Tag Archives: cycling

bike lanes need to be protected

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I’ve always felt that drivers are more reckless on streets with bike lanes. A new study confirms this. So bike lanes need to be separated and protected to be safe. This is especially acute where I live in Philadelphia, where we have faded, poorly marked bike lanes and vehicles constantly blocking the bike lanes causing bikers to merge in and out of sometimes fast moving, often angry traffic including trucks. Still, if I have to get hit by a car on a relatively slow residential street, I think I would rather be side-swiped rather than run over from behind. Riding with the flow of traffic scares me because if an inattentive driver hits you from behind while you are making a legal stop at a stop light or stop sign, you could very well die, whereas if you are sideswiped, you have a reasonable change to crash land on the curb or run into a parked car, pedestrian, or something else to absorb some energy and slow you down hopefully without killing you. None of these things should ever happen of course, it is just cowardly and ignorant politicians and bureaucrats who are putting their citizens and children at risk when solutions are available.

cars vs. meat

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This study attempts to find a hypothetical case where a person who bikes to work has a higher carbon footprint than a person who drives to work. I’m drastically oversimplifying, I’m sure, but what I gather is that if a vegetarian with a very fuel efficient car lived the same distance from work as a person who eats a huge amount of meat but bikes to work, the person who bikes to work could have a slightly higher carbon footprint. It is surprising, but I don’t think the right way to spin it is to say biking is bad. For one thing, people who bike to work are going to live much, much closer to work on average than people who drive to work. I also bet people who drive a lot eat more meat, on average, than people who don’t. Because steak and SUVs just go together. But I think the right take home message is that driving and meat are both pretty bad, environmentally speaking. If you want to help the environment, these are probably the two things you can limit or give up that will do the most good.

dots moving around on a map

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This is just dots moving around on a map, but I find these dots very engaging in helping me understand urban planning concepts and results of a simulation.

I found this on R bloggers, which talks about how the simulation and map were created.

Data Scientist Todd Schneider has followed-up on his tour-de-force analysis of Taxi Rides in NYC with a similar analysis of the Citi Bike data. Check out the wonderful animation of bike rides on September 16 below. While the Citi Bike data doesn’t include actual trajectories (just the pick-up and drop-off locations), Todd has “interpolated” these points using Google Maps biking directions. Though these may not match actual routes (and gives extra weight to roads with bike lanes), it’s nonetheless an elegant visualization of bike commuter patterns in the city.

protected bike lanes now!

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Helmets don’t do anything. We want protected bike lanes now!

What the researchers failed to find was any connection between helmet laws and bike-related hospitalization rates. That held true whether they looked at all cycling injuries or just traffic-specific injuries. Surprisingly, it also held true when they narrowed in on body parts protected by a helmet: the brain, head, scalp, skull, face, even neck. Since helmet laws don’t necessarily mean compliance, they looked at helmet usage, too, and once again found nothing.

The point is not that helmets do nothing or that you shouldn’t wear them. If you fall off your bike and hit your head, it’s obviously much better to have a helmet on. At a personal level, if that’s what it takes to get you riding, by all means, helmet up. But at the local government level, it’s time to recognize that other safety measures have far greater public health benefits—in particular, well-designed infrastructure that separates riders from general traffic.

biking as the only form of transport

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This article has an interesting slide show on what a city really designed around biking (aka cycling) might look like. Bike lanes go right into and out of buildings. I like the concept, but I wonder what it would be like to walk in this city. I like the idea of a city built for walking as the first and preferred form of transport, then bicycling second, then maybe personal rapid transit third. In my utopia, homes, work places, shopping/resting/gathering places, and natural areas are located so that most people take most daily trips on foot, hop on their bikes a few times a week to go to a meeting or visit friends across town, and hop on some form of motorized transportation maybe once or twice a month to go out of town. Actually that pretty much describes my typical month right here in decidedly non-utopian Philadelphia, USA.

benefits of cycling infrastructure

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From New Zealand, here’s a cost-benefit analysis of cycling infrastructure based on a participatory system dynamics model.

Methods: We used system dynamics modeling (SDM) to compare realistic policies, incorporating feedback effects, nonlinear relationships, and time delays between variables. We developed a system dynamics model of commuter bicycling through interviews and workshops with policy, community, and academic stakeholders. We incorporated best available evidence to simulate five policy scenarios over the next 40 years in Auckland, New Zealand. Injury, physical activity, fuel costs, air pollution, and carbon emissions outcomes were simulated.

Results: Using the simulation model, we demonstrated the kinds of policies that would likely be needed to change a historical pattern of decline in cycling into a pattern of growth that would meet policy goals. Our model projections suggest that transforming urban roads over the next 40 years, using best practice physical separation on main roads and bicycle-friendly speed reduction on local streets, would yield benefits 10–25 times greater than costs.

causal loop diagram

protected bike lanes

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Continuing on my recent transportation theme, this article on Alternet has some really good statistics on protected bike lanes. I am convinced that biking (a.k.a. cycling) is just a more practical way to get around urban areas than cars – it gets more people from point A to point B with less infrastructure, less cost, less wasted space, and no pollution. Plus, it promotes a more healthful, active lifestyle and urban design that supports that.

But for all this to happen, we have to build cycling infrastructure that is truly safe, and the U.S. just hasn’t fully committed to that. There are signs of hope, however – here are some of the statistics I’m talking about:

  • 27% of all trips in the Netherlands are made on bicycles. The Dutch designs are not secret but are available here (although their manual costs 90 Euros and it is not clear to me whether an English version is available).
  • The “pioneering” American city in protected bike lanes is…Montreal with over 30 miles (I just remembered, Canada shares our North American continent). But New York City has caught up and surpassed them with 43 miles. Other cities are Chicago (23 miles), San Francisco (12 miles), Austin (9 miles), and D.C. (7 miles). (Here in my native Philadelphia, we have not built protected bike lanes but have closed some lanes to traffic and painted some new stripes on the streets that would allow us to eventually separate them. Philadelphia has a burgeoning cycling culture and I think eventually it will happen. We don’t like to do anything first, we always sit back and watch what New York is doing for a few years before we build up the courage to try something new.)
  • Studies are finding that bike infrastructure boosts retail sales – 49% for a street in New York, 24% in Portland – and 65% of merchants surveyed reporting positive effects in San Francisco. (I’m not surprised by this – there is less space wasted on car travel lanes and parking, less time wasted circling around looking for parking, less money spent on parking, more room for trees and fountains and sidewalk cafes – you have more people in a given space, yet less crowding, with more time and money on their hands and a nicer environment where they want to hang around.)
  • And…duh…protected bike lanes are safer for everyone, and add more capacity to move more people at much lower cost compared to new traffic lanes.

The article also links to this fantastic collection of articles and data on protected bike lanes from “peopleforbikes“.