Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The League of American Bicyclists' annual bike friendly state rankings.

Congratulations are due to Washington, Colorado, Oregon and Minnesota; those four states took home top rankings this year in the League of American Bicyclists’ annual Bicycle Friendly States appraisal. The winners were announced this morning.

Washington has held the top position for six years running. But there were a few shake-ups further down the list.

Delaware was one of the main up-and-comers, jumping from number ten to number 5. The Bike League’s blog praised Governor Jack Markell, along with the state legislature and advocacy organizations.

“The benefits of biking are countless, and that’s why I’m proud to support dedicated federal funding for biking and walking infrastructure,” U.S. Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) told the Bike League.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, meanwhile, said his state is not satisfied with second place.

“An important part of making Colorado the healthiest state is encouraging people to be more active in their everyday routines,” Hickenlooper said. “We’re proud that our bicycle-friendly policies have skyrocketed Colorado’s rank up 20 places in just five years, and we are committed to being No. 1 in the near future.”

Among the other most-improved states were Illinois and Arizona.

Michael Sanders, the Arizona Department of Transportation bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, said his state has been studying bike collisions and developing ways to reduce them.

These testimonies from high-ranking political officials prove how effective the Bicycle Friendly State program is at incentivizing a little good-natured competition to make cycling easier, safer, and more convenient for everyone. 

Here’s a preview of the top 15:

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Believe it or not, in many U.S. states one of the biggest obstacles to active transportation is in the constitution.

Embedded in the constitutions of 22 U.S. states are bans on spending gas tax revenues and/or vehicle registration fees on anything but highways and bridges. That means no matter how much practical value a sidewalk, busway, or bike lane would add, those projects must go begging for funds.

Municipalities throughout the Denver area will soon be able to use gas tax revenues on projects like light rail expansion. Image: Captured Refractions

But thanks to the efforts of a broad coalition in Colorado, the number of states with constitutional restrictions on sustainable transportation spending is about to fall to 21. Governor John Hickenlooper will sign a bill tomorrow that opens up $250 million a year in state gas tax revenue to walking, biking, and transit projects.

Colorado-based transit and environmental advocates found a way to overcome the ban without the monumental effort and expense of a statewide referendum. And they’re eyeing six other states around the Southwest with hopes for a repeat or two.

Colorado’s constitutional amendment — passed in 1935 — states that gas tax revenues and vehicle registration fees can only be spent on highways and bridges. To make matters worse, the state had always depended on a narrow reading of the term “highways” to exclude local roads, sidewalks, and bike infrastructure, as well as transit.

Rather than try to overturn the rule, advocates in Colorado simply challenged the way it was being interpreted, said Will Toor, a former mayor of Boulder who helped lead the campaign as director of transportation at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project.

“Fifteen years ago, a group of us began making the argument that that was really an inappropriately narrow interpretation,” said Toor. “There are other places in the constitution that describe railroads as highways of the state.”

In 2009, a coalition of transit advocates had a small breakthrough. The Colorado legislature wanted to pass a new vehicle registration fee, but lawmakers needed the political support of transit advocates. The transit coalition was able to win a small, but important, fraction of the funding for transit – just $15 million out of $1.2 billion.

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Without its Ecopass bus program CU-Boulder would have to build an estimated 2,700 parking spaces. Photo: Colorado Daily

This is the fourth installment in Streetsblog’s series on transportation demand management at American colleges and universities. Part one gave an overview of TDM techniques that schools employ, part two profiled Stanford, and part three looked at MIT.

Sustainability is part of the ethos in Boulder, where there’s a joke that there are more bikes than people. And the University of Colorado at Boulder has really taken that ideal to heart.

Almost a third of students — and almost a quarter of faculty and staff — who commute to the CU-Boulder campus do so by bus. Nearly 12 percent of faculty and student commuters arrive by bicycle. And almost a quarter of student commuters and 6 percent of staff get to campus by walking.

Nearly 12 percent of the students, staff, and faculty who commute to the University of Colorado's campus do so by bike. Image: Daily Camera

These non-automotive commute rates didn’t happen by accident. Beginning in 1990, CU-Boulder embraced transportation demand management, setting up a university think tank to come up with new programs to reduce driving. The school’s first action, in 1991, was to negotiate a discount student bus pass with the local transit system. Within three years, the program tripled ridership by students to 900,000 trips per year. By 2001, ridership had ballooned to 1.85 million annual trips. A study found that 65 percent of those trips would have otherwise been made by car, according to authors Will Toor and Spenser Havlick in Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities.

The university extended the program to all faculty and full-time staff in 1998 and helped encourage the local transit system to secure federal funds to start new lines serving the campus. CU-Boulder now boasts of being in the top 9 percent of American colleges in transit usage and having “one of the lowest SOV modal shares” of any major university in the country.

That is all the more impressive, says Jeffrey Tumlin, a transportation consultant with the firm Nelson\Nygaard, because Boulder “is mostly a city of single-family homes.”

“Boulder is this extreme outlier,” said Tumlin, who did TDM consulting for the university years ago, “how they have made transit work for them in a very low density community.”

The school calls the transit program “Ecopass.” It assesses a $71 fee on all students each semester — about 75 percent less than the cost of buying regular monthly transit passes — and in return all students can ride local buses at no charge. Without Ecopass, the university would have had to provide 2,700 additional parking spaces at a cost of at least $5.6 million annually.

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The four sparsely populated mountain counties make up the Roaring Fork Valley extend over roughly 50 miles on Colorado’s Western Slope. About 32,000 people are interspersed throughout the valley in small towns like Basalt, Carbondale, and Glenwood Springs, but the local economy revolves around the nearby resort town of Aspen.

Smart branding is important for rural transit systems, says Smart Growth America's Roger Millar.

This, clearly, is challenging terrain for a transit agency. Aspen’s hotels and restaurants attract workers from around the region, but people who toil in local service industry jobs have mostly been priced out of the housing near Aspen.

“People who wash pots and pans at the hotels in Aspen were driving 75 miles one way for the privilege of doing that,” said Roger Millar of Smart Growth America at the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference in Kansas City last week.

As a result, Highway 82, the main route into Aspen, is the most congested highway in Colorado. Between 1992 and 1994, the Colorado DOT widened Highway 82 to four lanes.

“The DOT said by the time we get finished building four lanes, we’re going to need six lanes,” Millar said. “And everyone [in town] said, enough with that, we’ve got to do something different.”

Now the Roaring Fork Transit Authority is constructing the agreed upon alternative: a 39-mile bus rapid transit system along Highway 82 that they plan to call, in a bit of marketing genius, the VelociRFTA. When it opens this September, it will be the first bus rapid transit system in the country to serve a rural area.

The $40 million project will run buses every 10 minutes at rush hour, stopping nine times along the lengthy journey — a commuter express route. It will also feature heated waiting stations with bathrooms (pictured above). RFTA officials are encouraging users to walk or bike to the stations.

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Cycling advocates won an important victory today in the Colorado Supreme Court, where justices struck down the notorious bike ban in the town of Black Hawk.

Colorado's highest court today struck down the ban on bicycling in the tiny town of Black Hawk. Image: Denver Post

This casino town of just 118 banned cycling altogether in 2010 out of supposed concerns about “safety.” Three cyclists who were ticketed for violating the ban — Jamie Webb, Jeff Hermanson, and Mickey Jeronimus — have since been pursuing the case through the state’s court system. They had pro-bono representation from some local attorneys and the support of Bicycle Colorado.

In 2010, bike lawyer Bob Mionske wrote in Bicycling Magazine that the city was “flagrantly flouting state law.” And the Colorado Supreme Court concurred, saying that cycling is a “mixed state and local concern.” Cycling Utah carried this excerpt from the court transcript:

Black Hawk’s ordinance banning bicycles on city streets is in conflict with state statute, section 42-4-109(11), C.R.S. (2012), which requires any municipal bike prohibition to have an available alternate path within 450 feet.

They added:

[The city] may not promulgate regulations that conflict with state statute.

Moinske wrote back in 2010 that “the right to travel is an ancient right, now recognized as one of our constitutional rights, and the roads are the commons, open to all for travel and other uses.” This court decision helps protect that principle for cyclists across the country.