"Ghost bike" (Photo: +Russ from The SunBreak Flickr pool)
“Greenway,” like “bike boulevard” is one of those terms that may hinder conversations as much as it helps–you always have to be on guard against tribalistic jargon. What’s wrong with just calling them family-friendly streets?
The general principle is to apply a little jiu jitsu to the bikes v. cars debate. Rather than trying to squish bikes and cars onto the same heavily traveled arterials all over town, you create stretches of family-friendly streets in neighborhoods by taking streets without much car traffic, and dedicating them to biking and walking first. Cars can still travel on them, but slowly, thanks to speed bumps.
It changes the whole personality of the street when it’s safe enough for kids to bike on. And it’s quick and easy, relative to other transportation solutions. On Thursday, September 22, you can get the details from Mark Lear and Greg Raisman, who are visiting the University of Washington (Savery Hall 264, 7 p.m.) for a talk about Portland’s Neighborhood Greenways program.
In the span of just five short years, Portland will have transformed itself into a city where 80% of residents live within a half-mile of a “Neighborhood Greenway”–a special family-friendly street where it’s common to see families enjoying a bicycle ride together, kids walking to school or to the park, and even the occasional on-street basketball game.
Here’s a video that gives you a better idea of what it looks like.
Portland’s Bike Boulevards Become Neighborhood Greenways from Streetfilms on Vimeo.
Anyone who’s lived in Seattle for very long knows that if you want to change something citywide, you have first to sell it to the neighborhoods. It’s heartening to see the bottom-up approach taking off. Here’s the requisite Facebook page for Seattle greenways organizers.
It’s also nice to have a City Council member who’s already been sold on the idea; Sally Bagshaw came back from a Portland trip having seen the greenway light. She’s created a whole page of information on how greenways work, and she underscores that greenways aren’t just about bikes:
Neighborhood Greenways are for all of us, not just for bicyclists. Greenways are for those who want to live in a quieter, calmer neighborhood. They are for those of us who want to let our children play outside safely, where neighbors like to walk and ride in front of their homes in relative peace. Greenways are for people who like green and flowering trees and want to recreate how their neighborhoods look and feel.
These family-friendly streets limit traffic speeds to 20 mph or slower, while reorienting intersection stop signs to give priority to cyclists traveling along them. (Someone must have suggested marking these streets Local Access Only, but so far as I can tell, that’s not implemented in Portland. It’s the speed of car traffic that’s being discouraged, not cars. As it turns out, that’s usually good enough at reducing traffic volume.
That still leaves, of course, work to do in areas where bikes and cars have to share the available road area, but if you consider how many people might prefer to bicycle around their neighborhood as opposed to across town, this seems to be a good low-hanging fruit approach.
Vivace’s Brian Fairbrother crashed on some hard-to-see steps near 1177 Fairview Avenue North around 6 p.m. on August 30, 2011. He was removed from life support on September 8.
Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop detail from the City's map
But Michael Hoffman, a 31-year-old scientist at the University of Washington, provided Seattlepi.com and The SunBreak with an email he sent to the City of Seattle’s Parks Department in 2008, after he rode the newly completed Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop.
Some commenters on my earlier post (“Did a Bike Path Just Kill a Seattle Cyclist?“) took issue with the term “bike path,” since the stretch in question is clearly a sidewalk with no particular work done to make it more or less safer for bikes. But the City publicizes it as part of a “multi-use loop” and if you look closely at the map of the loop, those are little blue bicycles riding along…a sidewalk. Clearly, the map is not the territory.
As the Parks Department had put up a sign soliciting feedback, Hoffman responded with an alarming prescience:
It was nice ride in general but there were a few places that were a bit confusing or even dangerous for an unfamiliar rider. I’m not sure if the loop is considered finished yet but I thought these comments might be helpful. […] There is a bit on the east side where the trail seems to go down a lot of steps and then back up. It is not apparent until you are near the steps that they are actually steps rather than a ramp. I think this is dangerous currently. I would strongly recommend some warning signs here. If cyclists are meant to instead travel on the nearby road against the traffic flow, the trail needs signage and road markings to indicate this.
David Graves, a senior planner with Seattle Parks & Recreation, wrote back, saying: “Due to the traffic flow, the counter clockwise direction is more challenging to navigate on a bicycle than clockwise! As we work on drafting a Master plan for the loop, we will keep your comments in mind.”
When I first asked Seattle Department of Transportation spokesperson to comment on this, she referred me to Parks spokesperson Dewey Potter. Potter confirmed via email that Hoffman’s comments had been received and shared with SDOT:
It was one of many comments received during that process. Parks did share it with SDOT, as the planning team included staff from both departments. It is my understanding that SDOT intends to install signage at the site next week…
Signage is better than the nothing SDOT provided for the past three years, but if the City is going to prompt cyclists to ride on a sidewalk, there are also safety gates that let pedestrians pass but prevent bicycles from riding into danger zones. (It probably wouldn’t hurt to slow down runners and inline skaters as well.)
One of the odd disconnects that still separates car drivers from cyclists appeared in comments on my original post. Was Fairbrother wearing a helmet? (He was.) Was perhaps a 50-year-old man on a road bike trying to jump a flight of stairs? (It seems unlikely.) Why wasn’t he paying closer attention? (This is a question Buddha has asked all of us. I ask it every single day of car drivers on their cell phones.)
The disconnect is how easy it is to use bikes to get around, as a form of urban transportation, rather than a slow and sweaty way to annoy car drivers in a hurry. When you bike to get from Point A to Point B, you often just put your head down and go. That being the case, cyclists, just like any other human being, tend to rely on infrastructure’s coherence for safety.
This part of the loop is missing the equivalent of a Wrong Way – Do Not Enter sign. That’s all there is to it. But the larger lesson is that our current infrastructure promotes a cage-match atmosphere. Every time a cyclist is directed by sharrow to “take the lane” on a thin uphill street, car drivers line up fuming behind.
You could ask the drivers exactly how much time they’re losing over a single block, moving at 5 mph instead of 30, but that, while perhaps of rational interest, is not the issue. That infrastructure is creating a problem where there wasn’t one. No one drives an arterial to go slower than on a regular city street. If, because of hills, bikes are going to slow traffic dramatically, SDOT can’t simply throw paint at the problem–you can’t paint over anger and frustration, and its tendency to fasten onto a nearby visible object.
Seattle Transit Blog, calling for bike boulevards, cuts right to the heart of the problem:
Seattle is killing people on bikes at the rate of 1 per month, and we seem more interested in discussing the behavioral problems of people driving and cycling rather than addressing the structural problem, the underlying safety of our transportation network. Given the fallibility of human behavior and the assurance of operator errors, we would be wise to reduce structural risk rather than rely on educational campaigns.
In his post on improving road safety, Mayor McGinn echoes the sentiment:
It’s time to stop finding fault with each other, and to start finding a remedy. There has been a lot of overheated rhetoric about cars versus bikes or bikes versus cars, and it’s not helping make our roads any safer. It’s not even accurate. Most people who ride a bicycle also own a car. Drivers will also park and walk across the street or on a sidewalk to get to their destination.
Seattle Bike Blog argues, simply, “We have reached a turning point in Seattle bicycle safety.” I certainly won’t begrudge anyone who’s lost someone in an accident their righteous anger, but I empathize more with Tom Fucoloro’s faith that “we can do better.”
This summer’s disturbing cyclist death toll is notable for the ways in which our new bicycling infrastructure has failed us–all of us. I can’t imagine what a driver feels replaying that instant a cyclist seemed to come out of nowhere. This leaves everyone on edge. So let’s not delay rethinking what is proving to be a dangerous and divisive primary mode: putting bikes in the road with cars, with bike lanes, sharrows, and taking a lane appearing as options willy-nilly.
As Seattle Transit Blog’s Zach Shaner writes, “In Seattle we may lack many things, but we have an abundance of quiet, low-traffic streets directly adjacent to our busiest arterials. We should put them to better use and save a few lives.”
Sightline throws an off-speed pitch at the helmet-law home plate, with a post asking if mandatory helmet laws are why bike-share programs succeed or fail. (Seattle Bike Blog readers, you can relax, you read about this several months ago: “Mandatory bike helmet laws are a big issue facing any bike share system in King County.”)
In “Unchain Bike-Sharing,” Jake Kenyon writes:
If bike-sharing has been successful in so many places, why isn’t the Pacific Northwest already in on this? Why are there only two operational bike-sharing programs in all of Cascadia: a small one in Pullman, Washington, on the campus of Washington State University, and a tiny one in Golden, British Columbia? […] It turns out there’s something the Northwest has that other places do not, and it makes all the difference: mandatory helmet laws.
The evidence for this is slight, in one way: “The only failed program in the world is Melbourne’s. It’s also the only one put in place under a helmet law.” On the other hand, the rarity of it being the only failed program says something as well. (For a rigorously anecdotal and off-topic response to bike-share programs and their existence in general, try the comment thread at Slog.)
I think we can agree with Kenyon that bike-sharing programs to tend to attract the casual bike rider, and that adding helmets to the mix (with attendant issues of sizing, style, and hygiene) takes some of the impulsiveness out of hopping on a bike and taking off. And, all of a sudden, you have Massive Head Wound Harry lurking in the back of your mind.
But the reason this post is controversial and much-commented is not really because of bike-sharing, which actual cyclists have little reason to care about — it’s because King County’s mandatory helmet law (base fine $30, court costs $51) is yet another instance where Seattle bicyclists get to sort themselves into law-abiding and law-breaking camps. (If want to bicycle bare-headed until you get caught the first time, all you have to do to evade the fine is show proof of purchase of a helmet.)
There are seemingly contradictory arguments for helmet wearing and non-wearing, but essentially they boil down to these positions: the libertarian (“It’s my choice”), the idealist (helmets don’t “work”/Scandinavian countries don’t use them), and the public safety advocate (data shows bicyclists without helmets die, the numbers are overwhelming).
Per that last point, you can dispense with a lot of the technical jibber-jabber about how helmets are supposed to work or not, or at what speeds — they do. Harborview has a round-up of study after study showing that they do:
It should be made clear that arguments against using bicycle helmets are not evidence-based; bicycle helmets are the most effective means of preventing head and brain injury and should be a requirement for cyclists of all ages.
Yet it is also true that most serious biking accidents are car-related, and that the normal state of bicycling is not catapulting off your bike into a car. You can argue that, priority-wise, you can make bicycling safer than with helmets by simply removing cars from the equation.
That has been the direction of Scandinavian countries, and their widely used bike infrastructure. I classified this under the “idealist” position, above, when it comes to helmet use, because you derive none of the safety benefits of Dutch cycling while biking in the U.S. (Yes, even if on a Dutch Bike Co. bike.)
Kenyon concludes his Sightline post by saying the Northwest “just needs to tweak its helmet laws.” His suggestions are to make not wearing a helmet a secondary offense (i.e., not something you can be pulled over for alone, but something that can be tacked on if you blow through a red light), and to exempt bike-sharing from the helmet law.
The first tweak soothes the libertarians out there, while the second plays to the idealists (“When everyone rides, it’s safer”). It’s hard to justify the first to motorcyclists, who would no doubt like the same application of the law. As for the second, you’re creating a special class of cyclist. I wonder if the better tweak would be to require mandatory helmet usage if cars are “sharing” the road: That would create an incentive for bike boulevards and other solutions where bikes are physically separated from cars.
"Summer in Ballard," courtesy of our Flickr pool's Slightlynorth
Sightline’s post on the demographics of bicycling, “Who Bikes?” contains a response of sorts to that viral Vanity Fair article, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” by Joseph Stiglitz.
Stiglitz excoriates the pernicious effects of income inequality, concluding:
The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.
But when it comes to bicycling, the appeal extends through all income classes. And there’s nothing like nearly getting run over by an SUV to illustrate how your fate is bound up with how others live. (I know it’s irrational, but if I’m going to be hit, I prefer it be a Subaru.)
Now, certainly, biking is a more popular choice for anyone on a budget. Sightline’s Eric de Place says, “the biggest share of bicyclists isn’t yuppies, it’s low income people. In fact, the lowest-earning quarter of Americans make nearly one-third of all bike trips.”
But he emphasizes that bicycling is “remarkably evenly distributed” among the other three quarters. Said another way, the poorer half of the U.S. makes 52 percent of all bike trips, while the richer half make 48 percent.
The extent of this commonality of interests is likely to be overlooked if you’re not careful: in Seattle, just 2.5 percent of commuters go by bike, though that still places us mid-pack in the list of the top ten largest U.S. cities.
But there’s a lot of distance between commuting and riding solely recreationally. Seattle’s Cascade Bicycle Club has over 13,000 members, and their annual Seattle-to-Portland ride has sold out months early, with 10,000 participants. In a city like Seattle, where “practically everyone” has a bike hanging in a garage, I’d be more interested in knowing how often people hit the road with a bicycle for any reason, not just commuting. (Nationally, commuting made up just 11 percent of bike trips in 2009.)
Now more than ever, as Stiglitz argues, we could stand to build bridges that are not purely rhetorical. Seattle City Council’s Sally Bagshaw has returned from a trip to Portland with visions of bike boulevards. Typically, the response to something like this is as if bicyclists had literally stolen a street and made off with it, though people living on bike boulevards come to appreciate having a safe, quiet street that cars move slowly along.
But again, consider what the real population of cyclists might be, especially in the context of a residential street: kids biking to and from school or other activities, people visiting friends down the street, people just out for exercise, or running an errand near home. Cycling infrastructure is often seen as serving a minority, a niche group. But bike boulevards in Seattle could be serving a cycling population that rivals that of drivers–thanks to the obsession with measuring bike commuting, it’s actually hard to tell. What we do know is that bike infrastructure serves all income classes wonderfully equally.