Archive for the ‘Bicycles’ Category

What better way to conclude the Australasian Road Safety Conference, thought me, then to head out for a spot of cycling in Canberra, where spring is just on the wing. My guide was Ashley Carruthers, an anthropologist and member of local advocacy group Pedal Power (and my ride was a surprisingly nimble fold-up Dahon). Canberra is one of those intensely planned capital cities, its geography dictated by fiat and compromise, its layout and design (via the American Walter Burley Griffin) evoking, to my mind, D.C. — though, as Carruthers noted, reputedly infused with esoteric and hieroglyphic meanings. While the city, cycling wise, hasn’t gotten the attention of, say, Melbourne, with its new sharing scheme, Pedal Power boasts a large and active membership, and there’s a fairly wide trail network (though not much evidence of on-street cycling, in the area I was staying, at least).

Now, about that magpie, which I had tweeted about briefly in reference to its intoxicating song. It turns out they can be rather fierce enemies of those on bikes, swooping down from trees to land on their helmets and peck at their ears. As a countermeasure, riders will strap plastic twist-tie-like things to their helmets, virtually sprouting of their heads like gangly antennae. It was a bit unnerving to find a couple of these fellows coming toward me, the shock troops of some alien two-wheeled race. I’m not sure if this sort of thing happens elsewhere, but it was the first I had seen in such active preparation for avian attack. Yesterday, at least, the magpies were quiet.

… but the ETA (the one in the U.K., not Spain) says it’s not thinking creatively.

Over at the Nimble Cities project, I sift through some of the latest developments in bicycle infrastructure for cities, from “bicycle superhighways” to “bicycle boulevards,” that are being rolled out around the world. Further examples/concepts always welcome!

The WSJ’s Ralph Gardner, a hesitant city cyclist, writes:

Last year, the city passed a bill that went into effect several months ago requiring commercial garages with space for 100 or more cars to also set aside places for bicycles. The ratio is 10 spaces for the first 100 cars. After November 11, 2011, garages with only 50 spaces will also have to allow bicycles.

Sounds great. except for one thing: The law allows the market to set the going rate. My garage is charging—no joke—$175 plus 8.875% tax. That’s almost $200 a month to stow a bike! You probably won’t be surprised to hear it has no takers. As one attendant observed, “You can buy a new bike” for that amount.

Well, yeah, but on some bikes that price wouldn’t cover a single pedal. But in any case, perhaps not surprisingly, there seem to be few to no takers for $200 a month bike parking. The first question that came to my mind was why it was so expensive (when presumably you could fit upwards of a dozen bikes in a standard car spot), and then, secondly, why garages would charge such a high amount if no one seemed willing to pay it. Wouldn’t it better to make half (or anything above) the theoretical profit than no profit at all? I don’t know how these garages are set up, but if parking that bike means having to have an attendant park and retrieve it for you, I suppose the garages want to make sure the transaction costs are covered — i.e., if they charged cyclists ten bucks a month but then had to send attendants in search of bikes (when they could be retrieving more lucrative cars). In other words, do they essentially charge that much to not have to deal with the aggravation of dealing with parked bikes? But maybe the attendants don’t always have to fetch bikes; aren’t there some garages where the bikes are right within view? Do the city regulations on garages having to have a certain number of spots stipulate where and in what form those spots have to be?

Via Donald Shoup. I could watch this stuff all day. Not a helmet in sight.

With some out-of-town visitors to entertain, my destination yesterday was (where else!) the MTA’s Transit Museum. There I noticed a small detail that had escaped my notice prior — i.e., the presence of bike tolls on the Triborough Bridge. Can any transpo geeks out there enlighten us as to any more details about this? What was bike traffic like across the bridge when it opened? Was there a special toll booth, or did cyclists merge into a car lane? When was the toll scrapped? And for that matter, when did the (little-observed) policy of cyclists walking their bikes across the bridge(s) come into being?

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt

I’m in Shanghai at the moment, hence the gap in communication. Yesterday I trekked out to the World Expo (the typically anodyne theme: “Better City, Better Life”), a frenzied display of national industry, easy-to-digest cultural narratives, and pinpoint logistics (all those teams of marching soldiers, all those Disney style queue management systems). I began with the choreographed uplift of the USA and finished, reeling from the sun, with an earnest summation, from some rump sub-deputy minister, of all that Turkmenistan, that curious Caspian outpost rich in natural resources and the government corruption that goes along with it, had to offer (in short, architecturally decadent monuments, nice rugs, and pipelines — miles of pipelines; and now, Air Turkmenistan).

Where most countries went with grand, overarching messages of prowess, benevolence, and inclusivity, the day’s most rewarding experience had to go to the Danish pavilion, designed by Bjarke Ingels (who’ve interviewed several times in the past). Rather than overwhelm with several dozen messages, the approach at the Danish pavilion was simple: A white circular building, with perforated brise soleil style apertures, housing a white corkscrew ramp, rising from a pool containing Copenhagen’s famous Little Mermaid, up which one could walk — or, as pictured above, cycle (and that’s me, rather baking in the Shanghai sun) — along the way picking up a few discrete messages comparing Denmark and China across various indices. The whole way up, meanwhile, a long curving bench ran along the edge of the bike path, so people could sit, drink a Carlsberg, and watch the bike and pedestrian traffic go by, much like in Copenhagen itself (and I know Mikael from Copenhagenize will object to the helmets accompanying the bikes, but they were very nice helmets). It was charmingly low-key (yet somehow dramatic at the same time) and a more purely enjoyable experience than the multimedia fireworks going on elsewhere. I was wishing I could take the bike with me when I left — the Oman pavilion, so close on the map, was endlessly far away.

You know who you are.

But seriously, this etymological foray into the history of the word chauffeur has me, well, stoked.

Next up for Streetfilms: Ray Kelly?

Dan C. sends along this link to a case of a Texas cyclist who has been repeatedly arrested for the apparently radical (though seemingly legal) act of riding his bike on a road (and we’re not talking about an Interstate Highway here, but 30 mph local roads). Read all about it (and donate to his defense) here. As Commute Orlando points out, this sort of thing is not uncommon.

658304 from Bikesafer on Vimeo.

Via Jeff Frings, who politely tries to educate a driver (who’s clearly trying to overcompensate in all kinds of ways) on traffic laws. Later he’ll tell his long-suffering wife about some “idiot” cyclist on the road who wouldn’t get out of his way. It leaves one to wonder what actual percentage of drivers out there have a grasp of, say, more than 50% of the traffic code.

[The gist of the conversation is cyclist points out to driver that he's blown a stop sign and almost hit him; driving tells him to get on the f***ing sidewalk where he "belongs." Cyclist points out that that's illegal. Driver threatens bodily harm. Yadda. Yadda. Yadda.]

I know there’ve been guerilla lane paintings and the like, but just curious if anyone knows of examples where this model has been done in the world of two-wheeled infrastructure. The sponsor could check maintenance, remove debris, monitor double-parking violations — I dunno, even install tube vending machines or free air or some such.

Seeing Traffic positioned on a reading list recommended by Foreign Policy’s “Top 100″ thinkers had me in mind of book lists, and so I thought I’d round up the transportation-related books (or at least marginally so) that have crossed my desk this year and would make good holiday purchases for your mobility-minded friends (or yourself).

In no particular order:

1.) Joe Moran, On Roads. I’ve noted my interest in this book before, but suffice it to say it’s cracking cultural history of the U.K. motorway system, a must-buy for bitumen boffins everywhere.

2.) Ted Conover, The Routes of Man. OK, this one’s not out until February, but the galleys of this book accompanied me on a cross-country flight, and I was hooked. A far-flung, elegiac, honest examination of roads and their impact on us and society, Conover’s book ranges from the tangled “go slows” of Lagos, Nigeria to an (illicit) “capitalist road” trip in China.

3. The Yugo: The and Fall of the Worst Car in History, by Jason Vinc. If you’re old enough to remember actually riding in one of these things, and enough of an automotive-cultural obsessive to remember, say, the Yugo’s appearance in the plot-line of Moonlighting, then this tale of geo-political commerce is for you. And as Vinc reminds us, the Yugo was the “fastest-selling first-year European import in American history.”

4. Carjacked, by Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez.
OK, this is turning into next year’s list — this one’s not out until early January — but in Carjacked, an anthropologist and writer delve into American car culture — the romance that longed ago turned into marriage — and offer a thorough, gimlet-eyed assessment. Sample quote: “In the period from 1979 to 2002, the period in which seat belts, air bags and other improvements in vehicle crashworthiness were installed, U.S. crash deaths declined by just 16 percent, while those in Great Britain declined by 46 percent, in Canada by 50 percent, and in Australia by 51 percent.”

5. Waiting on a Train, by James McCommons. Shifting from road to rails, McCommon’s book is a cross-country trip into the modern-day heart of U.S. passenger rail (”service that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of,” notes James Howard Kunstler in his intro), laying bare the roots of its decline and offering a way forward for the country’s most embattled mode. And I’ve not read it yet, but Matthew Engel’s Eleven Minutes Late, a “train journey to the soul of Britain,” is definitely on my list.

6. Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution. Another one I’ve banged on about before about, but the go-to work on cycling as a form of transportation in America today. And full disclosure: The guy did lend me a bike to ride in Portland.

7. City: Rediscovering the Center. By William H. Whyte.
One of those rare books — reissued in paperback in 2009 — that actually lives up to the promise of “changing the way you see the world.” Along with the writing of Joseph Mitchell, I can’t think of any other title that has so influenced my experience of living in New York City.

8.
Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything (text by Stephen Bayley).
Because sometimes you just really want to look at a pretty picture of a 1955 Citroën DS.

9. Jeff in Venice, by Geoff Dyer. One of my favorite writers, and his description of driving in India does not disappoint.

Suggestions are welcome for others I may have left out.

I was struck recently, as I read David Byrne’s The Bicycle Diaries, by this passage, which refers to the author’s time in Buenos Aires:

Built on the floodplain of La Plata River, the city is fairly flat, and with the temperate weather and the streets more or less on a grid it is perfect for cycling around. Despite this I could count on one hand the number of locals I saw on bikes. Why? Would I inevitably find out the reason no one else was pedaling around here? Was there some dark secret explanation about to pounce on me? Am I a naive fool? Is it because the driving is so reckless, the theft so rampant, the gas so cheap, and a car such a necessary symbol of status? Is it so uncool to ride a bike here that even messengers find other ways of getting around?

I don’t think it is any of those reasons. I think the idea of cycling is simply off the radar here. The cycling meme hasn’t been dropped into the mix, or it never took hold. I am inclined to agree with Jared Diamond, who claims in his book Collapse that people develop cultural affinities for certain foods, ways of getting around, clothes, and habits of being that become so ingrained that they will, in his telling, persist in maintaining their habits even to the piont of driving themselves and sometimes their whole civilization to extinction.

I’ve not been to Buenos Aires, and it would certainly make an interesting South American point of comparison to, say, Bogota, where an activist mayor and many others helped to transform cycling in that city (and did I just read that Santiago is pursuing bike lanes rather energetically?). But it is an interesting question: The mixture of infrastructure, social norms, behavioral change, incentives, and whatever else is needed to get a bike culture off the ground. After all, as Mikael has noted of Copenhagen, for example, these things are not necessarily a fait accompli; Copenhagen could easily resemble Madrid or any other more auto-intensive European capital today were it not for a set of discrete historical events — and ongoing campaigns. Any cycling Porteñas happen to be reading and care to comment?

I thought of this again recently when an old chum from Portland, Steve Johnson at PSU, sent along his interesting essay on the prehistory of Portland’s bike renaissance. In the early 1970s, for example, he writes: “Sam Oakland estimated there to be about 400 people riding bicycles into downtown Portland on a daily basis (Frazier, 1971).” The number over the Hawthorne Bridge in 1975? 200. It’s a bit higher than that today, and the piece chronicles the long story of bureaucratic finagling, community activism, the endless hours of debates — bike lanes or bike education? — the entrenched opposition, the long miles traveled, etc., that have all led to this historical moment.

The BBC reports on what may be a troubling trend or a statistical aberration:

Many of the fatalities involving cyclists happen in collisions with a heavy goods vehicle (HGV). This year, seven of the eight people killed by lorries in London have been women.

Considering that women make only 28% of the UK’s cycling journeys, this seems extremely high.

One of the offered reasons seems to involve compliance with traffic regulations (the sort of thing drivers are always accusing cyclists of violating):

In 2007, an internal report for Transport for London concluded women cyclists are far more likely to be killed by lorries because, unlike men, they tend to obey red lights and wait at junctions in the driver’s blind spot.

The report said that male cyclists are generally quicker getting away from a red light - or, indeed, jump red lights - and so get out of the danger area.

This picks up on a theme explored by Ian Walker, the Warrington Cycle Campaign, and others: A new study finds cars pass more closely to bikes on roads with cycle lanes.

The study, which is due to be published in the scientific journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, says that on roads without cycle lanes, drivers “consciously perform an overtaking manoeuvre”. On roads with cycle lanes, they treat the space between the centre line and the outside edge of the cycle lane as exclusively their territory and make less adjustment for cyclists.

The study concludes: “Cycle lanes do not appear to provide greater space for cyclists in all conditions.” The Highway Code tells drivers to “give cyclists at least as much room as you would when overtaking a car”.

I’ve not read the study yet, so I’ll reserve further comment — save for my own suspicions that the presence of paint can both increase driver awareness but also encourage them to stop thinking — but this brings up a whole host of interesting accompanying issues: Does that proximity lead to less safety, either real or perceived? Do the car speeds differ on either street because of the presence or lack thereof of cycle lanes? Do the cycle lanes lead to an increase in cyclists? Do cycle lanes lead cyclists to behave differently?

As a primer I recommend this essay, not to mention Jeff Mapes’ book Pedaling Revolution.

(thanks to Prashanth in London)

I was struck by this post, about the bicycle-heavy back-to-school ritual in the Netherlands, at David Hembrow’s site. As he observes, “a few weeks before the start of the school term, banners and signs appear to remind drivers that children are to be expected to be on bikes in larger numbers again. The banner reads ‘The schools are starting again.’ ”

In the U.S., of course, it’s more common at this time of year for schools to send out notices that their “traffic patterns” have changed, meaning the location of where kids are picked up and dropped off, via car (and typically they’re changed because so many parents are driving their kids to school, and the parking lots have become not only congested, but safety hazards). Relatedly, I happened to read, over the DOT’s Fast Lane page, about Secretary Ray LaHood visiting a school in Peoria, where some young students gave him their thoughts on transportation and safety. I don’t know what they envisioned, but I was curious to note the school’s handbook, located here, which notes, “due to the volume of traffic in the parking lot, students should be dropped off and picked up and the Northmoor door of the school.”

The final thing to note, not surprisingly, is the WalkScore of the neighborhood where the school is located: 49 out of 100.

Two disturbing things across the transom. The former attorney general of Ontario, charged in the death of a cyclist in Toronto (ironically in light of the recent press on Chris Cavacuiti), apparently in some kind of altercation.

And in Wisconsin, a current legislator (one account says his license was once suspended) blows a red light, striking a cyclist.

(thanks Rob)

I just watched a solo driver in a massive Escalade with too-thin tires (new urban calculation: the thinner the tires, the longer the rap sheet) shout at two cyclists on my street as he passed (driving faster than the speed limit).

Then I came home to read this, from physician Chris Cavacuiti in Toronto, on understanding causality in car-bike collisions. I realize that science and reason often do not reign these days, if they ever did, but it’s nice, once in a while, to find there are people like this, correcting the lazy “bike-ist” misperceptions:

While there is a public perception that cyclists are usually the cause of accidents between cars and bikes, an analysis of Toronto police collision reports shows otherwise: The most common type of crash in this study involved a motorist entering an intersection and either failing to stop properly or proceeding before it was safe to do so. The second most common crash type involved a motorist overtaking unsafely. The third involved a motorist opening a door onto an oncoming cyclist. The study concluded that cyclists are the cause of less than 10 per cent of bike-car accidents in this study.

Mark Wagenbuur has put together a fascinating video (thanks to David Hembrow) on the evolution of a Dutch street (in Utrecht) over time; of particular interest is the creeping automobilization of the street in the 1970s-80s, only to see a subsequent reversion to historical precedents (or what we now call “complete streets”).