome. My name is Raisa Johnson. I've lived in Kansas City since 2016. I'm a member of the board of directors of the Major Taylor Cycling Club of Kansas City. Major Taylor was an Olympic cyclist back in the late 1890s and early 1900s who gained notoriety by being one of the first black cyclists allowed to compete in competitive races. So we're doing a bit of a different route tonight to showcase both the good and not good bike lanes in Kansas City.

3:30Every Monday night when the weather is nice, we have a group of 20, 30, 40 folks show up to take a nice, slow, casual-paced bike ride through urban Kansas City. The point of the community is just to get together and ride bikes. We differentiate ourselves from a lot of other groups in town in that it's not a race. we're not trying to finish in a certain amount of time. The point is just to get together, enjoy each other's friendship and company, and see the sights of Kansas City.

4:01You did it! You did it! That's quite the hell, isn't it? It was, yeah, it just kind of kept going, didn't it? But you did it. Did you do this a lot? Yeah, I mean, I've been riding with Major Taylor for quite a while. I haven't been here in a minute, but yeah, I ride, try to get 120, 140 miles a week. Wow. How safe is it? I mean, because when we came here last, we were told, get your affairs in order if you want to cycle across the city. I believe it's safer now just because time has passed and cycling culture has grown. But unfortunately, probably just like everywhere else, people still get hit.

4:39But have you noticed a change? Has it got better? I think so. So we definitely have some lanes for people that aren't as comfortable. So they don't have to be on the road and we have some protected lanes. So I think so. I'm definitely seeing more cyclists and more cyclists of all ages and more cyclists of all levels, too. What is it about group cycling? Because I'm really enjoying this. And it was a lot easier to go up that hill knowing that you were in front of me and I wasn't going to drop behind. Well, with group cycling is, first of all, you've got accountability. You've got safety in numbers.

5:10If anything happens, somebody will see it and or they'll help you or they'll be with you to it. and then just like you were following my will, you wanted to stay on my will, if I wasn't in front of you, you probably wouldn't have that same motivation. No, no, no. That's what does it. You were my motivation. Well, thank you. I'm very glad. Thank you for using me. What's your name, buddy? I'm Richard. Sorry, what's your name? Michael. Michael. Hi, Michael. Pleasure. Anytime, man. Love talking to you. As the sun set, we crossed the sprawling city to past shops, offices and parks. We took in busy four-lane roads and potholed side streets, but also an array of dedicated cycle paths, most separated from cars by concrete barriers.

5:51There were many more cyclists and it felt a lot safer, very different to when we were last here. I moved to Kansas City in 2016 and since then a lot of bicycling infrastructure has been put into place by the city. Some of the bike lanes that we put in are examples of the types of bike lanes we would love to see all around the city with concrete barriers protecting cyclists from traffic around. Others are not so great with concrete cutouts coming into the middle of the lane unexpectedly with a lane of traffic or parked cars between us and moving traffic and two-lane cycle tracks where vehicles aren't expecting to see cyclists coming from the wrong direction.

6:35So maybe not perfect, but there's certainly been an enormous change. To find out how that happened, let's return to our origin story and a group that's helped lead the Kansas City cycling revolution. In the workshop at Bike Walk KC, we met Amy, who we heard from earlier, and Executive Director Eric Rogers. I think that program in 2008 was really a wake-up call for our community. It was the type of notoriety that no community wants to get to be featured as the worst place in the United States to ride a bike. Not only were we the worst ranked city in the US, we were also the largest city without professional cycling advocates who could take the time to go at City Hall and advocate and testify and fight for funding and plans and infrastructure.

7:24What are your challenges, Amy? I mean, just give us a sense of the city. I spent a day yesterday trying to get around on public transport. And it struck me that, one, it's really spread out. You've got these neighborhoods kind of not very well connected. and two it's really hilly it is really hilly yeah so people think that kansas city because we're in the midwest and bordering kansas and missouri that it's flat and it is not so that's where the e-bike revolution has really come in in terms of helping folks ride where they want to ride and go for transportation not just leisure in that disconnectedness is one of the big problems are one of the big challenges for us.

8:04So we've really seen in our evolution as an organization, this shift from cycling as just a pleasure or leisure to now being a legit mode of transportation. And when people suddenly realize that your bike can get you to where you want to go daily errands and trips, you start paying attention to where the disconnects are. So that is one thing that's a challenge for the community that we've been working on. Kansas City has a lot of grassroots groups that are growing up and emerging. and taking on their own little bit of what cycling means for them. And so we have groups like All Bodies on Bikes, which wants to normalize people of all body types being on bikes and not just the typical athlete that you might see in ads and in magazines.

8:48We all look at Will then. Yeah, yeah. We have two or three groups that run rides that are led by and are for women specifically. We are also seeing bike buses in Kansas City. So groups of parents who will get all the kids in the neighborhood together and bike with them to school. You know, we work with a lot of immigrants and refugees who are new to Kansas City and don't have access to cars. And so we also see folks that are really cycling out of need. And then we have, you know, actually one of the largest mountain bike scenes in Kansas City, even though we don't have mountains. But we have hundreds of miles of cycle track just within a few minutes of the city center.

9:27So it really is the whole spectrum of a bike community now here in Kansas. So your nervous mountain is probably hundreds, if not thousands of miles away, isn't it? Right. But the hilly terrain does mean you can get some climbs and some descents and some creative trail layout. It gives you a little bit of a feel of mountain biking here. I'm of a certain age, and so is Eric. Oh, look, we all are. So, you know, in the U.S., growing up in the suburbs, like, the bike was my freedom. Like, everybody had a bike. It was just a given. And we've really gotten away from that. We see as many as 40 % of kids in some of the classes that we go into who have never even been on a bike.

10:05Wow. 40%. And that's just, that's crazy to me because it was such a thing growing up and coming up. And then there's something, I think, with American culture that once you're old enough to get a car, you abandon the bike. And suddenly it's a child's thing that you abandon. And we really want to challenge that and say that a bike can be a form of transportation, of exercise for your entire life. Where does your inspiration come from? Because if you think sort of global cycling, I guess people will think the perfect places to cycle. Like our original production meeting, you know, oh, let's go to Copenhagen or, you know, the Netherlands or something like that.

10:45Is that what you've been doing? Yeah, I think those are all great examples. but those aren't always the best examples to look at in the U.S. So in the U.S. we look at other similar Midwestern cities. We look at what's progress that was made previously in places like Indianapolis and Minneapolis and other Midwestern cities that are similar, very car-centric. Also, we try not to have too much of a Eurocentric lens and recognize that a lot of work has happened in the global South and in South America. So really interesting work in cities like Kampala in Uganda or in Mexico City, places in Brazil.

11:25There's not one right way to do this and make a city more bike friendly. There's examples from everywhere, especially cities are doing it at lower costs and aren't spending a ton of money, but are just doing very practical, efficient things. and I think you'll see here in Kansas City we've done some of that with what we call quick builds which is just quickly reconfiguring a street to put up some separation, some bollards, some curb stops to get a sense of physical separation from cars and bikes and then in the last couple years going back and making that more permanent, making bigger investments in permanent separated facilities which you'll also see some of here today.

12:08studies carried out around the world show that physically separating bikes from cars makes people feel safer on the roads and encourages more people to consider cycling and it's interesting to hear that they're looking to the city i live in mexico city for inspiration since i first moved there in 2011 more bike lanes and shared bike schemes have been introduced The city even shuts down its main thoroughfare, Reformer Avenue, to cars every Sunday so residents can bike, run and skate in peace. But the measures are patchy. Some neighbourhoods have them. Elsewhere, the car remains king. Whoa, there we go.

12:50Terrific. Amy mentioned the e-bikes that over-18s can now rent at locations across the city. The bikes are pedal assist, so you have to keep pedalling, with the motor topping out at 20 miles an hour. Riders are encouraged to cycle safely and wear helmets. So we put on our helmets, got on the app, and headed out to look at some cycling infrastructure. OK, we're good to go. Fantastic. Oh, there's quite a pace to these e-bikes. This is fun. This is great. Do you cycle in one in the U.S.? Yeah, I have an e-bike at home, so I have an e-bike. I have too many bikes. I have an e-bike, a road bike, a mountain bike.

13:35Is there such a thing as too many bikes? Too many bikes. I suppose your bank balance would say yeah. Oh, that's the bell. Cool. So this is Gillam Road. It was one of our first pieces of protected infrastructure. Yeah. It was quick build. So you see we have the bollards and the concrete curb stops. Yeah. This was put in to be able to build quickly and efficiently. And now some of the things we'll see elsewhere are more permanent, evolved versions of this design. Now, it looks to me like this is taken away, as it were, one of the lanes of vehicular traffic. This is what we call a road diet, which is taking the existing road space and reconfiguring it to make room for people who are walking and biking.

14:21Is that the sort of classic example of what angers car drivers then, that you actually took our infrastructure away from us? Sometimes, although often we find with the road diets and the traffic calming, we can go through here. Slowing the traffic down benefits everybody who's using the street. Yeah. So we find car speeds go down. We find the actually car crashes go down. And so calming the traffic and slowing everybody down just a little bit actually makes everybody safer. Yes, that's right. Road diets. Taking away lanes for cars and giving the space over to buses, cyclists and pedestrians. And it's another Eric we need to speak to.

15:05Formerly of Bike Walk Kansas City, Eric Bunch is now a city councillor. Some people like to call it a road buffet instead because rather than taking these things away, you still have great access for vehicular traffic on the street. But what we've done is we've added better access for transit users, and we've improved bikeability, but also, most importantly, it's improved walkability because it's easy to cross the street when there are two lanes instead of four lanes. Do you have any anti-cyclists? Are there people who will actively say, why are you putting all this money into this cycling infrastructure, This green lane here, where I can't see any cyclists down here, why you haven't fixed the potholes instead?

15:50We could invest our entire budget into potholes and we still get complaints about potholes. That is just an evergreen complaint, and I understand it. It's critical. Every city struggles with maintenance of infrastructure. The reality is that this is a pretty cheap thing that really adds a lot of value. And it's not just about a cyclist. It is about creating a safer environment so that I can walk my kids to this school right here. I'm looking down the street where my kids literally go to school. All of America is open for business for driving places. What we have here is we've just added some options.

16:25You can still drive down this and not be delayed whatsoever. You can see the traffic is flowing perfectly. There are two vehicles at that stoplight right there. What we've done is made it better for everyone else who may not want to be in that vehicle. As we heard earlier, not all these cycle lanes are popular, even with the cyclists. But they certainly feel safer than cycling on a busy five-lane road. And traffic deaths in the city are down, last year by some 30%. This is Richard Hollingham with Will Grant in Kansas City for the documentary from the BBC World Service. Investing with Schwab is like spending a Saturday at a great farmer's market.

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18:20It's not just the cycling infrastructure that's changed. Kansas City now has a streetcar. Free to ride, these trams run some 10 kilometers down Main Street from the trendy River Market district with its restaurants and bars to the art galleries, museums and university. We got off about midway to meet reporter for the Kansas City Star, Chris Higgins. The neighbourhood residents were definitely positive about the goals here. I think we saw a letter too that was written to the Kansas City Star. People who weren't as into it for sure, I think they aren't convinced of the benefits. I think slowing down traffic, people are concerned about increased congestion, and they're concerned about vehicles, too, who don't want to drive down the road at all, and they opt to take side streets, potentially increasing safety issues and congestion on side streets through the neighbourhoods as people avoid the main strip.

19:21Is this a question of, though, chicken and egg? You've got to put the infrastructure in first and then try and convince people it's going to work. Otherwise, it's never going to change. And that has been an issue over the past few years. Certainly, this is not the first bike lane road die that's happened in Kansas City. A few years ago, there were a lot of concerns that the city was pursuing these projects without full buy-in from the neighborhood. So they have really gone out of their way to get that public engagement, to get that buy-in. They have these public hearings, these meetings where they present it.

19:56I went to a couple of those. They do surveys. They gather feedback from residents about what they like to see and then create the project with that feedback in mind. We've been looking essentially at the micro level here, one particular neighbourhood, one particular crossroads. But as a local reporter, you're also going to have a perception of what the strategy is or what the intended strategy is for the city. What do you think the authorities are attempting to do or those who are making these decisions are attempting to do in Kansas City more broadly? On a narrower level, it's called Vision Zero.

20:30The vision being zero traffic deaths, zero people getting killed in car crashes, zero pedestrians getting hit by cars, and really just making the streets safer for pedestrians, people on bikes and people in cars as well. So efforts like this are very much a part of that because it slows down traffic. And that's the goal, right? That's kind of the main thing is that it does slow down cars. They'll say that to you. And it fixes up intersections to make them safer. It reduces those conflict points, visibility issues. But more broadly, and we're seeing this all around the United States, is a push to make neighborhoods more walkable and pleasant at the street level.

21:14All right, East Fairs! East Fairs! East Fairs! All right. today is bicycle club welcome welcome are you excited bicycle club started as this little dream where maybe two three students are going to follow me around the neighborhood and we would talk about routes and maybe a minor repairs how to fix a tube and things and it's really grown in the 10 years east high school is one of the largest and most diverse schools in Kansas City, teaching students from more than 40 countries. And cycling has become an important part of school life. It also boasts a district teacher of the year, Andrew Killen.

21:58We've had 275 different riders earn a bicycle with us at no cost to them. So we received everything through donations of the bicycles, donations of the helmets, locks and lights. Because of our school's student population, a lot of them are financially unable to have a bicycle, a working bicycle. And when the riders join us, we start with very small rides, two, three miles, and then we try to get as far as we can by the end of each cohort. So 15, 16 miles in an afternoon is something very doable by the end. I got involved. I was walking through the halls. I I saw a poster. It said, Bike Club Free Bike.

22:41And that's pretty much all I needed to join. It's been a fun time, though. So you get a free bike? Oh, yeah. My bike is, like, green, handles inwards. I forget what I named her, but she's awesome. Putting on, like, a helmet for the first time and, like, having to go out in front of your peers was kind of embarrassing, I can't lie. Like, or hearing my friends, like, scream my name because they saw me on a bike going down with a group of people. It's embarrassing, but, like, it's fun. You really do have to push yourself into going and doing different things and getting out of your comfort zone and do something fun like Bike Club.

23:16So, Bears, we're going to do our usual ride across the bridge, across the interstate. Unfortunately, due to our location on the east side of our city, we haven't had as many resources such as protected bicycle lanes installed. So whenever we leave the school, we have to make educated choices about which roads we're going to use based on traffic counts, traffic speed. And then I would even say like the accessibility of a left and right turns towards our destination. So while resources have been spent in our city, it hasn't been accessible for all of Kansas Cityans. All right, let's go ride bikes.

24:01So as we once again took to the hills of the city with the new generation of Kansas City cyclists, I caught up with teacher Amanda Dennison. They all seem to be really enjoying it, the students. They do. They love it. They're getting exercise. They're together with friends. It's just wonderful. These roads are pretty rough, aren't they? They're terrible. Where is our tax money going? But in the downtown or in the main centre, you've got all these new cycle lanes around here. You're constantly shouting hulls, glass, bumps, all sorts of stuff on these roads. Yes, definitely. It's very dangerous still to ride these roads.

24:41Stopping! Yeah, lots of obstacles to look out for.

24:53But the neighbours around here seem to be very supportive of it. The neighbors are awesome. Car ride! We passed a house back there with three or four greenhouses. And we've seen them grow their home garden over the years. They add new greenhouses. They're often outside talking. And we visit with them. And it's just awesome. So they're our biggest fans, I think. but yeah generally people are very friendly some people will get irritated but oh well I mean obviously you know we're we're cycling in a group and you're giving them instructions that they're going along the idea they could they could cycle this on their own absolutely we take pretty regular paths to get to different parts of the city where we want to ride each week and in two weeks we will ride home.

25:56We will ride the kids home with their bikes and their helmets and their lights and their locks so they know how to get to and from school safely. So it's a pretty cool thing we got going in Bicycle Club. It was an enjoyable and safe ride but it's clear that not everyone in the city is benefiting from cycle-friendly streets. Most of the initiatives to get people on their bikes have been driven by grassroots action, volunteers. Which brings us to the 816 Bicycle Collective. With the help of donations, its volunteers have transformed a derelict corner shop into a bustling workshop. My name is Sean Egan.