Tag Archives: transportation

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.

Should local transit just be built by the states?

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One of my new favorite snarks, Lisa Schweitzer at Sustainable Cities and Transport, discusses whether local transit funding shouldn’t just “devolve” to the states.

Federal involvement in transit also has led to a heavy capital bias in transit investment, prompting local and regional agencies to build transit projects, again and again, that they can’t afford to run with any frequency. This leads to a wider geographic coverage for transit–which probably still isn’t wide enough to deal with spreading regions–and with lower frequencies than really make for high service quality. (And sprawl is bad, bad, bad, evil and terrible! The worst thing ever! There? Will that sentence keep some of you land-use people outta my grill for the purposes of this post? Can I talk about something else now? Thanks.)

Transit has been on the teeter-tottery edge of those issues and criticisms for a long time. Why can’t New York pay for its own subways? Or Los Angeles? Or anywhere? That’s why we have local taxes and general funds, right? If you want transit, don’t go holler at the feds. Make it happen if you want it. Perhaps there would be a greater chance of that self-helping if leaders know that the buck really began and stopped with them, and they might instead be much more careful to match investments to operations.

The US Congress is overly dominated by rural interests, and many of us for years have argued that this creates a hostile environment for transit funding in the first place, as many rural senators wonder: “what’s in it for my constituents?” and the ineffectual spreading of scarce resources around to systems that aren’t particularly viable or worth investing in. Porky McPorktown.

The key drawback to devolution? Locals might not have the stomach for a local gas tax to replace the federal one.

So if places like California, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota were running their own budgetary shop, they could keep the revenues they are currently sending to Portland and Memphis and Charlotte.

Here’s the glitch: these donor state are only fiscally better off with Federal gas tax elimination or erosion if those donor states prove capable of passing a gas tax on its residents equal to or better than the 18 cents a gallon [- whatever the Feds give away to other jurisdictions]. And I’m not seeing that happen, at least not in California. Maybe in Minnesota. Maybe in New York, or Massachusetts. Maybe.

Montreal bike infrastructure

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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 →

Can Americans tolerate a robot car?

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Slate explores whether autonomy-loving Americans will be able to handle robot cars.

This American emphasis on the individual’s sovereignty poses a problem for new technologies designed precisely to deny personal agency. Autonomous technological agents—from military drones to the self-driving car—are increasingly prevalent. Their potential benefits and conveniences are immense. Yet as the currently cutting-edge becomes commonplace, these technologies could bump up against the prized American autonomy.

The United States drives more than any other society, and the self-driving car provides the glorious possibility of a hands-free cross-country road trip. But how will it harmonize with American drivers’ varied preferences for tailgating, conscientious speed-limit-monitoring, passive aggression toward walkway pedestrians, or highway-traversing pursuits of the fastest lane? General Motors, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Volvo, and Google are each currently testing driverless cars, with intentions to make the vehicle availablefor mass consumption by 2018. Recently, Nevada became the first state to pass legislation asking the Department of Motor Vehicles to formulate guidelines for driverless cars.

While engineers are perfecting the technology, they still must grapple with the drivers, who must both trust and enjoy the automated-car experience. Making a driver-free car safe and effective requires overlooking the uniqueness of each individual’s driver personality. Research suggests that autonomous technological agents like service robots and anthropomorphic computer interfaces can diminish users’ experiences of control. And we hate to give up control.

It is uncanny how many of these robot car issues have already been explored so thoroughly in Total Recall. (Start at the 17 second mark)

First Open Streets in Minneapolis

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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.

Harrowing animation of NYC street intersection

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“Bad interactions” as Kottke says, between peds, bikes and cars.

From the creator:

By summer 2010, the expansion of bike lanes in NYC exposed a clash of long-standing bad habits — such as pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists running red lights, and motorists plowing through crosswalks.

By focusing on one intersection as a case study, my video aims to show our interconnection and shared role in improving the safety and usability of our streets

The video is part of a larger campaign I created called ’3-Way Street’. Please see blog.ronconcocacola.com for more details.

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”.

On the proposed Stillwater bridge (part 4)

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Yet another view on the proposed Stillwater bridge to Wisconsin.  This time from Micky Cook, a Stillwater city council member in the Pioneer Press.

There are roughly 18,000 commuters who use the Stillwater lift bridge during rush hours on weekdays. The cost of the new bridge is $668 million. Rebuilding the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis cost less than half that amount, $261 million. How can we justify such an outrageous expense in this economy to accommodate a Wisconsin commuter corridor? According to MnDOT, 75 percent of weekday trips are commuters coming from Wisconsin. There already is a major freeway bridge roughly five miles south of the proposed site on Interstate 94 that connects to a network of highways in Wisconsin.

We all know the litany of economic ills we face. Gas prices are approaching an all-time high, a record number of homes are in foreclosure, people have lost their jobs and there is no more local government aid to help municipalities maintain services. The price tag on this project warrants serious discussion. If we do have that kind of money, shouldn’t we use it to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure of existing bridges and roads?

Isn’t this really just another development story? The current contingent pushing hard for a new bridge argues it is for the greatest possible good. We need to ask for whom and at what cost?

Ms. Cook also proposes some alternative solutions to deal with traffic in the area caused by commuters.

What about metering traffic lights or negotiating with the Coast Guard for a change in the lift bridge schedule to reduce the number of times the bridge is lifted during peak times? We could post the lift schedule and ask MnDOT to set up a traffic notice at the I-694 and I-494 interchange off of Highway 36, alerting drivers of bridge delays and redirecting them to alternate routes. We could lobby to make the lift bridge one-way heading west in the morning and eastbound for the afternoon commute. Big employers in the area could provide shuttle services and offer incentives for Wisconsin employees to use it from a Park & Ride on the other side of the river. Stillwater could use reserve officers to direct traffic during critical commute times and on busy summer weekends.

I’m sure there are other traffic control measures that could be implemented. Not all solutions have to cost outrageous sums of money. But it’s not as exciting as building a big new shiny bridge. And it goes without saying, if the lift bridge poses a real safety risk, it should be shut down immediately.

A very cheap traffic control measure not mentioned would be closing the lift bridge to car traffic.  I don’t believe this would have much ill effect on Stillwater, and would quickly solve traffic problems caused by commuters (I think they’d still have a lot of traffic, which is a good thing for downtown).

P.S. I really don’t intend for this blog to be all Stillwater bridge, all the time, I promise.  Things have just been a little busy lately.

On the proposed Stillwater bridge (part 3)

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Stillwater Bridge "Low-Slow" Alternative Drawing

Writing for Minnpost, Steve Berg points out that most politicians seem to view the Stillwater bridge as a freeway-style-bridge versus no freeway-style-bridge proposition, even though there may be another alternative.

What might this new bridge look like?

As I wrote here on March 4, a new bridge should relieve Stillwater’s summertime traffic problems without inducing an excessive amount of sprawl development on the Wisconsin side of the river. Obviously, its design should not intrude on the historic and natural quality of the valley.

That means a so-called “low, slow” solution (PDF) — a bridge that wouldn’t span the river from bluff top to bluff top but drop down to a level more in scale with the existing Lift Bridge. Speeds (and noise) should be kept to a minimum. Engineers might consider a three-lane design that would allow east-west flexibility depending on traffic flow. The bridge should be dynamically tolled as a way to fairly shift costs to users and to help manage traffic buildup in the area.

The park service, in rejecting the freeway-style bridge, seemed almost to invite such a design while rejecting outright the freeway-style bridge that MnDOT proposed.

Note that Berg calls for “dynamic tolling” to shift the cost to users, manage traffic and assumedly reduce sprawl (not subsidize low-density development in Wisconsin).  Other expert sources say a 4-lane bridge would not have enough demand to pay the tolls required to fund it, so I assume demand from a slower, narrower span would not generate enough in tolls to pay the cost.  Perhaps this is why MNDOT has floated the idea of a $3 toll, which would only cover half of the construction cost (but would cover maintenance) of the bigger bridge.