Equity and cycling infrastructure in Canada

I often wonder about who has access to cycling infrastructure. When I am commuting along designated paths, particularly separated paths, I’ve noticed that there is a strong association with bigger houses and fewer apartment buildings. But admittedly, I don’t bike around the entire city anymore. So perhaps I’m missing part of the picture. As a result, I was really interested to see a study by Zhao and colleagues regarding cycling infrastructure and access.

Access to cycling infrastructure matters because it can have significant impacts on how people perceive the opportunity, normalcy, and safety of cycling. Not everyone is willing or able to ride on roads, and technically it is illegal to ride most adult sized bikes on sidewalks in many locations. This can mean that people who could benefit from riding bikes either to commute and save money on transportation costs or as a means of fitness don’t have access to do so.

Zhao and colleagues (2024) looked at access for equity-deserving populations, which included children, seniors, recent immigrants, visible minorities, and people with low incomes. There were many parts of the results that surprised me. Of the 14 cities they examined, only one found a positive association between the percentage of children in an area and access to bike infrastructure. So, who do people picture riding bikes? Kids. Who doesn’t have access to infrastructure to make their riding safer? Kids. I wonder if this is due to a connection to the perceived distance travelled. Kids don’t go as far and they ride on community roads therefore they don’t need the infrastructure? I know, when there was a big freak-out about bike lanes in my community one of the arguments against them was that there were kids riding in them. This was seen as a safety problem because the lanes were just paint on the pavement and kids don’t always ride in the straightest lines. Those lanes are all now gone, leaving us commuters fighting for space on the roads by the way.

Seniors also had a negative association in nine of the 14 cities. Again, I can see an argument, oh they can’t ride their bikes. But maybe they could if they had had more access to safe routes throughout their lives and more access now. Especially with more and more options like ebikes and adapted bikes like adult trikes, it seems like improving infrastructure would help to draw more seniors out onto their bikes.

Interestingly, percent of recent immigrants, percent with low incomes, and percent of visible minorities were all mostly associated with positive relationships in the majority of the cities studied. This is good news, but again, I have questions. All those separated paths I ride aren’t what I’ve found in some other parts of the city. The painted lines are much more common in areas of my city, which was one of the ones studied, that I would connect to lower income and more visible minorities. To me, this means that we need another step to this research. Cycling infrastructure is not all created equal. So, with these areas where there is supposedly better than average access, is it the safer physically separated infrastructure or is it a few token paint lines and signs saying share the road?

We have a long way to go in Canada to make our cities accessible to anyone who would like to by bike. But, research like this does help to provide evidence of where we should look to next.