Bike Share: Bridging The Gap

I’ve been an enormous fan of rail and bus travel for as long as I can remember.  For a modest price, I can travel to cities in New York State while I relax, read, or get work done on the way.  Living in Rochester New York, which has an Amtrak and a Greyhound Station within a few hundred feet of each other, it’s relatively easy for me to break the shackles of traveling across the Empire State behind the wheel of a car.

The problem for me and many who enjoy traveling this way is, simply, what do we do when we arrive at our destination?  Most train and bus stations are located in downtown areas, making it easy for travelers toaccess the best of what cities have to offer. However, many city attractions are still several miles away from mass transit, far enough to discourage the average day trip adventurer.  Cabs in small Upstate New York cities are expensive, ride sharing like Uber and Lyft are illegal in New York State outside of New York City due to insurance regulations, and local bus systems can be confusing and inconsistent.

So how do we bridge the physical gap between regional mass transit options and city destinations?  The answer may rest in the growing movement of bike share.

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Engineers To U.S. DOT: Transportation Is About More Than Moving Cars

A trade group representing the transportation engineering profession thinks it’s high time for American policy makers to stop focusing so much on moving single-occupancy vehicles.

Should roads like this be considered a success? ITE doesn’t think so. Photo:Smart Growth America

U.S. DOT is currently deciding how it will assess the performance of state DOTs. Will it continue business as usual and equate success with moving huge numbers of cars? That’s what state transportation officials want, but just abouteveryone else disagrees — including professional transportation engineers.

In its comments to the Federal Highway Administration about how to measure performance, the Institute of Transportation Engineers — a trade group representing 13,000 professionals — said that, in short, the system should not focus so heavily on cars [PDF].

Here’s a key excerpt:

Throughout the current proposed rulemaking on NHS performance, traffic congestion, freight mobility, and air quality, an underlying theme is apparent: these measures speak largely to the experience of those in single occupancy vehicles (SOVs). While such a focus is understandable in the short-term, owing largely to the current availability of data from the NPMRDS and other national sources, ITE and its membership feel that FHWA should move quickly within the framework of the existing performance management legislation to begin developing performance measures that cater to multimodal transportation systems.

The first step in this process is instituting a program to develop standards and procedures for data collection within this alternative modes of travel, an effort which ITE feels should be undertaken by FHWA and its USDOT partner agencies concurrent to the final performance management rulemaking under consideration. Once this multimodal framework is established, FHWA can work to develop a more comprehensive and holistic set of performance measures that accommodate multiple modes of transportation, while achieving secondary effects of improved public health, community livability, and economic development.

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What Makes A City Walkable Or Unwalkable?

Walking is the oldest and simplest form of human transportation. Nowadays, walking a few blocks or crossing a street seems inconvenience. Walkability is a new term to describe how friendly a city or a neighborhood is to pedestrian activity. According to the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute, walakble communities are defined as: “they consider persons, not their automobiles, at the center of the design scale. When we design communities around the human foot, we create places that are socially, environmentally and economically vibrant”.

Walkability is the key to an urban area’s efficient ground transportation. Walking remains the cheapest form of transport for all people. Thus, the construction of a walkable city provides the most affordable and equitable transportation system, where any community can plan, design, build and maintain. Walkable cities return urban environments to scale, pattern and mix for sustainability of resources (both natural and economic). They lead to addressing many social and economic problems through social interaction, physical fitness, diminishing crime and increasing wellness. Walkable cities are livable built environments which lead to whole happy and healthy lives for the people who live in them. They keep jobs and attract young adults, families and children (www.walkable.org).

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Self Driving Cars And Cities

Ten years ago I found myself standing outside the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan. I looked out over acres of glinting windshields in a packed parking lot. I’d reached this spot by driving from Ann Arbor on the I-94, where the highway sometimes reaches 12 lanes across, in a little over an hour. Public transit would have taken me three and a half hours. What would Henry Ford think, one hundred years after the birth of the car? Pride or horror

It took 50 years to transition from the horse to the car. Surely few could have imagined the impact the car would have as it tore through cities, countries, and economies worldwide. Today, average Americans spend almost two of their eight hours at work paying off their car, which they need to get to that job. Last year in the US, more than 38,000 people died and 4.4 million were seriously injured due to motorized transport. Farther afield, in Singapore, 12 percent of the island nation’s scarce land is devoted to car infrastructure. In Delhi, 2.2 million children have irreversible lung damage because of poor air quality.

Incredibly, we might actually get a chance at a do-over — of our cities, our fossil fuel dependence, and the social contract with labor — thanks to the impending advent of autonomous cars. Yes, their arrival is inevitable, but how they will impact us is yet to be determined.

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Guerrilla Bike Lanes Show Cities How Easy It Is To Make Streets Safer

One night in June, a driver sped through the wrong lane of traffic in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco—trying to pass another car—and killed a cyclist riding legally in the other direction. A couple of hours later, another driver in the city's SOMA neighborhood sped through a red light and killed a 26-year-old woman on a bike.

The next day, the director of transportation at the SFMTA told a reporter that "the best bike infrastructure in the world would not have prevented these collisions." Bike and pedestrian advocates disagree, and since the city hasn't done much to help, they're taking action themselves—temporarily redesigning local bike lanes themselves.

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BTS Releases Smartphone App for Pocket Guide to Transportation

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) has introduced its most innovative product – a smartphone app for the Pocket Guide to Transportation 2016. The Pocket Guide is a popular, quick reference guide to significant transportation statistics. 

The new app allows users to take all the informative graphics and tables from the guide with them without having to carry a copy of the Pocket Guide. All of the features of the annual Pocket Guide will be available from both the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPad and the Google Play store for Android devices. All seven sections – Infrastructure, Moving People, Moving Goods, Performance, Economy, Safety and Environment – plus a new Major Trends section can be found on the app. 

To link to the iTunes and Google Play download sites, go to the BTS Pocket Guide to Transportation page. 

For inquiries other than placing orders contact Dave Smallen: 202-366-5568.

Bicycle Safety: The Road To Mutual Respect Between Cyclists And Motorists

Mark Atkins spends a lot of the time in the company of avid cyclists. As president of the North Florida Bicycle Club, he’s one of them.

They love being on the road, but they encounter their share of frustrations and fears, many of which are caused by motorists.

The list, Atkins said, based on his on experience and conversations with other cyclists, includes impatient drivers, distracted drivers and drivers who don’t give bicyclists sufficient space when passing them.

“I think there are many drivers who just don’t know how they’re supposed to behave around cyclists,” he said, “and who don’t know or appreciate that cyclists have a right to be on the road.”

But there is a flip side, Atkins admitted.

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