The City of Albuquerque boasts “400 miles of on-street bicycle facilities and multi-use trails.” But not all bicycle facilities are created equal. Most bicyclists in Albuquerque prefer to use paved multi use trails—i.e., trails limited to foot and bicycle traffic. As a result, Albuquerque bicyclists are fixated on one thing above all: how do I get to my destination without exposing myself to dangerous car traffic?
Apps such as Google Maps or Transit can help. But they often do not reflect facts on the ground. To paraphrase James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, “The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of [Google Maps] is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.” As but one example, Google Maps does not discern the paved shortcut between Campus Road and Central just West of Yale that enables cyclists to cross Central with little, albeit illegal, fuss.
In the end, there is a clear benefit to a DIY approach to navigation. Further, studies have shown that relying on navigation apps like Waze and Google Maps essentially turns off your hippocampus; you go into a kind of “autopilot” trance when software is guiding your turns.
So in that vein, I am writing about the main arteries of Albuquerque’s multi-use trail network, so that cyclists can better have a “mental map” of this great city. The heuristic we’re going to use is north-south and east-west. These networks are best thought of as a kind of hashtag, with three main trails running north-south, and three main trails running east-west:
Divided in this (admittedly unscientific) fashion, several points become clear. First, if you set aside painted bike lanes, Albuquerque’s bicycle infrastructure is almost entirely reliant on its flood infrastructure. Each of the highlighted multiuse trails are constructed along flood control rights of way. That all is fine if you are traveling in the same direction that water flows from the foothills to the Rio Grande (i.e., from the East to the West). Even then, you inevitably will contend with some vehicle traffic, especially if you are traveling on Paseo de las Montanas across main arterial roads like Juan Tabo, Eubank, and Wyoming. Traveling North or South is an entirely different story—it is almost impossible to avoid car traffic when biking from the Northeast heights to the South Valley, or from the West Side to Kirtland AFB in the Southeast heights.
Is there anything being done to solve the issue? Last year, the Albuquerque City Council adopted the 2024 Bikeway & Trail Facilities Plan, which proposes a long-term vision for improvements to Albuquerque’s bicycle infrastructure. But even the “long term” plan has no real proposals for creating a multi-use trail “X” on the map above:
To be fair, there is not much the City can do about this problem. The “Big I” intersection between Interstates 40 and 25 is the proverbial elephant in the room; there is no way to connect one corner of the city to another using multi use trails that does not involve massive reconfiguration of an Interstate. Nor does the City get much “bang for its buck” by constructing a paved multi use trail in a single developed area; that would come at the expense of incremental improvements to bike infrastructure elsewhere.
As a result, City leadership has correctly focused on incremental improvements to “all areas of Albuquerque.” As the map above illustrates, the City sees more bang for its buck converting throughfares in residential areas of the Southeast Heights into Bicycle Boulevards (i.e., lowering the speed limit on the street and posting numerous signs informing drivers that bicyclists are entitled to share the same right of way as cars), or with sidepaths (i.e., semi-separated bike lanes alongside car traffic) in the City’s Northwest quadrant.
None of this is to be criticized, but it is a reminder to look up from your phone when you’re on your bicycle. Google Maps may direct you to use an unprotected bike lane along Pennsylvania when you could be enjoying yourself much more checking out the houses along Parsifal.GPS navigation offers a “low stress” but potentially less engaging way to move through a city, similar to how separated bike paths offer a "low stress" but potentially limited way to cycle through Albuquerque. Likewise, both situations involve physical infrastructure shaping our behavior: GPS infrastructure (satellites, smartphones) encourages passive navigation, while flood control infrastructure and the cyclist’s ingrained preference for dedicated multi-use trails leaves the impression that any cross-town commute is going to be uncomfortable. Either way, we're letting pre-existing infrastructure determine how we interact with our environment, rather than developing more flexible, adaptable ways of moving through the city.