Tag Archives: minneapolis

Time for a change on Park and Portland

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This morning I witnessed a very near miss between a cyclist and a school bus on Park Avenue South (also known as County Road 33).  This “bad interaction” would be classified as a “left-hook” where the bus was slowing to turn left, and failed to yield to the cyclist in the bike lane (approaching from the left and behind). Had this crash occurred, it would most likely have been severe, if not fatal for the cyclist.  This is the same kind of crash that killed a cyclist on Park Avenue in 2009.

It’s always seemed a little crazy to me that some of Minneapolis’ most heavily-used bike facilities are located on streets that are functionally freeway relievers (see Blaisdell/1st Avenue on the west side of 35W).  Drivers expect (and marked speed limits permit) travel at 35, 40 or 45 miles per hour on these routes, feet away from cyclists traveling 5, 10 or 15 miles per hour.

Don’t get me wrong, Park and Portland (likewise Blaisdell and 1st) are pretty great bike routes.  Given their heavy traffic, they have priority over most cross-streets at intersections, meaning a speedy trip.  They’re also huge, so there is space for adequate bike lanes.

I don’t know what the ideal configuration is for bikes and cars on these two one-way pairs, but as Hennepin County prepares to repair and re-stripe Park and Portland this summer, I think it’s a good time to think about how both of these pairs could be made safer and more inviting for cyclists.  In fact, Hennepin County’s Complete Streets policy actually requires them to assess all road projects for inclusion of Complete Streets features and “integrate innovative and non-traditional design options”.

So, in order to get the discussion started, here are some questions and ideas:

  1. Do these streets need to be one-ways? Park/Portland and Blaisdell/1st became the one-ways pairs we know today to address traffic capacity prior to the construction of the freeway system.  Well, we have a freeway now (and a newly widened one at that), so I think it’s time to reassess this configuration. Blaisdell at 40th sees 2,800 AADT, hardly two-lane one-way street territory. Access Minneapolis, the adopted citywide transportation plan, specifically identifies the Park/Portland and Blaisdell/1st Ave one-way-pairs for evaluation and eventual reversion to two-way streets. Two-way traffic would mean slower traffic, and better streets for bikes. Two-way streets also might allow more space for a “multi-street” solution (see #5).

  2. Do these streets need to be three lanes wide?  At any time other than rush hour, three lanes are way too many.  This encourages speeding (see #1) and wastes space that could be used for other modes.  Hiawatha handles similar and greater traffic volumes, and is only two lanes in each direction for most of its length.
  3. Do we need on-street parking on both sides of the street? Park and Portland have parking on both sides.  Losing parking on one side would free up a lot of space to better incorporate bike and ped facilities.
  4. Is there space for an “innovative” solution?  Hennepin County is already apparently considering moving the bike lanes on Park/Portland to the right side of the street, which is a good start.  But what about “buffered” bike lanes (paint, bollards, etc)?  What about putting the row of parked cars between moving traffic and the bike lane?  How about a full-on cycletrack?  New York and Chicago have some great examples of protected facilities on very busy streets that use just paint and parked cars.  With one less row of parking, I’m sure Park and Portland could each fit a wide bike lane and a 6-foot buffer between the curb and a rowed of parked cars.

  5. How about a multi-street solution?  I’ve outlined a multi-street solution to providing a segregated two-way bike facility on the Blaisdell/1st Avenue pair at Net Density.  If Park and Portland were both two-way (or one two-way and one one-way) perhaps both a segregated two-way bike facility could be used on one half of the pair while the other reverted to all-car.  Maybe we could develop one really excellent two-way facility on 1st Avenue south (an at-grade Greenway perhaps)?

  6. What solution is potentially the most safe AND inviting?  We shouldn’t be planning bike facilities for 30-year-old males.  We should be planning facilities for mothers with kids in tow and retirees riding trikes at 5 miles per hour.  Any new facility should increase safety AND be a marketing tool for hesitant cyclists.  People should drive by on their car and think to themselves, “I’d be willing to ride on that.  And I’d be willing to bring my child along with me”.  (Note: there appears to be some controversy over the safety benefits of “segregated” bike facilities.  I won’t weigh in here, except to say that recent evidence seems to show additional bikes on the road means more safety. If better facilities attract more riders and make drivers more aware of cyclists, that is a good thing.  Traffic engineers, please debate in the comments)

What do you think?  Do you ride or drive on Park and Portland?  Are you one of those traffic engineer people who can tell me more about lane widths and design speed and why we’ll eventually be told we can’t have nice things?  Let me hear it (here’s something from twitter to get you started).

At present, according to the Minneapolis Bike Coalition, Hennepin County doesn’t seem interested in anything beyond moving the bike lanes to the right side of the street.  If you’d like to see something different on Park and Portland, contact your County Commissioner, contact the MBC and contact your City Council member.

Cross-posted at streets.mn

Where do the Nice Riders go?

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Nice Ride released their 2011 ridership data in January, and I’ve been itching to map it ever since.  Flows (don’t call them fluxes) are a particularly interesting way to visualize the ridership over different route segments.

I used ArcGIS with Network Analyst on a heavily modified Open Streets Map metro shapefile to generate routes between the start and ending station of each Nice Ride rental. The Open Streets map file allowed me to include off-street trails (very important in Minneapolis), which weren’t included in my previous attempts. I set Network Analyst to prefer off-street trails, bike lanes and regular roads (in that order).

Other than being pretty, you can draw a few interesting conclusions from the flows:

  • The most traversed segment, with over 16,000 trips, was the off-street trail through the Hennepin-Lyndale bottleneck (although likely some of this traffic went to the Cedar Lake Trail in real life).  In my opinion, this is a horrible segment for bikes and peds and if we’re trying to attract visitors back to Minneapolis, we should do something about it.
  • Other heavily-traveled areas are the Mississippi River bridges, downtown streets, and Uptown.
  • Men and women take similar routes.  I mapped both, but the flows looked very similar.
  • People are using Nice Ride even in the middle of the night. They are sticking even more closely to the southwest-to-northeast spine common during the day.
  • 30-day and Annual subscribers are getting into the neighborhoods more than casual subscribers (single day), pointing to the obvious conclusion that they are full-time residents who are using Nice Ride to go to and from homes more often.
  • Since Saint Paul only had a partial year of service, it’s hard to draw many conclusions yet.

What else do you see?

Cross-posted at streets.mn

Nice Ride 2011 route fluxes

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Nice Ride has released their data on rentals from 2011.  After seeing these maps of “route fluxes” from bike sharing systems around the world by Oliver O’Brien at the Suprageography blog, I just had to figure out how to make them myself.

I didn’t use Routino as Oliver did, but instead figured out a way to make ArcGIS Network Analyst do what I wanted (after a fair amount of data wrangling and lots of loading time).  I’ll probably post more on that later.

Trip counts on each segment vary between 4 and 29,000.  I restricted bike routes to roads with a speed limit under 40 mph.  One drawback is that my road network did not include off-street trails (greenway, etc).

Nice Ride data is public. Who wants to map it?

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Nice Ride has released all their 2011 data.  And by all, I mean ALL.  One file in the bunch has every “rental” for the entire year with origin and destination stations, trip duration, and time.  Another has every subscriber and his/her rental counts.  The greatest number of rentals by one person in 2011? 1,028 by a male born in 1946 (?!)

Anyway, I’d like to make a map like this, but I don’t quite have the mapping/programming chops.  Its something like combining a spider diagram combined with Network Analyst’s best route analysis but doing it thousands of times.

Anyone else doing anything with this data?

Mapping the Twin Cities bike counts

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View Larger Map

Much has already been written about the 2011 bike counts: the great news that counts continue to climb, how we might use them to prioritize infrastructure improvements, and even what grains of salt we should consume along with the data.  But I haven’t seen anyone map them yet.

So here’s my contribution.  Circle size represents 2011 count totals.  These are also the true counts, not extrapolated to annual numbers (I don’t think those numbers have even been released yet).

Cross-posted at streets.mn

Super energy efficiency for existing homes

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 The Star Tribune has a story about the MinnePHit House in South Minneapolis.

Sometime in the next few weeks, Paul Brazelton will move his family into a 1935 Tudor in south Minneapolis that has no furnace. He’s just finished a massive renovation of the family home and even though winter’s bearing down, he removed the boiler and plans to use that basement space for his daughters’ home-school classroom.

He also took out the fireplace.

If this sounds like the most uninviting house (and classroom) in Minneapolis, there’s something else to know: Brazelton, a software engineer and passionate environmentalist, has nearly finished a retrofit of his house to the stringent engineering standards of the Passivhaus model, a German system of homebuilding that uses insulation and highly efficient doors and windows to save energy.

The finished 2,000-square-foot home could be warmed even in the dead of winter with a pair of small space heaters, Brazelton said, though the family plans to piggyback on their hot water heater and use an in-floor heating system in the basement.

The project is the renovation of an existing home to meet EnerPHit standard for energy performance. EnerPHit is a subset of the Passive House standard (hence the PH), which is an energy performance standard that requires very high levels of energy efficiency.  The Passive House Institute has a summary:

A Passive House is a very well-insulated, virtually air-tight building that is primarily heated by passive solar gain and by internal gains from people, electrical equipment, etc. Energy losses are minimized. Any remaining heat demand is provided by an extremely small source. Avoidance of heat gain through shading and window orientation also helps to limit any cooling load, which is similarly minimized. An energy recovery ventilator provides a constant, balanced fresh air supply. The result is an impressive system that not only saves up to 90% of space heating costs, but also provides a uniquely terrific indoor air quality.

Passive House is a performance standard, meaning it doesn’t specify design features like LEED, but has performance characteristics that the building must meet after construction is complete.  Namely an airtight building shell at  ≤ 0.6 ACH @ 50 pascal pressure measured by a blower door test and a total heating & cooling demand of <4.7 kBtu/sq ft/yr.  Total energy use needs to be ≤ 38.1 kBtu/ft2/yr.

In layman’s terms, this means Passive House designs are 11 times more airtight than a conventionally designed and built modern home.  As for energy use, a typical single family detached home uses 76 kBtu/sq ft/yr.  My own house was built in the 1920′s and currently has no wall insulation.  In 2010, we used 89 kBtu/sq ft/yr in total, and I think we’re fairly frugal with our electricity.  That means when the Brazelton family finishes their home, it will use less than half the total energy of my house and be 15% larger.

The Passive House standard doesn’t require or depend on renewable energy to achieve this high energy performance.  It’s focused on minimizing, to the greatest extent possible, the loss of heat and capitalizing on natural heat sources like sunlight and even body heat.  The MinnePHit house will be renewable-ready, but it won’t have renewables to start with.  Paul, the owner, puts it eloquently:

 …we decided to use our limited resources in building a house with the highest level of efficiency and durability.  If maintained correctly, solar panels can last decades.  On the other hand, insulation can last centuries.  Looking again at the long term, the best investment is using less energy, not alternate energy.

Last but not least, this home is energy efficient because it is location efficient, located in South Minneapolis with nearby access to jobs, recreation and services.  The Brazelton’s definitely don’t have to use an automobile for every trip, and they likely won’t be traveling far to their destination.  The other local example of Passive House design can’t make that claim.

Finding space for bike infrastructure

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1st Ave buffered lane - parking is allowed on weekends

Finding space for new bike infrastructure is always tough.  Usually existing streets aren’t getting any wider, and parking and drive lanes often take precedence in the minds of residents and policy makers.  Solutions that allow cars and bike to share space are becoming more common, like the wonderful Bryant Avenue bike boulevard.  So when you find a street with extra space, it’s kind of a miracle.

When I ride to work, I frequently use the 1st Ave S/Blaisdell one-way pair for going north-south.  Both of these streets recently received bike lane improvements, including a bit of protected bike lane on 1st Avenue, south of 33rd Street.  When I asked the project coordinator why 1st Avenue got the protected lane instead of Blaisdell, which has higher traffic volumes, his answer was “space”.  Here are some of my observations (as a cyclist and autoist) from using these streets:

  • It seems like overkill to keep Blaisdell a two-lane one-way street when both 35W and the Park/Portland one-way pair are so close.  Especially south of Lake Street.  Traffic engineers, weigh in here.  Is there any appropriate traffic volume that warrants this type of street design in an urban setting?
  • Speeding is frequently an issue on these streets, especially Blaisdell.  I do it myself, and the liberal use of “this is your speed” radar signs reinforces this.
  • Much of the bike lane on Blaisdell is filled with potholes, manhole covers, street detritus and sometimes parked cars.  In other words, it’s not very nice.
  • Riding next to traffic that is traveling 35-40 mph is uncomfortable.  I certainly wouldn’t take my daughter in a trailer or on her own bike on these streets.
  • In almost all places where it has been measured, auto traffic volumes on 1st and Blaisdell south of I-94 have dropped since 2006, in some places as much as 30%.
I think there is extra space on this pair of streets which could be used to make cyclists a lot more comfortable without impacting auto traffic significantly.  I’ll go out on a limb and say these might even have potential to increase property values by getting rid of the mini-freeway that is Blaisdell.  Here are some options I think might work, in preferential order.
  1. Turn 1st Ave into a two-way protected bikeway from 40th to 16th Street or maybe even Grant.  This could be with a raised curb, or just some paint and plastic bollards.  There would still be space for one auto lane in most places I think.  Turn LaSalle/Blaisdell into a two-way with one travel lane in each direction starting at Grant, with parking on both sides.
  2. Move the bike lane on Blaisdell behind a row of parked cars and adequate buffer space.  I say adequate to distinguish this from the 1st Avenue North design.  See these examples from Chicago.  Reduce car travel lanes to one south of 31st Street.
  3. Turn both 1st and Blaisdell back to two-ways where possible with one travel lane in each direction and parallel parking.  Give them the bicycle boulevard treatment a la Bryant.  Set speed limit at 25.
What do you think?  Doable?  What am I missing traffic people?

A mileage tax for bikes

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Cruisin'

Funding for cycling infrastructure in Minneapolis is under fire.  I don’t want to get into the politics, except maybe one note¹: if this position were called “traffic coordinator”, would this even be an issue?  Ok, I’m done.  So funding for traffic that happens to occur in the form of bicycles is under fire.  How about we get creative?

It’s always bugged me that cyclists couldn’t really point to a specific source of funds for their projects.  If you read Chapter 8 of the Minneapolis bike plan, you see sources for capital projects include a laundry list of federal money, one-time programs, and state sources, none of which are really specific to cycling.  Where is the connection between local demand and funding levels, you might ask?  Well, funding levels appear to be determined mostly by how good your community is at lobbying for state and federal dollars.  Most cyclists pay income taxes, property taxes and gas taxes, so these revenues should supposedly go in some way towards bike projects, but the transportationists would say this isn’t an efficient way to allocate resources.

I’m a proponent of mileage fees for auto transportation, as most of the wonks and urbanists seem to be, so why not apply this concept to bikes?

My proposal is simple: cyclists who wish to participate download an app for their smartphone that tracks the miles they ride in a certain jurisdiction.  At the end of the month or year, the app displays total mileage and a suggested contribution amount based on a per-mile rate.  Users pay the amount they wish.

The app itself could work something like the fitness apps that are out there, like Map My Ride.  Open the app, push start when you’re leaving and stop when you’re done.  Total mileage is tracked.  The app could be specialized to just track within a certain city or county, and maybe even determine the jurisdiction of the street/trail on which you rode.

The plan depends on voluntary participants, which is a challenge.  The federal government has a website where you can donate money to pay down the debt, but it’s not wildly successful.  However, my approach will allow people to connect directly with what their paying for (bike lanes or trails), and not imagine its going to some lazy bureaucrat’s pension fund.

How much money would this raise?  There are roughly 8,000 Minneapolis residents riding their bike to work (which is close to a 4% mode share for workers over 16).  Let’s assume their round-trip commute is 8 miles and there are 230 workdays per year.  If you set the mileage rate at 10 cents, the bike fund gets $1,472,000 per year.  Of course, that assumes full adoption (unlikely) and that all the miles ridden are in Minneapolis (also unlikely).  What if 500 people track their mileage?  That’s 6% of regular commuters.  I’m not sure if that’s realistic, but that equals $92,000 per year in voluntary fees, more than enough for a bike coordinator.  That 8-mile commute would cost each biker 80 cents per day.  That’s cheaper than driving or taking the bus.

Another proposal from Straight Outta Suburbia that’s been making the blogosphere rounds lately is to tax sales of bicycles, accessories and repair to pay for infrastructure.  While I think a voluntarily mileage tax would be more politically feasible and have fewer unintended consequences, I think both ideas deserve some consideration.  Make sure to check out the comments section at Straight Outta Suburbia as it has some good discussion of the issue, including the excellent phrase “pigovian tax”.

What do you think about a mileage or accessory tax for bikes?  Would you voluntarily pay it?  Finally, do you know any smartphone app developers who want to help me build it for very low pay?

 

¹ Ok, maybe not just one.  Did you know that there are many locations in Minneapolis that see thousands of bike trips per day?  And that there are locations where one out of every eight travelers is on a bike?  It’s true!  Sounds like the kind of traffic that might need some coordination.

Transportation efficiency, safety and fluff programs

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snc12753

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.

Using LEED ND to strengthen existing neighborhoods

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pride at loring park

I’ve written a lot about LEED ND, the rating system built to define sustainable neighborhoods, including how to use it as a framework for sustainable regional planning.  Typically, the rating system is applied to new development or redevelopment: when new streets, buildings and infrastructure systems are being built.  Rarely has it been applied to an existing neighborhood, where development or redevelopment is occurring at a slow pace and changes to major infrastructure systems are unlikely or occurring incrementally.  That application was simply not the original purpose of LEED ND.  I’ve always viewed LEED ND as providing an alternative to a model of traditional suburban development that has low connectivity, low density and poor location efficiency.  In its current form, it is best suited as a guide to help us plan and build new development more sustainably.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t many valuable lessons for existing neighborhoods within the LEED ND system.  While we know that the greenest development is almost always the one that is already built, existing neighborhoods can often lack connectivity, walkability, density or other design features, which if retrofitted over time, could make them more livable and sustainable.

Neighborhoods and cities concerned about maintaining and improving livability, sustainability and financial viability are using LEED ND in just this way.  The Loring Park neighborhood in Minneapolis is in the process of creating a neighborhood master plan to shape their community for the next twenty years.  The neighborhood partnered with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs to assess the neighborhood’s sustainability using the LEED ND system.  Loring Park would also like to become officially certified as a LEED ND “project”, either under the current system or under a pilot existing neighborhoods program an alternative path for neighborhood and small areas plans that USGBC is developing.  A volunteer group, including yours truly, is working to help the neighborhood meet this goal.

The purpose of pursuing certification is to make this already green neighborhood even greener.  If Loring Park falls short in certain parts of the rating system, these shortcomings can be turned directly into goals for the master plan.  The Loring Park Draft Concept Plan includes a goal related to sustainable buildings and infrastructure and includes these goals for the use of LEED ND:

Further utilize the LEED-ND rating framework to:

  • periodically gauge neighborhood wide performance and progress toward sustainability goals
  • set in place (or augment) design guidelines or to set parameters for private project review and approval, or to gauge the merits of specific capital improvement projects
  • structure performance criteria for various incentives
  • preparation for government grants or other support from agencies that are familiar with LEED-ND rating system or that directly utilize LEED- ND standards as performance criteria

Our volunteer group, organized by the USGBC Minnesota Chapter and Loring Park residents, has just begun the certification process for the neighborhood.  This process will be a great opportunity to document the challenges of applying LEED ND to an existing neighborhood and review the rating system’s usefulness for a community planning process.  Stay tuned.