Watch For Me OK
Jan 29, 2026
Picture this: on your way to weekend brunch with friends, you head out of your neighborhood using the nearby bike lane. Halfway to brunch, the bike lane abruptly ends. Do you proceed and take the risk of riding in heavy traffic? Do you take a detour? Do you return home to take your car?
These gaps highlight the importance of a truly well-connected bike network and safe urban bike infrastructure.
Cyclists didn’t always have to think this way. Copenhagenize illustrated this phenomenon of abruptly ending connected bike lanes (and sidewalks) with “A Short History of Traffic Engineering.” With less than 2% of federal transportation funding spent on biking and walking combined, it’s easy to see why our cycling network hasn’t kept up with our driving network.
The timeline is fairly accurate. Before the invention of the car, horses, bikes, and streetcars ruled our streets. When the U.S. suburbanized in the postwar period and when the interstate highway system was built, street priority was handed nearly entirely to cars, largely because of the huge safety risk of mixing pedestrians and bicyclists with cars. For roughly the past 25 years, U.S. cities have been building bicycling infrastructure—lanes, trails, and paths—but two things have made that process slow. First, the staggering cost of building a bike lane beside every street means progress will take time on a limited budget. Second, our streets have limited space, which means bike infrastructure must use existing roadways, which then often leads to fights about what the best use of streets. Is it bike lanes, or car lanes? These debates are central to complete streets and multimodal transportation planning.
Why We Should Build Out Our Cycling Network
In Jeff Speck’s Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places, he reports five main benefits of walkability/bikeability. Walkable and bikeable places are:
better for our wealth: Walkability improves property values. Bike and pedestrian infrastructure costs less than roads for cars. Walkability also attracts talented workers to cities, creates more jobs than car-dependent places, costs significantly less than vehicle ownership, and creates health savings from daily walking and bicycling.
better for our health: We are less obese in walkable places, have lower healthcare costs where it is walkable, as fewer die from car crashes in walkable places, and air pollution causes less sickness and death.
is better for the environment: Walkable places use less resources overall, including less gasoline.
is better for equity: One-third of Americans cannot drive. The elderly are self-sufficient longer when they don’t have to drive. Walkability gives children freedom of movement and self-sufficiency. As biking and walking disproportionately serve the poor with quality mobility options, and walkability disproportionately helps the differently abled through safer urban mobility options
is better for community: These places report significantly stronger social connections since most people meet each other outside of cars.
Oklahoma City’s Project 180 is a prime example of using walkability and bikeability to enhance our downtown’s wealth, community, health, equity, and environment. In 2009, with the construction of Devon Energy tower, $140 million of the development’s future taxes were used to fund upgrades to the 15-block Myriad Gardens, as well as funding a “pedestrian-friendly two-way traffic system that includes 900 new on-street parking spaces, bike lanes, site furnishings and beautiful ornamental plantings.”
The city initially rejected the plan in fear of “instant gridlock,” but since its implementation downtown, it is now the core of OKC’s bicycling network and few even remember a time before the transformation.
Returning to our question: what is the best use of a street: car lanes, or bike lanes? Project 180’s answer is clear: both.