Tag Archives: transportation

I sold my car

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Today we sold our family’s second car. Since taking a new job last year, my car mostly sat in the driveway. I can get to work really easy on the bus or on a bike (and the same for my wife, to a slightly lesser degree) and parking costs made me think twice when I considered driving to work.

The sale was an emotional experience. I loved driving the car, and I’ve always liked driving. I got my learners permit when I was fourteen (Iowa let ‘em drive early) and as with most teenagers (at least back then) , the car signaled freedom to me. My feelings about driving have moderated some since, but I’ve retained much of the original nostalgia and excitement, especially when starting a road trip. I’ve learned a lot about the impacts on our cities and climate reliance on the car creates since that initial love affair, but in the end, the strongest reason we had to ditch the second car was cost.  Hundreds of dollars a week is a strong motivator.

But this wasn’t a simple matter of deciding to ride the bus more. A large number of factors has to converge to make it possible for a family of three with two jobs outside the home to make do with one (private) vehicle.

  • Working in the hub of a hub-and-spoke transit network. We have lots of bus routes that are fairly competitive with a car because my wife and I both work in or near downtown. This wouldn’t be the case if we worked in the suburbs, inner ring or outer.
  • We found a great daycare nine blocks from our house.  You can walk there easily in most weather from our house or take the bus/bike.  The location and density of daycare centers should not be overlooked if your goal is to encourage alternative modes.
  • Minneapolis is walkable and fairly bikeable.  The city does a pretty good job making it feel safe and easy to walk and bike places.  Destination density (stores, food, etc) is tolerably high in some neighborhoods, although it could definitely be better.
  • New technologies.  We feel better with one car knowing their is a car-sharing service that parks a car a few blocks from our house.
  • We have the resources to rent a car when we need it.  Even if we do this once a month for a week, we still save a lot versus owning.

We really depend on automobiles a lot.  If we want to change that for whatever reason, or if we want to be sensitive to the needs of those who can’t afford a car, then it’s about way more than providing transit.

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

Some perspective

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On Wednesday, President Obama signed a bill authorizing the construction of a new Stillwater Bridge, a $690 million project that will serve possibly 18,000 car trips per day.  Here are some other transportation segments that serve at least 18,000 trips per day.

To name just a few.  Some of these facilities may currently have adequate capacity, but I’m sure quite a few are in a state of deferred maintenance (potholes, surfacing) or could use significantly better infrastructure (bus signs, shelters, pedestrian facilities, intersection redesign, etc) to serve existing users.  I assume that if any of these segments need improvement, we’ll see bipartisan support and state and federal funding up to $690 million per.

(A special runner-up goes to the SE Washington Ave Bridge, which in 2011 saw an estimated 6,850 bicycle trips per day.  That’s only about 38% of 18,000, so $262 million for bike improvements on this span should suffice.)

Cross-posted at streets.mn

David Alpert on driverless cars

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I’ve been meaning to write a “how this urbanist stopped worrying and learned to love the driverless car” post for a while, but I’ve finally been spurred into action by this piece in the Atlantic Cities by Greater Greater Washington founder David Alpert.  Right up front I want to say I still have a lot of concerns about how we plan and incorporate robot cars, but on this issue of competing road users, I take a different view.

Alpert’s contention is that in our society’s haste to adopt driverless cars, we will “intensify current tensions” between drivers (more accurately called passengers in a robot car-filled world of the future) and non-auto users, such as pedestrians and cyclists, who are trying to use the same right of way.  I think this case is overstated for a number of reasons.

The author’s main evidence for the idea that tensions will be increased is reference to an animation done by some computer scientists that showed how to optimize an intersection when most of the cars are driverless, thus increasing flow.  According to the article,

[H]uman-driven cars would have to wait for a signal that would be optimized based on what everyone else is doing. And the same would be true of pedestrians and bike riders.

And to that Alpert reacts:

That certainly sounds like all other users of the road will have to act at the convenience of the driverless cars, under constraints designed to maximize vehicle movement instead of balancing the needs of various users…

The video even depicts an intersection with a whopping 12 lanes for each roadway, at a time when most transportation professionals have come to believe that grids of smaller roads, not mega-arterials, are the best approach to mobility in metropolitan areas.

Driverless cars, therefore, are poised to trigger a whole new round of pressure to further redesign intersections for the throughput of vehicles above all else.

I’m not sure how this one animation demonstrates why driverless cars would trigger a gush of road-building or elimination of non-auto facilities.  Setting aside the fact that I’m sure this animation was developed as a proof-of-concept (I can hear the research team now: “If we use 12 lanes in each direction, it will look even more impressive!”), this leads me to my first objection to the premise that driverless cars will increase tensions.

Driverless cars don’t make bad roads, people make bad roads

As Alpert himself states, “Already, cities host ongoing and raucous debates over the role of cars versus people on their streets. For over 50 years, traffic engineers with the same dreams about optimizing whizzing cars have designed and redesigned intersections to move more and more vehicles.”  Yes, and we’ll continue to have this debate into the future whether robot cars are adopted or not.  Given that gradual adoption of this technology is the most likely scenario (more on that later), I don’t see auto users getting more vocal (than they already are) about road capacity because there car has a few more widgets.

Building a balanced transportation system that looks at the full picture of quality of life rather than just mobility and speed will continue to be a challenge, although we seem to be making some progress in that direction.  Issues of public health, environmental impact and land use impacts will probably always take some extra effort to incorporate into transportation decision-making, an effort organizations like Greater Greater Washington should continue to make.  I view this as an institutional problem, failing to bring full information about transportation systems impacts to the design table, and it should be addressed in our decision-making processes.

12-lane at-grade intersections would make any cityscape pretty awful, but that leads me to my second objection:

Driverless cars can do more with less

Maybe the computer scientists at UT Austin should have showed a 2-lane 4-way intersection with driverless cars instead of a 12-lane intersection.  They also should have showed a comparison with a present day intersection.  One of the potential benefits of driverless cars is squeezing more flow or capacity out of the road systems we already have.  Cars can drive closer together, and yes, maybe intersections can look more India-like.  Potentially, we’ll get more from our existing concrete without having to widen or reduce non-auto infrastructure.

There is also this nagging funding issue.  In Minnesota for example, we already can’t pay for all the roads we want.  So 1) a huge explosion of more road-building probably isn’t likely and 2) driverless cars give us kind of another way out: if we’re intent on adding more capacity, maybe we can make our vehicles smarter rather than our roads wider.

And finally:

Driverless cars are safer

The first forays into “driverless cars” are about collision detection and avoidance (see a long list of existing implementation here).  Google’s driverless car has driven 200,000 miles and been involved in two accidents (both while being driven by a human).  Before any cars are driving themselves around, their computer brains will just be allowed to stop us from having accidents.  This is good for auto users and others alike.   And their adoption will happen gradually (they’ll be pretty expensive at first).

It seems obvious that driverless cars will be programmed to not hit pedestrians and cyclists.  Driverless cars will never (or very rarely) drive in a bike lane or right-hook a cyclist.  And for the next fifty years, they’ll probably be operating on roadways that look very similar to what we have today, pedestrian cross-walks and all.  The dys/utopian future where we have streets with tightly-spaced driverless cars traveling 200 mph is quite a ways off, and when that happens, why shouldn’t they be limited access and/or grade separated?  Wouldn’t we require the same of high-speed rail?

Again, there are lots of other potential negative impacts we need to be aware of as driverless cars become common (see my summary here), but I think these can be addressed by human policy decisions.  We also need to take some drastic action on emissions from transportation that contribute to climate change, and robot cars will likely not have a measurable impact there for some time (it’s also possible our action, if we take any, may actually delay their deployment).

Robot cars could offer urbanists a myriad of benefits that Alpert doesn’t address (but which others have covered in detail, but that should probably wait for another post.

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?

Using bikes for serious emissions reduction

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Bicycles in a square

According to the European Cycling Federation, if the whole of the EU cycled like the Danes, they could achieve significant emissions cuts.

If the EU cycling rate was the same as it is in Denmark, where the average person cycles almost 600 miles (965km) each year, then the bloc would attain anything from 12% to 26% of its targeted transport emissions reduction, depending on what forms of transport the cycling replaced, according to the report by the Brussels-based European Cycling Federation (ECF).

This figure is likely to be a significant underestimate as it deliberately excludes the environmental impact of building road infrastructure and parking, or maintaining and disposing of cars.

These figures are for the EU’s 2050 emissions reduction target.  The figures are even greater for 2020 targets.

Bikes are not a new technology that would require long adoption periods and high initial capital costs.  Almost everyone knows how to use them, and they are cheap.  They also have myriad co-benefits, not least of which is increased physical activity.  To get serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we should take a close look at the bike as a potential solution.

Using ECF’s study as a model and making some estimates, the Twin Cities metro could see some significant emissions reductions if we biked like the Danes, but getting there would be tough.  I’ll get to that, but first some initial thoughts on the Europeans. Continue reading →