On Saturday, April 26, the 2008 Minnesota Bike Summit was held at Quality Bicycle Products (QBP) headquarters in Bloomington, Minnesota. This was my second summit, and the mood of the 100 or so people who attended was decidedly more upbeat at its conclusion than last year. The reason: QBP announced that it would fund (or help fund?) an Executive Director position for a statewide bicycle advocacy organization.

I’ve been told that Minnesota has lacked such an organization for several years now. Bicycle advocates are hopeful that a Minnesota advocacy group can be as successful as the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin. A former staff member from that organization, Dave Schlabowske, was on hand as a keynote speaker to explain its history and what would need to happen in Minnesota. Schlabowske is currently the Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator for the City of Milwaukee - the first person to hold that office.

The other keynote speaker was Tom Huber, the Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. During one session on bicycle facilities, I was able to hear Huber confirm that I’ve been on target in one of my concerns: the dangers of sidepaths, or shared-use paths that are adjacent to roads. Huber said that the warnings about sidepaths in the AASHTO Guide to the Development of Bicycle Facilities (1999) are still accurate, and he gave me a copy of the Wisconsin Bicycle Facility Design Handbook (2004). That source has some nice graphics that illustrate the problems with sidepaths. Another attendee told me that the sidepath warnings will become even stronger in the 2009 edition of the AASHTO guide.

Huber and Schlabowske spoke together about an “advocacy effectiveness triangle,” though they seemed to modify this into a “square.” That square includes four groups working together: professionals (usually government staff), advocates, politicians, and businesses. Simply put, things happen and get done on a particular issue when these groups of people work together.

I was struck by the close working relationship between advocates and transportation officials in Wisconsin. Each needs to rely on the expertise of the other. For example, the Wisconsin DOT contracts with the Bike Federation to do much of its education related to Safe Routes to Schools and other programs.

I took a tour of the QBP facility and learned a little more about this 400-plus person company. They employ over 400 people and are the largest bicycle products distributor in the country. The tour leader said that 5000 of the country’s 5,200 bike shops are their customers. To give you a sense of their size: they employ 25 buyers as well as two full-time photographers who take pictures of the products that go into their catalog.

QBP also pays employees who bike to work; I think the figure was around $3 a day for a certain distance. Over 100 people bike to work each day in the summer, and about 30 or so in the winter.

My only regret at this summit: I did not take pictures! Seeing QBP’s LEED Gold building and their state-of-the-art warehouse facility was a treat, and I’m sorry I can’t share some images with you now.

Stephen Regenold is a Minneapolis writer whose Ultrafit column in the StarTribune is one of our most important regional bully pulpits for cycling and a physically active lifestyle. I commend him for his attention to cycling not only as a sport but also as a means of transportation - even in Minnesota in the winter. His column a few months ago on winter cycling is very informative, as is an accompanying video.

I also appreciated his March 19 column, “A large fella on a bike,” which concerned Scott Cutshall, who has lost nearly three hundred pounds after taking up cycling - his only real option for exercise when he weighed over 500 pounds, he and Regenold say. Cutshall eventually moved from New Jersey to Minneapolis so that he and his family could “embrace the cycling lifestyle,” he said. He was drawn to Minneapolis at first because it is home to the man who built his custom-made bike: Bob Brown, of Bob Brown Cycles. See Scott Cutshall’s impressive blog, Large Fella on a Bike, and hear him speak eloquently of his journey in an audio slideshow.

Regenold’s column is just one example of the StarTribune’s praiseworthy coverage of cycling and transportation in general. Regenold also writes on outdoor gear for a wide variety of publications; see his web site, thegearjunkie.com.

The Northfield Public Schools, the City of Northfield, the City of Dundas, and Bridgewater Township have received a $30,000 Safe Routes to Schools grant. The grant is one of 27 that were awarded throughout the state of Minnesota. During this round of funding, 105 grant proposals were submitted to the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

The Safe Routes to Schools program seeks to make conditions safer for children who walk or bike to school and also expand the number of students who do so. The title of the Northfield Safe Routes project is PaTHS: Pathways to Healthier Students: Planning Enhanced Access to Northfield Schools.

The Northfield area grant is a non-infrastructure grant, which means that it won’t be used to make infrastructure improvements. Instead it will focus on planning for possible future improvements, as well as the creation of education, law enforcement, encouragement, and evaluation programs that will foster physically active modes of travel to and from school.

The Northfield Area Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation, on which I serve as chair, presented the idea for the grant proposal to the Northfield Public Schools and local governments. All parties worked together to complete the proposal, with the task force managing the effort. Our thanks go out to all who helped, especially to Tom Stringer and Superintendent Chris Richardson of the school district, Joel Walinski of the City of Northfield, and Christopher Tassava of Carleton College. Carleton allowed Christopher, a professional grant writer, to donate work time to the project.

For more information on the Safe Routes grant, see a March 22 Northfield News article (which I found online but not in print), the school district press release, and MnDOT’s Safe Routes to Schools web site. See also an earlier post I did following the submission of the grant proposal.

From time to time Neal Peirce, a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group, writes on the topic of bicycles and public policy. On March 3, he published an excellent column, “Year of the Bicycle?,” that summarizes some of the developments in cycling policy worldwide over the last year. These include the Velib bike rental program in Paris, rental programs elsewhere, bicycle boulevards in Portland, and developments in the U.S. Congress.

Peirce’s column coincided with the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC, March 4-6, about which I hope to hear more.

Here’s an excerpt from Peirce’s column:

First the trends: Oil costs are surpassing $100 a barrel, global warming alarm calls are mounting, polluting autos and trucks increasingly clog city streets, and health concerns about a sedentary and fattening society are mounting.

And now the developments: Handy bike-for-hire stations are proving instant hits in Paris and other European cities, and seem poised to invade urban America. Moves to add painted bike lanes along city roadways are being eclipsed by proposals for entire networks of “bike boulevards” — roadways altered radically to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians. And a companion “Complete Streets” movement — making roadway space for cyclists and pedestrians, not just cars and trucks — is gaining traction nationwide.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., founder of the Congressional Bike Caucus (now 160 bipartisan members strong), claims a new pro-bike politics is forming, that it can mobilize a 1-million-plus national constituency and force clear recognition of the role of bicycles in the next (2009) federal transportation bill. He and the Bike Summit will be pushing for a sense of Congress resolution recognizing the potential of bikes to undergird a greener, healthier and more efficient national future.

Cycling, nationwide, still counts for tiny portions of commuting and shopping trips. But Portland’s experience shows the potential, Blumenauer insists: Since that city’s bike program began in the 1990s, the “modal split” for bikes has quadrupled and a $100 million bike industry has emerged, accounting for 1,000 jobs.

Paris’ Velib bike rental program — the name combines velo (bicycle) and liberte (freedom) — opened last July and registered an astounding 2 million trips in its first 40 days. Twenty-thousand bikes are available at 1,450 cycling stations across the city. Insert a credit card to sign up ($1.50 a day to $43 a year) and you can drop your bike off at any other station, the first 30 minutes free.

To understand why so many people sing the praises of Davis as a pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly community, see this Streetfilms video, “Davis, California, a Platinum Bike City.”

An e-mail from the League of American Bicyclists recently educated me about how Davis, California, became the “bicycle city.” It contained an obituary notice for Frank C. Child, former chair of the economics department at the University of California-Davis, who was a key player in the development of the bicycle network in that city.

Mr. Child’s story, summarized below in an obituary from the Sacramento Bee, is a testament to the role that citizens can play in transforming their communities:

Mr. Child joined UC Davis in 1962 and became the second chairman of the economics department the following year…. [He] arrived in Davis after living for four months in the Netherlands, where bicycles were the dominant transportation mode. Eyeing the city’s flat terrain, he and his wife, Eve, launched a grass-roots effort in 1964 to establish a system of bicycle lanes on Davis streets.

The couple organized a core group of citizens who lobbied, collected petition signatures and backed successful City Council candidates who supported bike lanes. In 1966, the Davis council voted to create the city’s first bike lane, spawning a national transportation movement.

“All the bike lanes in the United States today are descendants of what started in Davis,” said Ted Buehler, a graduate student at the UC Davis Institute for Transportation Studies.

The action delighted Mr. Child, who sold his second car and bought six bicycles for his family to get around Davis. He also helped persuade UC Davis Chancellor Emil Mrak to close large portions of the campus to automobile traffic to promote cycling.

“My father had a three-speed Raleigh with a wire basket for his briefcase on the handlebars that he rode for years,” Bill Child said.

In an opinion piece published yesterday in the StarTribune, Blue Cross and Blue Shield CEO Mark W. Banks, M.D., summarized the results of a study by his organization and the Minnesota Department of Health on the costs of treating obesity in the state. I discussed that study in a February 4 post.

Here are some key excerpts from Dr. Banks’ essay:

The Minnesota report states that healthier eating — combined with 30 minutes of physical activity a day — can significantly reduce some of the most costly illnesses to treat. The Minnesota Department of Health estimates that a more physically active Minnesota population could lead to a 30 percent reduction in heart disease, strokes, colon cancer, and osteoporosis; and 18 percent fewer cases of type 2 diabetes and hypertension.

However, the solution is not simply an issue of individual willpower. Realistically, if Minnesota truly wants better outcomes, we need to create a “state of health.”

What would happen if we created environments across Minnesota that encouraged more walking and less driving? What if it was as easy to find fresh fruit on our lunch breaks as it is to get a double cheeseburger to go? And how much more likely would we be to get moving if physical activity was something that blended naturally into our daily routines, instead of being a task reserved just for the gym? The changes would be dramatic.

Kudos to Dr. Banks, Blue Cross, and the Minnesota Department of Health for pushing hard on these issues.

Aside from government, there is no more influential force in transportation decision-making than the business community. My hopes for that community and its role in improving the transportation system were raised when, a few months ago, I looked at what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had to say about transportation.

What I found was a clear statement that the United States needs to take a multi-modal, sustainable approach to transportation:

America’s transportation and infrastructure system, once a marvel of the modern world, has been stretched beyond its capacity and has fallen into disrepair. A decaying transportation system costs our economy more than $78 billion annually in lost time and fuel. The Chamber advocates for a comprehensive approach to solving the nation’s looming transportation infrastructure crisis. Specifically, the Chamber believes that a multi-modal and intermodal vision must increase capacity, reduce congestion, and improve the efficient, safe, sustainable movement of goods and people throughout the country and world.

As I explained in a comment I made on the Locally Grown Northfield web site, where I first referred to this quote, there are four words here that stand out for me: “comprehensive,” “multi-modal,” “intermodal,” and “sustainable.” (”Intermodal” refers to movement from one mode of transport to another, as from a car to a train.) These are not words that I was expecting to see from the U.S. Chamber, because I don’t see them from the local Chamber where I live. Read the rest of this entry »

In its December 2007 issue, Scientific American Body published one of the best articles I’ve read on the topic of the relationship between the “built environment” - our roads, buildings, etc. - and our health. The article, by Kathryn Brown, presents some of the relevant statistics; describes efforts by “built-environment advocates” in communities such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Columbia, Missouri; and examines the scientific debate on how best to build communities that foster physical activity.

I was especially interested in the paragraphs below (emphasis added), which describe research that shows the positive influence of densely populated, mixed-use communities on physical activity. (Mixed-use communities mix different land uses together - residential, commercial, recreational, public, etc. - to give people shorter distances between different destinations.) Just to show that I’m interested in an open inquiry, I’ve included the author’s brief discussion of a Heritage Foundation editorial that questions the role of the built environment in determining a condition such as obesity. Read the rest of this entry »

StarTribune reporter Sarah Lemagie has written a nice article about the Northfield, Minnesota-based bike company, Rawland Cycles, and its founders, Sean and Anna Virnig. See also a January 3rd post I did on Rawland and also my conversation with Sean.