Google Maps ‘Bike There’

John Pucher is:

a professor in the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey). Since earning a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978, Pucher has conducted research on a wide range of topics in transport economics and finance, including numerous projects for the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Canadian government, and various European ministries of transport. For almost three decades, he has examined differences in travel behavior, transport systems, and transport policies in Europe, Canada, and the USA.

Momentum dubbed him ‘The Bicycle Scholar‘ and offers this introduction:

There is no doubt that Professor John Pucher takes his role as a bicycle scholar seriously. In his emails and on his office voicemail at Rutgers university in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he identifies himself as “Car-Free John”.

Pucher (pronounced Pooker) has been researching and writing about cycling as a form of urban transportation for more than a decade, looking at places where it works (many northern European cities) and where it doesn’t (much of North America), and teasing out what it is that makes a successful cycling city.

When asked about his “car-free” moniker and his transportation habits, he offers the guilty confession that he owned a car for three years in the early 1970s, but is quick to add that he soon found driving more stressful than it was worth.

On May 15, 2008, Pucher gave a presentation in Vancouver (transcript), at Simon Fraser University (wiki). Zakkaliciousness of Copenhagenize.com has suggested the presentation is ‘nothing short of astounding,’ and implores us to ‘See the film now. Quickly. It’s wonderful.’

I don’t know about you, but when Copenhagen talks - and talks like that, I listen. The original video is here, and I uploaded the main part of it — Pucher’s presentation — to Vimeo to make sharing a bit easier, and possibly be less taxing on SFU’s servers. [Vimeo is down at the moment - go figure.]

See BikePortland.org for more context and their previous coverage of Pucher.

There is a lot of good info in the talk, and I couldn’t possibly try to sum it up, here, but a few parts that stood out:

• We need to garner broad public support — I think this requires explanation, because I think there is more to it than meets the eye (in my opinion). This is something I’d like to add to The Big Initiatives list.
• Businesses/merchants are initially up in arms in objecting to car-free zones near/in front of their stores/restaurants, but once the areas exist, their business booms, and businesses/merchants who were not included in the car-free zone want in.
• ‘Bicycle infrastructure’ does not need to be expensive - use lane/road diets, remove auto access from bridges and other roadways, etc.
• Some countries use laser technology on little Smart cars to do preventative maintenance on cycleways.
• New residential/business developments required to have bike/walk facilities. Other anti-sprawl measures codified in law/ordinance.
• If we need to get across highways - over or under - make the cars do the extra effort, not the bikes. Might be less practical/more expensive, but it’s the philosophy as much as anything else.
• Right-turn shortcuts for bicyclists.
• Cycling can be extremely safe - you just have to build the right infrastructure, laws, etc.
• ‘Traffic calming’ and ‘bicycle boulevards’ are obvious big pluses.
• ‘Green Wave’ indicators for allowing cyclists to properly time their route through areas with street lights.
• Required childhood bicycle safety education including ‘licensing exam’ in 3rd/4th grade.
• Form coalitions with lots of groups, including environmental and public health organizations.
• Companies provide free car parking - why not provide free bikes, and bike parking, and showers, etc.?
• For every hour you spend cycling, you add more than an hour to your expected healthy lifetime.
• Averge canadian works two months a year to finance your car.  [I think this is similar for America, but not sure.].
• Bicycle route mapping (in Berlin, Germany)!!! This is the text from the relevant slide:
  • Free internet bike trip planning in Berlin:
    ——————————————-
    * Cyclist enter origin, intermediate tops and final destination
    of their intended bike trips.

    * Cyclists can indicate preferences:
    - desired speed of travel
    - direct arterial streets or secondary roads
    - type of pavement
    - volume, speed and mix of traffic
    - on-street lanes, off-street paths, parkways

• Danish town (a town in Denmark - I’m not sure which, yet) offers same type of bicycle navigation, but also on a cell
• “New Jersey drivers are homocidal!”  (NJ is my home state!)

The main web page for the video includes text about all the parties who were involved in bringing Pucher to town - I’ve linked to each of them with the best link for each:

Sponsored by Translink. Co-sponsored by the Bombardier Foundation and the Active Transport Lab at the University of British Columbia as part of the series “Shifting Gears: Five discussions on the Future of Transportation“. Program partners: Simon Fraser University City Program and the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition.

I had a little difficulty finding the website for the UBC Active Transport Lab, and that might have something to do with its full name being UBC Active Transport Collaboratory. According to wikipedia, a collaboratory is:

a “center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries” (Wulf, 1989).

That is not overly interesting, perhaps, until you see a joint research program from UBC and Georgia Tech called SMARTRAQ, which stands for ‘Strategies for Metropolitan Atlanta’s Regional Transportation and Air Quality’:

SMARTRAQ is a leading edge transportation and land use research project being conducted by Georgia Tech. Its goal is to develop a framework for assessing land use and transportation policies having the greatest potential for reducing the level of auto dependence and vehicle emissions in the Atlanta metropolitan area, while sustaining the economic vitality and environmental health of the region.

SMARTRAQ produced state of the art activity-based travel data representing travel patterns for all socioeconomic classes in the 13-county Atlanta region. When matched with data from the parcel-level GIS land use database and data from three sub-surveys, SMARTRAQ produced results that add important knowledge that can be applied to the development of a comprehensive regional transportation plan and in the evaluation of regional land use and transportation investment policies.

I’m a big believer in research, so I’m happy to see that a bunch of really smart people were working on important problems. Now, it’s up to us to make sure that research is put to good use. 

I plan on coming back to revist this post and update it with some thoughts and more links.

I’m also trying to get a transcription (the text) of the video (and I asked Professor Pucher for his slides, if they were public, and I also asked for permission to transcribe), and could use some help. More details here.