Portland Figured Out How to Get Kids Walking and Biking to School Again

In a relatively short amount of time — a generation or two — the number of American kids walking or biking to school has plummeted. This isn’t the result of some natural law — it’s the product of public policy decisions about how to design streets and build schools.

But here’s some great evidence that with intentional effort, cities can reverse the trend and make walking and biking to school popular again. Michael Andersen at Bike Portland lifted the above graph from a recent survey by the Portland Bureau of Transportation. It shows that after 15 years of Safe Routes to School investments, biking or walking (or scootering) to school continues to gain momentum.

Andersen writes:

Among Portlanders in kindergarten through fifth grade, walking, biking and otherwise rolling to school became more common than traveling in the family vehicle sometime around 2010 and has more or less kept climbing since.

If the trend continues, more than half the city’s primary schoolers will be walking, biking, skating or scootering to school by 2025 or so.

It’s worth noting that riding in a car isn’t the only thing becoming less common; riding a school bus has been, too…

Coincidentally, the news comes just as the For Every Kid Coalition delivers a big bundle of testimony to Metro in favor of creating a regional Safe Routes program. The coalition’s $15 million ask would include a bit for instructional classes (that the Bicycle Transportation Alliance might teach), but mostly for biking and walking-friendly infrastructure improvements to the streets immediately surrounding Portland-area schools.

Portland voters will also have an option to give their own booster shot to these efforts in May when they consider a 10-cent gas tax hike that would send a large share of its proceeds to biking and walking upgrades to streets near Portland schools.

Read the rest of the story here. 

DC Will Swap Driving Lanes For Bike Lanes In Four Key Places

Around the District, four new sections of bike lanes and protected bikeways will replace existing driving lanes. These are part of four miles of planned new segments that will close gaps in the city's bike infrastructure.

Photo by Dylan Passmore on Flickr.

They'll focus on four major areas: the Metropolitan Branch Trail, the Klingle Trail, downtown, and Piney Branch Road, near Catholic University.

The projects are part of an amendment the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) is submitting to the Transportation Planning Board's long-term plan. DDOT is proposing to complete all of them this year, an undertaking that would cost $1.35 million.

Here's a big-picture look at all of them:

Read the rest of the story here.

Fort Collins Aims to Build More Protected Bike Lanes

In a cycling-friendly town like Fort Collins, one would think we'd be leaders in bike lane design, right? Well, that hasn't always been the way.

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A buffered bike lane with a 3-foot section of striped lines on Lochwood Drive on July 28, 2014. (Photo: Coloradoan library)

But in wake of Portland, Oregon, recently becoming the first city to implement a new policy that mandates city planners, designers and engineers include only protected bike lanes in their designs, the city of Fort Collins is taking steps to follow suit, said FC Bikes program manager Tessa Greegor. Although the city has plenty of buffered bike lanes — with a median space of 3 feet between the bike and travel lanes — protected bike lanes usually have a "vertical element" to it and are not just separated by the street, she said.

The only protected bike lanes in the city are on Laurel Street, from Howes to Remington streets. They were completed in June and were mostly funded from a $10,677 grant.

The city is currently pushing for protected lanes, where necessary, in three upcoming projects: the Pitkin corridor, Lincoln Avenue and West Elizabeth corridor. These are just a few of the plans to move toward "innovative bicycle infrastructure designs, like protected bike lanes," as the default, Greegor said.

Chris Johnson, executive director of Bike Fort Collins, said he doesn't think protected bike lanes alone add to the safety of cyclists. Rather, they provide "a perception of safety," which he said is important to get more cyclists on the road.

"They certainly make people more comfortable," Johnson said.

Research seems to back up Johnson's claims. According to a Portland State University study, bike ridership increased between 21 and 171 percent in five U.S. cities that recently implemented protected bike lanes, and 10 percent of those users were drawn from other modes of transportation.

Boulder cycling advocates recently received a setback when overwhelming negative backlash forced the city to scale back its protected bike lanes on the busy Folsom Street in October. The city had initially removed vehicle lanes to widen the bicycle lanes, but then the public criticized the city for not taking the delays and economic impacts into account prior to rolling out the project. Out of the four blocks on Folsom that featured protected lanes, two remain. This cost Boulder close to $170,000.

Read the rest of the story here.

Houston Unveils a Bold New Citywide Plan for Bicycling

The same team that helped overhaul Houston’s bus network is turning its attention to the city’s bike network. 

 This week, recently-elected Mayor Sylvester Turner unveiled the city’s first bike plan since 1993. The plan envisions a network of low-stress bikeways — a welcome improvement over Houston’s previous bike plan, from 1993, which mostly consisted of “share the road” signs and sharrows on wide, high-speed roads, according to Raj Mankad of OffCite, a blog of Rice University’s Design Alliance. 

 In 2012, Houston voters backed the creation of the Bayou Greenways network, 150 miles of linear trails along the city’s low-lying bayous. But without on-street connections, the greenways would be fragmented and people would have to bike on dangerous streets, writes Mankad. 

 The new plan calls for about 800 miles of on-street bike lanes — up from just 8 miles today — and about 400 additional miles of off-street paths. Though the plan doesn’t give a concrete timeline for completing the network, the goal is to achieve “gold-level” status from the League of American Bicyclists by 2026.

You can read the rest of the story here.

10 Books Showing How to Fight for and Build People-First Cities

These inspiring leaders have authored 10 great and recent books on how to design and build walk-bike-transit-people-friendly cities and show us the strategies and tactics for making the places we call home more prosperous, green, healthy and happy as a result. Read them and join the revolution.

People and businesses want to be in vibrant, mixed-use, walkable, bike-friendly, transit-accessible, people oriented places. It is well documented that across North America Millennials and Boomers are moving to these kinds of places in droves. Business journals document companies abandoning car-centric office parks, that just 25 years ago were the wave of the future, to move back to these centers too. But not everyone can get in. Real estate experts and economists tell us the prices in these walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods are sky-high and pricing people out because there aren’t enough of them.

That’s because the traffic engineers and DOTs that control our streets (from 25 to 50% of a city’s land area) still use out-dated manuals to design streets for car convenience and speed. Planners are using land-use and zoning codes from an era that forces segregation of uses, abhors density and requires too much car parking. The result? Car-dependent, dispersed and disconnected places. These places, the ones we’ve been building for the last 75 years, make us less healthy, both physically and mentally. They degrade our environment. They cost more to maintain and put a strain on our resources. And they make us less happy too.

See the full list here.

The 6 Biggest Roadblocks To Building Complete Streets In Our Communities

Earlier this month, the Commercial Drive BIA starting distributing a bizarre and biased survey to the 750 shops, cafes, and restaurants along The Drive, under the guise that they were gauging their members’ support for a proposed protected bike lane on the historic high street. It contained a number of misleading and inaccurate statements – phrased as questions – which sparked an important and productive discussion in the community in the following days about building safer streets.

While we like to think common sense will prevail, and the merchants and residents will reach a consensus on a Commercial Drive for everyone, during that process, we watched the same fallacies come up again and again. So based on our observations of that (sometimes heated) debate, here are six paradigm shifts needed to build more livable and equitable streets in Vancouver, and in cities around the world.

Read the full list here.

The Case Against Drive-Throughs

Minneapolis-area lovers of quick and easy coffee, prescriptions, check-cashing, dry cleaning, and Big Macs are up in arms this week, after two city council members floated a proposal to tighten restrictions on urban drive-throughs. Drive-throughs are already banned from a number of the city’s downtown areas, as well as regions included in its “Pedestrian Oriented Overlay Districts.” By expanding those districts, the proposed ordinance would nix the construction of additional vehicle-friendly pathways in an expanded portion of the city, a “concession” to pedestrians and cyclists in an increasingly pedestrian- and cyclist-loving metropolis.

“The streets where a lot of people are walking, on our transit corridors, maybe we don’t want to have drive-throughs at all,” the council member Lisa Bender explained to the Minneapolis Star Tribune Saturday. “If we do, we may want to strengthen our controls of them and minimize their impact on people walking.”

The steel-tongued retribution was quick and fierce. The Star Tribune’s own editorial board aimed its pen Monday squarely at the offending council members, writing that drive-throughs are “an extra measure of comfort for customers”—parents with sick children, the tired and hungry who want food without leaving their cars, etc.

”A danger to pedestrians?” the editorial board wrote. “No more than any other obstacle pedestrians face in a busy city. ...If you want to walk dreamlike, headphones in, Zen in place, find a park path.”

Read the rest of the story here.