Tuesday Morning Commute - Everything is free

Good morning. My parents, lifelong Kentucky Wildcats fans, are probably still drunk.

• Alexandria Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee ride on April 14. "we will do a 13 mile ride from Old Town to National Harbor, with a detour to visit Oxon Hill Farms Park (at the head of the trail leading north into Washington DC). 
  Along the way we will discuss bicycle and pedestrian connections (and disconnections) and how they affect commerce on both sides of the Potomac.  According to our data, about 1 million people ride into Old Town on the Mt Vernon Trail each year.  With better bicycle connections, many of them could be guided towards shops in Old Town."
• Townson University experiments with a free bike rental program and it appears to be a hit. 
• April Fool's joke.
• According to one study, the net social gain of biking is $0.42 per mile. Which means if Americans biked to work as often as people in Copenhagen do, it would be a $17 billion gain every year (of course, 35 percent nationwide probably isn't doable).
• OT: Pepco is still offering free trees.

Comments

[Herman_Newticks]

More on the endless debate on jerks on the road. article's not bad. Comments are meh...
http://grist.org/biking/the-a-biker-problem-why-its-hard-to-share-the-road/

[charlie]

while I don't think biking to work is particarly healthy, that $17 billion number is too low. 1/3 of working americans (that is about probably about 60 million bike commuters) at 42 cents a mile. Assume 10 miles round trip to work (again, that is a low ball but realisticly ok for biking) and that is 600 million a working day, or $252M saving a day, or about 65B a year.

$17 billion a year is about what we spend on oil every week.

[Kolohe]

"According to our data, about 1 million people ride into Old Town on the Mt Vernon Trail each year. With better bicycle connections, many of them could be guided towards shops in Old Town."

Kind of an odd statement considering the Mount Vernon trail goes right through the intersection of Union Street and King Street pretty close to smack dab in the center of everything.

(what's out of the way is National Harbor, with the dirt path, and Oxon Hill, with the, well, hill)

[Kolohe]

And another two cents, what would be worthwhile is more connections between the MVT and Del Ray, which is one or two connections from being sufficiently easy for the casual cyclists.

[Jonathan Krall]

@Kolohe My observation is that lots of cyclists stop on Union St and spend money (in that I agree with you). However, the connections into the rest of Old Town aren't very inviting. The bike/ped counts that we (Alexandria BPAC) have been doing show low numbers of cyclists on Prince and Cameron Streets (count locations just west of Washington St).

As it turns out, Commonwealth and Mt Vernon had the largest bicycle numbers _not_ on a bike trail. I conclude that the pretty good connection to the Mt Vernon Trail to the north is making this route attractive to cyclists. But I agree that many more and better connections between Del Ray and the rest of the bike network would help a lot. If you want I can send you the first report from last year on this counting program (get in touch via the BPAC web site).