Chapter 5. Exhibit A for “Abundance”

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book “Abundance” calls out the inability of blue cities and states over recent decades to build the stuff that voters want: housing, high-speed rail, and the medical breakthroughs we desperately need.

“Countless dollars,” they observe, “Were spent on health insurance, housing vouchers, and infrastructure without an equally energetic focus on what all that money was buying and building…It revealed a disinterest in the workings of government. Regulations were assumed to be wise. Policies were assumed to be effective. Cries that government was stifling production or innovation typically fell on deaf ears.”[28]

Bike transportation exemplifies what they’re talking about: an enthusiastic and supportive public, lots of money spent, and very little in the way of meaningful results.

A seemingly well-designed feature connected two offset segments of a bike boulevard in Denver. But where are the riders?

Making bike transportation possible in cities is something that pluralities of voters have demanded for decades. According to a 2025 YouGov survey, “Americans are much more likely to support bike lanes in their local area than to oppose them (76% vs. 15%).”[29]

In 2024, voters across the country approved $24.7 billion in spending on bike infrastructure.[30]

People want bike transportation to be a reality in their communities and they’re ready to invest their tax dollars in it.

This stated desire of voters, however, crashes up against the rocks of implementation. The objective reality is that cities have failed to make bike transportation something that people of all ages and abilities do to get around.

An empty bike lane is not a win. Building something isn’t good enough. It’s getting people to use it that matters.

In no American city has biking become a primary mode of transportation for a large swath of the population. Portland, Oregon, which is widely considered to be the best bike city in America, does a remarkable annual Bike Count with more than 170 volunteers stationed across the city. Since 2014, there’s been a sustained decline in ridership. The 2024 edition reported more than a 40% decline in biking since 2014.

During the 2014 high water mark, according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS), 7.2% of the Portland population who commute to work rode a bike.

As John Simmerman, founder of Active Towns says, “I consider the ACS data to be so inaccurate that it serves as a distraction, and it doesn't come anywhere close enough to estimating how many people ride.” We don’t even have decent data.

Nonetheless, it’s the data we have. And the nationwide picture is bleak. In a country of 340 million people, less than a million biked to work in 2024. The percentage of workers who primarily bike to work has flatlined since 1980 at .5%. And a paltry 1% of total trips are taken by bike.[31]

We as bike advocates, planners, and transportation officials shouldn’t paper over this with vanity metrics like the number of dollars we’ve spent on infrastructure projects or the miles of bike lanes we’ve created.

This is not what results look like.

This is what results look like. We cannot rest until we’ve created this picture everywhere.

Instead, we need to acknowledge that we’ve fallen short in actually getting people on bikes and we need to revise our approach to create the future we seek: not just one in which people can theoretically ride bikes to the places they want to go, but a future in which they actually do it.

We keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We keep hitting the same pitfalls: excessive conflict, ballooning budgets for individual projects that are illogical in the context of complete and connected bike networks, an excessive dependence on consultants, protracted development timelines, and the most problematic of all: a lack of outcomes even vaguely approaching a transportation transformation.

“Abundance” is a powerful guide, because it opens a conversation about why we don’t have the cities we want. And the place to start to produce the results we seek is by being honest with ourselves about where we currently are.

References:

[28] Klein, Ezra, and Derek Thompson. Abundance. New York: Avid Reader Press, 2025.

[29] https://today.yougov.com/travel/articles/52404-three-quarters-of-americans-support-bike-lanes

[30] https://www.peopleforbikes.org/news/voters-approve-27.4-billion-for-better-biking-2024

[31] https://data.bikeleague.org/data/national-rates-of-biking-and-walking/