By Posted by melancholic optimist
A commenter on my last post mentioned that I wasn’t very specific about the monetary benefits of implementing the Portland Bicycle Plan, that is, of adding bicycle infrastructure and making it more attractive to ride bicycles (or walk) rather than drive. I started writing a comment in reply, but figured that would make a pretty good post all on its own, so here it goes.
There are a lot of potential benefits – firstly, much of the reason our roads are in bad shape, is that we have so many cars driving on them so often. If we can get more people riding bikes and walking more often, the roads will last considerably longer, as bicycle tires and feet do exponentially less damage to the roads. I think about this a lot, as many of the sidewalks in Portland are still there from as early as 1909, and are still serviceable. Busy road surfaces however, have to be repaved every few years in order to remain smooth, due to the volume of automobiles driving on them.
What many cities in Europe have found out, is that pedestrians and cyclists are better shoppers than those who arrive in automobiles. They are more able to stop on a whim, browse casually, and for those who don’t own a car, the fact that they aren’t spending loads on owning and operating an automobile all the time means they potentially have more money to spend. Many major shopping districts in European cities are car-free, and they thrive.
Active citizens are healthier citizens, and more productive citizens, and the city, as well as companies, pay money to support healthcare costs for the citizens of a city. An active lifestyle is one of the best preventative medicines, and countries in Europe have done studies that show the monetary benefits of having their workforce healthy and productive due to being regularly active are massive.
Traffic. We spend hours and hours sitting in our cars, wasting fuel, wasting time, polluting the air. Our streets simply cannot handle the volume of traffic we currently have, and we are expecting growth. Not only can we not afford to tear up our neighborhoods to build bigger roads (from a community point of view), we can much more easily afford to add bicycle infrastructure to our existing roads than build more roads. Portland’s entire 300 mile network of bikeways cost about the same as 1 mile of urban freeway. Granted, some of the stuff in the Portland Bicycle Plan is more expensive that what we have done so far, but it is still miniscule compared to the cost of building and maintaing automobile-only roads.
There is no shortage of news and information on this, and I’m sure a google search will provide many more specifics, studies and discussions on the topic. Here is a study from the European Cycling Federation to start (https://www.ecf.com/3379_1), and I know Mikael at Copenhagenize has also posted a number of times about this.
Obviously, people are still going to drive. I’m still going to drive, sometimes. However, currently 80% of trips in the U.S. are by single-occupancy automobile, and about 40% of all trips are 2 miles or under. The more people we can encourage to not drive when they don’t really need to, the better, in so many ways. Not just better for the "cyclists", but better for the city, better for the citizens, better for the businesses, better for the people who improve their health and save themselves money.
Continue reading “The monetary benefits of bicycle infrastructure”

By Jon Schmitz
Congress should get rid of fuel taxes and move toward a system that charges road users for the miles they travel, a leading national research organization said Wednesday.
A report by the RAND Corp. explored several different mechanisms for switching to a vehicle-miles-traveled fee, ranging from having motorists self-report their odometer readings to sophisticated onboard devices that track where and how far a driver goes.
A growing body of transportation experts, including two commissions established by Congress, has concluded that the per-gallon gasoline taxes that currently fund the lion’s share of highway budgets are obsolete and inadequate.
The 18.4-cent federal gas tax hasn’t been increased since 1993, and the advent of more fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel vehicles has further eroded that revenue source, causing the federal Highway Trust Fund to become insolvent.
"Failure to raise fuel taxes in recent years to keep pace with inflation and improved fuel economy has created significant transportation funding shortfalls at the federal and state levels," said Paul Sorensen, lead author of the RAND report.
"The prospect of more fuel-efficient conventional vehicles and alternative-fuel vehicles in the coming decades – though clearly beneficial in terms of the environment and energy security – threatens to make funding challenges worse. Shifting from fuel taxes to mileage-based road use fees would help to overcome this problem, and there are several promising options for implementing such a shift."
Since 1980, the total number of vehicle miles traveled in the United States has doubled but fuel consumption has increased only 50 percent, RAND reported. Charging by miles driven would place the burden for maintaining roads and bridges on those who use them most.
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Continue reading “RAND report suggests scrapping gas taxes in favor of per-mile levy”

Douglas Preston has been taking heat for his surprisingly acid comment in the New York Times vis a vis e-book pricing:
“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”
I won’t get into Wal-Mart or e-book pricing, but reading it I couldn’t help think of another form of American consumer: The driver. Just try floating the idea of a federal gas tax hike, simply to keep up with inflation (and, more ambitiously, to cover the actual costs of driving).
Continue reading “Entitlement”

Wile this video may not exactly encourage you to go out and ride in the snow but at least I hope it shows that cycling can be fun even in the snow.

2010 Snow-Cx-Opocalypse from Brian Butts on Vimeo.

[If they want to see non compliance with traffic laws they should come here.]
By Mary E. O’Leary, Register Topics Editor
NEW HAVEN — Assistant Police Chief Kenneth Gillespie worked in law enforcement in Los Angeles for years, but he said he has never experienced the culture of noncompliance with traffic laws that he found in New Haven.
Gillespie was one of a half-dozen city and state officials Friday who held a press conference, again pushing for legislation that would allow cities to put up cameras that would automatically record cars running red lights so owners could be fined.
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“When I came here, myself and (Police Chief James) Lewis were both surprised at the amount of hazardous moving violations that seemed to be an ongoing problem here in New Haven,” Gillespie said.
Continue reading “New Haven again urging green light for traffic cameras”