Designing better cycling infrastructure

Modern cities need beautiful designs so citizens benefit from the associated economic development and improved quality of life. Modern cities also need safe bicycle facilities to mitigate climate change by reducing carbon emissions. In 1893, the City Beautiful movement, though not perfect, was an upstream response to crowded industrial cities. The American architect and urban designer Daniel Hudson Burnham built a social reform utopia at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago to show how handsome built form could improve health. American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed the parks and boulevards and Burnham later planned Chicago’s streets, which established a national standard for transportation that embodied grace.1

In a linked paper, Welsh and colleagues (doi:10.1136/bmj.m336) studied the association between commuting by bicycle and injury related hospital admission2 in the UK, and revealed an urgent need to improve safety for cyclists. The authors cited the health and environmental benefits of cycling but noted that cycling levels remain low because of the perceived …