Tag Archives: bike

Open Streets are coming to Minneapolis!

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ciclovia Bogota

Scenes from open streets (ciclovia) in Bogota

Thanks to the great work of the Minneapolis Bike Coalition and support from Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Open Streets are coming to Minneapolis this summer!  On June 12th, Lyndale Avenue will be closed from 22nd Street to 42nd street from 10 am to 2 pm.  From the Open Streets Mpls website:

Starting in 2011, Minneapolis residents will have the opportunity to explore and enjoy their neighborhood streets by biking, walking, and skating without the presence of motorized traffic.

An Open Streets event (based on the Ciclovía from Bogotá, Colombia) will bring together families and neighbors to mingle, recreate, and shop in their communities in a safe, car-free environment.

Open Streets are not races.  Participants can begin/stop/restart/change direction at any time.

Open Streets are free!

In addition to biking, walking and skating, there are programmed recreational activities along the streets including yoga, dance lessons, aerobics, and games.  There are also musical performances and classes on bike safety and repair.

Open Streets promote:

  • Sustainable transportation choices, including walking, bicycling and transit.
  • Public health, bringing healthy physical activity to communities in need.
  • Local business, drawing foot traffic past the front doors.
  • Public space, helping residents see our streets as places where we can all come together and take pride in our city.

 

How the bicycle economy can help us beat the energy crisis

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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

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2 hour Bicycle Count Comparison 2007 & 2010 Downtown/University

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

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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 Data Dive: Twin Cities Mode Share Changes

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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.

Minneapolis Bike Master Plan: What’s up with maintenance?

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One Less Bike Lane Pothole - Scholls Ferry Road, Washington County, Oregon

Minneapolis recently released a draft of a Bicycle Master Plan for the city.  It includes a list of projects with a summary of eligibility for funding based on a number of qualifying criteria.  As an astute commenter noticed, a surprising number of projects meet all the qualifying criteria except “Operations and Maintenance”.  The plan explains the Operations and Maintenance criteria this way:

Are the operations and maintenance responsibilities defined? Proposed projects must identify how a project will be maintained before it can be submitted. Projects must also demonstrate that the project can be maintained in a cost effective manner for the life of the project.

In Chapter 8 of the plan (page 8-5), we get a hint about why so many projects are not meeting the O&M criterion:

The [Minneapolis] Public Works operating budget has been stretched to the point where new outside funding sources must be identified in order to provide adequate maintenance for new bicycle related projects.

If the project doesn’t have outside funds for maintenance (not just capital), the city can’t build it.  That makes sense, because we don’t want brand new trails only to see them crumble in a few years.  The plan identifies a number of potential permanent funding sources for maintenance, including a maintenance endowment, a sales tax on bikes and equipment, bicycle registration fees, naming rights and advertising, and more.

This is an important issue.  Clearly this is one of the major barriers to getting new bicycle projects built in the city.  The plan proposes a dedicated funding stream for capital projects, but the answer for maintenance costs seems less certain.  What are your ideas for funding ongoing maintenance of bicycle facilities?  Would you support a sales tax on bikes and equipment?  What about a bicycle registration fee?

Minneapolis Bike Master Plan: “Tier 1″ Projects

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View Minneapolis Bike Master Plan in a larger map

The new Minneapolis Bike Master Plan has a long list of projects necessary to build out the system.  82, if I count correctly.  However, only 6 of these are considered “Tier 1″ in the plan, which I think means that they are high priority and meet criteria necessary to qualify for funding sources. These six are shown in the map above.  The Upper River Trails count as one project.

According to Don Pflaum, the project manager for the plan, much of the funding for these improvements will come from outside sources, such as SAFETEA-LU grants.  So each project must be evaluated based on a number of criteria, and must meet these criteria before being eligible for consideration by the City.  The criteria include the ability of the project to increase mode share, improve safety, and be cost effective, among others. The end of Chapter 7 contains a matrix of all the projects including their ability to meet each criterion.

This ranking doesn’t exactly prioritize projects, except to say what is and isn’t currently eligible for funding.  After speaking with Don, I know the city wants more input on cyclists priorities for the system. 

So what are your priorities?  Should the six projects above be first?  What projects do you think would bring the most benefit? You can add your top priorities right on the map. Click on the view larger link, then click on “save to my maps” and then you can draw right on the map. Ideally, you’ll want to check the project list in the plan to make sure your project is in there, but if you have something the plan doesn’t have, go ahead and add that too, just make a note so we all know it is something new. Also maybe add your name and a short description of the project so we know what it is.

How Portland does buffered bike lanes

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On the Right Track from Mayor Sam Adams on Vimeo.

Here’s a great video from TC Streets For People on how Portland does buffered bike lanes.  I’ve previously complained about how Minneapolis’ first buffered bike lanes were poorly designed.  This video shows that successful buffered lanes (they call them cycletracks) have a good door buffer zone (hence, the word buffer).  Currently, the Minneapolis lanes on First have no buffer zone.

Now that Minneapolis is supposedly America’s most bike-friendly city, we need to work to keep our crown.  Let’s take a page from Portland and adjust the First Ave lanes so they have a chance of being safe and successful.

Minneapolis to build 35 miles of new bikeways in 2010

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A bike boulevard in Berkeley, CA. CC licensed by flickr user Elly Blue

The Jacobean at the City of Lakes Urbanism blog has a good summary:

2010 will bring about several new bicycle projects in Minneapolis. Thanks in large part to funding from the Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program (NTP), the city will fund the construction of 35 new miles of bikeways this year, most of which will come in the form of bicycle boulevards. Bicycle boulevards are a fairly low-cost form of bikeway which mostly involve improving existing low-traffic streets for use by cyclists. Common bike boulevard treatments include traffic-calming measures, improved crossing safety measures at high-traffic intersections, way-finding signs, and pavement markings to indicate to motorists that the space is intended for frequent use by bicyclists. The city has a nice two-pager explaining the bicycle boulevard concept (check it out here).

The city has a map of proposed improvements here.  In terms of my backyard, I applaud the improvements to Bryant, but I’m somewhat confused about the reason for not including the section between the Greenway and 49th in the bike boulevard plans.  I believe this area sees significantly more bicycle traffic than south of 49th.  My guess as to why it isn’t included is a political issue that starts with “p” and ends with “arking”.

Xcel Hiawatha DEIS released, public meeting scheduled

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Rendering from Midtown Community Works Partnership of potential overhead lines

The Office of Energy Security has released the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the Hiawatha Transmission Line Project, Xcel’s plan to run high-voltage lines along the Midtown Greenway (careful, the PDF is huge and will bog down even newer computers).  They have also announced a public meeting to take comments on the document on February 10th.

The DEIS does identify above-ground lines as having negative impacts on visual quality, being inconsistent with local urban design standards and potentially discouraging additional residential and commercial development nearby.

As I understand it, although the EIS has to identify mitigation strategies for the impacts of the project, it does not require that these mitigation measures be implemented if the project is approved.  From this TC Daily Planet article, it sounds as though the PUC may have the final say about mitigation, but I assume that the Department of Commerce is the responsible LGU, and would also have to approve a route and mitigation measures.

Either way, the public meeting is a chance for anyone to comment on potential additional impacts, whether the scale of impacts has been adequately measured, and the effectiveness of mitigation measures identified.  This is a good time to get involved.