Detroit’s Bike Bet: How the Motor City Aims to Become the Mobility City
How Electric Bikes, a Community-Based Bike Challenge and Behavior Change Are Helping Detroit Prioritize People-First Mobility
It’s hard to imagine a city whose identity is more tied to the automobile than Detroit, Michigan. Nicknamed the Motor City, Detroit is considered the birthplace of American car culture. It’s the city that put the world on automotive wheels, and where Henry Ford’s original factory still stands.
Yet roughly one-third of the Motor City’s residents do not own a car and, as a result, may experience limited mobility. A disproportionate number of Detroiters live at or below the national poverty line, and many communities are underserved by local public transportation. For these residents and many more, access to reliable, affordable transportation is essential to finding jobs and commuting.
Amid a national conversation about American infrastructure, the impact of the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and how states and cities plan to spend funds distributed by the United States Department of Transportation to promote equity and work toward environmental sustainability goals, Detroit is undergoing a fundamental identity shift. “We were the Motor City,” says Tim Slusser, Chief of Mobility Innovation at the city’s Office of Mobility Innovation (OMI), but “what our future is, what we truly aspire to be going forward… [is] the Mobility City.”
Detroit, like many American cities, was transformed in the middle of the 20th century. From 1953 to 1967, urban renewal and highway construction drastically altered the city’s racial and geographic makeup. These policies and initiatives, which included overtly racist redlining and the building of expressways through thriving majority-Black communities, devastated, divided and displaced entire Detroit neighborhoods. The effects of urban renewal are still felt today in decentralized, autocentric development patterns, debates about whether and how to equitably remove highways and overall plans to redress historic harms.
As a hub for strategic thinking about how to improve mobility in Detroit, OMI is tasked with understanding the needs of the people and welcoming new services and technologies that provide more affordable, reliable and safe mobility. OMI looks for ways to complement the city’s existing public transportation network, with options like shared electric scooters, bicycles and, eventually, autonomous vehicles. At the same time, OMI is cognizant of the fact that simply dropping new technology on the streets overnight does not usually yield the best results. The department works to cultivate the kind of collaborative partnerships that unite the public sector, private sector and community to build transportation ecosystems that serve the needs of the people using them.
Innovating with Micromobility
One transportation option that OMI is focused on these days is micromobility, those small, lightweight transportation devices including e-scooters and bikes that, according to Slusser, present a low-cost, more sustainable mobility solution that enables a broad cross-section of Detroiters to get where they need to go.
Of course, there are obstacles to hopping on a bike on any street in any city. Namely, whether you’ll be able to move safely, which depends on a number of factors like whether you are sharing the street with cars or if there is a separated bike lane. Another barrier is Detroit’s sheer size. The city covers 139 square miles, and outside of the dense urban core, regional jobs and resources are often located far from where people live.
While not a blanket solution, electric bikes are one way to address that spatial mismatch, delivering riders to their destinations over several miles without breaking a sweat. E-bikes are experiencing a global surge in popularity, with sales skyrocketing alongside non-electric bikes during the COVID-19 pandemic as people sought reliable transportation that allowed them to get outside during lockdowns. Research has shown e-bike sales in the U.S. have outstripped sales of electric cars.
Even before the pandemic-spurred e-bike boom, Detroit was becoming more familiar with these powerful light vehicles. The city recently completed a six-month program led by OMI and which included an e-bike leasing pilot. The goal of the entire program was to increase the number of bike commuters and shift trips from cars to bikes. The results, which are compiled in a new report from OMI, are helping to shape the way Detroit is approaching cultivating safe, affordable and active bicycling in the Motor City.
Experimenting with E-Bikes
The e-bike pilot actually is the second phase of a city-led program that began during the onset of the pandemic to provide e-bikes for essential workers who found their ability to get to and from work curtailed due to dramatic public transit service cuts.
To address this need, OMI partnered with NextEnergy, a local nonprofit specializing in piloting energy and mobility technologies, as well as Detroit’s bike share nonprofit MoGo and the New Urban Mobility alliance (NUMO), to procure a small fleet of e-bikes and market the program to essential workers through their employers, which included Henry Ford Health System. With a small, one-time fee, nearly 60 participants were able to lease e-bikes. They also received resources like free helmets and a bike guide featuring a map of safe routes and information for cyclists.
The pilot received positive feedback from participants, says Sherelle Streeter, a mobility strategist at OMI, with many requesting longer-term leases. These results, gathered through a post-pilot survey, demonstrated proof of concept: the bikes were popular and effective at helping participants get to and from work. Some riders reported also using the e-bikes for errands or recreation.
Shifting Behavior
Before the pilot even ended, OMI was thinking about the future of the e-bike leasing program and how to use the momentum generated to expand impact.
To imagine what a scaled-up second phase of the program could look like, OMI once more partnered with MoGo and NextEnergy, and welcomed People to Educate all Cyclists, an organization advocating for transportation equity for Michiganders with disabilities, and the Henry Ford Health System. Representatives from the partnership attended a virtual retreat in late 2020 organized by NUMO. At the retreat, attendees were challenged to create a behavioral change framework that they would incorporate into their city’s ambition for projects aimed at equitably reducing car trips while making it easier to walk, bike and take public transportation. Developing the framework required consideration of the many barriers to adopting a desired behavior (riding bikes, in the case of Detroit) and then designing and implementing interventions based on those barriers to enable existing and potential riders to overcome hurdles like unfamiliarity and a lack of high-quality bike lanes.
At the end of the retreat, Detroit’s first behavior change framework was underway, along with ideas for both relaunching the e-bike leasing program and developing a campaign to get more Detroit residents biking.
Scaling Up: The Detroit Bike Challenge
Spring 2021 saw the relaunch of the e-bike leasing program with an expanded scope. This time, there were 110 e-bikes available over a six-month period for employees of businesses ranging from large grocery stores to smaller mom-and-pop operations. OMI worked with the Southeastern Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) to pitch the program to Detroit-located employers and then identify “bike champions” within each participating employer’s organizational structure who would be tasked with spreading awareness of the program and related services to their coworkers. Bike share partner MoGo led operations, maintenance and education efforts.
Additionally, OMI announced the Detroit Bike Challenge, a citywide campaign to encourage Detroiters of all experience levels, ages and backgrounds to bike for recreation, health and fitness. The bike challenge ran from May through October and featured two month-long challenges and a series of mini-challenges with prizes for the winners. Nearly 650 registered bike challenge participants utilized the Love to Ride online “bike encouragement platform” to sign up for challenges, log miles ridden, post photos and encouragement for other cyclists, learn about other biking events and access an educational Bike Resource Guide.
To get the word out about the bike challenge, OMI collaborated with the city’s network of bike clubs and organizations, like the Detroit Greenways Coalition, a nonprofit for better bicycling and trails, and the Detroit Health Department’s Safe Routes Ambassador Program. City Councilman for Detroit’s 3rd District Scott Benson, who co-leads the Detroit City Green Taskforce, also supported the bike challenge and appeared in the promotional video. OMI drew on interdepartmental support as well, calling on the city’s public agencies to join in and share information about the bike challenge.
In getting more cyclists on city streets and trails, the bike challenge provided the right motivation and environment to encourage Detroiters to try biking, or biking more than usual. But OMI had another goal in mind: to shift perceptions around biking as a viable mode of transportation in daily life. That shift is necessary to developing, as Streeter puts it, “self-efficacy” in biking, the knowledge that you know how to and can do something safely and conveniently, which, in turn, is essential to flipping car trips to bike trips.
The behavior change approach was largely successful. According to data collected from user surveys, 55% of new riders and half of occasional riders reported biking more often than they normally would after the bike challenge concluded. Additionally, the bike challenge appears to have shifted how participants commute: 63% of those who didn’t bike to work before the bike challenge reported biking to work at least once a week after taking part, and 21% of survey respondents now commute more by bike overall.
The majority (64%) of bike challenge participants also noted that having an online community platform was helpful in connecting them to other members of Detroit’s bike community, indicating that another benefit of the bike challenge was exposing new and existing riders to a supportive network and providing a way to engage.
The First Detroit Bike Summit
Community engagement efforts did not stop with the end of the bike challenge. Before the bike challenge launched, OMI realized there was a key perspective missing from the behavior change framework — that of Detroit’s bike community. At the time, OMI was building relationships with the city’s bike organizations and clubs to spread awareness of the bike challenge and to find hosts for the mini-challenges, so it was only a matter of asking for input from advocates, leaders and others who have firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to bike in Detroit.
OMI crafted a bike culture survey, and the results informed a two-session virtual Bike Summit that engaged bike club and organization leaders in further developing the city’s biking behavior change framework. Over two sessions, attendees worked through trust-building exercises to create a network that would be beneficial for all parties. Discussions also focused on delving into what factors — such as the state of Detroit’s built environment, the accessibility of bike infrastructure and the design of streetways — represent either barriers or motivators to cycling in the city, possible solutions and areas where OMI can provide better support.
Direct engagement with the bike community and gathering input based on their knowledge and experiences were essential to building trust, which often is lacking in public agency efforts to interact with their constituencies. OMI understands that the support of the community is a prerequisite for any program that aims to improve access and mobility.
In a city like Detroit, building trust means proving that change will actually benefit communities that face limited access to economic opportunity, services and amenities due to lack of reliable, convenient and safe transportation. It also means showing the city is willing to both listen to and incorporate community input in plans to improve mobility while mitigating concerns about displacement, as bike lanes have been known to signal neighborhood change that can lead to gentrification.
The Bike Summit was key to establishing this trust and communicating how city officials at OMI value engagement from the community they serve. “When you change the culture between city administrators and city residents,” says Slusser, “I think that’s where we say we’ve succeeded. When we have created an open enough door that the residents feel [they] can speak and be heard, and the city feels like it can go out and engage the residents in a positive way.”
The summit culminated with a celebratory event at Delores Bennett Park in Detroit’s North End, where nearly 40 bike club and organization leaders, as well as members, joined OMI staff for refreshments, activities and a group bike ride. Director of the Detroit Greenways Coalition Todd Scott led the three-mile ride through the North End, which is the last remaining part of Paradise Valley, the cultural, entertainment and business center of Black Bottom, a predominantly Black neighborhood that was demolished during urban renewal and the construction of Interstate 375. The significance was not lost on riders, who stopped along the way to view murals painted by Black artists.
Scott, Detroit Greenways Coalition)
Becoming the Mobility City
It’s safe to say that OMI is betting big on bikes, both human-powered and electric, to help the Motor City become the Mobility City. For his part, Slusser believes Detroit has everything to gain from increasing cycling, including transforming how we design our streets and cities to be safer, better places to walk and bike.
In her role at OMI, Streeter is pondering the future of the e-bike leasing program and hosting the bike challenge annually. Part of making that happen means growing those partnerships that built and sustained the momentum of the campaign, and building on the interest of partners committed to the initiative as it evolves.
Another consideration is how to further engage the broad, diverse Detroit community. Streeter believes that “bikes are an opportunity to mobilize a larger demographic of people” because many Detroiters are likely to have at least some familiarity with bikes. Those local bike organizations and club members who participated in the Detroit Bike Challenge remain active in their support for the effort. Streeter is pleased to still receive Facebook messages from those members asking when the next group ride is.
Slusser and the OMI team are committed to engaging the larger Detroit community and actively seeking input to understand what their needs are. “There is “a lot of work still to be done to get full support of the community,” admits Slusser. In the end, “It’s all about how do we become this next, better version of ourselves as a city where mobility is our core, and at the core of mobility is people.”
Madlyn McAuliffe is Communications Manager for NUMO, the New Urban Mobility alliance.
NUMO is a global organization that channels tech-based disruptions in urban transport to create joyful cities where sustainable and just mobility is the new normal. Founded in 2019 as an outgrowth of the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities, NUMO convenes diverse allies and leverages the momentum of significant revolutions in mobility to target urban issues — including equity, sustainability, accessibility and labor — impacted by the shifting transportation landscape.
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