Funding local transportation locally

Whenever Tax Day approaches, I end up thinking about where that money goes, and what it buys, and whether I really wanted any of it.  Increasingly, it seems to me that the larger the governing jurisdiction, the less democratic it is, and the more despairing I am of having any influence over it.  More than any other realm of policy, the way we build our cities — and thus our buildings and our transportation systems — influences our energy use and other impacts on the world around us.  Land use is nominally controlled by local government (city planning boards, zoning commissions, etc).  However, in many important ways the actions that local governments can take are limited by the state and federal policymakers.  In particular, they’re limited by what they can get funded.  The large jurisdictions take your tax dollars, and then set up hoops for small jurisdictions to jump through in order to get it back.  This leads to an unfortunate homogeneity of policy, and discourages experimentation, or even imitation of things known to work in other places.  At best you end up playing accounting games, doing things like building bike paths with federal flood mitigation money.

30th St. onramp looking good

How exactly does this mitigate flooding again?

Continue reading Funding local transportation locally

An Afternoon of Boulder Streetscapes

I spent the afternoon wandering around downtown, reading, sipping coffee, and taking pictures.  I was surprised to see that Boulder had apparently been invaded (in the best possible way) by stylish olive skinned women wearing high heels, until I got to the Tea House, and remembered it was Persian New Year (also known as the Vernal Equinox).  The music and dancing was just winding down, but the outdoor space was still filled with people, and social buzz.

Happy Nowruz

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48 Minutes and 75 Bikes on the Boulder Creek Path

I spent some time this afternoon sitting alongside the Boulder Creek Path out east of where it joins up with the Goose Creek Path, heading toward the ocean of office parks that employ a significant chunk of Boulder, a 7 minute ride from my house at 21st and Walnut.  As the sun headed for the continental divide, I took a picture of (almost) every bike that went by.  Over 48 minutes, I saw 75 bikes. 

Looking at the photos after the fact, I did some counting and found some things out about cyclists in Boulder.

Continue reading 48 Minutes and 75 Bikes on the Boulder Creek Path

A Weekend Bike Tour to Fort Collins

I’m organizing an overnight bike tour from Boulder to Ft. Collins and back the first weekend in April (weather permitting of course, who knows what it will do).  If you’ve got route suggestions or know anyone in Ft. Collins that might be interested in letting some weary cyclists camp in their backyard for a night and take showers… we could cook them dinner or take them out as thanks!  And if you know anyone who might be interested in giving bike touring a bite-sized try, let them know.

Human Powered Comments on the Boulder County Transportation Master Plan

Reserved Parking

I went to one of the inaugural Boulder County Transportation Master Planning meetings… on January 13th.  I took notes, but never wrote them up (bad blogger!).  The process will probably take most of the year, and it’s looking out 25 years or so into the future, so really 6 weeks isn’t too big a deal, right?  If you haven’t already, please do take the Boulder County TMP survey.

Before the meeting there was a mingling session with a bunch of poster board presentations (available here as PDFs), mostly maps showing a bunch of different current and projected data.  Where people are, where jobs are, where trips go, both today and our imagining of 2035.  I talked briefly to George Gerstle (whose bicycle parking spot is pictured above) about the current and projected population centers in the region.

Boulder Population and Job Density 2010

Boulder County 2010: Blue=Households, Red=Jobs

The expectation is that there will be a lot of sprawling, suburban, car dependent development just beyond the southeast corner of Boulder County around Broomfield, in Jeffco, and also in the southwest corner of Weld County (which does not participate in RTD).  Also, growth is projected along the I-25 corridor, and along US 36.  By and large, what happens beyond the county’s borders is out of our control.  There’s a little bit of open space out there that we own, and we can control what kind of infrastructure exists within the county, but barring sudden and sustained increases in gas prices, it seems unlikely that these communities are going to embrace transit oriented development and compact urban design.  We’ve got sprawl at the gates, and we have to decide what to do about it.  These bodies politic are apparently not interested in planning around the possibility of significantly higher fuel costs in the future.

Continue reading Human Powered Comments on the Boulder County Transportation Master Plan

Better Bicycle Marketing in Boulder a la Cycle Chic

I’ve been talking to friends and co-conspirators about how best to do bicycle propaganda marketing.  There’s a tendency in Boulder — as well as more broadly in the US — to market transportation cycling on the basis of its environmental, health, economic, and even political benefits.  These benefits are significant, and are part of why I and many others who already ride, do so.  However, I don’t think that means they’re the right way to reach the other 99% of the US population (or even to the other 90% of the Boulder population).  To use this rational, functional framing is to use the marketing techniques of the 19th century, which often assumed consumers to be rational beings, making their purchases on the basis of the relative functional merits of the products on offer.  Some people behave rationally, in some purchases, but since the mid 20th century most corporations (and many governments) have realized that this is not actually the best way to move product.  Ever since Edward Bernays, marketing and public relations has largely been about evoking an emotional response and associating your product with the aspirations of the consumer, regardless of whether those aspirations are attainable or pure fantasy.  Most people with an analytical background are irritated by the idea that logical rhetoric and rational argument are not the best ways to convince people of something.  I’ve seen this issue come up repeatedly with public science communication, especially in the context of climate change.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mindcaster-ezzolicious/4126008476/

Irritating or not, this seems to be the way most people work, most of the time.  If we want cycling to become something everyone does, we have to work with people as they are, not as we wish they were.  The benefits of the bicycle will be realized if lots of people decide to ride, regardless of whether they’ve made that decision rationally.

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Bicycle infrastructure progress along Goose Creek

I’ve been biking along the Goose Creek bike path a lot over the last few months.  Boulder Aikikai is out there, and so is Community Cycles, and I’ll go for a short triangular on the Boulder Creek path, 13th St. and Goose Creek when I just need to get out in the sun for a little while.  Throughout the summer I was repeatedly reminded that there’s no good way to get from the path up to the east side of 30th St, and crossing 30th kind of sucks, especially when there’s any traffic.  A couple of times I went so far as to go under it and the nearby railroad tracks, and then up into the parking lot, and back over the railroad tracks and through another parking lot.  I’m sure this involved trespassing.  And I wasn’t the only one doing it either, there was a trail worn in the grass and the gravel.

So I was stoked to hear that a ramp connecting Goose Creek to the east side of 30th was in the works, and this fall the heavy equipment came out and started making it a reality.  I’ve been taking pictures as it progresses:

Goose Creek Path and 30th Street Progress

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Population Growth vs. Migration in Boulder and the World

The Boulder Blue Line has a short post entitled This Law Cannot Be Repealed by Albert Bartlett, who is an emeritus professor of Physics at CU, and who is most well known for speaking about the absurdity of “sustainable” growth and what exponential growth really means.  He’s also one of the original architects of Boulder’s “Blue Line”, which has limited growth beyond certain boundaries within the city and county.

I agree with Bartlett on a lot.  Unconstrained population growth is undoubtedly, in a global context, an epic disaster.  In his collection of essays Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley noted of overpopulation that “Unsolved, that problem will render insoluble all our other problems.”  Similarly, the unconstrained geographic growth of towns and cities is a catastrophe, resulting in very low-density, car-dependent development which exacerbates the consequences of population growth by increasing the amount of resources that each individual consumes, in terms of land and energy and material goods.

Parks are for People

Urban density and good public space make scenes like this possible.

Continue reading Population Growth vs. Migration in Boulder and the World

Population Growth vs. Migration in Boulder and the World

The Boulder Blue Line has a short post entitled This Law Cannot Be Repealed by Albert Bartlett, who is an emeritus professor of Physics at CU, and who is most well known for speaking about the absurdity of “sustainable” growth and what exponential growth really means.  He’s also one of the original architects of Boulder’s “Blue Line”, which has limited growth beyond certain boundaries within the city and county.

I agree with Bartlett on a lot.  Unconstrained population growth is undoubtedly, in a global context, an epic disaster.  In his collection of essays Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley noted of overpopulation that “Unsolved, that problem will render insoluble all our other problems.”  Similarly, the unconstrained geographic growth of towns and cities is a catastrophe, resulting in very low-density, car-dependent development which exacerbates the consequences of population growth by increasing the amount of resources that each individual consumes, in terms of land and energy and material goods.

Parks are for People

Urban density and good public space make scenes like this possible.

Continue reading Population Growth vs. Migration in Boulder and the World