People Protected Bike Lanes Made a Difference – StreetsBlog San Francisco
By Roger Rudick
When San Francisco bike-safety advocates Maureen Persico and Matt Brezina put together the first People Protected Bike Lane (PPBL) demonstration in 2017, who knew it would have a global impact? Marcel Moran, a researcher at New York University, just dropped People Protected Bike Lanes: Global Expansion of an Emergent Cycling Demonstration, a study that shows that it lead to more demonstrations and, more importantly, protected bike lanes getting installed in cities as far away as Europe.
"The genius of People Protected Bike Lane Demonstrations," Moran told Streetsblog, "is the very nature of the protest conveys the message of the protest." Because of that, images of the PPBLs in San Francisco were quickly picked up by mainstream media and distributed far-and-wide on social media. Advocates in other cities then copied the idea. "It happened in D.C., it happened in Chicago," said Moran. "I found reports on 55 demonstrations in 25 different cities and 11 different countries."
