An interesting article that touches on what might the future hold after peek energy and makes a strong case that bicycles (with certain modifications) have a lot to offer for a wide variety of uses and appeal to a lot of different types of people. There is a short discussion that while electric cars are a step in the right direction it is a small step, as it takes a lot of energy trying to utilize a one ton apparatus to haul just one person.
Continue reading “A Quiet Revolution in Bicycles: Recapturing a Role as Utilitarian People-Movers (Part I)”
Loch Raven reservoir update
[From our mail box:]
The group ran into Dept of Public Works Natural Resource Div officer Simon Phillips on the fireroad. This was on the back side of the reservoir near the small dam. He was clearing the fireroad of debris when the group rode up on him. He informed us that we were riding on a fireroad that was not authorized for recreational use. He sympathized with our cause but was committed in doing his job by the book. The officers receive their direction from the Dept of Publc Works. It is in our best interest to be receptive and non confrontational until this is resolved.
The DPW is enforcing the laws that have been on the books since 1999 in regards to recreational use of the watershed. People will be given verbal warning with the second warning resulting in a possible $100.00 fine. Warnings and fines are discretionary. Blatant night riding well after dusk appears to be an automatic fine.
It is rumored that a MB singletrack user on the Seminary trail received a $100 hit Sat. This was overheard in Performance bike shop. Several riders on the Merrymans loop received warnings and or tkts also. If you have not heard, 8-10 riders on 11/18 were given $100 tkts on the singletrack climb out to Providence Rd from the fireroad off of the Seminary loop.
The fireroads that appear to be ok to use are- 1. Seminary fireroad. 2. Providence Rd and Loch Raven Drive fireroad near gate. 3.Jarretsvile Turnpike entrance across from white house to Merrymans fireroad. Parking back on Dulaney Valley Rd. 4. Loch Raven Drive across from small island. Fireroad sits back off of the road about 25 yards. Fireroad is on left before bridge with cement sides. Please check DPW website for verification and maps. https://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/government/dpw/water/rnrs/index.php
You can use this web site to view the MB plan for Loch Raven. Map at bottom of plan page.
We were told that singletrack use is off limits to everyone at ALL. times. This applies to fisherman, hikers, joggers, equestians (horses), and MB. Sounds crazy but it sounds like that are going to follow the book with a magnifying glass.
Trail markings will be forthcoming. This will help designate trails that can be used for recreational use.
There will be a hearing on Mon 12/14 with the DPW and Mary Pat Clark (Balto City Council). Open to the public. Location and time will follow as soon as I find out. Please prepare concerns, ideas / solutions.
Finally, you are encourages to join MORE. They appear to be our best advocates locally. www.more-mtb.org/
Anne Mustoe: headmistress and round-the-world cyclist
It is an exceptional author who can supply a book with three appendices so varied as a technical specification of a bicycle, a timeline of the life of Cleopatra and an ichthyological listing.
Admirers of the intrepid former headmistress turned round-the-world cyclist Anne Mustoe were well accustomed to such precise, detailed and charming information in the books in which she chronicled what she termed her “new career”. When she resolved to cycle round the world, Mustoe was 54, somewhat overweight and unfit, and without any idea of how to mend a puncture. She had not ridden a bike for 30 years, wobbled when she tried again, and she hated camping, picnics and discomfort.
Yet, inspired by the chance sighting of a solitary European man pedalling across the Great Thar Desert while she was riding a bus through Rajasthan on a holiday in India, she “traded in the Kurt Geiger shoes and the Alfa Romeo” for a pair of trainers and cycle clips.
Her Condor bicycle, customised for her by a mechanic with a workshop in the Old Kent Road, was bought for her as a leaving present from the girls at her school, and she was still riding it 22 years and about 100,000 miles later on her last cycle trip this year.
Continue reading “Anne Mustoe: headmistress and round-the-world cyclist”
Report on Roland Park’s Sunday Streets pilot: 25 October 2009
26
November 2009
Report
on the 25 October 2009 Roland Avenue Sunday
Streets pilot
Prepared
by
Mike McQuestion, co-Chair, Sustainability Initiative
(mike.mcquestion@gmail.com)
Phil Spevak, President (pjspevak@gmail.com)
Roland Park Civic League
Background
Through its Sunday
Streets Program, the City of Baltimore proposes to close off
selected streets to motorized traffic during Sunday mornings, making
them available for recreational use. Sunday Streets is modeled
on Bogota, Colombia’s ciclovia.
Every Sunday, from 8AM until 1PM, a network of normally busy Bogota
streets is closed to motorists, allowing up to 1.7m residents to
traverse the city on bicycles, rollerblades, skateboards or on foot.
Bogota’s ciclovia has operated weekly since the early
1980s, providing residents in 70% of the city’s neighborhoods
with easily accessible recreational opportunities. The idea is
catching on. European examples include Copenhagen and Paris. In
Switzerland’s
Slow Up Program, 35-50km segments of particularly
scenic roads are closed on consecutive Sundays during the summer
months for pedestrians, skaters and cyclists to use. At this
writing, 38 cities in eleven countries have organized ciclovias.
Routes range from 1 to 121 km in length. Duration of ciclovia
events ranges from 2 to 12 hours. The number of events ranges from 18
to 64 per year. Annual budgets range from US$45k to US$2.08m. In
Seattle WA, Cambridge MA, San Francisco CA and El Paso TX, ciclovias
happen at least every month during the cycling season. Ciclovia
programs are credited with improving physical fitness, engaging young
people in constructive social activities and increasing neighborhood
cohesiveness (Sarmiento
et al 2008).
Sunday Streets
is an integral part of Baltimore’s
2009 Sustainability Plan.
The City’s
street network is particularly conducive to Sunday Streets.
(For more on this, see Baltimore’s 2006
Master Bicycle Plan.
City planners
prepared a detailed Sunday Streets implementation plan nearly
three years ago. The plan identifies specific streets and outlines
logistic and security procedures for the Police and Transportation
Department to follow. However, it has never been implemented,
ostensibly for budgetary reasons.
Supporters of
Baltimore’s Sunday Streets Program include the local
bicycling advocacy group One
Less Car. In 2008, One Less Car developed a 5-mile
Sunday Streets pilot route which runs from Lake Montebello to
Druid Hill Park along 33rd Street. This “lake-to-lake”
pilot, proposed for August 2008, was not implemented, again for
budgetary reasons (see below).
On October 25, 2009,
a modest, one-mile long Sunday Streets pilot was carried out
successfully on Roland Avenue, sponsored by the Roland
Park Civic League. Details of that experience are
described below. Most notably, the activity was successfully executed
from plan to completion in 8 weeks.
Continue reading “Report on Roland Park’s Sunday Streets pilot: 25 October 2009”
Submit your bike data to Google
Google told us last month that they were working on bike directions, but they didn’t make a big deal out of telling us how to help. Well, I could be mistaken, but it looks like the offer to ‘partner’ on bike directions (and all sorts of ‘mappy’ features) is just sitting there, waiting for folks to get to it.
If you speak ‘nerd’, or know someone who does, then the rest of this could apply to you. There are some high-level FAQs about data formats, and a link to a form to fill-out if you have some data and you want to partner with Google to get your data integrated into Google Maps. The data we most care about here, of course, is bike-related data — bike lanes, routes, paths, etc.
Who has bike data? Well, cities and bicycle coalitions, probably — and/or the folks who hold the copyrights on maps/data, if they are copyrighted. [Of course you know how we feel about this type of data — it should be free free free.]
If you are a planner/GIS-type person in the Bicycle division of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, then maybe you can help Google get us some bike directions — just fill out the form and see what happens. Could the good folks of our local bike coalition (the folks who put out the bike map) possibly work with Google to get this done? Got me — there’s one way to find out. [SFBC is up to 11,000+ members, now.]
Whatever city or town you live in, do your best to convince someone — I’d start with your local walk/bike/transit advocacy organization, if you have one — to contact the city/town/municipal government and ask them to follow up on this.
What does bike data look like? A lot of it is over my head, but we can look at Google’s “Complete Map Content Specifications“. There are lots of details, of course, but the human-understandable parts are very cool. If you’ve wondered what the GTFS format for bikes was going to be, we may have our first draft.
Can the data format handle wide curbs vs. bike lanes vs. one-ways vs. two-ways vs. high-speed arterials vs. bike boulevards vs. contraflow lanes vs. buffered bike lanes? I’m not sure, but it looks like it’s pretty flexible and can handle most if not all of the crazy configurations and complexities that occur in road networks.
RESOURCES from the National Center for Bicycling & Walking
-> “STATE HIGHWAYS AS MAIN STREETS: A STUDY OF…”
“…Community Design and Visioning;” WSDOT Research Report; by Nichols, Payne, Gear, and Miller; Washington State Dept. of Transportation, Office of Research & Library Services. Oct. 2009 (general info and link to 895kb pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/yjs4u55
-> “TRAVEL DEMAND IN THE CONTEXT OF GROWING DIVERSITY…”
“…Considerations for Policy, Planning, and Forecasting;” by Heather Contrino and Nancy McGuckin; TR News 264 Sept-Oct 2009. (general info and link to 741kb pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/yjrf3tu
-> “REALIZING THE POTENTIAL FOR SUSTAINABLE AND EQUITABLE…”
“…T.O.D.: Recommendations to the Interagency Partnership on Sustainable Communities;” a Policy White Paper by Reconnecting America. November 18, 2009 (473kb pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/ydmvatz
-> “MAKING THE LINK FROM TRANSPORTATION TO PHYSICAL…”
“…Activity and Obesity;” by Daniel A. Rodriguez, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Summer 2009 (563kb pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/y926bcj
Continue reading “RESOURCES from the National Center for Bicycling & Walking”
ROAD DESIGN AND DRIVERS’ SPEED CHOICES
"This report describes an investigation into whether or not physical characteristics of the roadway and the roadside environment are associated with actual vehicle running speeds, and how actual vehicle running speeds are associated with the occurrence and severity of motor vehicle crashes in conjunction with other roadway and roadside characteristics.
"Actual vehicle running speeds were observed at about 300 locations in urban, suburban and rural areas across Connecticut, at locations without horizontal curves or traffic control devices. Only vehicles traveling through the section unimpeded either by leading or turning vehicles were observed in order to get true free flow traffic speeds. Roadway and roadside characteristics were observed, and statistical prediction models were estimated to learn more about how free flow vehicle speed, roadway and roadside characteristics and crash incidence and severity are related. The factors associated with higher average running speeds are wide shoulders, large building setbacks and a residential location.
"The factors associated with lower average running speeds are on-street parking, sidewalks and a downtown or commercial location. These findings suggest that drivers slow down where the road feels ‘hemmed-in’ or there is noticeable street activity, and they speed up where the road feels ‘wide open’ or street activity is less noticeable. This finding is not surprising, but these relationships are quite strong in the observed data, and it is a useful result to isolate this short list of factors that are significantly correlated with actual vehicle running speeds.
"These findings demonstrate that through careful, intentional selection of roadway and roadside design elements, it is possible to influence the running speed of traffic on a road. It appears that drivers indeed take cues from elements of the roadway and roadside environment to decide how fast to drive and these cues are independent of the posted speed limit and other considerations that might be important to the community for reducing speeds.
"So the good news is that it is possible to influence drivers’ choice of speed through design of roadway and roadside elements; but the bad news is that many existing roads cue drivers to travel much faster than the posted speed limit and the community would like."
Continue reading “ROAD DESIGN AND DRIVERS’ SPEED CHOICES”
Report, petition call for safer roadway planning
From the Fast Lane: The Official Blog of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation
Last week, our friends at Transportation For America and the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership released a valuable report called Dangerous By Design. Yesterday I met with James Corless of t4America and a few of his colleagues from other interest groups about this report and its conclusions.
Now, “Dangerous By Design” has turned a lot of heads and for good reason. It shows that 11.8% of all traffic fatalities in America are pedestrians.
Look, no amount of engineering to make the insides of our vehicles safer for occupants is going to protect pedestrians and bicyclists. We need safer roadways. We need roadways designed to account for the needs of everyone who uses them, whether driving, walking, or riding in a wheelchair or on a bicycle.
The great thing about this Complete Streets approach to road planning is that it’s actually cheaper to plan for multiple road uses ahead of time than to retrofit roadways after they are built and someone gets injured or killed.
The problem with this approach is that it does cost a little extra up front. And states and communities facing budget shortfalls may be tempted to let road safety features–wide sidewalks, safe crosswalks–get cut along the way.
But, as much leadership as DOT can offer, only Congress can authorize federal funding for such programs. And, as the petition urging my leadership on safer roadway planning reminds us:
“The Transportation Bill comes around just once every six years, and we can’t afford another six-year delay on building the 21st Century transportation system our country craves.”
That’s why, when we hold our upcoming open meetings on new transportation legislation, I urge all of you who care about this important issue–from experts to everyday pedestrians–to come forward and tell us how strongly you feel about this. Then, we can let Congress know how much momentum is truly behind safer road planning.
So please stay tuned as we announce the dates and locations of these meetings and please visit the websites of the organizations who visited me yesterday (I’ve listed them below) to see what you can do to raise your voice on this important issue.
Continue reading “Report, petition call for safer roadway planning”
Tour De Greater Homewood / Jack Yates Memorial Ride Video
Traffic Injustice
This is the First of a Two Part Story
By Bob Mionske
Susanne Kibler-Hacker, 42, a highly experienced cyclist, is the coordinator for New Hampshire’s ride-to-work days at her office. The morning of October 15, 2009, she was riding her bike to work. She never arrived. She was wearing a reflective fluorescent vest, but a driver still hit her from behind. Kibler-Hacker, who survived the collision, was listed in serious condition at Dartmouth-Hitch*censored* Medical Center. Although New Hampshire has the best safe passing law in the nation, the driver was not cited for violating that law, or any other. Instead, police issued the driver a warning to exercise due care.