Thursday Morning Commute - Rebuttal

DDOT Director Terry Bellamy responds to WABA's charge that the agency is moving too slowly on bike lanes.

This year we have expanded the Capital Bikeshare system and are already planning to add 50 more stations and 500 more bikes next year in the District. That will include the first bikeshare stations on the National Mall. We have expanded our trail network along the Anacostia River and in addition to the new bike lanes installed on 11th Street, SE, Edgewood Street, NE and East Capitol Street, we’ve also installed several miles of sharrows across the city.

Also, I can tell you that we have more than 4 miles of planned bike lanes that are now ready for installation and will be put in as soon as the weather breaks in early spring. That includes:

•     Columbia Road, NW between Connecticut Avenue and 16th Street
•     4th Street, SW between Virginia Avenue and I Street
•     New York Avenue, NW between 15th Street and 9th Street
•     Upshur Street, NW between 8th Street and Rock Creek Church Road
•     I Street, SW/SE between 7th Street and New Jersey Avenue
•     Tilden Street, NW between Reno Road and Connecticut Avenue
•     R Street, NW between Florida Avenue and the Met Branch Trail

That list does not include additional bike lanes planned for 2012 or the crosstown cycletracks that are awaiting the completion of a study of the 15th Street and Pennsylvania lanes.

It is true that in the out years of the Bicycle Master Plan – now that the low hanging fruit has been picked – we are dealing with more complex environments and more constrained scenarios, which can extend the planning and development horizon for adding new lanes. With competing priorities, getting community buy-in for these projects can also be more complicated. That’s not an excuse; it’s the reality we face.

However, I can assure you, my commitment – and Mayor Gray’s commitment – to bicycling and bike lanes has not changed. We might not always move as fast as some would like, but if our progress slows from time to time that is not an indication of shifting priorities, but rather a reflection of the environment we’re working in, and our desire to do it right.

As Mayor Gray announced today, Census Bureau figures show the District is leading the nation in population growth. More and more people are moving here to enjoy the quality of life the city offers. We feel confident our joint effort to make the city more bicycle-friendly is one of the attractions, and we look forward to continuing to work with WABA and the community to gain more ground and make the District an even more desirable place to live, work, play and cycle.

I agree with most of what he's saying except for "that’s not an excuse." It is most definitely an excuse.

Yes. It has gotten harder to add bike lane miles. And everyone I know, knew that it would get harder. That means that if you want to meet the goals in the bike plan, you need to dedicate more resources to it, or move obstacles out of the way. So either the city never actually planned to build 10 miles per year or they've backed off that plan. But you can't argue that your "commitment has not changed" as you note that you are now going to be happy with smaller goals. That's the very definition of changing your commitment.

Just one year ago, DDOT thought it could get to 80 miles of bike lane by 2012. How were they going to do that? Were they just delusional.

Maybe this is our fault. What we thought we had was a commitment to build 10 miles of bike lane per year - or more under the action agenda. What we actually had was a commitment to dedicate a constant amount of manpower and money towards building bike lanes, and if that only gets 5 miles in one year, then that is all there will be. So I guess we can expect even fewer miles of bike lane in the future.

• One upside to the drop in the transit benefit that is sure to happen in January is that it might encourage some more people to walk or bike to work. If the benefit doesn't cover your whole month, you could bike on the nice days to lower cost. Still cheaper than buying a car.

Comments

[oboe]

Shorter Bellamy:

"Look at all this fantastic stuff we did before Gray came into office! The critique that we've failed to reach this year's goal on bike infrastructure is completely unfair--we have plans to do things next year."

I understand getting peevish, but WABA's point is just objectively factual.

I think Bellamy's doing a pretty good job considering the political constraints (i.e. that a good portion of his boss' political base is reflexively against bike lanes). But I have to say characterizing the 15th Street cycletracks and Penn Ave as "low-hanging fruit" is a bit silly.

Ok, a lot silly.

[SD]

Great post, David. You really cut to the essence of what he was saying with this: "But you can't argue that your "commitment has not changed" as you note that you are now going to be happy with smaller goals. That's the very definition of changing your commitment."

Fantastic stuff. I appreciated Director Bellamy's response yesterday, and I understood that as we build the "low-hanging fruit" that it gets more complicated, but this is exactly what I was thinking and hadn't quite figured out how to say.

I hope he sees this.

And relatedly, I wonder if he's actually read the 2005 master plan?

[jeff]

This is not a new complaint. If I recall, DDOT hasn't hit the 10 miles per year mark but maybe once since the plan was passed, despite other major cities averaging 10-50 a year. Despite the high commute numbers and success in bike share, DDOT has long been an under-performer when it comes to facility miles.

While I certainly applauded the Action Agenda, the 80 miles was always bit of a stretch, and seemed more about Klein's hopes than the reality of what the dept. could reasonably accomplish. I would have been happy with a benchmark of actually hitting the 10miles per year goal.

@oboe- 15th St and Penn Ave are most certainly low-hanging fruit. Both roads have excess space for their capacity levels and were redone with little more than some creative restriping (to the detriment of the safety of the facilities).

I think the lesson here is when the next bicycle master plan is written- or at least an update to the current one- that DDOT should not simply choose to do only the easy stuff first. There should be a better mix of high priority projects, even if it is at the cost of higher annual facility mileage. At this point the benchmark should be network connectivity and increased safe access to corridors not currently served by dedicated infrastructure regardless of the mileage.

[Chris]

As I think about this issue, I keep going back to the notion that a measurement of progress is, apparently, counting the miles of bike lanes built. Yet, when I actually take a look at the bike lanes, and use them, I wonder why. There are good bike lanes and bad ones, and there are ridiculous ones that are just plain unsafe to ride in. There are bike lanes that are rendered useless because motorists constantly use them for parking, and there are others that are so underused, I wonder why they were built to begin with. I'm just very frustrated by the notion that "progress" on bike-related issues seems to constantly go back to a simple metric like bike lane miles. I don't have an answer on what other measures should be considered, but I feel like somehow measuring how well the city is at cracking down at parking in bike lanes, or catching people for not using turn signals might be a lot more useful measurement of safety on the streets for cyclists.

[Dave]

@Chris - The LAB is partly to blame for that - lane-miles of bike lanes has become such a powerful metric that communities are perhaps more beholden to it than they should be.

[washcycle]

Chris, if Bellamy had taken that position - that bike lane mileage was no longer a metric they cared about and instead they cared about some other more direct metric (Miles Biked Between Injuries - in other words reducing injuries and increasing miles biked, for example) that would be fine - as long as he could say what they were going to do to get where they wanted to go and that that was measurable. But that isn't the position he took.

[w]

To take things into perspective, it is entirely within DDOT's capability to build out all lanes/facilities in the bike master plan in a single year. The fact that they don't just do it, and phase it in over some quantity of years is partly to manage the workload and partly due to other responsibilities, but the further the number of miles slips behind the goal of 10 just shows how the priorities at the top have changed.

Also, just because DDOT is expanding bikeshare doesn't mean they get a pass on following through on their commitment to expand infrastructure. CaBi expansion actually means new infrastructure is even more necessary.

[oboe]

@oboe- 15th St and Penn Ave are most certainly low-hanging fruit. Both roads have excess space for their capacity levels and were redone with little more than some creative restriping (to the detriment of the safety of the facilities).

Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but I remember the Penn Ave bike lanes were incredibly controversial when they were installed.

In fact, the reason they were restriped was not because they got it "wrong" but because they got it right the first time, but had to sub-optimize it because of political pressures.

Pretty much everything seems uncontroversial and "low-hanging" a year or two after it's implemented.

[washcycle]

Yeah, Penn Avenue is different. It was in the bike plan, but was done without other Penn Ave street work for political reasons. It was then redesigned, over the objections of the engineers and designers who knew best, again for political reasons.

[Tracy]

There are ALREADY bike lanes on part of I Street between 7th St. SW and New Jersey Ave. SE. It's great that they want to close the gap there, but why isn't the M St. SE/SW cycletrack lower-hanging fruit? Didn't the Capitol Riverfront BID already pay for the design of construction documents for that?