baltimorespokes

From the League of American Bicyclists

The draft of the Senate’s transportation authorization bill, S. 1813 Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, includes language that would introduce a mandatory sidepath law on roads in our National Parks and other Federal lands. It requires cyclists on Federal lands to use a path or trail, instead of roads, if the speed limit is over 30 MPH and a trail exists within 100 yards, regardless of its condition or utility of the path. The provision sets a terrible precedent. Passing it would send the wrong message to transportation agencies that these policies are acceptable. Laws like this have been taken off the books in states over the past 30 years. This takes us in the wrong direction.

For more information, read Andy Clarke’s blog post. 

The League is working on many other aspects of the transportation reauthorization bill. This petition relates specifically to the mandatory sidepath law, which we felt deserved special attention. Stay tuned for news and action alerts related to this and other aspects of this critical legislation.

Please join us in telling the Senate that the mandatory sidepath law is a bad idea –

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https://www.bikeleague.org/petition/

After a two year loan to the United States,
Michelangelo’s David is being returned to Italy… And a word of thanks to the proud sponsors that made his visit possible – McDonalds, Starbucks, & Burger King.

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[B’ Spokes: I just had to share this.]
Continue reading “After a two year loan to the United States, Michelangelo’s David is being returned to Italy”

For those of you following this, a nice rundown of the issues here: https://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/11/09/two-year-transpo-bill-moves-on-to-full-senate-without-bikeped-protections/

If people chose to take half of their car trips on two wheels instead of four, health care costs could drop by billions.
By Emily Sohn
THE GIST
* Biking instead of driving could save billions of dollars in health costs and thousands of lives.
* Cities with more biking infrastructure see lower rates of disease.
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Compared to driving, bicycling is clearly better for the environment and your health. But how much better is it?
A new study offers some hard numbers: If people in the upper Midwest chose to take half of their car trips by bicycle, health care costs would drop by $7 billion. And with better air quality for its now more-fit citizens, the region would end up with an estimated 1,100 fewer deaths each year.
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Continue reading “BICYCLING COULD SAVE BILLIONS”

{B’ Spokes: This is not good. For me the whole issue on why we need bike/ped money in the first place is because a lot of road engineers thought it would be good to save a penny or two on the dollar and build roads for cars only. And now they are trying to build more car only roads… as I said, not good.]

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Excerpt from Washcycle:

But if the effective loss of federal funding isn’t enough, there’s also the loss of access to federal roads (page 226 ):

(d) BICYCLE SAFETY.—The Secretary of the appropriate Federal land management agency shall prohibit the use of bicycles on each federally owned road that has a speed limit of 30 miles per hour or greater and an adjacent paved path for use by bicycles within 100 yards of the road.

Even if the trail is in very bad shape, and the road is perfectly safe, the Secretary will have no leeway to allow cyclists to continue to use the road if a trail is available. This is very bad policy.  Among other things it would end biking on portions of the Rock Creek Parkway where the speed limit is 35 mph.

Not that I think this rule is needed, but it’s especially bad to set the limit at 30mph – which is far too low for banning cycling. And 100 yards is a very wide net. A trail that far away serves a very different purpose than a trail just off the road.

Continue reading “Senate Transportation bill is bad for cyclists, bans biking where trail exists”