Seville, Spain has gone from 0.4% (essentially zero) to 7% bicycle mode share in 5 years. Boulder’s bike share is something like 9% and we’ve been at it for 20-30 years. This suggests to me that we are being too timid, and that we have no reason to rest on our laurels. Seville did this on the cheap, and they did it fast, by taking a small amount of space from cars, and giving it to people, while also physically protecting the people from the cars.
Tag: transportation
A bicycle reverie from Clever Cycles
Oregon’s plans to legislatively enable peer-to-peer car sharing have put cargo bike retailer Clever Cycles into some kind of (wonderful) bicycle trance, envisioning a world where the motorcars simply rust away. They already sit 92% idle after all.
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.
How exactly does this mitigate flooding again?
American Bucket Bikes: CETMA Cargo
Finally, somebody is making long-john style bucket bikes (bakfiets) in the US! That someone is CETMA. The frames come apart into two pieces so that they can be shipped at somewhat reasonable cost ($300) by ground carriers. Total cost for the frame, at your door: $2150. Eccentric bottom brackets for use with internally geared hubs. Disc brake tabs. Integrated platform allowing flat-bed or box-bike use. Looks pretty awesome.
Why don’t I dress up like a traffic cone?
Why not dress like a traffic cone when you ride your bike? Lots of great reasons, from the Lazy Randonneur. Including, importantly, the desire to move cycling in the US beyond being some kind of sporty geeked-out niche activity.
Winter Bike and Winter Stripes
We occasionally get actual winter here, and it’s not too hard to deal with, but honestly, this is much closer to the essence of winter cycling in Boulder:
Location Efficiency and Housing Type
According to this EPA study, regardless of the type of housing, living in an area with good transit access saves more energy than building a “green home”. Of course, living in a mixed use, transit accessible apartment that’s also energy efficient uses the least energy, but it’s important to realize how limited the potential for cost-effective energy efficiency is in a sprawling suburban context.
Population density vs. cycling rate
David Hembrow looks at the correlation between population density and cycling rate for a range of cities. Or rather, he points out the remarkable lack of correlation. Clearly there’s an intrinsic relationship between population (# of people) the distances people need to travel to access that population, and the density of the population, but even for cities with densities comparable to the US (1000-2500 people/km^2) cycling can be a very convenient mode of transport.