Transportation efficiency, safety and fluff programs

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Brendon

Ken Greenberg and Trent Lethco discuss the potential benefits for drivers of providing more bike (and transit) capacity on local systems. Given the minor controversy that has erupted over the decision by Minneapolis Department of Public Works to hire a Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator, I thought this article was especially timely.

One of the key transportation issues we’ve only begun to tackle is system efficiency versus system capacity. When we think about moving the highest number of people in the smallest available footprint, creating more space for walking, cycling and transit makes perfect sense. By focusing on making our existing systems more efficient, we can allow more people to travel on the roads, highways and transportation systems we’ve already built.

Every additional trip we take on foot, on a bicycle or by public transit frees up significant space for drivers, since the “footprints” of these other modes are so much smaller. The cyclist beside you is not the car in front of you; the bicycle locked to a ring at curbside means one less parking space is taken. Driver, cyclist and pedestrian are complementary rather than mutually exclusive categories. Most of us are all of these at different times. What’s crucial is the proportion of time we use each mode, and creating communities where the car is needed for only certain types of trips. For other trips, we can make more efficient choices.

Recognizing this reality, cities around the world are finding innovative ways to share their rights of way. Cities such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen, London, Paris, New York, Montreal and Vancouver are rapidly making the shift to safe and efficient multimodal networks. More than a hundred cities now have bicycle-sharing programs such as Bixi. If we decide we want our system to be more efficient, we must also ensure it has the attributes that make the more efficient choices the attractive ones – and that comes through land use, system design, pricing and skillful urban design.

Greenberg and Lethco’s article is all about efficiency, but the bike coordinator position is also about public safety. Ward 2 Council member Cam Gordon provides an eloquent rebuttal to the Strib article:

I am concerned that the article presents a false choice between this coordinator position and public safety. In fact, the bike/walk coordinator position is a public safety position. According to the records from our Public Works department, there were 46 bike/ped fatalities in Minneapolis between 2000 and 2009, and 5,509 bicyclists and pedestrians (that we know of) have been hit in that same timeframe.

These are big numbers, and it’s easy to lose sight of the human suffering behind each one. So I ask you to remember Audrey Hull, the young woman who was hit and killed in Ward 2 earlier this year, and the pain that unnecessary tragedy caused to her family and friends.

Safer, better designed infrastructure can save lives. That’s not an assertion, it’s a fact, borne out by the studies that have looked into road treatments like bike lanes. By helping us build more and better bike and pedestrian infrastructure, this coordinator will help prevent deaths like Audrey’s.

Montreal bike infrastructure

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Brendon

A few weeks ago we went to Montreal for a week. I learned not to rent places without air conditioning and that Montreal has some great bicycle infrastructure. The off-street stuff is pretty standard for Minneapolis, but their on-street facilities are impressive. A large cycle-track network, lots of on-street bike parking and a bike sharing system that has over 5,000 bikes. Here is a map (in French) of the city’s bike network (pdf). Cycletracks, which are two-way cycling routes that are on the street, but divided from cars, usually with a curb, are in blue.

According to the 2006 census, Montreal (the city) had an 11% bicycle mode share. Take that, number one cycling city.

Below are some pictures we took, mostly of bike stuff and streets, while in Montreal and Quebec City.

Continue reading →

First Open Streets in Minneapolis

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Brendon

Yesterday, June 6th, was the first Open Streets event in Minneapolis. It was organized by the Minneapolis Bike Coalition, with lots of hard work. From everyone I’ve talked to and all the tweets I’ve read, it seemed to be a rollicking success. But how can people not like cruising up and down Lyndale and saying hi to their neighbors and friends?

Below are a few photos the wife and I snapped. Check out the Open Streets page for more.

How the bicycle economy can help us beat the energy crisis

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Brendon

Elly Blue at Grist has a very interesting series on “bikenomics”, exploring the impact of bicycling on economics, both micro and macro. Her post on the economic case for on-street bike parking is great, and should be made into a flyer and sent to all small businesses in Minneapolis. Her latest post deals with “the energy crisis”, meaning generally addiction to oil, high gas prices, and environmental externalities of fossil fuel use.

There’s no easy way out at this point. But if we approach energy as a transportation issue rather than a geopolitical one, we can at least start to see a way through it.

Instead of pushing gas prices back to even more artificial lows, we need to invest that money that is normally all tied up in oil into bikes … and places to ride them.

Bicycling makes a lot of sense in a landscape built for cars. Bikes are fast and flexible enough to fill the gap between transforming spread-out driving destinations to walkable, accessible communities. With 40 percent of our driving trips spanning less than two miles, the distances are feasible — so long as the roads aren’t designed to be terrifying.

It takes minimal investments, mostly in mitigating the effects of sharing space with motor vehicles, for bicycling to almost overnight become a convenient and attractive choice for many, many people.

She does conclude by saying that nothing can save us from our energy crisis (although the bike will help us get through it with “grace”). But how much impact could it really have? The statistic she cites – 40 percent of our driving trips span less than two miles – seems amazing. What if we could convert some of those trips of that to a bike or walking?

According to the Metropolitan Council’s latest Transportation Behavior Inventory survey, the average household makes 10.3 motorized trips per day. Perhaps 9 of these trips include an automobile. 3.6 trips per day (40 percent of 9) at 2 miles is 7.2 miles per day. Using average mileage, that is 116 gallons or $465 per year per household (at today’s gas prices). Not a huge amount, but enough for perhaps a nice weekend vacation with the family. As a region though, that’s about $500 million per year. Not too shabby. Plus, that $500 million isn’t going to countries we don’t like, much of it will likely circulate in the local economy. That’s also 130 million fewer gallons of gasoline burned and 1 million fewer metric tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere, which is about 5 percent of the emissions from gasoline in Minnesota every year.

So if we can take the shortest of our short trips by bike instead of car, will we have an impact? Not huge, but definitely measurable. Of course, the above are numbers for just a few of the benefits, Blue offers many more. I feel out of my depth trying to answer questions about if and how we could do it, but the most recent numbers for the Twin Cities show only cycling and telecommuting growing in mode share, so I’d venture an “it’s possible”.

More Evidence Cycling is Increasing in the Twin Cities, Increases follow Investments

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Brendon

Bike Walk Twin Cities does an annual count of cycling and walking at a number of locations around the Minneapolis. Their latest report compares 2010 to 2007 counts and finds big increases.

From 2007-2010, bicycling increased by 33% overall, with the highest volume increases (number of cyclists) at such locations as the Franklin Avenue bridge over the Mississippi River, the Midtown Greenway, the Cedar Lake Trail under I-394, and at the Sabo Bridge.

Walking also increased from 2007-2010, by 17%, with the highest volume increases (number of people walking) along Riverside Avenue, Cedar Avenue south of Riverside, and the Hennepin Avenue Bridge over the Mississippi River.

Their data also seems to show a correlation between new infrastructure and walking and cycling increases.

The rates of bicycling and walking are up in the Twin Cities, even in locations without new bicycling and walking infrastructure. However, the data for locations with new facilities, such as the Sabo Bridge (160% increase overall) and the Riverside Ave nue corridor (up 83%) show that dramatic increases follow investments.

This is consistent with trends shown in the latest American Community Survey data. The full report, maps, tables and lots of other good stuff from the counts can be found on the Bike Walk Twin Cities website.

Minneapolis bicycle crash rates steadily decrease while bike commuting climbs

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Brendon

From the Star Tribune:

Recently crunched city data show the reported cyclist-motorist accident rate dropping as the number of bike commuters grows. For 2008, the most recent year for which complete data were available, the crash rate was one-quarter that of 10 years earlier. Moreover, a trend line shows a steady decrease in the crash rate even as the number of commuting cyclists more than doubled.

It would be interesting to see these crash rates for other cities, since we know mode share for bicycles is increasing in many parts of the metro. I’m not sure if they parse them out as specifically as Minneapolis does.

The Strib also quotes Peter Jacobsen from the journal Injury Prevention, but leaves out a critical sentence (emphasis mine):

A motorist is less likely to collide with a person walking and bicycling if more people walk or bicycle. Policies that increase the numbers of people walking and bicycling appear to be an effective route to improving the safety of people walking and bicycling.

About a month ago, the Governors Highway Safety Association released a report that actually said “A focus on liveable communities…may increase walking and pedestrian vehicle conflicts”, although the discussion in the report actually seems to point more towards distracted pedestrians or pedestrians being forced to walk were poor or no facilities existed.

ACS: Minneapolis Neighborhoods See Big Gains in Bike Mode Share

Posted on December 29, 2010 by Brendon

On-street bike parking at the Birchwood Cafe in Seward

New American Community Survey data is out, which gives us the first look at Census Tract-level data since 2000. I pulled out some transportation data for the Twin Cities metro, and previously looked at trip-to-work mode share changes for the region. Cycling and telecommuting showed gains, carpooling and driving alone showed losses.

These small changes don’t seem that interesting, until you start to dive into the data. Since cycling gained mode share, it’s worth exploring in more detail where these gains are happening. Are the gains happening uniformly across the metro, or in specific areas? What places have the highest bicycle mode share? What do the changes mean for infrastructure and transportation planning? Attempts at answers are after the break. Continue reading →

ACS Data Dive: Twin Cities Mode Share Changes

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Brendon

New 5-year estimates from the American Community Survey are out, which give everyone the first update of Census tract-level data since the 2000 Census. If you haven’t explored the New York Times Mapping America tool for some of the broader trends (race, income, housing and education), make sure to check it out.

I pulled out some journey to work data (mode and travel time) for the seven county Twin Cities area since the New York Times didn’t include any transportation information and I was curious. I’ll be sharing some interesting things I find over the next week. You can download my raw data set here.

The first thing I looked at was simply the change in mode share for travel to work for the metro as a whole. Mode share increased for working at home (which could be telecommuting) and bicycling. Mode share for telecommuting rose almost 3/4 of a percent, while bicycling was up a little less than 1/2 of a percent. However, if you look at change in total commuters for each mode, the number of cycling commuters increased over 90% since 2000, while the number of telecommuters increased 25%. Driving alone, carpooling and walking all lost mode share, noticeably, carpooling was down over 1 percentage point. Transit stayed nearly static.

Next time I’ll dive a little deeper into these changes in bike and telecommuting mode share and map how changes are happening across the metro.

Bicycle Commuting in Minneapolis is way up (but also down a little?)

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Brendon

According to new Census data from the American Community Survey, commuting to work by bicycle in Minneapolis has more than doubled since 2000. However, the data also show that between 2008 and 2009, Minneapolis saw a 10% decline in bicycle commuting. This trend does not mirror national trends in bicycle commuting, but does mirror the trend of our arch rival in all things bicycle, Portland (they were down 2% since ’08). The actual percent of commuters bicycling to work in Minneapolis in 2009 was 3.8% (Portland was at 5.8% and the nation as a whole was 0.55%).

The League of American Bicyclists has crunched the numbers on the 70 largest US cities, and has concluded that nationwide bicycle commuting rates have held steady since 2008. However, large gains have been made since 2000 and since 2005. Non- “Bicycle-Friendly Communities” (as defined by the LAB) actually saw large gains since 2000, with a 71% increase, while Bicycle-Friendly Communities only saw a 48% increase.

So why the big drop in Minneapolis since 2008? It’s hard to say exactly. Perhaps lower gas prices have lured some folks back into their cars. Another possibility is that it’s not a trend at all, but a fluke of the data. The League of American Bicyclists page does a good job of explaining all the limitations of the ACS, including a couple big ones like the fact that ACS is an estimate, not a true count and the fact that ACS asks respondents only what the principal mode of travel the worker usually used to get from home to work in the previous week. From the LAB page:

Workers were asked to list only the means of transportation they used on the largest number of days in that week. This means that if the respondent rode a bicycle to work two days but drove three, they would not be counted as a cyclist. Likewise, workers were asked only for the means of transportation used for the longest distance during the trips. If someone biked one mile to a bus stop and rode the bus for two miles they would not be recorded as a bicyclist.

The League of American Bicyclists is also quick to note that bicycling’s share of all trips is three times larger than it’s share of commuting travel. Meaning you are more likely to choose a bicycle for a trip to the store or soccer practice than you are for a trip to work.

Census 2010 data, which will give us information down to the neighborhood level, will be available sometime next year and should give a more accurate accounting of commuting habits. The City of Minneapolis is also in the midst of a new bicycle and pedestrian count, which actually counts bike riders at many locations throughout the city. While this doesn’t break down commute versus non-commute trips, it will give us another indicator of overall bicycle use in the city.

A proposal to fund Minneapolis bike projects

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Brendon

The Minneapolis Bike Master Plan identifies many critical projects that lack maintenance funding, and the plan says these projects can’t go forward without it. Many potential maintenance funding sources are listed in the plan, such as bicycle registration, a special taxing district, a sales tax on bike products in the city, an endowment, advertising, and a number of others. Some of these ideas may work and be palatable (like sponsorship), but many suffer from problems with enforcement or unintended consequences (bicycle registration, sales tax).

My humble proposal? Increase parking meter rates and direct the additional revenue to bicycle capital and maintenance costs. On-street parking and bicycle facilities often compete for space, and if the city is serious about encouraging more people to use bikes (and other non-auto modes) as transportation (as the Council goals, Greenprint and draft bike plan all state), increasing on-street parking rates would help.