Ten Boulder/Denver Transportation Issues for the Next 10 Years

Bite-sized summaries of ten regional transportation issues, including using Bcycle as a last-mile transit solution, the bazillion-dollar freeway boondoggles in progress, $5 gasoline, FasTracks finances, Boulder-Denver BRT and more.  Would be nice if they had links to deeper information… but that’s what The Google is for.

Bike Helmets Not Warranted

A concise explanation from Urban Country on why bike helmets really aren’t warranted.  First, cycling just isn’t that dangerous, and we do most safe things without a helmet.  Second, strongly promoting or legally requiring them discourages cycling in general, and fewer bikes on the road is less safe for cyclists, less healthy for society, more expensive in terms of infrastructure, pollution, etc.  Third, bike helmets aren’t really designed to deal with serious accidents — the ones that kill or maim you.  And fourth, focusing the blame for what danger does exist for cyclists on the cyclists themselves, distracts from the real bicycle safety issue, which is cars.

Activate the Future

BMW is running an ad campaign on the future of mobility.  Of course, they call it a “documentary”.  It’s amazing how close they come to imagining a future in which we don’t use cars in cities.  But of course, since they’re a car company, they can’t quite get there.  The fundamental attribute of cities that makes them work — density — is also what makes them incompatible with cars.

The Selfish Automobile

A good overview of the cost of cars in terms of money, space, and time at Planetizen. Transportation costs are already unaffordable (>20% of household income) for the lowest income 40% of the US, and drivers only pay a minority of automotive costs directly.  Over the last half of the 20th century, the proportion of household income dedicated to transportation doubled.  Cars use ~20x as much spacetime (s*m^2) as bikes for the same commute, and ~200x as much as a pedestrian.  Interestingly the direct car costs mentioned are only about half what AAA estimates ($4100 vs. $8500 per year).

The Motorist’s Identity Crisis

What are the social connotations of cycling? If you’re driving, and you see someone on a bike, are you more likely to think they’re a loser?  That they’re poor?  That they ride because they have no other choice?  Or will you be irritated by their smug sense of superiority?  Can the same drivers have both of these experiences?  They only make sense when the drivers themselves never ride.  When it’s us and them.  The connotations of cycling are changing, and I think that’s a good sign.

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.

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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.

Continue reading Better Bicycle Marketing in Boulder a la Cycle Chic