The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and AAA have joined together to promote National Bicycles Are Dangerous Month. I don’t understand why the US DoT would think that AAA and the NHTSA have any experience with bicycling. They’re both catastrophically automotive organizations. If anything, they have institutional imperatives to discourage cycling, which is exactly what their so-called safety recommendations do, by portraying bicycling as a dangerous activity, and placing the onus on cyclists to be safer, even though all the 100 daily deaths on US highways are perpetrated by cars.
Tag: transportation
Bicycles, Transit, and the Last Mile
Transit agencies have a problem called the Last Mile. It’s especially problematic in lower density communities, where convenient, high frequency local feeder bus, light rail, and trolley lines are unlikely to be economically viable. Many US communities have this problem. The most common solution is the Park-n-Ride — a gigantic surface lot or parking structure adjacent to a regional mass transit line. People drive their cars a few of miles and park them all day — usually at very low cost to the driver, and often for free (though of course, parking isn’t actually free). There are lots of problems with this model. Parking lots take up a lot of space. Structures are very expensive ($10k-$25k per parking spot). What do you do when you get where you’re going? If the transit line doesn’t come within easy walking distance (500 meters?) of your ultimate destination, this model probably isn’t attractive. It also assumes that you’re going to own or have access to a car, even though you’re taking transit, which precludes you from reaping most of the economic benefits of not driving, as they only accrue when you get rid of the car completely.
I bring the Last Mile problem up because I just came across a study entitled Bicycling Access and Egress to Transit: Informing the Possibilities. Combining bicycles and transit instead of cars and transit can help with a lot of the above issues. The cost per bike parking space is at most a couple of hundred dollars, not $10,000 or more, and for a given area, you can park ten times as may bikes as cars, making a bicycle park-n-ride much more economical in both dollars and space. It’s also possible to take at least a few bicycles along on transit vehicles, which can solve the problem of getting to one’s final destination on the other end, though not generally for everyone since bicycle capacity tends to be limited, especially on buses.
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.
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.
Energy and Equity – Ivan Illich
Energy and Equity is an essay from the energy crisis of the 1970s. It’s got a socialist bent, but I don’t think that’s actually vital to the point being made. As the speeds at which we travel and the distances traversed have increased, the cost of that transportation as a fraction of personal income has also gone up. Going further faster isn’t really an improvement, if one has to work longer hours to pay for the privilege. Thoreau made a similar point with respect to trains. Bicycles are a notable exception to this trend. With them you can travel much further and faster, even including the time it takes to earn the bicycle and pay for the infrastructure it requires.
Potential Boulder Transportation Innovations
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
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.
Can competitive cyclists help the face of bike advocacy?
Tim Johnson, apparently a prominent cyclocross racer, recently got into bike advocacy. Says he:
Bike advocacy is about as far away from ‘cool’ as one can get. It’s a world full of recumbents, Day-Glo yellow, helmet mirrors, wool and tweed; the stereotypes that make self-important racers and hardcore enthusiasts cringe.
I’ve often been confused by the question “Are you a serious cyclist?”. I don’t own a car, and bike virtually everywhere I go. I’ve spent a year or so cumulatively living on my bike touring. In eastern Europe, in Mexico. To my mind, this makes me serious. But not so in some other minds. To many it seems that only competition can make one “serious”, and I just don’t understand. But then, I’ve never watched a SuperBowl either.
Continue reading Can competitive cyclists help the face of bike advocacy?
Boulder’s Car Commuter of the Year
Automobilist Jay Moriarty Wins “Automobile Commuter of the Year” Award. His unwavering commitment to this relic of the 20th century has no doubt warmed the hearts of oil company shareholders and petro-dictators worldwide.