Streets.MN is the culmination of a lot of work by some great land use and transport thinkers in Minnesota. I’m please to be part of this project. Today the new website was launched so please head on over and check it out.
Of course make sure to do the Twitter and Facebook thing too.
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
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
Strong Towns on the Stillwater Bridge.
Let’s stipulate for the sake of this conversation that the new St. Croix bridge is a worthy project (it’s not, but let’s pretend that it is). At a time when Americans are being forced to make some really difficult financial decisions, particularly about infrastructure spending, the reason why this project is likely to proceed while 1,100+ of our deficient bridges receive little funding is important to understand. Understanding that reason will illuminate why we are in such a dire financial situation, why our infrastructure is failing and why nothing we are likely to do will make the problem better.
The St. Croix bridge is a very expensive project. It is projected to cost more than the estimate for fixing ALL of the 1,149 structurally deficient bridges in Minnesota.
Without knowing the numbers, it would be fair to assume that the St. Croix bridge is really critical in terms of traffic volume. Not so. The bridge is projected to carry 16,000 vehicles per day. For comparision, Minnesota’s 1,149 structurally deficient bridges carry a combined 2.4 million vehicles per day.
This seems insane, and it is. Why would a state full of rational people spend $670 million on one bridge to carry 16,000 cars when we already have 1,149 bridges carrying over 2.4 million cars that are in a state of critical disrepair? Why would we not spend the money first on maintaining the bridges that we have? What business do we have adding more bridges to the inventory when we do not have the resources to maintain our existing ones?
I have a family obligation to promote the Twin Cities Urban Sustainability Forum on November 2nd and 3rd. The forum is bringing together academics and practitioners to explore the connection between urban sustainability, what planners and practitioners often work on, and urban ecosystems, which I think is a way for the St. Paul campus folks to get involved in cities.
Twin Cities Urban Sustainability Forum, Nov. 2-3, 2011
REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN!
Updated (10-12) agenda, including speakers and panels
Cost: $25 general $10 students
Continuing education: AICP and PDH credits available
Location: U of M Continuing Education Center, St. Paul campus.ABOUT THE FORUM The Forum will highlight emerging outcomes of sustainability research and cutting edge trends in sustainability practice and policy. Presentations by leading national and international speakers will address:
· Connecting urban ecosystem science with social and economic sustainability
· Federal and state-level sustainability policy
· Overcoming disconnects between sustainability research and practice
Insightful panels and networking opportunities will inform a translational research agenda – to ensure a closer connection between re-search priorities and urban sustainability practice.
HIGHLIGHTS
Speakers from the federal Sustainable Communities Partnership and state agencies will highlight emerging policy directions in sustainability. Researchers from the University of Oregon, University of Colorado, Virginia Tech, and the University of Minnesota will highlight cutting edge research addressing urban infrastructure, energy, air quality, health, and natural resource issues. U of MN research center directors, including CURA and CTS, will explore new approaches to connecting research and practice around sustainability.WHO SHOULD ATTEND? Planners, water and natural resource managers, engineers, urban ecologists, and others interested in urban sustainability practice or research.
For more information: Contact co-organizers Lawrence A. Baker, Dept. of Bioproducts & Biosystems Engineering (baker127@umn.edu) and Carissa Schively Slotterback, Urban & Regional Planning Program, Humphrey School of Public Affairs (cschively@umn.edu).
The event is funded by the McKnight Foundation, National Science Foundation, U of M Center for Transportation Studies, and U of M Center for Urban and Regional Affairs.
Minnpost interviewed Representative Betty McCollum (whose district does not include the Stillwater bridge). She has strong feelings about the proposed bridge.
MinnPost: You’ve long been against the plans for a big freeway-style bridge plans south of Stillwater. Is cost your major concern?
Rep. Betty McCollum: Cost should be every Minnesota taxpayer’s concern. Did you know the proposed St. Croix mega-bridge would be the most expensive bridge ever built in Minnesota? This project will cost $700 million and serve 18,000 vehicles the day it opens. Compare that to the $390 million price tag for building BOTH the new Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis and the Lafayette Bridge under construction in downtown St. Paul. The I-35W and Lafayette bridges are used by nearly 300,000 Minnesotans every day.
Based on the facts, the mega-bridge fails every common-sense test of taxpayer value. The mega-bridge wastes taxpayer money, especially when smaller, less-expensive options are available. Stillwater needs and deserves a new bridge, but a $700 million mega-bridge only six miles from the I-94 crossing is both excessive and irresponsible.
MinnPost: How about the environmental concerns?
McCollum: The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act is the law of the land. It should be respected, not tampered with, as is being proposed in both the House and Senate legislation. I believe the Stillwater Lift Bridge can be replaced in a way that’s compatible with the letter and spirit of the law. The St. Croix is the only river in Minnesota protected under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The current design has been litigated and delayed for years and years because it violates the law.
Beyond Minnesota, the mega-bridge sets a new, dangerously low standard that would threaten every mile of every protected river in the national Wild and Scenic River system.
MinnPost: You’ve said that a new bridge would benefit Wisconsin more than Minnesota. How does that work?
McCollum: The estimates I’ve seen show 75 percent of the bridge traffic would be from Wisconsin, while Minnesota taxpayers pay the majority of the costs.
MinnPost: Would a new bridge feed urban sprawl, too?
McCollum: The proposed four-lane, freeway-style mega-bridge is designed to accelerate urban sprawl. But growth at the edges of the metro has come to a screeching halt because of the housing slump and high gas prices. So the bridge is not only poor urban planning, but it’s also out of sync with today’s economic realities. A smaller, appropriately scaled bridge can meet the transportation needs of both Minnesota and Wisconsin residents, regardless of population growth in St. Croix County.
Net Density has been on a little bit of a hiatus lately, mostly because of the deluge of summer-time activities. In Minnesota, we have to take advantage of the weather while we can. No one is indoors reading planning blogs, right?
Well, if you aren’t out riding your bike or drinking beer on a dock somewhere and you need some planning wonk, you can see me presenting on LEED ND for Regional Planning at the Twin Cities Research Group next Wednesday, June 8th.
TCRG Brown Bag Speaker Series:
Wednesday, June 8, Noon to 1:00 p.m.
Topic: Location Efficiency in the Twin Cities: Using LEED-ND for Regional Planning
How can our region accommodate the expected addition of a million people between now and 2030 while protecting critical natural systems, minimizing greenhouse gas emissions, using infrastructure efficiently and building vibrant and economically competitive communities? This presentation demonstrates that the principles of LEED-ND (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development rating system) can be applied to develop more effective regional planning and growth management policies. GIS analysis was used to show what areas of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region are eligible for LEED-ND based on location requirements and existing built form.
Featured Speaker: Brendon Slotterback, AICP, LEED AP, is a Sustainability Program Coordinator at City of Minneapolis
Where: Wilder Foundation, Room 2610, 451 Lexington Parkway (at University Ave), Saint Paul, MN 55114
Map with the meeting’s location is at www.TwinCitiesResearch.org
Event is FREE. Wilder’s parking ramp is FREE. Bring your own brown-bag lunch.
As always, we will have an open discussion with the presenter at the end of the hour. Join us to participate with your ideas, questions, and suggestions.
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”.
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.
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.
