Category: Advocacy

Do you want this facility? Where?

April 4, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Take a look at this protected two-way bike lane in Brooklyn, New York City.

Some people are suing to remove (or change it). If you’re someone who doesn’t live there, here’s why this fight could still be important for you. Or maybe you want to know why the bike lane was installed.

If your city’s transportation or public works department proposed a protected bike lane or cycle track for your town, where should the first one go?

I propose 11 locations for Chicago (see link for ideal segments):

  • Blue Island Avenue
  • Chicago Avenue
  • Fullerton Avenue
  • Grand Avenue
  • Halsted Street (in some discrete locations)
  • King Drive (connecting downtown/South Loop to Bronzeville, Hyde Park, Washington Park)
  • Ogden Avenue (the entire street, from the city boundary on the southwest side to its dead end at the Chicago River near Chicago Avenue)
  • Wabash Street (connecting downtown and IIT)
  • Washington Boulevard/Street
  • Wells Street – this may be one of the easiest locations to pull off, politically at least, especially if Alderman Reilly pays for all or part of it with his annual appropriation of $1.32 million (“menu funds”).
  • Western Avenue

    Notice how I didn’t propose Stony Island. Here’s why.

    P.S. This will not be like the case of high-speed rail in America, where if one governor refuses money for an HSR project, other governors can compete for that money. The Prospect Park West bike lane will not be picking up and moving to another state 😉

    Look at all that room for people to go about their business, whether by car, bike, roller skates, wheelchairs, or their own two feet. Photos by Elizabeth Press.

    Gaps

    April 3, 2011 / / 0 Comments

    A map that focuses on striped bikeways in downtown Chicago.

    When you look at your bikeways more abstractly, like in the graphic above, do you see deficiencies or gaps in the network? Anything glaring or odd?

    It’s a simple exercise: Open up QGIS and load in the relevant geographic data for your city. For Chicago, I added the city boundary, hydrography and parks (for locational reference), and bike lanes and marked-shared lanes*. Symbolize the bikeways to stand out in a bright color. I had the Chicago Transit Authority stations overlaid, but I removed them because it minimized the “black hole of bikeways” I want to show.

    What do you see?

    Bigger impact map

    This exercise can have more impact if it was visualized differently. You have to be familiar with downtown Chicago and the Loop to fully understand why it’s important to notice what’s missing. It’s an extremely office and job dense neighborhood. It also has one of the highest densities of students in the country; the number of people residing downtown continues to grow. If I had good data on how many workers and students there were per building, I could indicate that on the map to show just how many people are potentially affected by the lack of bicycle infrastructure that leads them to their jobs (or class) in the morning, and home in the evening. I don’t know how to account for all of the bicycling that goes through downtown just for events, like at Millennium and Grant Parks, the Cultural Center, and other theaters and venues.

    *If you cannot find GIS data for your city, please let me know and I will try to help you find it. It should be available for your city as a matter of course.

    Why I’m keeping track of Brooklyn’s bike lane drama

    March 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

    A protected bike lane on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn installed by the New York City Department of Transportation in summer 2010 is under attack. Two groups have sued the city in March 2011 over the lane’s installation. The city published a report that indicated that the new bike lane contributed to fewer drivers speeding, a decrease in injuries, and an increase in compliance of the law banning bicycling on the sidewalk.

    I have written several articles about the drama, including New Yorkers really want to keep their bike lanes.

    Why am I paying attention?

    I believe this fight may come to Chicago when the Chicago Department of Transportation starts planning the cycle track to be installed on Stony Island Avenue between 69th and 77th Streets, which may be installed as soon as 2014.

    And when the fight does come, I want to know as much as possible about how to defend Chicago’s first cycle track.

    Will we be successful and install a similar facility in Chicago? Photo features New York City’s first cycle track, from 2007, on 9th Avenue.

    Voting on bikeways in San Luis Obispo County

    March 19, 2011 / / 0 Comments

    Session summary: A staffer at San Luis Obispo Council of Governments (SLOCOG) wants to learn about ways to have residents learn about proposed bikeways in the jurisdiction, their costs, and possibly vote or rank them to prioritize installation. SLOCOG is also considering a referendum for a sales tax that would fund transportation improvements to pay for road maintenance, transit service, and bikeways. This tool could be used to decide how the sales tax revenue is spent.

    UNEDITED

    SLOCOG – what a funny name
    250-300k population for the county.
    slow-growth county, not affordable

    GIS, web interface – routes of bikeways, identified by color
    $30m over 25 years
    bike plan
    Oh, you want that class 1 to the beach? That’s $15m
    survey of unmet bike needs

    This is what we want to do, this is the money we have.
    This is where 10k people want a bike lane.

    passenger car sales tax (I missed how the sales tax would work)? county sales tax increase to fund transportation
    quadruples range of options.

    Adriel Hampton: Bright Idea – ideation, vote them up and down
    Lot of marketing, moderation, outreach
    Just cuz you build it, people don’t come
    You have to market it hard.

    Me: Will there be a soft side to this? In-person charrettes? No, but will consider.
    Have the potential bikeways already been identified and have all had their costs estimated?
    Yes, bikeways identified.
    Costs will be estimated soon based on past construction projects.

    Starting with bikeways, then complete streets modules, streetscapes.

    Jeff Wood:
    Phily Planning Organization, web interface – click on the projects you want
    Portland
    Sacramento – Willingess to pay game?

    Matt: How do they frame sales tax? This is the touchiest subject for us.

    OpenPlans GeoExt application.

    Adriel: I think scenarios is better than open.
    Matt: We’ve made the plan, have the network. We need the people to justify the funding decisions we make.
    mottmann@gmail.com

    Leah: TechSoup – let county-wide bike coalition get grants to pay for software/application.
    Google StreetView – have the trike feature your best bike route.
    LA Times, if you do this in the budget, then this happens. Generated a lot of buzz.

    Sean Hedgpeth: Capital and operating budgets.
    I added about federal funding not paying for maintenance.

    Matt: rideshare.org
    Richard: 66% votes needed to approve the sales tax.
    Sean: Have to sell sales tax with potholes.
    Matt: Cycling will get 7% of sales tax.

    What’s the county’s policy on open data? It’s not that it’s hidden, it’s just that the organization and outreach is not there.

    SidewalkChalk (?, url)

    Adriel: SeeClickFix – civic points – put a gaming aspect on things. participation rates are so low.
    1-9-90 model. Create, read, do nothing to web content.
    Look at
    Adding some goofy elements to project.
    So anti-Farmville until I found out about their special corn that would help Haiti

    Measuring gas prices and bicycling trips

    March 7, 2011 / / 0 Comments

    From the Chicago Tribune: Gas prices continued to rise Monday, driven higher for nearly two weeks straight by the turmoil in Libya, with analysts expecting prices to keep climbing.

    Active Transportation Alliance asks, “How can we make the gas price bubble permanent?” -Essentially the same topic I write about below.

    I was thinking ever since I first read in the Chicago newspapers that gas will hit $4 per gallon this year (it already has in the City) that there’s a relationship between the price of gas and the number of people on bicycling or the number of trips people make on their bicycles.

    As the price of gas rises, so does the number of people out bicycling on the streets. As the price of gas falls, bicycling declines as well.

    Chart from GasBuddy.com showing average gas prices in Chicago for the past 3 years.

    The data available to us doesn’t necessarily support this hypothesis, but the data available* is nearly worthless. Gas prices were over $4 per gallon in 2008. That was when Chicago started seeing tons of people on the street on their bicycles. The local Fox News affiliate interviewed Mike Amsden, a city planner at the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), about the bike counts (first in five years) in a news segment about the influence of $4.65 and a “major peak, almost 350% in pedal pushers this year.”

    Several newspapers published articles about the palpable increase in cycling, including a Time Out issue called “Bike Love” with messenger Jeff Perkins on the cover and interviewing 7 local cyclists inside. All of them published “how to get out and ride”-type articles. But despite the many new riders on the street in 2008, few came back the next year!

    This graphic describes my point about gas prices up, bike trips up; gas prices down, bike trips down (but perhaps ending at a rate a little higher than where it started).

    2009 came and the gas prices dropped – the modern heyday of Chicago cycling was gone. 2008 saw the highest numbers at 2 of 3 locations also counted in 2003, although the difference in study months makes the comparison suspect. I hope that 2011 is the start of annual and accurate counts of bicycling in Chicago.

    But it’s reasonable to expect that some of the new people riding their bikes instead of taking expensive car trips will stick with it the following year, even as gas prices decline. Let’s keep these riders bicycling year after year, encouraging more to stay on the bike path than would normally otherwise with strategies like more urban-appropriate infrastructure (separated and protected bike lanes; secure bike parking at workplaces and train stations; traffic calming/slower traffic) as well as enforcement of laws that protect cyclists.

    Let’s concentrate less on the “insane”  numbers of people cycling on Milwaukee Avenue at Ohio Street (3,121 bikes on September 15, 2009) and more on how to raise the number of people cycling on our other streets. Milwaukee Avenue doesn’t need anymore attention (except for its intersections). Getting people off Milwaukee and safely and efficiently onto east-west and north-south routes should be the priority. -Photo shows Halsted/Grand/Milwaukee, just 300 feet southeast of the Ohio count location.

    *Available data

    The American Community Survey (ACS) 3-year estimate for 2006-2008 tells us that 1.0% of working Chicagoans 16+ took their bikes to work (nevermind the tinny sample size that makes this data near worthless – it’s the only thing we have*). The 3-year estimate before (2005-2007) says 0.9% took their bikes to work. Not much of a peak or increase! For 2007-2009, the data shows 1.1% cycled to work.

    Also ignore the fact that the ACS only asks about the mode you spent the most distance on. It does not collect data on multi-mode trips. So if you bike 3 miles to the train and the train is 30 miles to your destination, the ACS would only record “public transportation.”