Sunday Afternoon Ride

Still digging out of the backlog

• Frederick wants to become Maryland's first Bicycle Friendly Community. Unfortunately, that title already belongs to Rockville, MD (which then lost it's designation two years later). They can't be Maryland's only one either. That is currently Baltimore. But they could be Maryland's first community to get Silver.
• WABA has a new forum just for women.
• Fairfax County has no bike parking requirements.
• Recissions of federal highway funds were announced by states last month. While programs that fund biking were hit pretty hard nationally, regionally things were nearly as bad. Rails to Trails annalyzed the recissions and it turns out DC chose to return 0% of their Transportation Enhancement money. Bike League notes "For example, after the last round of rescission, Washington Area Bicycle Association (WABA) members sent almost 700 emails to the DOT director to express displeasure with bike/ped rescissions. This time DC was among those that rescinded nothing for TE." Maryland and Virginia returned slightly more than a proportional percentage of there TE money (1.3 and 1.4 times respectively) but that still put them in 17th and 18th place nationwide.  But DC's awesomeness goes farther. DC also gave back $0 of the Rec Trails money and $0 of the CMAQ money. That is solid support of cycling (and walking and other programs). My mother would say that a handwritten thank you note is in order. Virginia also gave back $0 from Rec Trails, but $3,584,484 from CMAQ. Maryland did the worst though. They gave back $90,248 from Rec Trails - which doesn't even require a match - and $4,235,975 from CMAQ. 

Comments

[SJE]

Maryland can't find the cash to keep the CCT clear after storms yet gave back free $$$$? Was there no way that they couldn't have asked to have some of the $ go to maintainance?

[Jim]

I'd say Maryland did better than Virginia, as far as bike-ped goes. VA gave back $1.8 million in TE while MDE gave back $960,000 in TE plus $90,000 in rec trails. So 3.3% of the VA rescission is for bike-ped, while 3% of the MD recission is bike-ped.

The CMAQ funds tend to go to diesel retrofits, commuter parking lots. In theory they can go to bike-ped but they usually do not so I would not lump them in.

Nationwide, 27% of the rescission came from enhancements, while only 0, 2.7, and 3.3% for DC, MD, and VA. So we didn't do so bad.

The CMAQ money

[SJE]

Jim, did you mean to truncate your message?

[Shane (WABA)]

Just wanted to note that those emails from WABA requesting "proportionality or better" in rescissions went not just to District leaders, but also leaders in similar positions in Maryland and Virginia. The District's leadership was not uniquely targeted by WABA, but certainly responded most favorably.