Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Whenever street space is allocated for bicycling, someone will inevitably level the accusation that the city is waging a “war on cars.” But it turns out the people in those cars want separate space for bicycles too, according to surveys conducted in two major California metropolitan areas. Bike lanes make everyone feel safer — even drivers.

Far from constituting a war on cars, protected bike lanes are a big relief for drivers. Streetsblog SF

Rebecca Sanders is a doctoral candidate in transportation planning and urban design at the University of California-Berkeley. She’s spent a lot of time asking people — drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians — what kinds of street treatments would make them feel safer, giving them a list of safety improvements to choose from. Most drivers said their top priority was bike lanes. (In the Los Angeles area, the top choice was for improved pedestrian crossings, but bike lanes were a close second.)

Sanders began this research with Jill Cooper of Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center, under the sponsorship of the state department of transportation (Caltrans). They interviewed drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists on major corridors in and around San Francisco and Los Angeles, asking drivers why they picked the mode they did, and asking everyone how they perceived safety issues, especially for biking. Then they asked what kinds of street treatments would make the street safer for them.

“What was interesting about that study was that in the San Francisco Bay Area, the most requested item, across the board, was a bicycle lane on the corridor,” Sanders told Streetsblog. “It was the most requested item by drivers, it was the most requested item by pedestrians, and it was the most requested item by bicyclists. That was quite surprising to us.”

It’s no shock that cyclists asked for dedicated street space in overwhelming numbers, and it stands to reason that pedestrians want bicycles off the sidewalk. Perhaps it should be just as obvious that drivers would welcome dedicated bike infrastructure, too. They find that bike lanes help them be aware of cyclists and make cyclists’ behavior more predictable, according to Sanders’ research. In general, there’s less potential for conflict between drivers and cyclists when they each have their own space.

“We have not done a good job of recognizing and validating the concerns of drivers about predictability,” Sanders said. “For a long time, cyclists have been defensive; they’ve been fighting for space, and legitimately so. But in the process, some areas where we could really work together, I think, have fallen to the wayside. Everybody wants predictability on the roadway. Nobody wants to feel like they’re going to get hit or hit someone else and it’s going to be beyond their control.”

The results of Sanders’ San Francisco-area research are due to be published soon in the Transportation Research Record and are available now on the Berkeley website. Meanwhile, Sanders has continued to look into drivers’ attitudes toward bike lanes, making it the topic of her (as yet unpublished) dissertation. She has conducted focus groups and internet surveys to shed light on what drivers and cyclists need to feel safe.

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Secretary Ray LaHood (left) and Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn (right) ride along the Riverwalk to kick off U.S. DOT's bike safety summit. Photo: City of Tampa, via Fast Lane

First there was “Click It or Ticket.” Then there was Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Now, U.S. DOT is campaigning to end another life-threatening behavior: disrespecting cyclists.

“We need to develop zero tolerance for people who don’t respect cyclists,” Secretary Ray LaHood said yesterday at the first of two national bike safety summits hosted by U.S. DOT this month. “That’s the campaign we’re kicking off today.”

At yesterday’s summit in Tampa, Florida, LaHood announced a new, long-term, national-level campaign to improve bicycle and pedestrian safety through aggressive education, enforcement and engineering.

“It’s simple,” LaHood said yesterday. “When you build a road, build a bike lane. When you’re fixing up your street, build in a bike lane. Do that, and we’ll be supportive of that at the national level.”

“Another simple thing,” LaHood went on. “We need to make sure people driving here have respect for bicyclists. Bicyclists have as much right to the road as they do.”

“If someone is not respectful of cyclists, there’s a penalty,” he said. “That’s it in a nutshell.”

The secretary conceded that improving conditions for bicyclists will not happen overnight, but he made a promise to the more than 200 planners, advocates and bicycle professionals in the audience that U.S. DOT “will not stop until the number of bicyclists killed on our roads is zero.”

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Bike advocates got yet another reason to love Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood last month when he announced that U.S. DOT would hold two bicycle safety summits this year. The summits would examine why bicycle fatality rates are rising when automobile fatalities are falling.

Change comes slowly in Tampa, but it does come. Photo: Bicycle Stories

Less than a month after he made this announcement at the National Bike Summit, LaHood revealed where and when those summits would be held: in Tampa on April 11 and in Minneapolis on April 29. He made that announcement on his Fast Lane blog on April Fools’ Day.

Florida activists had a hard time knowing whether to take the announcement seriously. With just 10 days until the summit, they started scrambling to see if anybody could confirm that it was real. Kathryn Reid Moore, who runs Broward County B-Cycle and is part of the South Florida Bicycle Coalition (and is an occasional contributor to Streetsblog) was surprised to see that there was almost no chatter whatsoever on bike-related social media networks in her area. When she started posting information about it, local leaders accused her of falling for an April Fools prank. After all, who would highlight one of the deadliest cities in the country for cyclists in a safety summit?

Even the most progressive transportation officials in Broward and Miami-Dade County hadn’t been informed about the event.

That’s forgivable, given that the summit is happening in Tampa, nearly 300 miles away. But Tampa area active transportation leaders were out of the loop, too.

Jason Bittner, director of the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida, told me his center wasn’t engaged at all in the planning, which surprised him, since they have a large bicycle and pedestrian safety program and are a leader in local advocacy efforts. (He did acknowledge the agency might be keeping them at arm’s length to avoid a potential conflict of interest since his center has applied for a U.S. DOT grant.)

Advance collaboration might have helped. It turns out the date of the summit is the same date as one of the biggest events of the year for people interested in active transportation: the 2013 Commuter Choice Summit, sponsored by Bittner’s center, the Association for Commuter Transportation, and FDOT.

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Yes, traffic fatalities have been (mostly) going down, but as long as cyclist and pedestrian fatalities keep going up, we can’t truly say our streets and roads are getting safer. That’s the message from 68 members of Congress to one pretty receptive audience: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Lawmakers say states should be making sure their streets are safe for everyone. Photo: Tiffany Robinson, Ped-Bike Images

In their letter to LaHood, sent on Saturday, the 68 lawmakers – including nine Republicans — note that between 2010 and 2011, driving got safer: Roadway fatalities dropped 2 percent overall; 4.6 percent for occupants of cars and light trucks. But bicyclist fatalists went up 9 percent and pedestrian deaths rose 3 percent in the same time period.

LaHood announced earlier this month that U.S. DOT would be holding two bike safety summits this year. But the lawmakers want the agency to go further. And they didn’t just ask in vague terms for increased attention to safety. They got specific: U.S. DOT should create “separate performance measures for non-motorized and motorized users.”

If it sounds like they might have gotten some ideas from people deep inside the bike advocacy world, well, you got that right. Hundreds of Bike Summit participants made this their key “ask” earlier this month when they visited their representatives on Capitol Hill. Apparently their representatives listened.

SAFETEA-LU, passed in 2005, required states to set goals for reducing overall fatalities but included no specific reporting requirements for biking and walking. Without state attention, vulnerable road users have become even more vulnerable, with fatalities increasing both in real numbers and as a percentage of roadway fatalities, according to Caron Whitaker of the League of American Bicyclists.

One-third of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee signed on to the letter, giving DOT a good sense how the committee wants them to interpret MAP-21. “When Congress set performance measures areas, they were saying, ‘These are the things we are going to judge you on,’” Whitaker said in an email. “If bicyclists and pedestrians aren’t included in the performance measures, we risk being left behind.”

“In over half of all states, more than 10 percent of roadway fatalities are bicyclists and pedestrians but yet only seven states report investing in any bicycling and walking safety projects,” she added.

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“In 2014, federal investment in surface transportation — which is currently about $50 billion per year — will drop to $6 billion or $7 billion. In one year.”

Rep. Peter DeFazio says underinvestment in transit is killing people, and it's about to get way worse.

Those were the dire words spoken by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) at the start of this morning’s Transportation & Infrastructure Committee hearing on MAP-21. What he meant was this: At the end of MAP-21, the Highway Trust Fund is expected to have a balance of almost zero and a $7.1 billion shortfall in 2015. Congress would have to radically reduce FY 2015 highway and transit investment levels to ensure that the trust fund remains solvent. According to AASHTO, federal highway investments would have to be cut from approximately $41 billion to $6 billion and transit investment from $11 billion to $3 billion.

“That is pathetic,” DeFazio said. “And we have to do something about it.”

Funding Cuts Force FTA to Break Agreements

T&I Chair Bill Shuster agreed. “That’s our biggest challenge moving forward,” he said. And Ranking Democrat Nick Rahall added that the sequester cuts and Congress’s inability to pass a real budget has compounded the funding crisis.

FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff warned that the cuts will have a profound impact on transit projects around the country:

Overall, the sequester struck $656 million from FTA’s budget. It reduced program funding for our [New Starts] capital investment grants program by almost $100 million. This will means that few, if any, New Starts construction projects will be fundable in the near term.

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“It may seem surprising,” admitted Bike League President Andy Clarke.  And even AAA PR Director Yolanda Cade acknowledged that the 750 bicyclists in the room may be asking themselves, “‘Why is AAA here today?’” After all, she said, “We do have ‘Automobile’ as our middle name.”

AAA and the Bike League have been working to find common ground, and offered this video as an indication that they found some.

Still, this is the same AAA whose chapters have gone on record opposing congestion pricing, blaming the victims for pedestrian injuries, and urging Congress to dedicate all Highway Trust Fund monies to highways.

Time will tell if the new alliance with the Bike League is just a PR move, or if it reflects a shift in AAA’s attitudes toward bike/ped policy.

As more people bike in Minneapolis, the rate of cyclist-involved crashes has decreased. Image: Dept. of Public Works

Good news out of the Sierra Club Green Transportation Campaign, whose national conservation organizer Rachel Butler brings our attention to Minneapolis’s first ever Bicycle Account [PDF]. The compilation of cycling-related data shows a marked increase in the number of cyclists and a steadily decreasing injury rate to go along with substantial investments in bicycle infrastructure on city streets.

According to the report, some 7,000 Minneapolis residents used a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation to and from work in 2010. That’s nearly twice as many as in 1990 or 2000, when the number of cyclists stayed relatively flat. And, as a share of all commuters, it’s good enough to rank Minneapolis the number two city for bike commuting in the U.S.

Mayor R. T. Rybak hopes Minneapolis will become "a truly welcoming and world-class bicycling city." Photo: Dept. of Public Works

The news is yet more evidence that cold weather cities can make cycling an attractive option. In fact, according to the rankings compiled by Copenhagenize, many of the cities with the highest cycling rates are in Northern Europe and Japan. While bicyclists in Minneapolis account for four percent of commute trips, compared to 55 percent in Copenhagen, the number is growing.

“I anticipate that we will see this report as a regular register of our collective bicycle accomplishments throughout the city,” Mayor R. T. Rybak writes in the report. “Minneapolis is going to keep at it, and we can all look forward to the benefits as we become a truly welcoming and world-class bicycle city.”

The mayor is serious about cycling in Minneapolis, and he has plenty to brag about already, including the launch of the Nice Ride Minnesota bike-share system and the growth of the city’s bike network to 167 miles of on-street bikeways, a 75 percent increase from 2010 to 2011 alone.

The report comes on the heels of Minneapolis’s first ever Bicycle Master Plan, adopted in July, which set ambitious goals for the growth of the city’s bicycle network over the next 30 years. Additionally, in December, the city hired its first full-time bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, Shaun Murphy.

The report also highlighted the city’s steadily improving record of bicyclist safety:

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Streetsblog commenters are, in general, really, really smart. I learn a lot by reading the comments you all post, and sometimes an especially insightful comment deserves a little extra attention.

Here’s a gem from the Streetsblog Network’s story last week responding to a Salon article titled “Are Urban Bicyclists Just Elite Snobs?” This started a big discussion about whether cyclists are, in fact, essentially jerks.

Commenter Karen Lynn Allen sort of nailed the whole debate with this:

Yesterday I saw a bicyclist do [insert dangerous, stupid, inconsiderate, boneheaded move here] and it nearly inconvenienced me. This means all bikers better watch out because the responsible, productive, law-abiding members of this community aren’t going to tolerate this kind of of anti-social behavior from you riffraff much longer.

Yesterday I saw a car driver do [insert dangerous, stupid, inconsiderate, boneheaded move here] and kill someone!  A tragedy, but it was an accident, no one’s fault really, just one of those bad parts of living in the modern age that we all have to put up with. After all, anyone can make a mistake. It would be a shame to even suspend the driver’s license over it because they really might need it to get to work. It certainly is no reflection on me or how most people drive.

Applause!

Come to think of it, nearly 33,000 people were killed by cars last year, and still, no one seems to be talking about the epidemic of unsafe driver behavior. How many people were killed last year by bicyclists?

Federal safety officials missed their own deadline Friday for making new rules about dangerous trucks.

A 76-year-old man in LA county was hit by a truck while riding his bike in 2008. Republicans want to keep current trucking laws in place that Democrats and others say lead to driver fatigue, causing accidents like this one. Photo: Aitken Aitken Cohn

October 28 was the original deadline by which the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was supposed to announce new hours-of-service regulations for trucking, but in the end, they gave themselves another month to do it.

The pending change is the result of a lawsuit brought by Public Citizen, the Teamsters Union, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the Truck Safety Coalition against the FMCSA to tighten the standards. The suit resulted in an agreement that the FMCSA would change the current 11-hour driving day and the 34-hour rest period before starting a long workweek to a 10-hour driving day, keeping the 34-hour “restart” but with new restrictions.

The Bush-era rule has been struck down twice before by the courts, but the FMCSA kept reinstating it — first in late 2007 and then about a year later. This time, the agency appears ready to make a change.

The 11-hour rule was a “midnight regulation” made during President George W. Bush’s final days in office, according to the Teamsters. The Bush administration increased the workweek from 60 to 77 hours of driving and reduced the restart period from 50 hours to 34.

The Teamsters say truck crashes cost the nation $20 billion in 2009, and that truck driver fatigue is a major factor in truck crashes. Some statistics indicate fatigue is a factor in 30 to 40 percent of truck crashes, though the FMCSA itself puts the number at 5.5 percent.

“We will continue to push for a rule that protects truck drivers, instead of the greed of the trucking industry,” said Teamsters President Jim Hoffa when the court case was decided two years ago. “Longer hours behind the wheel are dangerous for our members and the driving public.”

The problem isn’t limited to highways. Six percent of pedestrian fatalities and nine percent of bicyclist fatalities in 2009 were caused by crashes with large trucks, according to the NHTSA. Between 1996 and 2005, crashes with large trucks accounted for almost a third of all cyclist fatalities in New York City, according to a joint report by NYC agencies [PDF].

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It’s back-to-school time, and along with it, the requisite crackdown over kids getting to school by bike. A few years ago, we highlighted cases from Mississippi to British Columbia where authorities stopped kids from walking alone.

There's no Google street view of the intersection where Tryon's daughter was stopped for riding her bike, but here's the same street, close to the school.

And now, we have the case of Teresa Tryon of Tennessee, threatened with criminal charges for letting her child ride a bike to school.

Bike Walk Tennessee highlighted the case on its blog, saying it was “crazy” to threaten a mother with arrest for doing more or less what all parents should be doing: encouraging active lifestyles for our kids.

“On August 25th, my 10-year[-old] daughter arrived home via police officer,” Tryon said. “The officer informed me that in his ‘judgment’ it was unsafe for my daughter to ride her bike to school.”

Bike Walk Tennessee says Tryon’s daughter’s route to school was reasonably safe, and Tryon herself said Monday that she “passed a total of eight cars in the four times” she was on that road that day. Observers say it is an un-striped, residential street. Police say it’s one of the busiest streets in town, connecting public housing units and subdivisions to the downtown area.

Nonetheless, when Tryon complained to the police, she was reportedly told that until the officer can speak with Child Protective Services, “if I allow my daughter to ride/walk to school I will be breaking the law and treated accordingly.” She asked what law she would be breaking, and was told the answer was “child neglect.” The officer acknowledged Tryon’s daughter wasn’t breaking any laws.

Columnist Lenore Skenazy regularly writes about giving children the independence to make their way around their neighborhoods freely and unsupervised. In a recent post, she points to a child development book from 1979, when six-year-olds could be expected to be able to “travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home.”

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