On March 15, 2019, San Francisco protestors took to the bike lane on Howard Street to put their bodies between cars and cyclists as a signal to city officials that they were fed up with the inaction following severe, and sometimes deadly, accidents throughout the busy corridor.
It wasn’t the first time these demonstrators, led by local bike-safety advocates Maureen Persico and Matt Brezina, gathered to show their peaceful support for protected bike lanes and it wouldn’t be the last. In fact, these rallies, which began in 2017, would spread across the globe, and, according to a new study, were successful at creating change in several of the cities in which they took place.
New York University Urban Science Faculty Fellow, Marcel Moran, PhD, writes in the study’s findings that the movement, which has been dubbed People Protected Bike Lanes (PPBL), “represents one of the latest forms of bicycle demonstrations, joining a long history of activism that stretches back decades in both Europe and the United States.”
The Howard Street gathering was ultimately successful. There’s now a protected bike lane there, in addition to a handful of others in the Bay Area where People Protected Bike Lanes made a stand.
Moran’s work sought to determine how effective these and more than 50 similar demonstrations were across the world. The review “demonstrates that PPBL grew significantly, both in number and geographic extent, from its origination in San Francisco in 2017,” Moran writes.
“Amidst the growth, its occurrences have hewed to its original format, in that it is both a primarily stationary demonstration type focused on specific streets (compared to group rides which are inherently mobile), and that it communicates a concrete, unified demand regarding the inadequacy of existing bicycle infrastructure, compared to conveying a generalized right to the street of some previous bicycle demonstration types,” he says.
The results
The study traced 55 distinct PPBL demonstrations that took place between 2017 and 2023. In addition to the cities in the U.S. that held these gatherings, cyclists and supporters also assembled in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, England, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and Scotland.
Of those 55 demonstrations, 58% later had protected bike lanes installed, says Moran, who deployed historical street imagery to track changes along the paths of the protests. Of the 17 Bay Area events, all but two now have protected bike lanes. The two that do not have protected lanes have painted bike lanes.
Many of these gatherings attracted more than two or three dozen people, but some were much larger. The Midtown Manhattan PPBL event, for example, brought in 350 people.
“The level of coordination in terms of matching t-shirts and signage also varies,” Moran says. “Some PPBL participants have held hands, though most simply stand in a staggered line. Most participants stand without bicycles, though some stand with their bicycles at their sides, which further creates a physical barrier between bike and automobile traffic.”
At the 2019 gathering on Howard Street, organizers said it was difficult to trace how many supporters showed up to the three-blocks they occupied, but Brezina later told Streetsblog SF that the group ran out of the 100 t-shirts printed for the event in about 15 minutes.
“We also had a lot of people join for part and then pass their shirt to a newcomer later in the event. People such as my brother’s wife Whitney was there with her two kids, but they supported from the sidewalk as she didn’t feel comfortable standing on the line with kids. We had several other people who joined on the sidewalk but didn’t stand on the line because they found the road too scary (really says something doesn’t it),” he told the news organization.
Why protected bike lanes?
There’s a reason why so many cyclists and cycling community supporters demand protected bike lanes: They work.
A 2019 study in the Journal of Transport & Health assessed 13 years of data in 12 major US cities, finding that “an increased prevalence of protected bicycle facilities suggest safer cities for all.”
This finding reinforces what many transportation and city planning experts have previously reported. Among them, the Federal Highway Administration.
“Separated bicycle lanes can mitigate or prevent interactions, conflicts, and crashes between bicyclists and motor vehicles,” the agency writes. “In fact, converting traditional bike lanes to a separated lane with low-cost flexible delineators can reduce bicycle-vehicle crashes by up to 53%.
Putting physical barriers between cars and cyclists creates an extra layer of protection for cyclists, but this infrastructure can be rare to come by. According to data compiled by the city, approximately 3% of San Francisco streets have separated bike lanes. Only New York City has more streets with protected bike lanes – 3.3% of streets there feature bike lane barriers.
What’s next?
PPBL events have slowed to some degree, Moran told Streetsblog SF following the study’s publishing in March 2025. Part of this may be because of the pandemic effect on the movement, but demonstrations are still popping up in new cities.
Denver is among the latest with a demonstration in late 2024. There, local outlets reported that a few dozen people protested the cancellation of a protected bike lane.
Activists say more bike lanes are needed everywhere, especially in urban corridors where vehicle drivers and cyclists must co-exist. San Francisco, which sought to end traffic deaths by 2024 and failed, continues to work toward safer roads. A draft of the new Biking and Rolling Plan, released in January, identifies how local residents are traveling across the city, where gaps exist, and what changes should be investigated next.
“Above all, creating a plan for biking and rolling gives us a chance to talk about and find agreement in what we all need, how we invest our city, to better understand each other, and build trust, so that government serves people fairly,” the draft report says. “After an intense decade of change, a plan helps us look ahead, prepare, and anchor some certainty.”