Skip to Content
Streetsblog USA home
Log In
Bicycling

There’s a Flat Bike Network Hiding in Your City, If Someone Would Build It

4:10 PM EDT on August 8, 2017

There's no doubt: Hills are a problem for bike transportation. Which is why one company's concept for removing the hills from a city has such promise.

This short video comes from Lisbon, Portugal, a city built on "seven hills." It's made by a firm called Horizontal Lisbon, which makes the intriguing promise that it's discovered how to make the city horizontal:

The secret: finding a bikeable city threaded through the familiar one.

Horizontal Lisbon mapped 1,093 kilometers of city streets, it explains. Then it calculated the incline of every single one:

Of those, 691 kilometer have grades of no more than 4 percent — suitable for relatively low-impact biking. (For comparison's sake, that's about half the maximum 8.33 percent grade allowed by the Americans with Disabilities Act for bridges and access ramps.)

Using its new maps of the city's flattest 63 percent of streets, Horizontal Lisbon then identified a series of relatively flat bike routes, assigning a color to each one as if it were a subway line. This maps one of the routes and its feeder streets in yellow:

And here's green:

The suggestion of using color to independently brand different bike routes is novel, but seems appropriate for the winding paths these routes would need to take through the city.

Horizontal Lisbon's concept has mostly just been marketing for their mobile app, which helps people choose flat routes to bike on.

But there's a broader lesson here for any city that wants to build for biking. Street maps are not enough to know if a network works. To serve people who haven't built up thighs of iron, cities should calculate which streets are flat and assign particular importance to getting safe bike routes on those streets.

In many U.S. cities, this will mean running protected bike lanes on one-time streetcar routes that remain commercial corridors today. Topography, after all, has been shaping our cities since their beginning.

As Horizontal Lisbon shows, computers may be useful for this job. But considering the contours of the land as we plan our transportation system isn't really a high-tech innovation. It's more like a forgotten skill.

PlacesForBikes is a PeopleForBikes program to help U.S. communities build better biking, faster. You can follow them on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook or sign up for their weekly news digest about building all-ages biking networks.

Stay in touch

Sign up for our free newsletter

More from Streetsblog USA

Tuesday’s Headlines Triple the Fun

Amtrak is staffing up and ready to spend the $66 billion it received from the bipartisan federal infrastructure law.

September 26, 2023

Pols: Congress Must Bolster Sustainable Commutes to Reduce Carbon and Congestion

The feds should bolster sustainable commuting modes and transportation demand management strategies.

September 26, 2023

Monday’s Headlines Are All About Pete

From trying to avert a government shutdown to promoting rail safety, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is in the midst of a busy week.

September 25, 2023

What is the Life of a Dead Pedestrian Worth?

A Seattle police officer sparked outrage when he joked that the death of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula might be settled for as little as $11,000. Some families get even less.

September 25, 2023

Why Reducing Vehicle Miles Traveled Matters

“Our job now is to prioritize solutions that mitigate the impacts of climate change while equitably improving quality of life. To do so we need to rethink how we build so Californians can drive less."

September 22, 2023
See all posts