The Democratic and Republican political conventions will be here soon, with the Democrats meeting August 25-28 in Denver and the Republicans September 1-4 in St. Paul. Both conventions will have an unusual feature: bike-sharing programs that will make available 1000 bikes to the public in each city for free.

The program is a joint venture of the Humana Freewheelin bike-share program and Bikes Belong, a non-profit bicycle advocacy organization funded by the bicycle industry. Humana is a large health insurance company that has had success with an employee bike-share program at its headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky.

I’m excited about the convention bike-share opportunity because I’ve been following the spread of “new generation” bike-sharing programs for the past year, particularly the enormous Velib’ program in Paris, France, which started last summer. These newer bike-sharing programs are more high-tech than the “yellow-bike”-type of program that some cities and college campuses have had. Those older programs have usually been plagued by theft, vandalism, and disrepair, since the bikes are not locked, there is no system of checking the bikes out, and there are few resources for maintaining the bikes. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday my family and I came home from a week’s vacation in Wisconsin and, after a long day of travel, unpacking, and child care, I watched the Olympics on television. Flipping through the channels during the commercials, I landed on a local cable access channel and found the commissioners of my county - the elected officials that run Rice County, Minnesota - discussing transportation issues at a recent working session.

The county transportation engineer, Dennis Luebbe, proposed a policy that concerned me: banning county funding of facilities such as sidewalks and bike paths in future transportation capital improvement projects. The policy would immediately effect county funding of a recent local project that has been contentious: the Woodley Street/CSAH 28 project here in Northfield. Note also that the county receives funding from the state for transportation infrastructure; state funds, of course, come from our income tax, sales taxes, and other taxes and fees that we pay.

Mr. Luebbe said that bike/ped facilities might be considered in projects outside of the CIP, but that hardly seems satisfactory. I will await further comment until I locate the text of the policy and receive an answer from Mr. Luebbe regarding my questions:

1. Is the proposed policy available for viewing online? If not, would you send us a copy? If a rationale is not included in the text of the policy, we are interested in learning that also.

2. Do other counties have a similar policy? Which ones do you know of?

Here is the PDF of the policy, which was sent to me by Fran Windschitl at Rice County:

proposed-highway-cost-participation-policy

Back on July 8 I mentioned a 2004 paper, “Quantifying the Benefits of Non-Motorized Transportation for Achieving Mobility Management Objectives,” by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. I decided to read the paper more closely in preparation for a session on July 28 with our local city council to discuss the work plan for our task force on nonmotorized transportation.

The article provides an excellent summary of the many benefits of nonmotorized transportation, and it attempts to quantify some of them. Litman conservatively estimates that trips shifted from motor vehicles to walking or biking can yield a benefit of about 50 cents to about 5 or 6 dollars, and probably the benefits are much greater than this. Presumably some of these benefits accrue to an individual, while others accrue to a government or society in general.

Here are the main benefits that I would mention to decision makers in terms of how nonmotorized transportation can be an economic benefit to my city:

• Roadway cost savings: walking and biking do less damage to roads and lead to lower road maintenance costs
• Vehicle cost savings: driving a motorized vehicle is more expensive than walking or biking; money spent on vehicles and fuel typically leaves a community
• Air pollution reductions: these have a positive impact on health
• Health benefits from exercise

Here are some excerpts from the paper:

Read the rest of this entry »

Two Minnesota organizations have released an important document, the Statewide Conservation and Preservation Plan. Created by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR), the new plan makes policy and research recommendations that are intended to preserve the state’s natural resources in the face of increasing demands and impacts from our society, including climate change. Carbon emission reductions are one of the important goals of the plan.

I haven’t yet had time to do more than a cursory reading of the report’s executive summary and its transportation chapter. Here are a few excerpts from the executive summary:

The Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR) funded a unique partnership among the University of Minnesota and the consulting firms of Bonestroo and CR Planning to evaluate the state’s natural resources, identify key issues affecting those resources, and make recommendations for improving and protecting them. More than 125 experts, including University scientists and public and private natural resource planners and professionals, participated in the 18-month effort. …

• The key issues for which recommendations are made in this report are:
• Land and water habitat fragmentation, degradation, loss, and conversion
• Land-use practices
• Transportation
• Energy production and use, and mercury as a toxic contaminant related to energy production

Here are the three recommendations from the Transportation chapter:

• Transportation Recommendation 1: Align transportation planning across state agencies and integrate transportation project development and review across state, regional, metropolitan and county/local transportation, land use and conservation programs.
• Transportation Recommendation 2: Reduce per capita vehicle miles of travel (VMT) through compact mixed-use development and multi- and intermodal transportation systems.
• Transportation Recommendation 3: Develop and implement sustainable transportation research, design, planning, and construction practices, regulations, and competitive incentive funding that minimize impacts on natural resources, especially habitat fragmentation and non-point source water pollution.

The report clearly deserves closer reading and the attention of state leaders. Note especially the involvement of leading state scientists and planners.

For more information, see the official press release and a Star Tribune article.

A friend recently loaned me the spring 2008 issue of Yes!, a magazine dedicated to “Building a Just and Sustainable World.” This was a “Climate Solutions Special Issue” with one of my heroes, Bill McKibben, on the cover.

I haven’t yet read the entire section on climate solutions, but I did read its commentary on transportation, by Guy Dauncey. He proposes a future in which 5 percent of the United States’ surface transportation needs are met by walking, 10 percent by biking, 20 percent by transit, 5 percent by teleworking and teleconferencing, 5 percent by trains (presumably longer-distance), 5 percent by ridesharing, and the rest by personal motor vehicles.

What caught my attention more, however, was the magazine’s “The Page That Counts” section, one of those lists of facts that many magazines publish. For this issue, it begins with these three facts:

Amount of its roads budget that Copenhagen devotes to services and infrastructure for cyclists: 1/3 [1]

Amount of money that a community gains for every mile biked instead of driven: 50 cents [2]

Benefit to Norwegian society for each physically inactive citizen who chooses to bike or walk to work: $4,500 - $5,900 [3]

The quoted facts speak to the generally unrecognized benefits of walking and biking. I was especially drawn to the latter two, because they could capture the attention of elected officials, government staff, and other leaders.

Here are the sources for those facts:

1. “Livable Copenhagen: The Design of a Bicycle City,” Alyse Nelson, Center for Public Space Research, Copenhagen, 2007. This is a 7mb pdf file and will take a while to load depending on your internet connection.
2. “Quantifying the Benefits of Non-Motorized Transportation for Achieving Mobility Management Objectives,” Todd Litman, Victoria Transport Policy Institute, November 30, 2004.
3. “Walking and cycling track networks in Norwegian cities: Cost-benefit analyses including health effects and external costs of road traffic,” Kjartan Sælensminde, Institute of Transport Economics, 2002.

I hope to dig further into these sources and have already glanced at the second one, by Todd Litman, which is quite impressive.

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.

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.

Yesterday the Minnesota House voted to override Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto of a state transportation funding bill. The override - a first for Gov. Pawlenty’s administration - means that the state will raise its gasoline tax for the first time in 20 years, raise the sales tax in the Twin Cities metro area to support transit development, and raise motor vehicle license tab fees - all to fund badly needed road and transit repair and upgrades.

Raising taxes during a recession is a painful decision, but today we have many more vehicles driving more miles than we did 20 years ago, and they are heavier vehicles to boot. That means roads and bridges are being pounded and need to be repaired. Other roads have become unsafe and need to be updated. At the same time, we simply have more people, and investment in transit is necessary to end the costly traffic gridlock in the Twin Cities. The increase in the gas tax was long overdue, since gas tax receipts have been eroded by inflation. Our investment in transit is also long overdue. Minnesota is finally maturing into a 21st-century state.

The Republicans who crossed party lines to vote in favor of the bill deserve praise, not vilification. Even the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce supported this bill.

But don’t think we’ve solved our transportation problems with this bill. According to MinnPost’s Steve Berg, “The new law will fill about 25 percent of the state’s transportation shortfall, estimated at nearly $2.5 billion a year.” And so we muddle on.

For more analysis of the vote and issue, in addition to the excellent article by Mr. Berg, see commentary by another MinnPost writer, Britt Robson.

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.