If our cities truly need an overhaul, why on earth are we talking about incrementalism? Shouldn’t we be talking about revolution?

Now I work for Strong Towns, so there’s no surprise here: I was wrong. And I’m pretty glad about that fact.

What Incrementalism Isn't

So before I talk about how Strong Towns-style incremental development is exactly what our cities need to make our places more bikeable and more financially productive, let me tell you what incrementalism isn’t.

Incrementalism isn’t an excuse for a lack of urgency. If a stroad in your neighborhood is truly dangerous and draining your community resources, someone has to do something, and — for reasons we’ll explore in a minute — an incremental development mindset can actually make it easier to do something quickly and make a more meaningful change.

Incrementalism isn’t necessarily small. It does take place through small steps—but smallness is always relative. If you live in New York, NY your next incremental step to make your city more bikeable is going to happen on a way different scale than it would in New York, TX (population 20).

Incrementalism isn’t always linear—or slow. When you talk about incrementally building a bike network, that doesn’t mean that you’ll need to wait for your local leaders to stingily parcel out the funding for one more block worth of bike lane, once a year, unto infinity. Instead, incremental development is about crafting lots of small experiments, seeing how they fare, and reacting to what we learn by setting up new experiments in turn. If that still sounds too slow, it might help to use the synonym “iterative development" here, or even "rapid prototyping." It’s all about using the scientific method to test our investments in public space, at a speed and a scale that makes sense for your community. And if you live in a big place, you can go big and go fast — as long as your "big", fast project is actually an array of smaller, deliberate projects.

Incrementalism is creative. And that means that when we’re looking for the next smallest thing we can do to make our places more bikeable, we need to always think in three dimensions, if not more.

1-D: The Incremental Bike Lane

Ask your average die-hard cyclist what they want out of their streets, and a good number of them are likely to say the same thing: lots and lots of bike-specific infrastructure.

I don’t blame them. I’ve been to Amsterdam and Minneapolis and lots of cities that have miles of glorious, separated bike lanes where I’ve spent many happy hours tooling around on two wheels without fear of being struck by a distracted driver. I also know how frustrating it is to visit a city and find bike lanes scattered in arbitrary places—one alongside a mega-stroad here, another on a random neighborhood street with an overzealous HOA there—with no regard for how the network connects the real destinations I actually want to visit. If you gave me a magic wand and told me I could use it to overlay St. Louis with a network of shiny new bike lanes in an instant, part of me would be really tempted to do it.