Excerpt from Strong Towns Blog by Charles Marohn
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One of the NextGen people I really admire (I admire them all, actually) is Eliza Harris (Twitter). She’s been very kind to me in sharing her time and enthusiasm to get me integrated into CNU. She’s also a fellow conservative-minded person and we’ve had some delightful conversations on the intersection of conservative thinking and New Urbanism. Very engaging.
Eliza moderated a session on bikeability – something outside of my core area of knowledge and competency, but something I need to know more about. I’m recording the session, but here are my notes.
Randy Neufeld, SRAM Cycling Fund, was the first speaker. He had some great photos and examples, but I’ll summarize his talk with a primary strategy that I really liked: Take people on a trip. We need to get our public officials out into communities to see how things like biking are done in successful places.
Jonathan Patz, MD, talked about some of the health benefits of cycling and reducing auto travel. Some interesting statistics and observations on “natural experiments” like Yom Kippur, where people reduced driving for religous reasons and there were large measurable benefits in asthma-related and other emergency room visits.
Maggie Grabow, states that 40% of all car trips are 2 miles or less, 50% of the population commutes five miles or less. How do we replace these car trips with bicycle trips? She did a model to see what would happen if one in five trips were replaced — not a radical amount. The result was that hundreds of deaths were prevented, hundreds of thousands of fewer hospital admissions and billions of dollars in savings. I really don’t question such radical results – just the activity alone would be a dramatic change from what most people get. And how easy is this?
Sara Rider, Saris Cycling Group, a company from here in Madison, discussed an incentive program that they put in place to encourage people to bike. Intersting approach and I can see the appeal to the culture of a bike equipment manufacturing company, but I have an incentive program that would be less complicated and more effective for the broader population – $5 gasoline. Here is a cool video that she shared:
A lot of these speakers promoted a group called Bikes Belong, so I’ll link to that website for you to check it out.
My colleague Jon Commers just sent me a Tweet asking about cold weather urbanism. I’m going to ask a question on cold weather biking, Jon, when we get to Q&A. Here’s the feedback from the group:
Many cold climate cities are big into cycling. As you go further north in Europe, cycling often increases. Also, we should not look at it as an either or – bike most of the year, but you might not be able to do all. Also, communities that get out and plow right away show a dedication to biking. Wear warm clothes and it is actually easier to do than skiing, snowshoeing or fishing.
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https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/4/live-blogging-from-cnu-19-saturday.html oldId.20110606233453346