Portland Organ metropolitan area is about to have a new bike trail. Advocates in Mobile can lear a lot from the process the Metro has gone through to get it completed
from Oregon Metro:
The future Westside Trail will create new connections among communities in Washington County with a north-south route between the Tualatin and Willamette rivers.
The finish line is in sight
Someday, the Westside Trail will travel through urban and rural landscapes connecting the Willamette River near Forest Park to the Tualatin River at Tigard and King City – and neighborhoods, businesses and schools along the way.
Metro is working together with residents, cities, park districts and community organizations to create a vision for a trail that will provide a continuous north-south route. Eventually, the trail will connect with portions already completed by the Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District and other regional trails including the future Ice Age Tonquin Trail and the Rock Creek Trail. (read more on http://www.oregonmetro.gov/)
HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – Organizers of an upcoming forum at the Von Braun Center hope to give Huntsville a nudge toward becoming a better place for cyclists.
Marjorie Holderer, spokeswoman for the inaugural North Alabama Bike Summit starting Thursday at the VBC North Hall, said the Rocket City is making positive strides but still lags far behind many of its competitors.
Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Austin, Texas, Greenville, S.C., Charlotte, Raleigh and Asheville, N.C., and Orlando, Fla., are among the nearly 300 U.S. cities already certified as bike friendly by the League of American Bicyclists.
Being left off that list puts Huntsville at a disadvantage when recruiting new industry and working to lure young professionals, Holderer told AL.com Friday. (read more at AL.com)
Advocacy Advance is a dynamic partnership of the Alliance for Biking & Walking and the League of American Bicyclists to boost local and state bicycle and pedestrian advocacy efforts. With support from SRAM, Advocacy Advance provides targeted trainings, reports, grants and assistance to equip advocates with the specific tools they need to increase biking and walking in their communities.
Last year $2.9 billion was spent on transportation projects. How much of that was spent on bicycle and pedestrian facilities?
Not much! Alabama ranks 46th out of 50 states on percentage of transportation money spent on bike/ped infrastructure.
0% of those funds were used on bike-only projects
1.2% was used on pedestrian only facilities
0.7% was used on shared (bicycle and pedestrian projects)
6.1% of spending on transportation projects had bicycle and pedestrian facilities (including road projects)
93.9% of spending on transportation projects had no bicycle or pedestrian components.
The new Advocacy Advance report, Lifting the Veil on Bicycle and Pedestrian Spending, takes a look at a complex federal process – the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program (STIP). STIPs, at their most basic, are budget documents that express how states plan to spend federal transportation funds for the next four years.
They examined these documents in every state to determine the types of facilities that are planned for people who walk and bike. We asked if planned projects will serve bicyclists-only, pedestrians-only, or both through a shared facility and whether they will occur as part of other roadwork or as standalone projects. We found that:
Bicycling and walking investments are difficult to determine and appear to be small.
Bicycling and walking facilities are more numerous than cost percentage estimates alone might suggest.
Complete Streets policies are often correlated with more projects including bicycling and walking facilities, but having good data better explains states’ performance.
No strong trend emerged in how states allocated spending among biking, walking, and shared-use facilities.
States are required to make information accessible means and involve the public. By rating each state based upon how their DOT presents federally required planning information, we hope to encourage best practices that improve transparency and lead to better civic engagement.
Yesterday we unveiledThe Best Complete Streets Policies of 2013 and to celebrate we hosted an online discussion with representatives from many of this year’s top-scoring communities. Panelists gave listeners a behind-the-scenes look at how many of this year’s policies were created, and provided insights for how other communities create strong policies of their own.
If you were not able to join us for yesterday’s event, an archived recording is now available.
Joining yesterday’s event were Roger Millar, Director of the National Complete Streets Coalition; Chris Kuschel, Regional Planner, Metropolitan Area Planning Council (Massachusetts); Mayor James R. Walker of Peru, IN; Mark Demchek, Executive Director of the Miami County, IN YMCA; Karen Mendrala, Livability Planner for Fort Lauderdale, FL; Mayor Jonathan LaBonte of Auburn, ME; Craig Saddlemire, Chair of the Bike/Ped Committee for Lewiston/Auburn, ME; Rick Taintor, Planning Director for Portsmouth, NH; Andrew Fangman, City Planner for Muscatine, IA; Chris Schmiesing, City Planner for Piqua, OH; Jamie Parks, Complete Streets Program Manager for Oakland, CA; Bob Vinn, Assistant City Engineer for Livermore, CA; Aric Schroeder, City Planner for Waterloo, IA; and Mayor Jon Crews of Cedar Falls, IA.
Thank you to everyone who participated. The event provided great information for experts and newcomers alike about how public policies can build safer, more convenient streets for everyone.
Each year, $37 billion is allocated to states for transportation projects. How much does your state plan to spend on bicycle and pedestrian facilities? The new Advocacy Advance report, Lifting the Veil on Bicycle and Pedestrian Spending, takes a look at a complex federal process – the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program (STIP). STIPs, at their most basic, are budget documents that express how states plan to spend federal transportation funds for the next four years.
Sound Transit in Seattle, WA was made possible in part by federal transportation funding. Photo by Flickr user Sean Marshall.
Real estate developers everywhere are familiar with the federal programs and regulations involved with building transit-oriented development. With the federal surface transportation bill due to expire early this fall, how could these programs and regulations be improved?
We want to hear from you. Join LOCUS for a conference call on Tuesday, February 25, 2014 at 3:00 PM EST to discuss federal transportation programs as they relate to smart growth development and how these programs can better support walkable, sustainable development.
The event will be an opportunity for LOCUS members and allies to brainstorm and share ideas. Please join us next week!
LOCUS is a national network of real estate developers and investors who advocate for federal policies that promote sustainable, walkable urban development in America’s metropolitan areas. Learn more about LOCUS >>
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The Best Complete Streets Policies of 2013 Streetsblog USA – February 18, 2014
A growing number places are adopting policies to create safe space on the streets no matter how you get around.
Customers venture out to walkable businesses Roanoke Times (VA) – February 18, 2014
Who needs a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get around in the snow? In southwest Roanoke, all you needed Thursday was a good pair of snow boots.
Does Reducing Regulations Yield Expanded Housing Options? Planetizen – February 19, 2014
Outdated and onerous regulations, particularly those found in zoning ordinances, are affecting the availability of housing choice. What can communities do to expand their hosing stock?
Muscatine’s street smarts pays off Muscatine Journal (IA) – February 19, 2014
A national advocacy group for improved community development has ranked Muscatine as “a national leader in creating streets that work for everyone.”
Creating Great Places summit to be held Thursday Winston-Salem Journal (NC) – February 18, 2014
The keynote speakers will be Mayor Allen Joines and Ilana Preuss, chief of staff of Smart Growth America.
Vitality must include walkability Independent Record (MT) – February 18, 2014
The goal of fostering urban vitality in Helena is certainly worth public discussion.
State Farm Announces Major Transit Oriented Development; New Jobs Peach Pundit (GA) – February 18, 2014
Finalizing what has been rumored for months, State Farm announced this morning that it will build a campus just West of Perimeter Mall, adjacent to the Dunwoody MARTA station.
What good is a protected bike lane that isn't safe when it crosses the street? A Portland-based planner proposes a systematic answer to the problem in a short new video Tuesday.
"Sharing busy traffic lanes with cars is absolutely unacceptable, and separation by a line of paint is often not enough," says the video's creator, Nick Falbo. But, he adds, "it doesn't matter how safe and protected your bike lane is if intersections are risky, stressful experiences."
Falbo, whose day job is as a professional bike planner, isn't so much introducing new ideas here — as Falbo notes on his project's website protectedintersection.com, many of the concepts will be familiar to people who saw Mark Wagenbuur's 2011 video "Junction design the Dutch way." Instead, he's trying to advance new ways to talk about these ideas. His hope is to make "protected intersections" as familar a concept in the United States as "protected bike lanes" have become.
"One of my goals with the video was to give people something else to call it other than a Dutch Intersection, as well as to give names to all of the various elements that make it up," Falbo writes in an email.
My favorite part of the video is Falbo's careful breakdown of the four elements of a great protected intersection:
1) A corner refuge island.
This "key element" of a protected intersection "physically separates bicyclists as they make right turns, and provide a secure refuge for those waiting at a red signal protected from moving cars," Falbo explains. Sure, it takes a lot of real estate at a street corner. But then, so do all the cars driven by people who would ride bikes if it were more pleasant to do so.
"Think of it like a curb extension for bicyclists."
2) A forward stop bar for bicycles.
This is used both by bikes turning left — instead of merging with auto traffic, they simply head across the street and then turn left from there — and by bikes going straight ahead.
"The forward stop location makes bicyclists incredibly visible to drivers waiting at a red light; the physical distance ahead of cars gives bicyclist an effective head start when the light turns green; and the distance of the road that bicyclists need to cross is greatly reduced."
3) A set-back bike and pedestrian crossing.
"The critical dimension is one car-length of space between the traffic lane and the bicycle crossing, around 6 meters.
"With this design, drivers turn 90 degrees to face the bike lane before they even cross it, making people on bikes highly visible and out of the driver’s blind spot."
4) Bicycle-friendly signal phasing.
Dedicated bike signals and phases give people on bikes "a little extra time to get rolling, enter the intersection, and maybe even clear it completely before people driving start to move."
The project is Falbo's submission to George Mason University's 2014 Cameron Rian Hays Outside the Box Competition, a contest for interesting new transportation ideas. (Our favorite from last year: the pop-up protected bus lane. Who said bike riders should have all the fun?) He acknowledges that this video will invite debate and that this perfect solution can't work at every street corner.
"Starting that conversation is the whole point," Falbo writes. "I hope to go on a conference tour this year pitching the concept to any other planners, engineers and designers that will listen."
The Green Lane Project is a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets. You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook or sign up for our weekly news digest about protected bike lanes. Story tip? Write michael@peopleforbikes.org.
It started in 1898, right at the end of the 1890s "bike boom" that began with the pneumatic tire and ended with the Oldsmobile. But it was different than the "Good Roads" movement you might have heard of, in which bikers allied with farmers to create paved shared routes through the countryside.
No: this was, as University of Wisconsin-La Crosse historian James Longhurst wrote in an academic paper published last October, a "forgotten episode" in which "an alternative vision of the future of American transportation flickered to life, and then faded."
Before most roads were widened and paved, and before cities required (or assessed) abutters to install concrete sidewalks and curbing, advocates took advantage of the transitional state of the built environment to insert sidepaths into the urban landscape. The proposed paths "shall not be less than three feet or more than six feet wide … and shall be constructed within the outside lines and along and upon either side of such public roads and streets." While they were to be built within the already-established legal right of way, the sidepaths were segregated from both the adjoining road and from sidewalks: already-existing pedestrian paths were not to be subsumed or inconvenienced. Later court decisions made it clear that wagons, carts, and horses were excluded from the paths. They were to be a separate network, set apart from foot and vehicle traffic, solely for bicycles.
They were, in short, protected bike lanes.
The movement had its own national magazine, "Sidepaths," with a circulation of 5,000, published in America's bike capital: Rochester, N.Y. Sidepaths, Longhurst writes, had more success in some cities than in others and "briefly flourished in Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and elsewhere."
The basic problem for sidepaths, Longhurst shows, is that after an initial burst of enthusiasm among bike advocates faded, there wasn't enough public money in place to build and maintain them.
Charitable fundraising dropped off. Governments resisted taxing the public at large for what was seen as a service for urban elites. User fees, funded by bike licenses, were supported by some bikers but not others.
Where sidepaths were hobbled from the start by a weak and fluctuating funding stream, [historian Christopher] Wells observes that the interstate highway system was successful because of the ingenuity and invisibility of its financing, hiding the cost from end users and protecting it from the depredations of marauding legislators. When it comes to infrastructure, it seems, the funding mechanism is destiny.
'Had it been successful, a separate sidepath system would have changed American history'
Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, in 1894.Photo: nycgovparks.org.
"Had it been successful, a separate sidepath system would have changed American history," Longhurst writes in his article, which will also inform his upcoming book tentatively titled "Bike Battles."
If the paths themselves had continued to exist, they might have offered alternative suburban and interurban commuting options throughout the twentieth century. As cities and towns of America expanded, the suburbs would have bloomed along the sidepath networks linking them back to the urban center. The persistence of sidepaths might have provided some American cities with a built-in radial network of bicycle paths throughout the twentieth century — the very network that many are now trying to build or accommodate, with great difficulty, in the twenty-first.
The Green Lane Project is a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets. You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook or sign up for our weekly news digest about protected bike lanes. Story tip? Write michael@peopleforbikes.org.
Top image and magazine cover: "Sidepaths. Monroe County," scrapbook dated 1899, Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County, Historic Monographs Collection, Rochester, NY.
Livermore, CA is included among the top of The Best Complete Streets Policies of 2013.
A total of 83 communities adopted Complete Streets policies in the United States in 2013. These laws, resolutions and planning and design documents encourage and provide for the safe access to destinations for everyone, regardless of age, ability, income or ethnicity, and no matter how they travel.
The Best Complete Streets Policies of 2013, released today by Smart Growth America’s National Complete Streets Coalition examines and scores each Complete Streets policy enacted in 2013. The report outlines ten ideal elements of a Complete Streets policy and scores individual policies based on these ideals. Policy elements refine a community’s vision for transportation, provide for many types of users, complement community needs and establish a flexible approach necessary for an effective Complete Streets process and outcome.
Fifteen agencies led the nation in creating comprehensive Complete Streets policies in 2013. These policies are a model for communities across the country. They are:
Rank:
Jurisdiction:
Score:
1.
Littleton, MA
94.4
2.
Peru, IN
92.8
3.
Fort Lauderdale, FL
89.6
4.
Auburn, ME (tie)
88.0
4.
Lewiston, ME (tie)
88.0
6.
Baltimore County, MD
86.4
7.
Portsmouth, NH
86.0
8.
Muscatine, IA
83.2
9.
Piqua, OH
82.4
10.
Oakland, CA
81.6
11.
Hayward, CA (tie)
80.8
11.
Livermore, CA (tie)
80.8
11.
Massachusetts Department of Transportation (tie)
80.8
14.
Cedar Falls, IA (tie)
80.0
14.
Waterloo, IA (tie)
80.0
Small towns and big cities alike enacted Complete Streets policies in 2013. The types of policies these communities use is similarly diverse: most take the form of a resolution adopted by a city or county council, but changes to municipal code and city-wide policies are gaining popularity. Policies adopted by an elected board are also popular. Of the top scoring policies of in 2013, almost all are this type of policy.
Over time, the typical Complete Streets policy has become increasingly well-written, as reflected in an upward trend in the annual median scores of policies. The median score of policies adopted in 2013 was 60.0, up from 46.8 in 2012.
Nationwide, a total of 610 jurisdictions now have Complete Streets policies in place. Today, 27 states as well as the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have Complete Streets policies. Fifty-one regional planning organizations, 48 counties and 482 municipalities in 48 states also have adopted such policies.
The Best Complete Streets Policies report is intended to celebrate the communities that have done exceptional work in the past year and to provide leaders at all levels of government with ideas for how to create strong Complete Streets policies. The report includes extensive detail for what makes Complete Streets policies work well, and how every community can make their streets better for everyone.
BicycleMobile.org is a an advocacy website devoted to every aspect of bicycling in Mobile, AL. We have lists of group rides, information about bike shops and a list of key issues for advocacy and infrastructure.