Cycling across America

For the past two months I have been cycling across America with a dozen or so architects and others involved in the built environment, looking at American cities, and the land in between, to see what we can learn about cycling infrastructure in the land of the automobile. At the time of going to press we’ll have  got somewhere past Chicago and on our return will report on our findings at the NLA’s London Cycling Summit.
 

When Bill Bryson moved back to the US from England he wrote a goodbye book entitled ‘Notes from a Small Island.’ I was frequently reminded of Bryson’s analysis as I rode through Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. By comparison to these great open spaces England is neat and manicured, with everything in its place.
 
These huge states are shockingly profligrate with their land - your barn falling down? let it, and build another next door; getting a new truck? leave the old one to rust in the field. Large areas of this beautiful countryside are disfigured by rotting trailers, wheel-less automobiles and discarded junk. Cities stretch out for miles and miles with low rise sheds and malls and scrub - Helena, capital of Montana, was probably the worst example we came across. When I get home I promise I shall never again criticise Green Belt policy.
 
The landscapes we have cycled through have been awesome, but it is hard to say the same about the buildings. I yearned to see an elegantly detailed residence, a modern barn that has the charm of those that are now disintegrating, I long for a building positioned in the landscape with the elegance of composition of a Tuscan estate. So many buildings looked like they have come out of a catalogue and just plonked anywhere. This will clearly improve when we get further east and we look forward to visiting gems such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax building in Racine, Chicago, Columbus, Falling Water and of course New York.
 
I guess it is because there is so much space out in the west that development in such exquisite surroundings is taken so lightly. A map of the whole of Britain is just 1:10,000; the map I used to trace our route across the US is 1:3,800,000! That says it all really. When you’re a small island you care for every bit of it, sometimes too much, so that development is thwarted by nimbyism; but when you’ve got a lot of something, it’s easy to squander it.
 
When people ask me what we can learn from the US I point out that in the 1960s American thinkers like Jane Jacobs, William H Whyte and Bernard Rudofsky, were way ahead of us Brits in the discussion of placemaking in cities and the way the balance of use needed to change. A lot of the work that Mayor Bloomberg, planning chief Amanda Burden and transport commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan have been doing in New York in terms of improving public space as well as cycling infrastructure stems back to Jacobs et al.
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So what can a bunch of architects add to the jam-packed blogosphere of debate about cycling in cities? Architects shape our cities yet, with rare exceptions like Jan Gehl, Richard Rogers and Terry Farrell, they do not have a voice in the discussion about creating the right balance of uses in them. The fight against the domination of automobile in our streets is led by activists and partisans not by those who design the urban fabric.  Designers are used to balancing the needs of different users, they can see how changing the way we use cities can improve public space and they can propose solutions that create better and more civilised places. We hope the work we are doing on our ride can provide useful ideas and examples of how London can move more speedily to become a better cycling city.