Chapter 8. The Best Available Network
A map is a key to unlock the world around us. And as the world around us is imperfect, and there are no direct, human-sized pneumatic tubes from A-to-B, a map is the best representation of how to navigate imperfection.
A historical document known as an “atlas.”
The first step cities need to take to create complete, connected high-comfort bike networks is to create a Low-Stress Bike Map. This is not a bike master plan of all the future awesomeness we’re going to build. This is a map that illuminates the ways to comfortably go places today.
It includes existing trails, protected bike lanes, and bike boulevards. And then we fill the gaps with other existing assets in the right-of-way: quiet neighborhood streets, park trails, sidewalks, and desire paths.
Randy Neufeld, one of the founding fathers of American bike advocacy, describes this as the “Best Available Network.”
Our current understanding of Denver’s Best Available Network — marked up with community suggestions for improvements.
The Best Available Network is the high-comfort bike network hiding in plain sight in your city. And you can map it in a matter of months. We published the first version of the Low-Stress Denver Bike Map within six months. In Lakewood, it took four months. In Dallas and Indianapolis, we published the version 1.0 map in three months. In Flagstaff, it took two months. And in Boulder, it took a month.
It’s liberating to discover that in most American cities, within a matter of months, we can have complete bike maps that make the cities navigable for a huge swath of the population.
Dallas — yes, that Dallas — is navigable by bike thanks to the efforts of the Dallas Bicycle Coalition.
These are bike networks that already exist, to a degree, in residents’ heads. They’re comprised of the routes that folks who already ride bikes use to navigate their community. It’s how they go to work, it’s how they meet friends for coffee, it’s how they get to church, and it’s how they ride with their kids for ice cream.
To be clear, a Best Available Network is not perfect. There’s huge room for improvement. And a clear need remains for investment in fixed infrastructure. But most importantly, we’re creating enabling conditions so anyone can ride anywhere – today.
This stands in stark contrast to the status quo approach of a 25-year bike master plan. The map of a Best Available Network exists for the same reason that maps originally existed – not to show some hypothetical future state, but to show people how to navigate the world as it currently stands. Maps of the Silk Road helped traders navigate the most perilous passes of the Hindu Kush; they didn’t propose a tunnel underneath the mountains.
Rory Stewart’s book “The Places in Between” chronicles his traverse of this route from Herat to Kabul shortly after 9/11. Map source.
In 2016, in my early days of mapping Denver, I had a conversation with a grizzled mechanic at a much-loved and now sadly departed bike shop. I was astonished when he explained his 8-mile route from his home in Central Park to the shop in the Golden Triangle. This dude was as hardcore as they come, and yet he eschewed the painted bike lane on high-speed, high volume MLK and instead rode 28th Ave, a chill neighborhood street, across the city.
Best Available Networks have existed throughout history and create incredible new opportunities and possibilities. The shipping route around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America was a Best Available Network.
Then Magellan came along in 1520 and discovered a workaround through the fjords of modern day Chile that made it less hazardous to navigate. As circuitous as these southern routes were, they were the Best Available Network because the coveted Northwest Passage – a sea route to the Pacific Ocean across the top of Canada – was plugged up with pack ice.
The Panama Canal opened in 1914 and changed everything.
And the climate change melting of the Arctic Ocean has further advanced the ease of global shipping as the Northwest Passage becomes increasingly navigable. Use what’s available to complete the network today and upgrade over time. Such is the evolution of a transportation network.
How is this relevant to bike transportation? It demonstrates an evolution in how people get to the places they need to go.
It also shows the importance of a truly connected network. A maritime shipping route from the landlocked Great Salt Lake is unviable because it’s not connected to anything. Yet bike networks in cities across America are disconnected archipelagos – a bike lane here, a bike lane there, and huge gaps everywhere.
Moreover, since the dawn of time, people have accepted routes that are, at times, circuitous. Until infrastructure like the Panama Canal is built, we have to use workarounds. It’s okay if, at first, our Best Available Network doesn’t have perfectly direct routes.
When we take the first entrepreneurial step and create a Best Available Network, we’re walking in well-worn footsteps. Since the Silk Road crossed forbidding mountain ranges in Afghanistan and since the Oregon Trail used South Pass to surmount the Rockies, rather than going over the Wind River Range in Wyoming, people have been finding Best Available Networks to go places.
Today’s Best Available Network is not the exact network of the future. As new low-stress bike infrastructure comes online, we add it. As we discover new routes, we add them. As we tap into on-the-ground knowledge, the network evolves.