The hierarchy of speed | Keven Bloomfield | TEDxUKY

Speaker discusses the bicycle infrastructure for Lexington, KY.

Kevin Bloomfield is a fourth year architecture student and Gaines Fellow at the University of Kentucky, from Las Vegas Nevada. As a Gaines Fellow, he has worked on bicycle issues over the last year and a half, investigating various aspects of bike culture and urban infrastructure.
His senior Gaines Fellowship thesis project involves local case studies (Virginia Avenue, and Martin Luther King Blvd) in Lexington, and both the University of Kentucky and the city of Lexington's master plans for urban renewal in which he applies design thinking to develop a series of typology proposals for bicycle infrastructure.
The end goal is to propose a rubric of types (separated bike paths, sharrowed streets, bike boxes, etcetera) which depend on site specific variables (street width, population, traffic volume, etcetera), opposed to any individual condition.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

I like to drive. I like cars.

I'm sure all of you in this room do too.

But I'd like to ask you a question,

that is, what happens
when you don't have any more;

that is the same situation
that I found myself in.

I didn't have any, I lost my car.

So I realized at that point

that I was going to have
to do something else.

I was gonna have to walk or use the bus

or dare I say it, use my bike.

It's pretty much when I started to realize

that Lexington, the community I live in,

has a wonderful array of facilities.

When I say facilities, I mean bike paths.

It can also mean some other things,
but we're talking about paths.

And I realized that we have a lot of
really good infrastructure in Lexington.

But we also sometimes
don't really succeed very well.

I found myself in many situations
where I thought

wow, this is really dangerous.

This is not, this is not cool.

So let me think,
why do people ride their bikes,

why do people choose
other forms of transportation?

And I realized that,
for me, it was because I had to.

I found myself in situations
where it was the only choice I had.

But then I also found
how much I enjoyed it,

how healthy it was and all other benefits

that come along with riding a bike,

especially like getting
everywhere pretty quickly.

Did you know that on average in Lexington,

it takes you to drive 25 miles per hour,

it doesn't matter if you go 80
to make that green light

you will still gonna get there
in the same time:

from Hamburg to downtown,
you can get there in 30 minutes.

That's about the same as with a car.

So I decided that
I needed to start to rethink the order.

the hierarchy of speed,
as I call it, of transportation.

It doesn't mean that we value the car
or the bus or the bike or walking,

as any of them being higher.

I needed to rethink how I thought
about my transportation.

Because right now,
we kind of value the car the most

and everything else
just seems kind of ancillary.

So 90% of people,
they drive their cars to work

and only 0.6% ride their bikes.

But yet, 70% car rides and car trips
are less than 2 miles.

You can travel 25 mph
on average on the bike

just the same as you can in a car.

There's no reason to,

the bike suddenly becomes just
as important or just viable as a vehicle.

So when we start to balance
our decision-making process

for how we decide what vehicles to use,
bike, walking or cars, specifically bikes,

then you start to think more critically
about how you're getting somewhere

and choosing the right form
of transportation.

It's about, not riding because we have to

but it's about riding because you want to.

And that made me think also,

what kind of people
are riding their bikes,

because that's kind of important.

If you have people who ride all the time
and then you have people who don't,

how do you get better infrastructure?

What takes lots of people riding,
more people riding?

And so I thought, who is this audience,

who are the people who are not riding?

It made me think about basically
everyone, who is riding or not?

So first you have this person.

This person is just everyone:

a college student, a co-worker,
just everyday life.

And then you have, of course,
the hipsters who ride to anything.

They ride on the snow,

they ride on the highway,

they probably ride in front of you,
making you pretty angry sometimes.

And then of course
you have the professionals,

they do it for fitness,
they do it for triathlons,

they do it for their living,
as bike messengers and pros,

Lance Armstrong, Tour de France,
all that stuff.

But then you also have
people who just do for recreation.

Here we see somebody who's retired.

They may decide suddenly
to pull their bike out of the garage.

But it doesn't have to be
any of these particular cases.

It seems that if we talk to the audience
of people who put their bikes away,

mainly those who graduate college
and start to start their families,

grow their lives
and start their first job.

They do, they put their bike
in that garage,

and they don't pull it back out again
until retirement.

So we started taking these groups:

retirees, people who use it
just for recreation,

people who just do it
on weekends for fun,

and as well as the regular people
who just travel.

They got to work.

They are starting their lives off.

And those people need to ride.

When we start to do that, start to choose

and think of our
complete transportation system

as a series of viable options,

depending on what you are doing,

where you are going, why you are doing

how far is it,
how fast you need to get there.

Then you can start to figure out

how you're going to actually get from
one place to another with just your bike

and how you might choose your bike
to get to those places

instead of the normal car
or other forms of transportation.

And by doing that,

we will start to actually see an increase
in ridership in our communities.

And thus we will get better
infrastructures. So it's not so dangerous.

I'd like to challenge
everyone in this room

to think before you get in your cars
or even on a bus

and try to consider
how you might choose a bike instead

so that you'll improve the lives
of all cyclists in your community.

Thank you.

(Applause)