There’s Always Something More to Be Said

I’ve become delinquent with my follow-ups in the New Year.  But my negligence notwithstanding, there always seems to be insights that follow on the heels of past posts.  So, today will be a collection of follow-ups.  You can spend a few minutes glancing at them, or you can spend a half-day following all the links.  Go ahead, get lost in the online world of urbanism.

StrongTowns:  As a reminder of the upcoming video chat with Charles Marohn of StrongTowns, we’ll start with something from Brent Toderian, a Vancouver, BC city planner.  Toderian seems to be a convert to the StrongTowns theory because he tweeted, “These days in North America, the most persuasive argument for compact, walkable cities, and for walking, biking, and transit, is a fiscal one.”

Please note that Toderian isn’t saying the “best” argument, but the most “persuasive” one.  The distinction is significant.  One can argue that there are many reasons for an increased emphasis on urbanism, including climate change, peak oil, and market demand.  But the fiscal argument is the one that will likely resonate across the broadest range of the political spectrum.  And that breadth can be crucial toward building a consensus.

Infrastructure Cult: Despite the efforts of Marohn and Toderian, the drumbeat of the infrastructure cult continues.  When the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) released their updated assessment on the need for more infrastructure, the Bloomberg Report, CNBC, and the Washington Post all jumped into line, noting the $3.1 trillion of GDP that could be lost without new infrastructure.

All three understood one key point differently than I had.  They assumed that $3.1 trillion would be the GDP loss if the U.S. didn’t fund $1.1 trillion in potentially unfunded infrastructure improvements.  But I understood it to be the loss if none of the $2.7 trillion in infrastructure costs required between now and 2020 were funded.  I still suspect that I’m correct.  If I could argue that $3.1 trillion in benefits would flow from $1.1 trillion in costs, I’d make that point as clear as possible.  And ASCE didn’t do that.

Presidential Inauguration: I described an urbanist connection for the woman who offered the invocation at the inauguration, but missed another urbanism star.  The press coverage of the motorcade from the Capitol to the White House gave good coverage to the newly installed bicycle lane on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Bicycles versus Motorcycles: Two months ago, I made a passing note about the line between bicycles and motorcycles becoming blurred.  Apparently I wasn’t the first to think so.  The European Union has developed a demarcation between the bicycles and motorcycles.  I don’t know if they drew the line in the right place, but I’m sure of two things.  One, there is at least one manufacturer unhappy with the decision.  And two, the U.S. government will draw the line in a different place.

Readership: I recently noted that readership of this blog had decreased slightly during the holiday season.  I hoped for a rebound.  The rebound happened.  Readership is now at its all-time peak.  I thank my loyal readers for coming back three times a week and for telling their friends about this blog.  We’re hopefully building a solid North Bay urbanism community around this blog and around other people and sites who offer a similar message.

I continue to send email reminders, by bcc, whenever I publish a new blog post.  If you or a friend would like to receive these emails, let me know by comment or by email.  I’ll be pleased to add you to the list.

Petaluma Urban Chat:  This past Saturday, Petaluma Urban Chat took its scheduled Petaluma Transit field trip.  The outing went well, with the Petaluma Transit manager joining us for lunch to discuss some of the intricacies of transit planning and finance.  The group will soon begin discussing its next field trip.

The next meeting of Petaluma Urban Chat will be on February 12, when we can chat with the StrongTowns founder.  Details are here.

These follow-ups were fun.  Look for more next week.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Quarterly Fun

With everyone making plans for New Year’s Eve, I don’t’ want to unduly burden your minds.  Instead, I’ll offer my quarterly update to April Fool’s Day.  Because there’s just too much urbanism-related weirdness to save it for only one day a year.

We’ll start with the auto industry fighting back against the increasing use of bicycles.  Check out this attempt by Long Island City Hyundai to convince that guys on bikes can’t get girls.  The comments are also fun.

But the bicycle still has some adherents, as shown in this Daily Mail article about a 40-foot tall Christmas tree of bicycles in China.

Not to forget our pedestrian friends, John Metcalfe of Atlantic Cities offers his thoughts on a German invention, a “decelerator helmet” that stores images of the outside world and plays them back at a reduced rate to the person inside the helmet.  Which seems like a good way to see a curb in fine clarity several seconds after tripping over it.  Some inventions seem like ideas in search of a problem.  The decelerator helmet appears to be one.  Although perhaps a homeplate umpire could use one for ball-strike calls.

Switching over to transit, Kaid Benfield of the National Resources Defense Council presents videos that show the daily pattern of transit trips in several metropolitan areas.  The patterns are hypnotic.  However, please note that the San Francisco model includes only Muni and BART.  The North Bay isn’t quite the transit vacuum that the video makes us appear.  Golden Gate Bus, Marin Transit, Sonoma Transit, and other local providers may not make the North Bay a transit-rich environment, but at least we’re not a black void.

We’ll finish up with another transit link.  Jay-Z recently used transit to move between shows.  While on a subway, he had to explain who he was to a rider who sensed he was famous, but couldn’t place the face.  Gawker provides the endearing video.

Be safe on New Year’s Eve.  And if you can use, use transit, bicycle, or foot before and after your parties.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

The Case for and Controversies around New Bicycle Facilities

In three recent posts (here, here, and here), I’ve spoken about bicycle use.  Specifically about how more bicycle use can benefit urbanism, about how helmet laws, school policies, and low bicycle adoption by youths may be limiting the growth of bicycling, and about how a frequent argument against additional bicycling facilities can be rebutted.

Today, I’ll look at much of the world is beginning to value bicycle facilities and what bicycle improvements of the 21st century might look like.  Plus what the pushback might look like.

To set the stage, consider this quote from Ed Reiskin of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, “The most cost-effective transportation investment we can make is in bicycle infrastructure.”  He’s not suggesting that we don’t need to make continued accommodation for motor vehicles, only that more trips will be made per dollar of investment for bicycle facilities than for other facilities.

I suspect that Reiskin’s thought is more valid in congested San Francisco than in the outer reaches of drivable suburbia.  But if it’s true in San Francisco, there will soon be more and more places where it’ll become true.

Jay Walljasper in Sharable Cities presents information from around the country about the connection between bicycles and economic development.  During a joint bicycle ride, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak offered that “Biking is definitely part of our strategy to attract and retain businesses in order to compete in a mobile world”

Rybak continued “I was having dinner with a creative director that a local firm was eager to hire for a key post.  He was an American living in Europe, and we spent most of the evening talking about the importance of biking and walking to the life of a city. He took the job.”

Also in Minneapolis, the CEO of a large advertising firm tells Walljasper, “We moved from the suburbs to downtown Minneapolis to allow our employees to take advantage of the area’s many trails and to put the office in a more convenient location for commuting by pedal or foot.  Our employees are healthier, happier, and more productive.  We are attracting some of the best talents in the industry.”

Walljasper notes that driving among young adults is declining, a trend that may be partially, but not fully, explained by the economic times.  As reported by Walljasper, “The Federal Highway Administration found the miles traveled by drivers under 30 dropped from 21 percent to 14 percent of the total between 1995 and 2009.”  It was a time period that was only slightly impacted by the recession.

Walljasper further reports that “even Motor Trend magazine notes that the young professionals flocking to cities today are less inclined to buy cars and ‘more likely to spend the money on smartphones, tablets, laptops and $2,000-plus bikes.’”

Per Walljasper, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, mayor of Chicago, also understands the value that bicycle facilities can add to a city.  ”One of the things that employees look at today is the quality of life and quality of transportation because of the ease that comes with it.  And that ease is having trains as a choice, buses as a choice and bikes as a choice getting to and from work.”

Similarly, Walljasper interviewed Ellen Jones, director of Washington’s Downtown Business Improvement District, who said, “It’s just crazy how biking has taken off here, especially the new bikeshare system which a lot of people are using for commuting.”

Jones described the recent decision of a high-tech company looking for new office space, “A lot of their employees bike to work and they were concerned about whether they could easily get their bicycles upstairs. When bicycling is part of the final decision on where a company relocates, then we know its impact.”

Finally, Walljasper talked with Martha Roskowski, director of the Green Lane Project, which promotes protected bike lanes across the country.  Rostowski described her perspective, “Cities that want to shine are building these kind of better bike facilities as part of a suite of assets that attract business. And they find that bike infrastructure is cheap compared to new sports stadiums and light rail lines, and can be done much faster.”

The Green Lane Project brings us back closer to the North Bay.  As reported by Alexis Chavez in the San Francisco Chronicle, the City of San Francisco is one of six cities involved in the Green Lane Project.  The City is implementing what it calls green tracks or cycle tracks, which are routes dedicated to bicyclists and separated from both street traffic and sidewalk pedestrians.  The intention is to emulate north European cities such as Copenhagen. 

Bouncing back across the country, Jonathon Maus of BikePortland.org offers reporting on a recent speech by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg    Bloomberg noted the vast bicycle and pedestrian  improvements that have occurred during his administration, including banning traffic from Times Square.

Per Bloomberg “We’re using streets in ways they have not been used in a long time.  Cyclists and pedestrians and bus rides are as important - if not, I would argue more important - as automobile riders.  Transportation … it’s not sexy and certainly invites controversy.  We’ve just got to keep developing, keep building sensibly, with some plans and community involvement; but not stopping.”

Despite Bloomberg’s pride in the achievements of his administration, a contender to replace him in 2013 has already stated that removal of bicycle and pedestrian facilities would be among the first priorities of his administration.

The subject of challenges to bicycles lanes is timely, because a controversy recently erupted in Toronto on that exact topic.  Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford, was elected from the drivable suburbs around the fringe of Toronto.  His mayoral agenda has been contrary to pretty much every urbanist belief, including the need for bicycle facilities.

His most recent action was to successfully push for the removal of a bicycle lane which was installed under his predecessor’s administration and is currently handling up to 1,000 bicycle trips per day. 

The bicycling community came together in outrage.  Mick Sweetman of Rabble.ca argues that the lane removal is poor public policy, while Chris Bateman of Blogto.com catalogues the Twitter responses to the removal.  And Steve Fisher of Torontoist.com reports on a recent bicycle ride on the soon-to-be-removed lane.  Many of the riders were in zombie attire, moaning “Laaaanes” instead of “Braaaains” and contending that the bicycle lane would remain among the “undead”.

I’ll close by suggesting the Mayor Bloomberg hit the most important note about bicycling, and about the broader topic of urbanism, when he said “We’ve just got to keep developing, keep building sensibly, with some plans and community involvement; but not stopping.”

Too often, urbanist momentum has been waylaid by attempts to overbuild consensus or to appease a final property owner.  So much of the development environment is already stacked against urbanism that we can’t afford to let ourselves be too easily stopped.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Do We Wrongly Pigeonhole Bicycling?

In my last three posts (here, here, and here), I’ve written about bicycling.  Specifically about how increased bicycling can benefit urbanism, about how helmet laws, school policies, and low bicycle use by youths may be limiting the growth of bicycling, and about how a frequent argument against new bicycling facilities is largely based on fallacies.

Today, I’ll look at one more possible impediment to increase bicycling.  The difficulty in grasping the full range of transportation options that are offered by bicycles.

Bicycling covers a remarkably wide range of human locomotion, seemingly more than any other method of transportation.  The six-year-old pedaling along the sidewalk with training wheels and the professional bicyclist climbing a mountain in the Tour de France are using machines that are, at their essence, identical.

Surely the bicycle in the Tour de France is the greater technological achievement, but both bicycles have human legs rotating pedals which move a chain which drives a rear wheel.  It’s a simple technology with a remarkably broad range of application.

And that broad range of application can trip us up.  In our planning documents, we differentiate between the needs of motor vehicles, addressing local travel, freeways, parking, and emergency vehicles.  But bicycles tend to be considered as a single element even though different bicyclists can have very different needs.

To illustrate my point, I’ll share an anecdote.

Many years ago, I was a consulting engineer for an Oregon project.  The site included some 600 homes, a golf course, extensive paths, and much else.  As the project developed, there was a regular need to return to the county planning department for amendments to the project approvals.  I organized and wrote most of applications.

About three years into the development, with another amendment application in preparation, the local bicycle community came forth with a request that their right to traverse the property be acknowledged.  The project lay astride the best routes between the city and some fine bicycling trails, so the request was reasonable.

The developers agreed to the request.  But when I went to write that that part of the application, we disagreed about where the bicyclists should ride.  Much of the project had 28-foot roads paralleled by 8-foot pedestrian paths.  The developers thought that bicyclists should be restricted to the paths and that only motor vehicles should be allowed on the roads.  (It was and remains a very typical perspective.)

I was appalled by the thought.  My first attempts to argue against it were unsuccessful.  But then I had an idea.  I sat down with members of the project management team, drew boxes representing the 28-foot roads and 8-foot paths, listed the likely users of both including cars, emergency vehicles, golf carts, recreational  bicyclists, children on bicycles, joggers, casual walkers, and children at play, and asked the managers to divide the users between the roads and paths.

Faced with the vision of golf carts and children at play sharing an 8-foot strip of asphalt, the managers saw the error of their thinking and agreed that golf carts and serious bicyclists should use the road instead.  And that is how the land use application was written.  The range of bicycling had been acknowledged.

You might think that the lesson, once learned, would be long remembered.  You’d be wrong.  I recently received an email from the community association for the project.  “On a safety note, when operating golf carts on … walking/bicycle paths, you must yield to pedestrians and bicyclists.”  Twenty years later, we’re back where we started.

Ironically, I recently sold my lot in the project.  I moved to California years ago, but continued to own land in the development.  I watched the land market go way up.  I watched the land market collapse.  I was prepared to wait for a rebound, but received an offer I couldn’t refuse.  It was the right decision, but it still feels hollow to let loose of my last connection to a major part of my life for more than twenty years.  My last action on behalf of the project will be to forward a link to this blog post, hoping to restore the road and path, including bicyclists, into where they best fit.

While we still work to grasp the current range of bicycling, technology offers the promise of further challenges.  Take a look at this “chainless e-bike”.  Is it a plug-in bicycle?  Or is it the more minimalist motorcycle ever?  I don’t know.  But I do know that if we don’t come to grips with it and its forthcoming kin we’ll be failing to make use of all the future has to offer us.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Should We Be Building Bicycle Facilities?

In my last two posts (here and here), I’ve spoken about bicycle use.  Specifically about how more bicycle use can benefit urbanism and how helmet laws, school policies, and low bicycle adoption by youths may be limiting the growth of bicycling.  Today, I’ll look at the arguments around another possible impediment to more bicycling.

An oft-made comment regarding increased bicycle usage is that our communities lack sufficient facilities.  The argument is that with more facilities, including bicycle lanes, bicycle paths, and even bicycle storage areas, bicycle use would increase.  I don’t think that improved bicycle facilities are a panacea that would increase usage overnight.  But I believe that improved bicycle facilities are an essential element of the future of bicycling.

But a frequent response to the request for more facilities is that devoting scarce resources toward meeting the needs of a minuscule portion of the population with a particular recreational interest isn’t justified.  And it’s certainly not justified in these economic times.

It’s a response that’s based on three deeply-engrained fallacies.

The first fallacy is that bicyclists are mostly focused on the recreational aspect.  There are certainly bicyclists who do long weekend rides for physical fitness.  I have a cousin in that category and it’s a great thing for him.

But when I think about the need for better bicycling facilities, I don’t think of the weekend riders.  Instead, I think of a friend who often commutes from Petaluma to Santa Rosa by bicycle.  And of a friend who usually bicycles to our monthly Petaluma Urban Chats.  And of an architect in my neighborhood who often bicycles to his downtown office.

The second fallacy is that improved bicycle facilities would benefit only bicyclists.  It’s just not true.  During weekday commutes, almost every bicycle on the road represents a car that isn’t sharing a travel lane or competing for a parking place.  Transit is often described as freeing up road space.  Increased bicycling would certainly do the same.

The third fallacy, and perhaps the most significant, is that bicyclists will always remain a small minority.  Today, not many folks ride bicycles to work or for daily chores.  However, they don’t ride not because they don’t want to, but because, among other reasons, they don’t have safe routes to do so.  I have a friend who wants to do his grocery shopping by bicycle, but the only route available involves a street crossing that he won’t do with a trailer behind his bike.  More and better bicycle facilities would be a key toward making bicyclists less of a minority.

So, bicycle advocates are faced with making the “build it and they will come” argument, which seems a near-impossible argument to win.  Except that it isn’t.

There are numerous precedents in our region for building facilities in expectation of greater future use.  In 2006, how many people were riding a railroad between Santa Rosa and San Rafael?  None.  And yet Marin and Sonoma Counties voted for SMART.  In the 1960s, how many people were commuting by rail between Contra Costa County and San Francisco?  None.  And yet the Bay Area counties approved BART.  In 1930, how many people were driving across the Golden Gate?  None.  And yet San Francisco and Marin Counties approved funding for the Golden Gate Bridge.

Is it possible to follow the lead of those approvals and to make improved bicycle facilities a reality?  Possibly.  But there may be one key difference between BART and a bicycle lane.  I’m guessing that many voters in the 1960s could visualize themselves commuting by rail.  But too few voters today, and too few public officials, can see themselves living their lives on a bicycle.  And that lack of vision gets in the way of funding for more bicycle facilities.

We’ll continue to fund some improvements, but unless there is a fundamental change in how we view bicycling, it will usually be through altruism, not self-interest.  And ultimately self-interest is a more powerful motivation.

Which frames the challenge for the bicycling community.  The thought that the person we see in the mirror in the morning may someday use a bicycle lane to buy groceries is probably more important to propagate than all of the visions of what a bicycle-friendly community might look like.  It’s a big challenge.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)