Managing emergencies with bikes

by: Tom Babin

Note: This article originally appeared in Canadian Cycling Magazine 6.2

You don’t notice aftershocks while riding a bike. That’s what Jane Pearce Learned during the most harrowing commute of her life. It was February 2011 and Pearce, a university PhD candidate, had been living in Christchurch, New Zealand for only a few weeks, but she was already accustomed to living with earthquakes. Much of the country rattles nearly constantly. Christchurch was still in recovery mode after a massive 7.1 magnitude quake six months previously and damaged buildings but somehow spared lives. This time, however, the 6.3 quake’s epicentre was shallower and located closer to the city. The result was devastating. Building collapsed, streets buckled, fires started and flood waters rose. A six-storey building housing a local television station came down and caught fire, killing more than 100 people. The city’s downtown business district was nearly razed.

Pearce, working four floors up in a building outside of the destruction zone downtown, felt the swaying and evacuated. Her first thought was the well-being of her partner, but with cellphone networks jammed with frantic callers trying to locate loved ones, her only course of action was to head home and hope for the best. While most people went for their cars, Pearce, a bicycle commuter whose thesis was focused on the use of cargo bikes in cities, grabbed her 1992 Specialized Stumpjumper and set off on her 7 km ride home. She felt odd at first because she had failed to take her helmet and clipless shoes, but the images she encountered on the ride quickly pushed that feeling from her mind. Her commute skirted downtown and saw piles of masonry resting beside half-destroyed buildings. The ground was heaving because of liquefaction, a phenomenon in which an earthquake turns saturated soil to liquid, causing slit and water to seep through the city. Aftershocks – there would be tens of thousands of them in the coming months – were already rattling the city.

In the midst of all of this, the city was gridlocked. Thousands of people had taken to their cars to flee but had clogged the transportation network, leaving the city at a standstill at a time when movement was essential. Some abandoned their vehicles and took to their feet, many in panic, others in a daze. Pearce, however, rode past all of it, negotiating the bike around her wounded city, wide-eyed and adrenaline-fuelled. “My bike gave me a bubble of normalcy in this crazy place,” she says. She made it home and, with a gush of relief, greeted her partner, who had also escaped the city by bike. Then she said a quiet thanks to her Stumpjumper.

Pearce’s story connects to an idea that has emerged the past few years as bicycles have become a more common vehicle of urban transportation. The things that make bicycles great in cities – their efficiency, their small size, their universality, their independence from gasoline – also make them great during times of disaster. It’s a truism, albeit a sad one, that nearly every major urban disaster the past several years has seen the bicycle emerge as a kind of minor urban saviour. In Japan, residents used bicycles to escape the 2011 tsunami. In New York, residents used bicycles to get around a nearly shuttered city during hurricane Sandy in 2012. Think of the long lines of cars fleeing New Orleans after hurricane Katrina and you can start to understand why a bike might be a good idea in a disaster. Even some disaster planning agencies are starting to realize the Potential of bicycles, and are including them in their post-disaster planning. But the idea is a nascent one, and there are some nagging questions that are only starting to be mulled by disaster-planning agencies. How big of a role can bikes play in times of mass tragedy? Can bicycles really make cities more resilient?

These are more than just academic questions. For a few heartbreaking weeks back in 2013, I faced those questions in a very real way. I’ve been a year-round bicycle commuter in Calgary for years, so I’ve braved my share of inclement weather, but little prepared me for the floods that overran the city that June. From my house on a hill, I was spared any damage or real danger, but when downtown was swamped, evacuated and eventually closed. Evacuations jammed roads with vehicles. Major thoroughfares were underwater, leaving kilometres-long lines of cars stuck while drivers sought alternative routes or tried to back away from encroaching water. Although much of the city was untouched by flooding, the transportation system backed up everywhere. Drives that normally took 20 minutes turned into five-hour epics. Public transportation in some areas collapsed completely. Commuter rail tunnels filled with water. Buses were floating. The mayor urged people to stay home, but evacuees were on the move, at first escaping and then desperate to get back home to see the damage.

To my surprise, however, my bicycle got me around with relative ease. Many of my usual routes were gone – riverside bike paths were taken over by the fast-moving water, and pathways bridges were ripped from their moorings – but during the following days, I realized my bicycle was my ticket around the city. As flood waters receded, I started riding through flooded areas, my tires packed with silt, to photograph and write about what I saw as part of my job as a journalist with the Calgary Herald. On Twitter, evacuees began asking me to check in on their homes because they had no way of getting to them. I would ride to their neighbourhood and tweet photos back, sometimes delivering good news, sometimes not. As floodwaters receded and cleanup began, downtown remained closed to motor-vehicle traffic, but police would wave bicycles through the barricades. Cyclists who usually rode in the margins of downtown infrastructure took seemingly surreal photos of themselves in the middle of abandoned roads. For a few days, amid heartbreaking pain and destruction, the bicycle was king of a ruined empire.

After seeing the utility of bikes during Calgary’s floods – jumping curbs, cutting through parks, squeezing around lines of cars, riding through shallow water – I began wondering if there should be a larger role for them.

Paul Steely White, the executive director of New York’s Transportation Alternatives, a cycling and pedestrian advocacy group, says the value of bikes in disasters is often underappreciated. He had this realization in the days after hurricane Sandy brought New York to a standstill in 2012. Subways were down. Public transit was limping. Roads were impassable by car. The National Guard was called into the city, and put out a call to citizens to help ferry relief supplies to areas that had gone days without help.White and his son helped fil a front-loading cargo bike with bottled water. It was a small moment in the midst of a larger tragedy, but in the days following the hurricane, such moments were repeated all over the city. Bicycles became the talked-about vehicle of the disaster recovery. Cycling trips increased fourfold, even though millions of people were not travelling to work as usual. There was a spike in bike sales at local shops. White thinks the moment helped New Yorkers realize the usefulness of bikes in big cities. “It was a time that showcased the resiliency of cycling,” he says. “It really opened people’s eyes to the utility of travelling by bicycle.” It’s impossible to know how much of a contribution bicycles made to the city’s recovery, but as a symbolic gesture, it was significant.

Symbolic measures are nice, but they aren’t going to evacuate grandma when a disaster strikes. Some people say it’s time to start thinking more seriously about how bicycles can contribute to post-disaster recovery. A few cities, such as Seattle and Portland, Ore., recently started including bikes in their disaster planning. In that planning, not only are bikes seen as the best way for getting around, but they are also employed as vehicles to deliver emergency supplies. In the case of a disaster in Portland – almost a guarantee considering its location on a geologic fault line – a fleet of orange-vested relief workers will saddle up on cargo bikes to distribute supplies across the city.

Such planning, however, remains in its early development. Dr Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Centre for Disaster Preparedness in New York, says there is no doubt that bikes can play a role in keeping a city operating after a disaster, but even he isn’t sure what their capacity might be because so little work has been done in the area. Disaster planners are coming around to the idea, but he also thinks families should consider bikes when making their own plans, especially if they don’t own a car. “It’s a provocative idea, and it really makes sense,” he says. “In a disaster, traffic is going to be an abomination. You can certainly imagine people on bicycles slipping in and out of traffic, provided they’ve thought about it ahead of time.”

In May 2014, as part BC’s emergency preparedness week, New Westminster’s police, fire and city officials held the Amazing Disaster Rally. The event took riders on a 25-km route that featured emergency-related challenges. It’s main goal, however, was awareness. “You want to know the risk in your area. You want to make an emergency kit. And, you want to make a plan for your family,” says Cory Hansen, emergency planning assistant at the City of New Westminster. That plan can include bikes. “On the Lower Mainland, we have a mass of the population who enjoys cycling. A lot of people have bikes. They have them at home, but they haven’t thought about using them in an emergency if they had to go help someone, move supplies around or go and get supplies.” Over on Vancouver Island, Victoria ran similar rallies in 2013 and 2014. The City of Victoria and the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition designed events that had participants practise searching for a lost person, conducting damage assessment, riding over difficult terrain and travelling through tight spaces.

For her part, Pearce thinks the full potential of bikes is being overlooked. After surviving Christchurch’s earthquake, she started testing the viability of bikes in the post-disaster city. She travelled using different kinds of bikes, including those hauling bicycle trailers and cargo models. Nearly all of them were more effective than a car, but she found the smaller the bike, the more manoeuvrable it was through the disaster zone.” Bikes had the run of the city,: she says. “Bikes could get places nobody else could.” Her experience gave her some unique insight into the use of cargo bikes in post-disaster cities, and she went on to work as a consultant with Portland on disaster planning. One thinking she learned from that experience is that a city like Portland, with a high number of everyday bicycle commuters, is destined to recover better because more people will have a viable transportation option. A recent report from the University of Oregon found much the same thing: “A bicycle fleet for emergencies… could prove useful in most communities to deliver critical supplies, act as a communication link, conduct damage assessment and provide first aid and personal transportation. Local jurisdictions should consider the long – and short-term economics of having a small fleet of cargo bicycles rather than an extra city fleet vehicle.”

Pearce says Christchurch also has an opportunity to rebuild into a more bike-friendly city, but she’s discouraged by the direction the city is going as it pieces itself back together. “You have to incentivize people to get on bikes and de-incentivize cars. The disaster is already discentivizing cars because everybody’s fighting for reduced space. Authorities could have squeezed cars harder and made trips easier for bikes, but we aren’t seeing that.”

Despite that, Pearce is still riding her Stumpjumper to work, and still cruising over the aftershocks and small quakes that shake the city nearly every day. It’s a constant reminder of the potential disaster that awaits, but it’s also a reminder that, at the very least, she has one sure way of getting around when the next one hits.