TheWashCycle

More Bike Lanes Coming to Adams Morgan

ANC1C has received word from DDOT that in the next few weeks bike lanes will be added to the following locations:

 

Harvard Street from Adams Mill to Argonne Place; and

Euclid Street from Columbia Road to 16th Street.

 

According to DDOT this is part of a citywide initiative to make bicycling safer and more convenient.

Photo by rocketjohnnyk

It turns out, Oregon has other Congressmen

From a recent edition of Power Breakfast

And finally this morning - how do you get to work? Congress wants to make it safer for you- to go on foot or by pedal. Democrat Peter Defazio is putting money into the transportation bill to improve safety for walkers and riders. He comes from Oregon - where bicycles are king.

"The key seems to be for a lot of people that they feel safe on a bicycle, and it seems feasible, not that they're going to have to follow an intricate, labrynthian route to avoid major roads."

DC Triathlon

DC Triathlon
Originally uploaded by foramenglow

WCS Triathlon

Adam Voiland snapped some photos of last Sunday's triathlon. I didn't get down to check it out, but I ate dinner across the street from the finish line on Saturday night.

Line-cutting

Melanie Snyder of Vienna recently wrote in to Dr. Gridlock

Scenario: I am driving along a lovely two-lane road. I approach a cyclist and patiently follow until I can swing out wide and pass. Not too far after, I come to a stoplight.

While we wait for the green, the cyclist passes all the waiting cars, sometimes running through the red light. Now the cyclist is first again, and all of us have to putt along behind until we can pass again. This seems wrong and dangerous.

Now let's ignore the red light running part. Running red lights is illegal, and thus wrong on one level at least. Whether it's necessarily dangerous is a discussion we've had many times before. But, this isn't what she'd really complaining about.

Her complaint rang true with others I talked to. After waiting behind a cyclist - sometimes for miles - for a safe chance to pass it is frustrating to find yourself behind them because they passed on the right and moved to the front of a line of stopped cars. This isn't illegal - if you can do it without crossing the white stop line, which is illegal. Of course, in some places road designers actually encourage cyclists to move to the head of the queue by creating Advanced Stop Lines or bike boxes - but these probably aren't on the kind of roads Ms. Snyder is describing.

Dr. Gridlock dances around the answer: "cyclists must follow the same rules as cars" (which isn't technically correct), cyclists are "still struggling for full recognition of their rights on the streets and for their share of transportation resources". But about as close to an opinion he gets to is "Cyclists who really believe that cycling should be part of the mainstream of America's transportation should... do what it takes to gain the support of other travelers."

Usually in this situation, I line up at the back of the line - I don't care to be passed by a bunch of angry drivers any more than they care to be stuck behind me. If there's more than one lane, or a shoulder or bike lane, then I move to the front if I can do so safely (yes, I cross the stop line if I can). But what do people think, is the situation she described rude - and, as always, this poll is highly unscientific, so please, no wagering.

New York Street Design Manual and JSK article

New York issued a new Street Design Manual. Richard Layman writes of it:

There is no question that the new New York City Street Design Manual is far more detailed and therefore likely more useful than the equivalent in DC, the DC Public Realm Design Handbook. The NYC manual is more descriptive and prescriptive. The DC manual is from 2007, and it doesn't include deep, specific details in the way that the NYC manual does.

For example, the DC manual outlines a hierarchy of streets, but doesn't provide detailed descriptions and a framework for treating each type of street.

The Times article notes

[The manual] also complements a broad push by the Bloomberg administration to make the city more amenable to pedestrians and bicyclists — with next week’s closing of parts of Broadway being one prominent, if controversial, example.

The manual itself features 6 pages on the geometry of bike lanes and paths. They break bike lanes up into three classes, with two types each.

Class I: Bike Path (think Cycletracks)
    Signal Protected Path
    Protected Path with mixing zones

Class II: Bike Lanes
    Buffered Lane - (pictured)
    Standard Bike Lane - what we mostly have in DC

Class III: Bike Route
    Shared Lane - with sharrows
    Signed Route
So far in DC we've only worked with the bottom three of these types. But I suspect we'll get to more later. There's a lot more to the manual than that, but It would take more than one post to go through it all.

Richard Layman also has a link to a New York Magazine article about NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

"Honk, Honk, Aaah" is interesting in part because of the comments appended by readers. Many are quite interesting, such as asking why is biking called elitist when it is cheap enough for anyone to partake? Another negative comment asks a reasonable question from a mobility standpoint, about taking away for new bike lanes, hundreds of parking spaces in outer borough areas where bicycling isn't prevalent, but response comments are interesting, etc.

From the article:

To her supporters, she is a heroic figure of vision and inspiration—the woman who tamed the automobile and made the city safe for bicyclists.

She lives in the West Village and often bikes to work.

She has fashioned herself the city’s streets commissioner, rather than the city’s traffic commissioner.

Her most visible markings are the bicycle lanes you see everywhere, 180 miles more of them since 2006.

The DOT’s last bicycle-program director, Andrew Vesselinovitch, had quit the year before, writing in the Times a month after he left that “our efforts were so rarely encouraged, and so often delayed, that I came to the conclusion that the department is not truly committed to promoting bicycling in New York.” That may have been mostly Weinshall’s doing, but some say the resistance came from higher up. “I’ve heard from DOT people that the mayor really doesn’t like bikes,” says one biking advocate. “He has that Upper East Side–pedestrian attitude. Getting run over by a Chinese deliveryman—that to him is a ‘cyclist.’ ”

Her chief policy adviser, Jon Orcutt, for example, is a former executive director of Transportation Alternatives, which was founded in 1973 as a confrontational pro-cyclist group and evolved into a more mainstream advocacy outfit. Says one person who has followed New York City transportation policy for many years, “I’ve been in this business a long time, and I am absolutely shocked to see how a group like Transportation Alternatives is literally writing transportation policy in the city of New York—unchecked.”

One early trip took her to Bogotá, Colombia, where the city’s former mayor, Enrique Peñalosa, led her on a five-hour bike tour. But Copenhagen, often called one of the world’s best-designed and most livable cities, has had a particular influence over her. The city center features eighteen car-free areas and several pedestrian promenades, all stitched together by an elaborate network of bicycle and pedestrian paths.

After angry residents intentionally blocked the [bike] lanes with their cars, a self-proclaimed group of “bike clowns” rode through the area in pointed hats handing out fake parking tickets and staging slapstick pileups.

Local business owners say the [wide protected] bike lanes have eroded their profits, preventing their customers from making quick curbside stops and forcing them to find new places to park delivery trucks. Gehl himself was initially unhappy with the design: He thought the bike lanes were too wide but was told they had to accommodate a standard-issue snowplow. And when you look at how the newly designed street gets used—the same amount of traffic in fewer lanes and a surplus of space for a fairly scant flow of cyclists—it can make even an enlightened urbanist wonder whether this was the most efficient reallocation of precious city space. It is certainly getting under the skin of some local merchants. “We’re pissed off,” the co-owner of Chelsea Florist on 22nd Street recently told the Villager.

But perhaps most important, there’s her obsession with the bicycle. Even though cycling is up in the city—levels have doubled since 2000, according to the DOT—most New Yorkers see a bike as a luxury, or don’t have the space to store it, or live and work in places that do not make for a practical commute. In the longer term, a city like New York might reorganize around a more bike-friendly vision, with more dedicated lanes and better routes stretching from midtown into the boroughs. But in the meantime, the transfer of street space from cars and trucks to bikes is a shift in power, one that disproportionately benefits what could be called Bloomberg-voting New York.

Sitting in a West Village coffee shop, Sadik-Khan does her best to refute her critics. “It’s not just about, you know, elite people on fancy bikes,” she says. “That’s one of the most cost-effective ways to get around, and in tough economic times you don’t pay to get on a bike"

If the Broadway plan does succeed, the next step (though Sadik-Khan is not talking this way publicly) will likely be to close more sections of Broadway until one day in the near future the entire boulevard has been converted to pedestrianized open space. It’s hard to characterize how dramatic a change that would be. Imagine a Manhattan with two major parks: one built in the nineteenth century as a confined space of bucolic wonder; the other refashioned in the 21st century as a long, open boulevard slicing the island on the diagonal.

Google Trail View - Now in America

Last time we checked in on Google Trail View, it was photographing the car-free roadways of Europe. Now, Google is taking it onto trails in the US (via BikePortland)

"Much of the world is inaccessible to the car," says Daniel Ratner, a Google senior engineer who designed the trike. "We want to get access to places people find important."

The project just got underway. So far, only a bike trail in Monterey, Calif., is up and running. Google has cyclists out now in California, Italy and the United Kingdom. The company says to look for hiking and biking images from those locations over the summer.

The addition of biking and hiking trails to Street View is a smooth marketing move, he says. "I see Google saying, 'You're freaked out by Street View, well, look at this. What's not to like about biking and hiking trails?' It makes the whole project now seem warm and fuzzy."

Ratner's trike is a modified three-wheeled bike, like the ones used to take tourists for a spin, with a huge antenna and camera on back. It looks so different from a normal bike that when people see him, they ask, " 'Is that a Google robot?' " Ratner says.

Rails to Trails and with Trails

As I clear out my school-induced backlog, I'm sorry to say that I failed to alert you of the opening of Virginia's newest section of rail trail. A 12-mile segment of the High Bridge Trail between Prospect and Farmville opened on June 6th at 9:00am (the same day as the Wilson Bridge opening - perhaps you could have done both - but it seems like a lot). This section connects with four miles opened in August of 2008. The High Bridge Trail will eventually run 33.8 miles from Pamplin to Burkeville, but right now only the 16 mile Prospect to Appomattox River section is open. The 2400 foot long High Bridge itself is the next scheduled section to be opened, a $2M project that is estimated to take about 18 months.

That's all pretty quick considering the train only quit running in 2004 and the ROW wasn't handed over until 2006.

The section open now sounds like a railroad buffs dream.

Examples of the isolation of this zone are everywhere… telegraph poles erected in the 1900’s still bear antique ceramic insulators. The original cement mile markers built by Norfolk Southern are in pristine condition and are considered the official trail markers. Each one of them are a historic landmark in their own right and a wonder to behold. To either sides of the trail are remnants of the old rail way signal system — signs and devices used by the engineers to determine their status along the rail system. In other places these treasures have been carted off to adorn private collections… but they have been spared that fate here.

But Virginia isn't just working on Rails to Trails. It's working on Rails with Trails too.

The VBF and 31 other organizations are calling for the inclusion of bike and pedestrian facilities on future rail upgrade, enhancement and improvement projects throughout Virginia and the United States.

Among the groups adding their support are ... the Washington Area Bicycling Association, a powerful force for bike advocacy in our nation’s capital.

Besides freight corridor projects, such as the I-81, “Crescent Corridor” and “Heartland Corridor” running from Chicago to Portsmouth, VA, there are currently ten major high-speed passenger rail corridors proposed for improvement along the east coast, according to the Department of Rail and Public Transportation’s, Director, Charles M.  “Chip” Badger.  In a presentation to the Virginia Commonwealth Transportation Board on June 17, Mr. Badger stated that over $8 Billion in federal capitol grants have been proposed under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to improve rail passenger services.  These funds will be available until September 30, 2012.  $1B will then be allocated each year for five years to supplement these projects.

The VBF feels that some of these tax dollars should be used to include multi-modal, bike and pedestrian paths as projects as these corridors are upgraded.

Including trails with future rail projects could be an enormous boon to cyclists, it's like "Complete Rails."

Finally, in news for rail trails, the Surface Transportation Board has scheduled a public hearing for July 8 at its headquarters in Washington, D. C., "to examine the impact, effectiveness, and future of rail banking" under the National Trails System Act now that's it 25 years old.

The hearing now scheduled on the program's future arises out of "an increasing number of questions brought to the board informally."

Formally, the board has pending a proposal involving R. J. Corman Railroad Co./Pennsylvania Lines Inc. in Clearfield County ,Pa., to construct and operate over 10 miles of a previously abandoned right-of-way and reactivate a 9.3-mile portion of a connecting rail-banked line. STB has been informally asked "who would be responsible for bearing the cost of rebuilding a railroad bridge removed during interim trail use if active rail service should ever be restored."

This is one of the questions STB will tackle as it seeks to determine how successful rail-banking has been for both carriers and trail users.

Rail-banking is a critical tool for trail building, but it relies on the idea that the rail corridor is actually banked. If lines cannot be restored when needed, it will remove one of the key reasons of support for the program.

To date, the Board has authorized nine rail banked lines for the restoration of rail service.

The question of who pays for a removed bridge could have expensive implications, but unfortunately the other "informal" questions are not mentioned.

Any person wishing to speak at the hearing should file with the Board a combined notice of intent to participate (identifying the party, the proposed speaker, the time requested, and the topic(s) to be covered) and the person’s written testimony, as soon as possible, but no later than June 29, 2009. Also, any interested person who wishes to submit a written statement without appearing at the July 8 hearing should file that statement by June 29, 2009.

Lawyer's Road Diet

FABB  has been covering the proposed Lawyer's Road changes pretty regularly, so I haven't, but last week Dr. Gridlock picked it up too. VDOT is proposing to restripe Layers Road, between Fox Mill Rd and Myrtle Lane in Reston, from 4 to 3 lanes with 5-foot bike lanes (as shown). Despite some objections ("there are other routes available to cyclists", "the road is too dangerous for cyclists", "this will cause congestion") comments have run 3-1 in favor of the restriping. Dr. Gridlock points out

Over the past three years, there were 56 crashes on this two-mile section. VDOT engineers estimate that 15 of those could have been avoided. Several vehicles have been hit from behind while waiting to turn left. So traffic engineers think they could reduce the crashes by at least a fifth just by restriping the roadway. "VDOT has identified a no-cost approach to reduce vehicle crashes and improve safety on Lawyers Road while also giving cyclists additional travel options."

He points out that people think that dieted roads cause congestion and that they looks more dangerous, but on Arcola Avenue or Connecticutt Avenue drivers have gotten used to it.

"One of the major hazards on our roadways in Montgomery County"

There were a couple of recent articles about speeding, the efforts to reduce it and the theoretical impacts of those efforts. Speeding, and it's compatriot aggressive driving, is one of the largest, if not the largest, threat to all road users.

In Virginia, 183 lives were lost in speed-related crashes during 2007, the latest year with complete statistics. That was a 9 percent increase from 2006. The Maryland numbers show that from 2005 to 2007, aggressive driving killed an average of 75 people per year. That was an increase from the previous three years, during which an average of 64 people died in aggressive driving crashes.

"One of the simplest ways to reduce aggressive driving is to reduce your speed," said United States Park Police Chief Sal Lauro

So the Smooth Operator campaign, that targets aggressive driving during waves in July, August and September, is a good step toward reducing traffic fatalities.

They issue lots of tickets: Almost three million since the campaign began in 1997.

It's worth noting that enforcing speed limits appears to be having some positive effects.

Montgomery County police credit the county's 60 speed cameras with helping cut in half the number of traffic fatalities.

Nine people have died in traffic accidents so far this year. During the same time frame last year, 19 had been killed. In 2007, 18 had died.

My inner scientist is, of course, recoiling at the idea that one half a year makes a trend. If there had been 25 deaths would they have called the cameras a flop? Or that only cameras can be credited (people are driving less and were, for a while, buying smaller cars - for example). But if they installed cameras to slow people down to improve safety, and then people slowed down and the roads became safer

A 2008 study of 11 camera locations found a 25 percent reduction in crashes on the roads where the speed cameras were located.

It is reasonable to assume that the cameras should get some credit - if not the lion's share. As Prof. Steven Dutch puts it "Correlation doesn't prove causation when there is no plausible link between two phenomena, or when there is some more plausible cause. But if there is a plausible link, then correlation is very strong evidence for causation."

I've heard several arguments against speed cameras; such as privacy issues, not being able to face your accuser, manipulation of the data or circumstances to increase violations and, thus, revenue. But this is a new one:

"I am against the speed cameras. No. 1, I don't think they pick up one of the major hazards on our roadways in Montgomery County right now -- bicyclists," resident [Name redacted at person's request] told the Montgomery County Council.

Really? Bicyclists? Not drunk drivers? Not inattentive drivers? Especially since we're talking about speed cameras (not red light cameras) - and it is very difficult for cyclists to speed. Bikes just aren't that big a hazard - in comparison. In NYC, where there is a larger bike share than Montgomery County, and many delivery cyclists, here are the average fatalities based on NYC DOT and NYPD data from the period 1990-1995.

Pedestrians Killed by Bicyclists: 1 annually
Pedestrians Killed by Motor Vehicles: 250 annually

Pedestrians Struck by Bicyclists: 500 annually
Pedestrians Struck by Motor Vehicles: 13,000 annually

And there are not 250 cars for every bicycle. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, even on sidewalks, more pedestrians are injured by cars than by bicycles.

Furthermore being against speed cameras because they don't stop bad behavior by cyclists, is like being against penicillin because it doesn't cure carpal tunnel syndrome. That isn't the point. If he wants to be FOR enforcement for cyclist, that's fine - but that isn't a reason to oppose speed cameras.

In recent dust-ups like the one over Loudoun County's ticketing of cyclists on an MS ride, people like to point out that cyclists have the same responsibilities as drivers. Cyclists have the same obligations - to operate their vehicle safely, legally and courteously - but not the same responsibilities as the driver of a 2000 lb machine that could (and does) easily kill if mishandled. Cyclists do, on occasion, kill pedestrians, other cyclists and even motorist with bad behavior - but it is pretty rare. Even if you wanted to kill someone with your bike, I'm not sure you'd be successful half the time (and you'd injure yourself so badly, you probably wouldn't try more than once).

So, same obligations, different levels of responsibility - that's one reason why we let kids bike, but not drive. And why we require drivers to demonstrate limited proficiency before being allowed to drive. Driving, we recognize, requires more responsibility.

This is not to excuse bad bicycling behavior, and cyclists can do more to ensure their own safety and that of others; but the idea that we represent "one of the major hazards" on the roadways is just ridiculous. Maybe by hazard [Name redacted at person's request] meant "something that keeps me from speeding."