Yesterday, The Charlotte Observer posed the question, “Can Charlotte become a city of people on bikes?”  It’s a really good question.  Bike lanes, like any sort of infrastructure project, cost money.  Where they’re added to existing roads in cities, they also tend to reduce the number of lanes available to motorized traffic.  So building them only makes sense if you have a lot of demand, if significant numbers of people are riding bikes and those numbers are grown, if there’s good use of what existing capacity there is.  Otherwise, you might spend a lot of money and actually increase congestion.

In Charlotte, there’s not a lot of use.  We know that from U.S. Census Bureau numbers that reveal just 0.2% of commuters in Charlotte use a bike to get to work.  And we also know that, in the roughly ten year period between the 2000 Census and the American Communities Survey 2008-12, that number barely moved.  The Census Bureau deemed the small increase statistically insignificant.  They’re the experts, so I’ll trust them on that.

But The Charlotte Observer’s question is slightly different.  It’s not “Is Charlotte a city of people on bikes?”  The answer to that is clearly no.  Rather, they ask, “Can Charlotte become a city of people on bikes?”  Implicit in the question is acknowledgement that Charlotte is not currently full of bicyclists, so it asks about potential.

I don’t have a crystal ball, so I can’t answer that with absolute certainty.  Neither can anyone else.  But I can make some judgments based on what I know both about Charlotte and about patterns of bicycling.  (I wrote about this issue as it relates to Raleigh’s Bike Plan earlier this year.)

  1. Bicycling in Charlotte hasn’t grown much in recent years, so while it’s possible that could change, there’s no current trend in that direction.
  2. Cities with lots of cyclists tend to have high population densities, around 8,000 per square mile.  Charlotte’s population density is nowhere close to that; it’s about 2,700 per square mile.
  3. The exception to #2 is very small cities that are usually dominated by a university.  Charlotte doesn’t fit that profile.
  4. Cities in the South have the lowest rates of cycling in the country, probably for a variety of reasons including climate and culture.

So I think the answer to The Charlotte Observer‘s question is, “Probably not in the foreseeable future.”