Cities to go live include Vancouver; Kelowna, B.C.; Edmonton; Calgary; Winnipeg; Waterloo, Ont.; Toronto; Ottawa; and Gatineau, Que.
O Canada is right next door to the good ‘ol US of A, but still — this is the first international expansion of google’s bike directions — a very cool development — one we’ll hopefully see a lot more of.
Congrats to all the collaborators, including Google, the Google Maps team, the National Capital Commission, the various participating cities, etc.
The announcement was first made a couple of weeks ago at the Sustainable Mobility Summit 2010. The press release has some nice words from some of the higher-ups — I’ve quoted liberally, since I think it’s sometimes important to know just how widespread, and high-up, the support is for better biking facilities — online and off:
“Hosting the Canadian launch of the new biking directions feature of Google Maps at the Sustainable Mobility Summit in Canada’s Capital Region is a perfect opportunity to highlight our efforts in encouraging the use of alternative modes of transportation in our region,” said Marie Lemay, Chief Executive Officer at the National Capital Commission. “By integrating NCC’s recreational pathways with city of Ottawa and Gatineau cycling lanes and paths, Canada’s Capital Region becomes the first region in the country to have its entire cycling network on Google Maps. This new feature is no doubt a step in the right direction to improve cycling in the Capital Region.”
“Ville de Gatineau is proud to take part in the implementation of this sustainable mobility project. The posting of maps dedicated to cycling on a site as popular as Google Maps will not only enable us to better serve the cycling enthusiasts among our citizens and visitors, but also to promote active transportation in the area. The involvement of three local partners in this initiative aimed at developing our network of bike paths should guarantee our success,” stated Ville de Gatineau Mayor Marc Bureau.
“The City of Ottawa has always placed a high importance on encouraging residents to use sustainable transportation alternatives like cycling,” said Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien. “By having the City’s paths, bike lanes and suggested routes available on Google Maps we are providing a convenient, accessible technology for our residents to plan their cycling trips to where they work, live and play and allows us to build on similar partnerships we have with Google for bus and pedestrian travel information.”
“Easy access to information is a powerful resource for supporting and encouraging the choice of sustainable travel options,” said Lorenzo Mele, Chair of the board of directors for the Association of Commuter Transportation of Canada. “The introduction of Google Bike routing in Canada will put cycling at the forefront of people’s thoughts as they search out the optimum way to get to their destination. Google bike routing, especially when in an area where Google transit is available, provides a complete overview of travel options for the user. We applaud Google’s initiative and support of cycling and sustainable mobility.”
Mayors, Commissions, Cities, you name it — everyone wants in on this biking thing.
“The reason we wanted to be part of this is that it’s a tool that will address a barrier to people who aren’t yet cycling,” he said, pointing out the service allows cyclists to plot a route that’s safer and, at times, quicker.
“This will allow them to feel more comfortable to get out there.”
People who ‘never contemplated biking as a realistic option’ are now biking — because of physical infrastructure changes which allow them to bike, and cool tools like Google Bike Directions and RideTheCity.com, which help put biking into that ‘realistic option’ category. Interestingly, RideTheCity.com has also gone international with their introduction of bike directions for Toronto and Iceland. Nice!
One thing I noticed on my last visit to Toronto, a couple of summers ago, was that there seemed to be quite a few people riding bikes, and riding them in spite of the fact that there was little to no bike infrastructure — not even regular bike lanes. Google bike directions comes at a good time for Toronto, where biking may be under attack from the new mayor. Though, with bike sharing due to launch in Toronto this upcoming May, the new mayor might decide that it’s too costly politically to be on the wrong side of history.
And we know Vancouver and Quebec have been going bike-crazy these past few years.
Let’s keep pushing for more and better bicycle infrastructure. Don’t let anyone you that bikes can’t be the dominant mode of transport in your city (unless you live in Venice) — especially not professional traffic engineers and transportation planners. We all have very good reason to be very skeptical of anyone who’s been doing this stuff for a long time — they need to prove that they can get with the program, and start building cities/towns/streets for people instead of cars/trucks/buses.
p.p.s. An article in the LA Times titled ‘Los Angeles, by Bike and on a Budget‘ (or, ‘Los Angeles on $100 a Day’) has some nice things to say about Google bike and transit maps/directions — here are a couple of snippets:
And as the days passed, I realized that, for a city known for its car culture, Los Angeles can be managed on a bike. The small number of dedicated bike lanes and marked bike routes are scattered around somewhat unhelpfully, but Google Maps’ bike mapping beta for mobile and Web does a fairly decent job of making sense of them.
…
From there, I cruised a few smooth miles east toward Hollywood via back streets parallel to major thoroughfares, where, even on a Sunday afternoon, traffic was looking like a challenge. (A smartphone with Google Maps or other GPS-like applications is an invaluable help, although I believe they still make maps on paper as well.)
…
and I was in no mood to bike the rest of the way back to Santa Monica. So Google Maps led me to the No. 920 bus, a straight shot back to Santa Monica via Wilshire Boulevard.
November 19, 2010By: Peter Smith Category: City Spotlight
By afagan
That is, the US Nation’s Capital — Washington, DC. And, yes, those are bike lanes on America’s Main Street — Pennsylvania Ave. Incredible.
They’ve been making tremendous bike improvements in DC over the past couple/few years, and a lot of it has to do with blogs like GreaterGreaterWashington.org, and DC’s DOT head, Gabe Klein and Planning Director, Harriet Tregoning.
We know that a big part of getting the bike infrastructure we require is making biking familiar to folks — right now, for most of America, biking remains ‘the other’ — some activity that they have no realistic way to relate to. But now, thanks to the work of advocates and responsible and responsive government officials like Klein and Tregoning, every time a member of Congress goes out their door to head down to the Capitol, or one of the myriad government buildings in/around downtown DC, they’re going to see bikes — lots of them — and more and more of them as time goes on. I think this will have a profound effect on how elected officials view biking, and it will translate into more political and financial support for biking. It’s super-important to keep DC moving forward on all livable streets policies, but especially on biking — the transformative tool in our Livable Streets toolbox.
Well, there’s about to be a new mayor in town, and one group of citizens (or, at least the executive board of one group of citizens) is urging the mayor-to-be to dump both Klein and Tregoning.
Hundreds of citizens are responding, though — led by GreaterGreaterWashington.org. A petition has been set up to allow you to show your support for both of these officials who are helping to transform DC into a more livable city. It is especially important to sign onto the petition if you live, work, and/or play in DC. Around this blog, we know that petitions can work, so it is worth your time to let the new Mayor know how you feel about a more walkable, bikable, livable DC.
Here is a StreetFilms video featuring Gabe Klein from just a few months ago:
Get some more third-party context on this issue from the Washington Post blog, D.C. Wire.
We’ve talked before about how allowing people to get around by bike is a human rights issue, a women’s rights, issue, etc. This video we found on the Bicycle Partnership Program website jumps over to India to find out how bicycles are helping millions of people, including and especially women, live fuller lives:
The interesting thing is, you don’t have to go to India to find inequality that is further exacerbated by a lack of mobility — it’s right in our own backyards. I understand that some folks want to talk about cars being squeezed, and how bad traffic will get when we add bike lanes to some road, but this misses the larger point — people need safe, comfortable, and dignified walking and biking conditions — anything less is not acceptable.
If, after providing walkers and bikers the infrastructure they require and deserve, then we can talk about whether motorized traffic will also be allowed to use these particular roads, whether there will be more than one auto travel lane in either direction, whether we will allow for left-turn pockets, etc., but at no point should we entertain accommodating automobile traffic better before we even provide the minimum required pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. There may be reasons we are forced to compromise and accept less than the required walk- and bike infrastructure, but we should never start from that compromise position, and any road (re)design must be done with a view towards greatly increased walking and biking (so, avoid things like raised/landscaped medians, etc.).
Specifically, how do we get bikes taken seriously by transportation advocates of the motorized type, and others in the Livable Streets movement?
I expect resistance from drivers, the auto industry, the AAA, etc., but I don’t want to expect it from advocates who are generally pro-livable streets. This is a serious problem for us.
I don’t know the answer to this question. We managed to get Google to take bikes seriously enough to integrate them into Google Maps, but far too many transportation advocates still, it seems to me, look at bikes as an afterthought, if at all.
The evidence for this assertion is really just everything that I read and see from the Streetsblog Network each day. I at least skim every single post that shows up in the Network’s feed each day (300+ blogs, but not sure how many daily posts make it into the feed). In addition, I also at least skim dozens/hundreds of transportation-related articles and posts from sources that are not Network members each day. In very few cases do I ever feel that bicycles are being treated with the respect they deserve as a viable means of transportation. The only exceptions typically come from Denmark- or Netherlands-based blogs, and from BikePortland.org and a couple of other bike-oriented blogs.
My current solution to this problem is fairly one-dimensional, but I think it could eventually prove reasonably effective — I leave comments. On blog posts. On articles. You name it. If someone is advocating for spending tons of money on some form of motorized transportation (and some of these projects are so expensive that the stacks of money could actually weigh tons — about $90 Million dollars in $100-dollar bills would weigh a ton), and they’ve excluded bikes from consideration, then I let them know. I can’t say that I always maintain a ‘happy-go-lucky’ attitude when leaving these comments, but I never claimed to be perfect.
Let’s do some examples.
My current favorite blog is Greater Greater Washington. Too often, the blog’s founder and main blogger (and former Googler), David Alpert, writes posts that I feel give short shrift to bicycles — like any number of posts on the K Street Transitway. My response is a comment — usually written while trying to keep my temper in check — but it’s important to register your thoughts — whether you think something is unacceptable or does not go far enough or whatever. You’re probably not going to change anyone’s mind that day, but it’s important to open up the debate when it seems confined to an unnecessarily-narrowed field of options — namely, options that include only motorized forms of transport, or options that do nothing to allow travel by bike. Whether you agree with this specific corridor design and post or not is not important — I’m just trying to show a pattern of advocacy across the entire ‘transportation advocates’ spectrum.
I should say that despite my very serious disagreements with GGW regarding bike infrastructure, it’s a ridiculously awesome blog. First, there was BikePortland, then there was Streetsblog, and then along came GGW. They’re all special and unique snowflakes with their own strengths and weaknesses, but GGW is a rising superstar — which makes it all the more important we get them to recognize bikes for the miracles they are, just one use of which happens to be as a serious form of transportation.
The next example comes to us from a blog post by Barbara McCann, the Executive Director of the National Complete Streets Coalition. I have to admit, I can be pretty jaded when it comes to seeing points of view expressed by transportation advocates that do not give biking the respect I feel biking deserves, but this blog post actually sent me to another planet:
Frankly, in the past, I’ve discounted the value of the European model in the United States. It has been just too different – and certainly has been rejected by most local elected officials in the US. Specific European treatments such as cycle-tracks (bicycle lanes raised from the road surface and separate from the sidewalk) seemed pointless to discuss. On this trip, however, I came away with greater clarity about what European cities have to teach the Complete Streets movement in the United States.
Simply put, we just can’t have this type of excuse-making. It was never valid, and it never will be. ‘Too hot’ and ‘Too cold’ and ‘Too Portland’ and ‘Too Europe’ are not valid arguments against bicycle infrastructure. I have to admit, once I read the source of this quote was ‘Complete Streets’-something-or-other, I thought, “Oh — those guys.” I had remembered seeing any number of photos of ‘complete streets’ photographs over the past couple of years that were part of various organizations’ ‘Complete Streets’ marketing efforts — whether they were national groups, state groups, whatever, they always seemed to show pretty-ish streets with sidewalks, a bunch of auto-travel lanes, and occasionally even a bike lane — no bike lane buffer, no grade separation, no physical separation, no cycletrack, no nothing. The organizations, I thought, seemed to exhibit some weird belief that just calling a street ‘Complete’ would allow normal people to actually bike on that street. That’s not good enough. Credit to McCann for coming around. Let’s hope there are more conversions on the way.
The next example is brought to us by Ellen Dunham Jones, whose TED talk was just released. In one of the first slides from her presentation (about the 0:40 mark), we see a slide with two photos — one on top (the ‘before’ photo), and one on bottom (the ‘after retrofitting’ photo). In the top photo, we get an ugly suburban multi-lane roadway with a right turn lane and a small bike lane. Ok. The ‘after retrofitting’ photo, however, is curious — it may just be tough to see, but if the bike lane made it to the ‘after’ photo, it is not obvious.
What we got, for sure, was a widened sidewalk (a good thing) — taking away the bike lane (a bad thing), and some new car parking where the right turn lane used to be (not sure car parking is preferable to a right turn lane). The bike lane may still be around, but as I said, if it is, it’s not obvious. This is a disaster. It’s still a multi-lane roadway with multiple (at least two) lanes going in the same direction, which means auto speeds will be accelerated and the environment will not be conducive to bike travel.
There is no clearly visible bike lane, no green bike lane, no bike lane buffer, no separation from fast-moving auto traffic, no visible bike parking, etc. In short — bikes were not considered. At all. And this is coming from the person who is leading the charge to retrofit suburbia — the person who is going to, in theory, help us all see the errors of our ways for the past 50 years. With this direction, the new suburbia will be the same as the old suburbia, but with wider sidewalks, and more car parking.
At the 14:00 mark, we get a slide showing another signature transformation — this time, some traffic sewer of a road (Palm Canyon Dr, Cathedral City, CA) into a ‘beautiful boulevard’ (allegedly), which, instead of providing a safe and comfortable place to ride a bike, provides a median filled with trees and other junk. This is a total disaster. In my estimation, the ‘after’ road — the ‘beautiful boulevard’ — is actually worse for bicycle access than before.
Oddly enough, this boulevard looks eerily similar to an infamous and dastardly boulevard in San Francisco which has sharrows, lots of trees in raised medians, and regularly terrifies and injures and maims those brave (or stupid) enough to bike on or anywhere near it. In this case, Ellen Dunham Jones happened to have her TED talk released just as I was in the process of writing this blog post, but the pattern is clear across the advocacy/(re)development spectrum — it is present in 99% of the new developments being planned for your town.
However you decide to advocate for bikes in your town, whether it’s a combination of sharrows and car-control devices and techniques, or if it’s fully-protected bike lanes, or something in between, it is, in fact, something that has to be integrated into the built environment — we need real bicycle planning with real bicycle infrastructure. We all know now that bikes can sell the urban lifestyle like no other piece of lifestyle equipment, so we’ll often see development plans with a nod to a theoretical smiling biker, but we know from looking at the plans that that theoretical biker will never be there as long as the roads remain in that anti-cycling condition. We need to call these people out — no more using bikes as props to hawk your wares unless you actually plan on allowing people to ride in your community.
[Update: I'm still learning much of this stuff as we go, and seeing this disaster called Palm Canyon Drive prompted me to finally look up what 'boulevard' actually meant:
usually a wide, multi-lane arterial thoroughfare, divided with a median down the center, and roadways along each side designed as slow travel and parking lanes and for bicycle and pedestrian usage, often with an above-average quality of landscaping and scenery.
What this means in English is this:
a massive, anti-human highway, probably invented by General Motors, jackhammered into the middle of your once-proud city, in the service of speeding cars through your city, and dotted with 'band-aid' landscaping in an attempt to obscure what highways through the city actually are--life-diminishing and soul-destroying dystopian devices that benefit the auto industry at the expense of the city and its residents.
That's pretty much what we're looking at with 'boulevards'. The obvious answer here is don't let them do this to your town. And if all else fails, don't let them use anything permanent (like concrete) for the medians.
My only experience with 'bike boulevards' is riding them in Palo Alto, CA and Berkeley, CA, and I think that, if done right, they can be useful for cutting down on through-auto-traffic, so a street might become a bit safer for teaching your kids how to ride a bike, for playing stickball, etc. But for having any real impact on bike mode share, bike boulevards aren't going to cut it -- we need safe and comfortable access to the major travel corridors. ]
We need to bring Ellen Dunham Jones, the folks at DPZ, and other leading lights into the bike fold. We need to get them a manual that says “Here are the five to ten basic road designs that will allow people to get around on bikes.” We need to make sure they all understand subjective safety. (Ideally, we need to get them on bikes.) Ultimately, it will be up to them to decide whether they want to allow people in the communities they’re (re)designing to get around by bike, but right now they’re ‘sleepingwalking into a future’ that is going to be very difficult, and it’s on us to make sure they’re aware of the destiny they’re designing for people. As Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar, says, “Infrastructure is destiny.”
In all of this, it should be noted that there may be one or more reasons why various advocates don’t want to, or can’t, take biking seriously — I’d like to mention a couple right quick, even though the main purpose of this post is to ask myself and all of us to recommit ourselves to getting our fellow advocates to start taking biking seriously as a form of transportation — for work, play, utility, exercise, etc.
Because biking is next to impossible in most of America, we just don’t have enough people who do it. Some of the leaders of our advocacy organizations and blogs just can’t conceive of a transportation scheme which is not dependent on motorized transport (namely, cars, but also buses) to a substantial degree — they grew up in a different era and are too prepared to settle for ‘a crappy little bike lane’. Maybe we just need to make sure all these folks get to go on junkets to places where they take bikes seriously? Fine by me – I’ll contribute to the cause. We need more aggressiveness for more and better infrastructure, not less. It’s a practical need, of course, but I’d argue it’s also a moral imperative. Don’t condemn our kids and grandkids and all future generations to a life of even greater struggle and heartache — the climate debt is already too high — let’s do our best to turn this ship around.
Along the same lines, most bike advocacy in the US has yet to move beyond the ‘bike lanes is all we need’ mode of thinking. David Hembrow constantly harps on how important ‘subjective safety‘ is to allowing more people to bike — and thank goodness he does it. In his now-famous presentation at SFU, John Pucher, the Cycling Scholar, harped on how important it is to create policies that allow everyone to ride. Pucher’s insistence on making sure we considered everyone when designing our bike infrastructure bordered on the absurd, but now we see why — people just don’t get it unless you drill it into their heads.
Here’s a brief, imaginary conversation between an advocate and Mr. Pucher:
Advocate: Mr. Pucher, who should we design this bike facility for?
Pucher: Everyone.
Advocate: Not just young male teens?
Pucher: No, everyone.
Advocate: Not just roadies?
Pucher: No, everyone.
Advocate: Even old people?
Pucher: Everyone.
Advocate: What about women?
Pucher: Yep, them too.
Advocate: Pregnant women?
Pucher: Yes, everyone.
Advocate: What about younger kids?
Pucher: Everyone.
Advocate: What about people who are not fast?
Pucher: Yes, them too — everyone.
Advocate: What about–
Pucher:Everyone. Everyone everyone everyone.
Advocate: How about–
Pucher:Everyone.
Advocate: What if–
Pucher: Everyone.
We need to allow everyone to ride, and that requires designing bike infrastructure with particular attention paid to subjective safety.
Another major cause of why bikes continue to get short shrift from transportation advocates is because bikes face competition from mass transit, and in particular, competition from bus rapid transit (BRT). Many motorized/public transit advocates either can’t imagine a majority of people getting around by bike, or just feel that motorized transport should be given priority over non-motorized transport — in contradiction of the Livable Streets Transportation Hierarchy. The K Street Transitway posts, from Greater Greater Washington, are an example of this bikes-vs.-buses scenario. Bikes appear to be losing in that particular situation, but the outcome is not always guaranteed to end badly for bikes. For instance, New York City is doing some BRT-type work, but they’re not banning bikes from these corridors (always), and they’re even planning on (sometimes) providing cycletracks. Of course, NYC isbanning bikes from the 34th Street Transitway, much like the K Street Transitway is doing in DC. Berkeley, California recently shot down a ‘full-build’ BRT option, so now there will be room for bike lanes. That BP-supported blog TheCityFix and pro-car/anti-transit personality Randal O’Toole both support BRT does not seem to have caused most transit and bike advocates to be more skeptical of this form of transport which is highly popular in the least livable, least sustainable cities in the world. I can’t explain this — all I can do is put the information out there. And don’t get me started on the incredible noise that buses make — terrible for bikers, terrible for walkers, terrible for sidewalk-diners, terrible for city livability.
I’m not crazy about buses/BRT, in general, for several important reasons, but particularly from a cyclist’s point of view, as David Hembrow points out, buses are terrible for subjective safety (“Buses are really not compatible with bicycles, and there’s nothing like them to lower subjective safety.”). Bikers and would-be bikers hate the idea of driving near cars — it’s pretty logical that we’d be deathly afraid of the Tyrannosaurus Rex of motorized transport, the city bus — or its possibly only-slightly-less frightening cousin, the Brontosaurus of motorized transport, the articulated/bendy/BRT bus.
Two more quick notes in case you haven’t heard it yet:
One-way streets are bad for bikes and businesses. One-way streets induce very high rates of speed that prevents sane people from riding bikes on these streets. One-way streets force bikers to go ‘the long way around’ instead of providing direct access to the bikers’ destinations. One-way streets produce greater noise, which kills sidewalk activity — nobody wants to be subjected to that type of discomfort and psychological stress. Also, cars drive by too fast to notice any of the businesses. Larger, gaudier business signs do not seem to help. One-way streets are threatening and confusing to tourists. One-way streets increase fuel consumption, because drivers have to go ‘the long way around’ even if they didn’t miss their turn. All one-way streets should immediately be converted back into two-way streets, while at the same time providing the appropriate bicycle infrastructure, traffic calming, etc. Most cities and towns around the world are now following this trend towards sanity and livability. See for yourself. Read more here.
Medians and, in particular, raised medians — are bad for bikes. Medians create roads — aka boulevards — which exhibit the worst qualities of two of the worst modern inventions known to man — the freeway and the one-way street. No sane person wants to bike on these median-populated roads. The medians induce speeding, and block bikes from turning around when they want to. It’s also obvious that medians take valuable road space away from bikes — if you like trees, put them adjacent to the sidewalks/cycletracks, where they belong, so they can shade humans instead of cars, and where they can provide more subjective safety — real and/or imagined protection from death monsters. Medians reduce any perceived ‘friction’ by drivers headed in opposing directions, providing drivers with the subjective safety that bikers deserve more. Do not provide subjective safety to motorists before providing it to bikers. If you just have too much road width and you can’t conceive of a possible use for it, use it to build cycletracks. Simple.
Another example of bikes being overlooked as serious transportation are the fun bike bans popping up all over America. There are lots of reasons they are occurring, but one reason is certainly that bikes in these places are not seen as serious transportation — they’re just toys. This mentality is made possible by those of us who refuse to demand appropriate bicycle infrastructure on the most important corridors of our cities and towns. When we volunteer to relegate ourselves to the small side streets, we are voluntarily giving up our rights to the road — we are, in fact, ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’. Without appropriate bicycle infrastructure on our most important corridors, only the hard-core transportation bikers and the ‘bikes-as-sport’ roadies will ride — leaving bikes to be viewed as toys instead of vital tools used by people to get to work, school, etc.
A final example — though we could go on all day — is in the lack of attention given to bicycles for new mega-mixed-use developments at places like…the Googleplex. We’ve talked about it here before, but we have to keep at it — we have to get bicycles taken seriously. The Googleplex lives on the ‘wrong side’ of Highway 101 — our commuter train, Caltrain, is this close to being phenomenal, but many (most?) of the employers along Caltrain’s route — from San Francisco in the north to San Jose in the south — cannot be accessed via bike by mere mortals — crossing the 101 is just impossible. It’s scary, and people die. Mars would be a friendlier landscape. So when Google goes to the Mountain View city council and says, “Hey y’all — we wanna build a Googletopia on the wrong side of 101, and we’re not planning on doing anything to connect the area to the rest of civilization with anything other than a bigger, scarier fleet of shuttle buses idling and zipping between the Googleplex and the Mountain View Caltrain/VTA stop,” — well, those councilors have every right to be skeptical. In an ideal world, we either tear up the 101 and start from scratch, or tear it up and turn it into a bike-friendly boulevard, or submerge every part of it that disrupts local bike traffic, but we have to do something to connect East and West. Can’t we all get along?
Cycling can be viewed as an essential human right — the ability to move around under one’s own power in safety, comfort, with dignity intact, must be guaranteed for everyone.
Cycling can be viewed in the context of women’s rights — without appropriate bicycle infrastructure, we know that women are effectively barred from biking in numbers equal to men — this represents serious discrimination against women that is not just unfair (and should be declared illegal), but directly and very negatively impacts their ability to take care of themselves and their families.
In summary, the refusal of transportation advocates to consider biking a serious form of transportation has very negative effects on entire groups of people — women, minorities, the working poor, young people, old people, etc. — we have to correct this.
If you have any other ideas for how we can get transportation and city livability advocates to start considering biking a serious and legitimate form of transportation, I’m all ears!
Update: I updated/corrected some of the description of Ellen Dunham Jones’ slide concerning the disappearing bike lane, and included a snapshot of the slide. Also inserted at least one other ‘Update’.
Update: Just found out about this cool group from the Netherlands — Interface for Cycling Expertise. It’s some sort of technology/knowledge/expertise-transfer organization. Link from here.
Update: StreetFilms just published video of the Velo-City 2010 Bicycle Conference in Copenhagen, the event that helped Barbara McCann to experience her ‘bicycle revelation’. Near the beginning of the video, at the 1:00 minute mark, Andy Clarke, head of the League of American Bicyclists, says this:
The fact that there are about a hundred people here from North America, the US and Canada, I think is cause for optimism, because I think one of the things we’ve lacked in the US is the real belief that this stuff actually works…
That’s exactly the point of this post — not enough of our self-proclaimed ‘advocates’ are ‘true believers’ — we need to figure out how to move them to that place. If it requires junkets for all of them to Denmark, or an even better model for cycling infrastructure, The Netherlands, then so be it — count me in to help fund the way — whatever it takes — but no more excuses.
Quick note — we’re not talking about just big, relatively-dense cities here — David Hembrow has pointed out for us how the relatively small town of Assen, The Netherlands has a 41% bike mode share and it only has a population density of about 2,000/sq mi. Copenhagen has a similar bike mode share — around 40% — and it’s population density is about 16,000/sq mi. In other words, as best as anyone can tell, population density is not a determining, or even important, factor in how many people choose to get around by bike (or, if you like my phrase-ology better, how many people are allowed to get around by bike).
For reference, Portland’s population density is about 4,000. Mountain View sits at about 6,000/sq mi. Amsterdam is at about 12,000. San Francisco is at about 16,000. Manhattan is about 70,000. All of these towns, and your town, need appropriate bicycle infrastructure.
Update: DPZ has a new book they’re working on called Light Imprint. It says, in part:
“Light Imprint is a green approach to neighborhood design. It employs New Urbanist principles to create compact, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. …”
So, can we get ‘bikeable’ added to the mix?
I thought that maybe bikes were being considered, somehow, inherently, but there’s just no evidence to support that notion.
The Congress for the New Urbanism does mention ‘bicycle’ twice in its Charter, with one mention being in the context of allowing children to ride to school. Schoolchildren being able to ride is important, no doubt, but we need to convince the CNU folks that biking can be for adults, too, and that they need to actually start considering bikes when they plan instead of just assuming that because a place is compact and walkable, that it is also bikeable — that’s not true, unfortunately.
Update: I fired off a quick email to Ellen Dunham-Jones and she mentioned that the ‘disappearing bike lane’ slide was just an oops-type mistake, and that she basically does care a lot about bikes, and is interested in and works on bike policy, especially that concerning integrating bikes into urban design (including retrofitting suburbia) in a systemic fashion. She helped organize all sorts of bike-related stuff, directly or indirectly, including Atlanta’s first ciclovia (She teaches at Georgia Tech, in Atlanta.). She had a grad student work on a bikeability project, etc. She also mentioned the ‘Access Bikeway‘ plan of Carmel, Indiana (which I think is a waste of time/money/effort/etc. — I think working for access to the main roads is our best/only chance at success), and that we might be able to help ‘get bikes taken seriously’ by proposing a session idea for the smaller, more-focused CNU Transportation Summits that happen yearly (I’m assuming they’re still happening.).
Speaking of TED, can we get a pure bicycle talk in there, now? Mikael is on the site. David is there. I love Kunstler’s TED talk (and he’s a cyclist). But now I want a full-on bicycle hagiography — someone that can show we can do this, and we must do this. The only person I can imagine that being, at this point, is Mikael Colville-Andersen. Anyone else we should consider?
Also, cities do not have an obligation to build boulevards/collectors/arterials that accommodate cars. We have to build transportation networks that work. If cars and motorized transport can prove that they provide more benefit than they do pain, then we might be able to continue to accommodate them in the future, but there’s no reason to believe that roads with multiple lanes dedicated to cars will exist in the future.
Davis, California (wiki) was in the spotlight this weekend for the grand opening of the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame. It used to be located in Somerville, NJ. I’d read something about the upcoming festivities on Friday evening, and decided to take the train from SF to Davis on Saturday.
The train ride was great-ish — lots of nice scenery along the way. Apparently, you used to be able to take a boat from SF all the way to Sacramento — all of this is visible from the train:
Still, he said, he looks forward to certain landmarks: the Rio Vista bridge rising to accommodate the Bay Breeze passing beneath; the ghostly “mothball fleet” of retired ships moored near Benicia; the old C&H Sugar refinery at Crockett; and the East Brother Light Station, now operating as a bed-and-breakfast on an island in the straits separating San Francisco and San Pablo bays.
The train seemed to run about hourly — I used Google Maps to plan my route. I rode my bike to BART (our metro/subway), headed over to Oakland, rode about a mile to the Jack London Square Amtrak stop, hopped on board (there were plenty of bike racks on the train), then about 80 minutes later hopped off in Davis.
I had forgotten until I’d stepped off the train that Davis was a real bike-friendly town — Platinum. There were bikes parked everywhere — it seemed like a smaller version of Amsterdam. Crazy.
Met another biker on the train, Malcolm, who volunteers at the bike shops in both Davis and SF, so we rode over to the Hall of Fame together. It was a quick two-minute ride on what seemed like very calm downtown streets. Malcolm warned me to actually stop at stop signs — the cops in town were sticklers for that sort of thing.
We reached the Hall of Fame at about 4:45 pm — after it’d closed for the day, and just as the evening’s ‘private’ festivities were about to begin. Someone (not mentioningnames) heard I was from out of town and managed to get me an ‘Inductee’ badge — and I managed to sneak in after that. Malcolm said he spent a lot of time in the area so he’d get to see the Hall soon enough at a later time.
Yesterday’s Breakaway from Cancer event gave hundreds of cyclists the chance to ride the same 114-mile route that the professionals will race during Stage 2 of the 2010 Amgen Tour of California.
Cancer survivors and four-time Amgen competitor George Hincapie led the pack of amateur cyclists yesterday morning from Davis’ Central Park to Santa Rosa.
Cycling fans from all skill levels could choose to complete 50- or 22-mile segments. The Breakaway Ride, presented by Specialized, was founded in 2005 by Amgen and fundraises for nonprofit partners and those affected by cancer.
A few people spoke at Saturday’s evening event — it was mostly thanking sponsors, but I think everyone was a bit excited to hear what George Hincapie (wiki) had to say. On locating the Hall in Davis, he said, approvingly:
All you see is bicycles and bike lanes.
And he’s right — that’s your first, and probably overwhelming, thought when you first arrive in Davis (assuming you’re not from or used to visiting bicycle meccas). As he was speaking, the crowd could look behind him onto the street and see bicyclists streaming by at a leisurely pace — mostly younger student-types, beach-style cruisers with baskets, wearing flip flops, etc.
Going there I was able to settle one question I’d been curious about — would the Hall talk any about…’regular cycling’ — i.e. commuter cycling, etc. That answer would appear to be, ‘no’ — aside from choosing such a bicycle-friendly city (relatively speaking) to locate in. I wasn’t greatly disappointed because I didn’t expect it, but it made me want to establish a Commuter Cycling Hall of Fame or something like that. Why not? There’s a Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. Our place would basically celebrate the heroes (Streetsblog, Sadik-Khan, etc.) and villains (GM, Moses, etc.) of the bicycling world. In fifty years, people probably won’t believe what we had to put up with.
Speaking of Mountain Biking, there was some of that on display. I even managed to meet Ned “Deadly Nedly” Overend. I saw this hard-core dude on the wall, on some wicked bike, ripping down some hill, and I thought, “Wow — for this mountain bike stuff alone, and this guy crushing everyone for, like, decades — this place is worth a visit.” Then I met him outside when I was making another beer run. Thanks to Sudwerk Restaurant and Brewery for keeping my glass full.
I got a kick out of seeing Gracie Sorbello and her awesome unicycles grace the walls of the Hall. I met Gracie during a 100+ mile Waves to Wine MS event a couple/few years ago. She was riding it on her unicycle. Crazy, and awesome. Gracie’s photo album is here.
The Six-Day Race exhibit — about the Europe-born event which packed Madison Square Garden back in the day — was cool. I guess all sorts of endurance racing was possible a long time ago – before ‘occupational health’ was too much of a concern.
I was pretty anxious to leave the Hall event because it was so nice out, and I just wanted to ride around Davis a bit before it got dark. I did finally jet and cruised around a few blocks in downtown. I have to say — there were too many cars, and as soon as you ventured just outside the down-downtown core — boom — cars and aggressive drivers and all that — definitely not what I was expecting, but I did hear that Davis’ bike mode share had been dropping for some time. It made me wonder if a town could lose its bicycle-friendly status, or get dropped from Platinum to Gold? Even in Davis, providing even minimal infrastructure for cyclists is not a guarantee.
I think a new Platinum+ rating might be in order — it gets conferred upon your city only when you hit 40% mode share of all trips. Why not? Nothing left for cities to grumble about when the League either does or does not honor your city with a particular award level — either you have the mode share or you don’t.
On another topic, Google Maps added kinetic scrolling. Click through to find out exactly what that means — if you use maps a lot, you’ll probably find it useful.
I’ve been using Google Maps bike directions a lot. I can’t wait for the mobile version to drop.
[Update:] OK, this is really weird, but I actually started looking into this idea of starting a sort of ‘national bicycle museum’ (for ‘lifestyle’ cycling) — probably either in my current hometown of San Francisco, possibly Portland, and maybe even somewhere else. Well, it turns out that the US Bicycling Hall of Fame (USBHOF) is actually co-located with the California Bicycle Museum (CBM) — I just didn’t realize it! Most if not all of the bottom floor of the USBHOF building is actually the CBM — I think.
There is also a Bicycle Museum of America in Bremen, Ohio — which is located outside of Lancaster, Ohio — which is located outside of Columbus, Ohio.
If you’re into making your own Google Maps (i.e. if you’re a nerd/programmer), this post may be of interest to you.
A sample application might be if you wanted to find the nearest bike shop, or bar, or both, on your bike ride home — now it’s possible to do that with the Google Maps v3 API.
On March 10, the same day that Google announced bike directions for the US, they also released the API update.
Then, just a couple of days ago, on March 23, Google released an API update that allows developers to get access to elevation data for any point on the globe (not just the US, and includes ocean depths, shown as negative elevations). Now, bike directions already take into account elevations, but it’s always good to have access to the raw data — there’s no telling what kind of creative ways you can use Google Maps to help us travel and live smarter and better.
Overall, we’re hoping the Elevation service will help you build higher-quality applications catered towards hiking, biking, mobile positioning, and low resolution surveying.
Here’s a screenshot of their blog post which shows profile data for Lombard Street in San Francisco:
Happy hacking!
p.s. I’m late on this, but StreetFilms just held a celebration/fundraiser here in SF tonight — I missed it as I’m a bit germy at the moment, but I do have my own personal earmark set aside for them. It’s not much, but it’s something, and every bit will help. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a StreetFilm might be worth a million words. Like bike directions on Google Maps, I think that StreetFilms will continue to be felt in increasingly wider circles, in more manifold ways. They’re just that good.
And if you’ve tried to watch some StreetFilms on your iPhone only to be thwarted by the lack of Flash, you might be able to find your film over on the StreetFilms Youtube Channel. Mobile advocacy — gotta love it!
A post-announcement news round-up is on the way, but on the first day of Spring 2010 (now, the day after), I’m a bit too excited about one article in particular, that I just need to share it now — from The Atlantic (hyperlinks and bold mine):
Other websites already provide biking directions, including ridethecity.com and mapmyride.com. However, Google being Google, the introduction of Google biking will attract a larger audience, or at least anyone who Googles the word “bike.” Ideally, Google’s heft could also influence city planners to create more bike lanes and more-reluctant bikers to put on a helmet and get peddling. And coupled with the greatest biking incentive in the world — warmer springtime weather — Google biking looks like it picked the right time to get into gear.
This sentiment, that the simple introduction of bicycle directions on Google Maps, could actually influence city planners to…change their plans, is pretty amazing — and I think it’s spot on, and probably it is not nearly hopeful enough.
The influence of Google’s bike directions (and maps) will, I believe, be felt in increasingly wider circles (people, business, policy, culture), and in more manifold ways.
Said another way, I don’t believe we can really know what other positive influences these bike directions will have until they arise naturally over the next few months and years — the intermediate advances will have to be realized, first.
I think it’s not a stretch to suggest that Google’s introduction of biking directions has already ‘changed the game’. Being very explicit — I think Google’s introduction of biking directions helped sway Ray LaHood to issue his ‘sea change’ comments.
Think about it — one of the most influential companies in the world says, “You know what, y’all? We think bikes kinda rock, so we’re gonna go ahead and do this bike directions thing that will put biking, finally, on an equal footing with driving, transit, and walking.”
What happens a few days later? The Secretary of Transportation for the United States of America says, essentially, the same thing.
It is a game-changer, especially for those short trips that are the most polluting… This new tool will open people’s eyes to the possibility and practicality of hopping on a bike and riding.
The next step, of course, is for us advocate-types to tilt the pendulum such that non-motorized transit is actually favored over motorized transit. We’ll get there.
Spring is here. Seemingly every car in existence is being recalled. And I need to go out and ride while I jam to an old, but new-to-me band, MGMT.
There are myriad events affecting Google’s stock price from day to day, but on the day bike directions were announced, Google shares jumped about two percent:
15. What’s in this effort for Google and the Google Maps (and/or Transit) team and Google stockholders?
Besides the indirect benefits that Google would reap from this feature implementation (like, say, the continuing and/or increased adoration of millions of people around the world), there are probably direct benefits. As mentioned in the petition, this feature would “Help Google realize its core mission of ‘organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.’” But I also believe this feature is a money-maker – an effort aimed at the quickly-growing number of people who choose to commute by bike. Google will be positioning itself to capture more local advertising revenue, be able to capture a larger share of the burgeoning bicycle industry, and its expertise in the mapping/GIS arena (one of growing importance) will be further strengthened. Since Google Maps revolutionized online mapping, lots of folks are starting to realize the importance of this revenue stream. Google stockholders will be pleased with the introduction of bicycle directions to Google Maps as this feature would almost certainly have a positive impact on share price.
Let’s see if Microsoft, Yahoo, Mapquest and others wants to compete, or if they’re just going to cede online mapping to Google.
I did the San Jose Bike Party last night. Good times. One great scene was seeing all these different groups of bikers converging on the meeting point from every different direction — big chopper bikes, etc. It looked like a revolution was about to happen. Maybe it is.
Happy First Day of Spring! Get on your bikes and ride!
Today we’ve added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that’s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that’s exactly what we’ve done.
And here’s a quick video of how to use the bike directions:
Thanks to the Google Maps team that put together, what at first glance, appears to me to be an exceptional tool. The quick and accurate routing, the multiple route options, the drag-and-drop routing ability, and the bike route layer are all brilliant.
Thanks to all of you 51,330 (and growing) petition-signers who took the time to lend your support to the cause. I believe we helped make a difference.
Thanks to long-time editor of this site, Brandon Warga, for preventing many of my mistakes from going out the door — too bad we didn’t have him before we wrote up the petition!
Thanks to RideTheCity.com for proving that bike directions could be done, and done very well. I can’t tell you how many comments and emails I received saying: a) why are you doing this? b) why aren’t you doing this yourself? c) this can’t be done, d) this should not be done, e) etc. It was so common we decided to add it to the FAQ — with a bit of a defiant tone. RideTheCity were not necessarily the first web application in the world to provide bike directions, but when I first saw RideTheCity, I was very impressed — and it made myself and others hopeful that Google would eventually follow suit.
Thanks to the many people over the past couple of years who said, “Keep it up!” — your support was often the only thing keeping us hopeful and energized. In comments, in person, through email — y’all rock!
Thanks to the myriad people, places, and policies who had some role in pushing for this feature — too many to list, of course, but off the top of my head:
BikePortland.org — for making it obvious how a website could help build community and inspire us to action
City of Palo Alto — for allowing me to be introduced to ‘everyday cycling’ by way of bike lanes and physically-separated bike paths
Austin — for being an insanely cool place, with insanely cool people, and a crazy-fun place to get around on bike (and an awful elevated highway that cut downtown in half and convinced me that bikes were the best way forward )
AustinBikePeople — for being insanely cool people who were enthusiastic supporters of the petition and really helped kickstart its take-off
Other Mapping Efforts — for pushing us all to continue to think bigger in terms of what could be possible for an online mapping tool
John Pucher — for an incredible presentation at Simon Fraser University that first alerted us to the existence of sophisticated bicycle mapping tools like BBBike, for inspiring us with examples and data, for imploring us to use all the tools at our disposal to turn public opinion in our favor, and for speaking out in favor of social justice and, in particular, women’s rights and the importance of appropriate bicycle infrastructure.
Cars can be useful — we can put them up on blocks and grow tomatoes!
— but it’s important to register your thoughts — whether you think something is unacceptable or does not go far enough or whatever. You’re probably not going to change anyone’s mind that day, but it’s important to open up the debate when it seems confined to an unnecessarily-narrowed field of options — namely, options that include only motorized forms of transport, or options that do nothing to allow travel by bike. Whether you agree with this specific corridor design and post or not is not important — I’m just trying to show a pattern of advocacy across the entire ‘transportation advocates’ spectrum.
