Google Maps Bike There…for a safer, healthier, happier world. :-)

Too many streets continue to be optimized for motorized traffic at the expense of non-motorized traffic — in particular, bicycle traffic. We should not allow this to continue to happen.

An example we’ve mentioned before is 34th Street in Manhattan/NYC. It seems whoever is pushing for changes are having a bit of trouble:

Pedestrians who navigate Midtown’s crowded sidewalks won’t get as much as they could have from the proposed 34th Street Transitway. The Times reported last night that NYC DOT will not pursue plans for a pedestrian plaza between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue as part of the project.

But let’s look at the current use of the street — what types of modes does the street currently accommodate?

OK, so bikes aren’t currently allowed to use 34th Street. Fine.

So, the redesigned street is going to allow bikes to use it, right? Maybe we’ll get some sharrows, or a narrow bike lane, or maybe even a buffered bike lane, or maybe what is actually, minimally required, a cycletrack, right?

No. None of that, actually.

This redesign will benefit motorized transport — buses — and pedestrians, and it will do it while keeping cyclists from being able to use this all-important corridor.

So, let’s just put aside the motive question, and let’s not even worry about where this particular design lives on that continuum between incompetence and sadism — instead, let’s just go straight to the politics.

If you actually wanted a street redesign to be implemented, would you:
a) offer a design to allow cyclists to use this street, or
e) prevent cyclists — the city’s most vocal livable streets constituency — from using this street?

Obviously, more than a few folks in New York City thought that e) was the correct answer. And this is causing problems — there is not enough support for this project.

If you would like to bike around New York City, and in particular, Manhattan, are you going to go out of your way to get excited about and support a street redesign which prioritizes motorized transport over cycling, and which may, in fact, actually legally prevent you from riding your bike on 34th Street in the future? You are already barred, practically-speaking, from using this street, but you’re going to go out of your way to support a project which will continue to bar you from using this street?

Of course, not.

In fact, you could even decide to, for several good reasons, oppose this project. As we know, any project that attempts to force people to ride the bus without offering them a dignified alternative is going to produce a heap of problems — namely, automobile traffic, angrier drivers, less political support for continued street improvements, etc.

This same process is playing out all over America — in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, etc.

The lesson?

Even if you despise cyclists and cycling with the very core of your being, if you want to get your project implemented, then consider allowing cyclists to use the redesigned street. If for no other reason, do it for the politics.

Dangerous rhetoric directed at cyclists should not be tolerated, much less condoned, by any of us. Gosh forbid any of us actually participated in anything so crazy and reckless.

We warned that the verbal attacks by NYCDOT and TA would lead to cyclists being physically attacked even more than they already were — and now we have at least one physical attack, caught on video, that lends credence to this argument:

The cops will not be charged, in part, because there will be little to no pressure applied to them for one or more reasons, which include, but are not limited to:

1. NYCDOT and TA have given the police and other citizens even less reason to treat cyclists respectfully, and
2. The full surveillance video hasn’t been released, so none of us can see the full beat-down.

It is theoretically possible that this is just another case of police brutality by steroid-popping cops — like the cop who tackled an unsuspecting cyclist, but it seems unlikely — whatever crime had allegedly been committed was already done/over with. The cops needed a pretext, and bicycle ‘advocates’ gave them one. Riding on the sidewalk an arrestable offense? In the new New York, yes. At least the Critical Mass cop was arrested, if not eventually convicted of assault (though, he was convicted of lying) — but his victim was white. Will this assault on a non-white victim make the Huffington Post? I wouldn’t count on it. Even if we could count on overcoming the race issues, this is a new New York City — one that slanders cyclists as ‘jerks’.

If this violence was not caught on surveillance camera, we might never have known about it. Who knows how many cyclists these cops beat up, arrested, and humiliated off-camera.

And if police officers, who are sworn to ‘protect and serve’, are doing this to citizens, imagine what type of free reign non-officers have to harass and terrorize cyclists. It’s a scary proposition. I wouldn’t want to be a cyclist in NYC right now — especially not a cyclist of an easily-identifiable minority race.

Hopefully the head of NYCDOT, Janette Sadik-Khan, and the head of TA, Paul Steely White, call off this attack on cyclists and cycling in New York City before anyone else is seriously hurt and humiliated, or worse. It’s time for cycling ‘advocates’ to renounce their harmful rhetoric and speak about the respect that every human being deserves, even cyclists, and they should do this even if it is not a popular position with drivers.

And it should go without saying that the reason people ride on the sidewalks is because there is no safe and comfortable place to ride on the streets in that area — that’s on the Mayor and City Council, and NYCDOT/JSK. I can’t tell the exact location of the deli/sidewalk in question, but the Google Street View shows no bike lanes in and around Westchester Square, and the Google Maps Bicycle Layer shows about zero bike lanes in and around that area. There are plenty of things NYCDOT and TA can be doing instead of attacking cyclists with reckless rhetoric.

NYC is cracking down on cyclists. Transportation Alternatives (TA) signed off on the attack, and then had the audacity to question the validity of the attack. New York City Officials — Janette Sadik-Khan, in fact, The Queen of Livable Streets — authorized a “Don’t be a jerk” publicity campaign directed at cyclists — effectively calling them ‘jerks’. It was a twisted and cowardly act.

In an imaginary system where bikes were not daily subject to random violence and threats of violence (‘domestic terrorism’ in every sense of the phrase), including the possibility of severe injury, maiming, and death, calling cyclists jerks might not be such a big deal. However, in the reality-based community, we know that the violence directed at pedestrians and cyclists, caused by law-breaking drivers, is all too real, and it continues — often, with impunity. One of the main reasons drivers are able to act so reprehensibly, and with such impunity, is because cyclists are vilified in the press — by drivers, by pedestrians, by politicians, and now, by cycling ‘advocates’.

These verbal attacks on cyclists from high-ranking officials is bad enough, but when cycling ‘advocates’ chime in, you really start to wonder what their actual motives are. Are they trying to get you killed?

Attacks on cyclists from right-wing politicians is fairly common, and they are always condemned, but why is the condemnation of Janette Sadik-Khan so muted, if not completely absent? I, for one, think she should resign immediately. Paul Steely White, the head of TA, should resign too.

Almost every week I meet someone new who has been maimed by a car — really. Just in the past couple of weeks I met a former cyclist who got his jaw crushed and various other gruesome injuries when he was left-hooked by a law-breaking driver — he no longer bikes. I met a girl who was a scholarship-caliber collegiate lacrosse player who was run down in her neighborhood as she was walking across the street — the cop told her she wasn’t in a crosswalk, so she was given a ticket for jaywalking — there are no crosswalks in her neighborhood, and she can no longer run. I, myself, quit cycling because I was tired of getting terrorized by cowardly drivers, and tired of dealing with police who would rather violate my rights than help me catch an outlaw driver. In fact, when a driver is jailed for attacking cyclists, it actually makes international news.

These verbal attacks can lead to physical attacks, and lead to an even more profound lack of protection for cyclists under the law. They delegitimize cyclists even more than they already are, putting them in even greater danger. We have years worth of data and anecdote to tell us that pedestrians and cyclists alike are hunted classes out on the streets — and yet we have our top leaders condemning cyclists. It’s really unbelievable.

The Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA) has signed off on a similar, if not quite-as-extreme, attack against cyclists. This ‘resolution’ did achieve some blowback, though not nearly enough. I called the attack ‘pernicious’. But it was much worse than that. It was, and remains, a disgrace. Shane Farthing, the head of WABA, should also resign immediately. But first he wants DC-area cyclists to — wait for it — testify at a DC Council hearing to express “our concerns about the protection of cyclists by our laws.” Is that some kind of sick joke, Mr. Farthing?

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) has come very close over the past few years to signing off on a similar attack, but it has not, as of yet, fully materialized.

And now we have missives from bloggers defending cyclists as actual human beings who deserve the right to live free from violence and threats of violence — as if that’s going to stop the physical assaults, or do something about the profound lack of protections afforded to pedestrians and cyclists by our streetscape and the legal system.

There is absolutely no justification for attacking cyclists in this way. There are lots of ways to stop the slaughter on our streets — making cyclists obey unjust laws is not one of them. Instead, create bike-specific laws that accurately reflect the nature of biking. Create safe, comfortable, direct, and dignified cycling facilities. Pass stronger laws against distracted driving. Make it easier to prosecute all manner of driver law-breaking that routinely injures, maims, and kills pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers alike. Train police officers to take pedestrian and cyclist complaints seriously, and put some of them on bikes, in plainclothes. And tell non-biking pedestrians that we’re sick and tired of sticking up for their rights while they attack us — they need to be more responsible and go after the people who created the conditions that force cyclists up onto the sidewalks in the first place — you don’t just have rights, you have responsibilities, and just because you don’t bike doesn’t mean you get to abdicate those responsibilities to your fellow man — start acting right. The list goes on and on.

A blog called The Dirt by the American Society of Landscape Architects has a new blog post up titled ‘Designing For Active Living.’ It is not good, though I can’t say that I’m surprised. I feel like anyone who has been practicing anything related to urban planning/development in America for ten years or more should change careers, retire, or head directly to The Netherlands for some retraining — not that you have to be an experienced professional to know how to prevent active living.

Here’s the latest attack on American society, delivered in the form of a short animation video:

Designing for Active Living from ASLA on Vimeo.

Let’s start with a screenshot, at the 0:18 mark, of a bike lane in a door zone — perfect — exactly the type of development we want to encourage — if you want to ‘get active’ by getting doored and ‘stress test’ your body under the wheels of a city bus. And check out the incorrectly-installed bike racks on the sidewalk — perfect for tripping pedestrians:

At about the 0:23 mark, we get a slight positive with an overall negative — a multi-use path (MUP) with separated walk and bike lanes/areas (good, as many MUPs have proven dangerous), but the mini-walk path means you wouldn’t even be able to walk two-abreast, and the animation and narration suggests that bikes are only meant for exercise, and only to be used on ‘trails’ and ‘paths’ — not on roads. The rack also seems to be full — and that makes sense, because it doesn’t feel safe to ride a bike anywhere but on that mini-MUP:

Here’s a great picture with lots of motorized traffic, but nobody walking, and nobody biking. No bike lanes, no cycletracks, not even any sharrows — and, as best I can tell, the light rail line is running in the outer lane on the street shown, guaranteeing that the street will be unusable by bikes — similar to how Portland mis-designed some of its early streetcar lines, and how DC did some of its early streetcar lines (and may yet build more malignant streetcar lines). The outside lane is not designated, so we can only assume it is for car parking and bus stops. And notice the corner curb cyclist push-out — guaranteeing that we will never be able to see a cycletrack here, and guaranteeing that the 12-ton city bus will have to cross what I think is a (yellow) bike lane. [Is yellow the new color for bike lanes in Landscape Architect-landia?] Us cyclists and would-be cyclists love playing leap-frog with buses.

The ‘network of trails’ comment (1:40) says it is a good way to get people to ‘stop using their cars for 5-minute trips’ — this is the exact wrong way to deal with the malignant design of our road system — instead of giving people a real option to go by bike, we scold them and tell them ‘not to drive for short trips’ — as if exhorting them to save the polar bears or keep their kids from having to learn to swim in the streets is going to change their behavior. If the streets are not comfortable for biking, people won’t bike — simple. You don’t need a degree to know this, but maybe you need to be a member of the ASLA to not know this?

At 2:06, we get a picture of our first bike lane — and I’m not even gonna bother to tear it apart — it’s perfectly sadistic the way it is — I love it. This is how ‘professionals’ want to fix our towns — after they fixed them the first time around. How many more times can we afford to let them get it wrong?

At 2:23, we get what could be our first well-designed bike lane — it’s not in the door zone — but if the road is so gargantuan, then why can’t cyclists have a cycletrack, separated from motor vehicles — you know, the kind of separation that is required if we want to allow people to bike? But that’s not the only problem here — notice that the bike lanes only appear to be on one side of the street — what possible explanation could there be for this? Are these massive uphills going in both directions? And what about those center yellow lines — are they really necessary? On the street going out to the right, is there really a landscape architect in America who thinks that that tiny little bike lane, sandwiched between parked cars and moving cars, is going to be comfortable for anyone other than the most extreme cyclists?

The sad truth is that very few professionals working in the planning-related fields have knowledge of how to allow bikes into the public realm. I don’t much care if they ‘care’ or not — I just want them to do a good job — I just want them to allow people to get around by bike.

It is possible that some of them mean well, but by continually pumping out this hollow, jingoistic, anti-bike propaganda, they are hurting our efforts to make the world a safer, healthier, and happier place. Ignorance is not acceptable. We have to start getting it right — we have to start prioritizing walking and biking, in that priority order, according to the Livable Streets Transportation Hierarchy. We have examples of ‘active living’ all over the world, including now in the United States — there are no more excuses.

If we can’t start getting this stuff right, I’m thinking we just need to shut down the entire American Planning/Architecture/Development/Landscape educational and certification systems, along with all corresponding ‘professional’ associations. If someone really shows a strong desire to not damage America even further, then we can send them to planning school in The Netherlands. Yeah?

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.).

Immediate emancipation from car culture, gradually achieved.

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 is banning 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:

1. 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.
2. 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?

Oh – just discovered a picture of the dastardly Octavia Blvd on the ‘Urban Thoroughfares’ CNU page. Brilliant.

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.

The CNU put together a document with the ITE called ‘Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach‘. So, we have walking manuals, all sorts of driving manuals, but no cycling manuals. I don’t suspect any of the Complete Streets organizations have any type of road design manual, and even if they did, they wouldn’t give bikes enough attention. Scotland has a ‘Cycle Infrastructure Design‘ guide (pdf). Scotland also has this cool guide called ‘Building Sustainable Transport Into New Developments‘. The document repeatedly talks about walk+bike+transit+everything else, over and over and over again — in that order of priority. Nice. Maybe NACTO is working on something similar? Ah — here are a bunch of NACTO links. There’s an older/ugly, but useful document of Dutch road design on the ITE site (pdf). This is that funky, but very cool Dutch CROW group — tough to find reports in English.

Update: Moms with their kids in NYC. If you give people a chance to ride, they’re going to ride — it’s that simple.

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 mentioning names) 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.

The place is very cool. I can’t say I’m big into roadie/racing-type biking, but there was lots to see, even if racing is not your thing. Here’s some pre-event press from a Sacramento paper. The SacBee has some day of coverage with details on days and times open, admission fees, etc. The UC Davis (wiki) newspaper, The California Aggie, provided some great coverage, including details of Sunday’s Breakaway from Cancer bike ride from Davis to Santa Rosa:

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.

The Tour of California is almost here — May 16. Davis gets the start of Stage 2, on the 17th.

George Hincapie (R). Source: The Aggie

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.

Final note — I added a couple of ‘Thank you’s to the original “We’re live!” post — The Rails to Trails Conservancy (RTC), the SFBC, and the MCBC. We talked about the RTC a few months ago, and said they were, “an awesome bike and walk path-creating and and right-of-way-preserving organization.”

[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.

I have to say, I really like this idea of creating a world-class bicycle museum. Imagine being able to go into  a big, nice building in downtown somewhere and being able to check all the incredible bikes and lifestyles that biking offers. See Portland’s rain-ready bikes, San Francisco’s bike messenger bikes, Oakland’s scraper bikes, Austin’s custom bikes, Walmart’s cheap bikes, LA’s low-rider bikes, Huntington Beach’s beach cruiser bikes, New York’s fixed-gear bikes, Amsterdam’s cargo bikes, Ho Chi Minh’s pedicab bikes, London’s mail bikes, Paris’ beautiful delivery bikes, Copenhagen’s Christiania bikes, etc. etc. etc.!

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.

In Google’s words:

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.

StreetFilms has a number of ways you can help support the cause — straight donations, some with t-shirt and DVD gifts, sponsorship packages, you name it.

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!

If you cruise around the bike blogosphere, you’ll eventually run across this ad for the new bike directions feature of Google Maps:

I think the ad is kind of nifty, and I still can hardly believe it’s real.

One place I know I’ve seen the ad is over on this bikeportland.org post.

Anyways, saved for posterity’s sake.

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.

Maybe I might not be so crazy to think that Google Maps could have had that much of an influence already. Here’s the League of American Bicyclists’ Andy Clarke:

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.

Even the car people seem to suggest a casual, if not causal, connection between bike directions and the ‘sea change’ comments from LaHood:

First Google Bike Maps, now this.

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.

Happy riding!