Tag: infrastructure

Revisiting Junction Place, the TVAP and Multi-Way Boulevards

Antisocial Facades

Last fall I and other representatives from Community Cycles participated in a discussion with the city and various stakeholders regarding upcoming redevelopment along Pearl Parkway.  I wrote about the experience and the Transit Village Area Plan (TVAP) more generally from the perspective of a human-powered urbanist.  Mostly, we looked at different possible streetscapes for Pearl Parkway between 30th and the railroad tracks.  The property at 3100 Pearl Parkway is slated to be developed in the near future, as a 320 unit rental apartment complex, and as one of the first major developments in the area plan.  The city is interested in experimenting with novel street treatments in order to try and make the place special and attractive.  Community Cycles got involved largely because the TVAP “Connections Plan” had, with minimal fanfare, superseded the Transportation Master Plan (TMP) and removed the bike lanes which had long been planned along Pearl Parkway in favor of off-street only infrastructure.  We felt that this change was not necessarily in the best interest of cyclists, and wanted to ensure that whatever did end up getting built would be safe and efficient.

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Xcel backing away from solar-thermal enabling San Luis Valley transmission

Xcel appears to be backing away from new transmission lines to the San Luis Valley.  This infrastructure is required to implement the several hundred megawatts of solar-thermal generation that they proposed in their 2007 resource plan.  Solar thermal is the only renewable power (other than pumped hydro, which has limited availability) for which energy storage is potentially feasible right now (e.g. using huge tanks of molten salt).  It’s interesting to contrast the utility’s statements on the San Luis Valley project with what they’re saying about the Pawnee retrofit, and what they said about the Comanche 3 plant.

Bike Transport in Switzerland and Austria

A pleasantly surprised American cyclist commenting on bike infrastructure in Switzerland and Austria, in particular Basel and Innsbruck, two European cities that aren’t particularly big (166k and 120k respectively), and which do have some weather and topography, not so different from Boulder.  Basel’s bike mode share is 17%, about double Boulder’s, and their bike infrastructure is fantastic.  If we get another 9% of our trips by bike, can we have that too please?  Or maybe the causality is the other way around.

Portland’s bike corral backlog

Portland literally cannot build bike corrals fast enough to satisfy local businesses.  After installing 30 corrals in 2009 and 21 in 2010, there are now 75 businesses on the waiting list.  Once you reach a certainly critical mass of cyclists, swapping a single car parking space (1.3 customers) for a dozen bike parking spaces (12 customers) is no longer a difficult idea to sell to business.

Potential Boulder Transportation Innovations

Portland Bike Box

Much cheaper than an underpass…

The Camera reports (in a pleasantly positive light) that Boulder is exploring a variety of low-cost bike and transit improvements.  Underpasses and separated trails are awesome, but quite costly, and often depend on external funding sources.  Thankfully there are also locally fundable small-scale improvements that can go a long way toward improving the quality of service for bikes and transit users.  Most of them are just better paint, information, and organization of the streets, but represent potentially large quality of service improvements.

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2011 Boulder Cyclist Survey Results

Southern Sun Bike Parking

We put out a survey in early March (more detailed summary here in PDF format), asking a bunch of questions about the bicycle habits and desires of Boulderites, and we’ve gotten nearly 200 responses.  This is an attempt at a summary.

A large majority (83%) of respondents reported using their bikes as either their primary (53%) or secondary (30%) mode of transportation.  This isn’t too surprising, since we targeted cyclists in promoting the survey.  It’s important to realize though that at some level, our most important audience is people don’t currently bike, or identify as cyclists, but who could be potentially be enticed into riding given the right inducements.  This group is important both because it’s large, and because it’s not “the choir” in terms of preaching.  It isn’t your base that you aim for in politics, it’s the undecideds.  At the same time, the current cyclists are the political constituency that we are trying to represent in an advocacy context.

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All Transportation Infrastructure is Development

A good post from Fort Worthology on the perils of continuing to build late-20th century sprawling car-centric cities, and the fallacy that transit/bike/pedestrian infrastructure is a “handout for developers” while highways are not.  All public infrastructure — especially transportation infrastructure — has consequences for developers, and economic development, and you get the development you build your transportation systems for.  Who wants to be the next Detroit?  Who wants to continue supporting the petro-dictators?  Not me, thanks.

New York’s Bike Lane Battle is a Sham

New York’s streets are safer and more livable than ever.  More than half the households in NYC do not own a car.  Polls show conclusively that the public supports the bike lanes, traffic calming, and pedestrian plazas.  They also make economic sense.  Unfortunately, most decisionmakers in the city do own cars, drive regularly and get free parking everywhere, so they have a clear conflict of interest with the people they supposedly represent.

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?

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