17 Tuesday Apr 2018
There is a remarkable restored film that was made in 1911 in New York City by the Swedish company Svenska Bigrafteatern. The footage has been slowed down and there is unfortunately a soundtrack added that is not original.
It does show the remarkable time when streets easily incorporated all users, and formal pedestrian crossings had not yet arrived. read on >>
16 Monday Apr 2018
Posted in Annals of Cycling, Bicycling, Seattle
Seattle’s indispensable historian Knute Berger does a series on the city’s bike background:
How bikes led Seattle’s first roads renaissance
Meet Seattle’s first bike vigilantes
13 Friday Apr 2018
Posted in Annals of Cycling, Bicycling, Transportation
Chinese bicycle sharing companies Mobike and Ofo rank among the country’s most successful start-ups, and have rolled out millions of bicycles to China’s cities. Mobike claims there are 2m rides per day on its platform in Guangzhou alone. …
They are quite unlike the bicycles my grandmother remembers. These are smart bikes, with about 300 patents involved in their production. They are unlocked and paid for in seconds with a scan of the bicycle’s QR code.
Mobike says it operates one of the largest Internet of Things networks in the world and is integrated into WeChat, China’s equivalent of WhatsApp. Both companies nudge their customers into using bicycles responsibly. Users receive points for parking inside a geo-fenced area, which are agreed with local authorities. and are lose them for parking in inappropriate spaces or damaging a bicycle. Read on >>
10 Tuesday Apr 2018
If you have been in San Francisco California in the last few weeks you have probably seen them-electric scooters are everywhere. And as discussed by a reporter for the New York Times section California Today in San Francisco “Shared electric scooters are available to reserve and rent by app for as little as $1 a ride. They are billed as a way to “help make transportation better and more environmentally friendly” by one start-up, Bird, which has netted $100 million in venture capital funding.” Read on >>
28 Wednesday Mar 2018
Tags
This week, selected items and observations from a short trip to Victoria.
Back in 2016, Dan Ross reported on Victoria’s first protected bike lane on Pandora Street here. Since then, as reported here, the City has moved towards a complete active transportation network in the core – notably on Fort Street, just now nearing completion.
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While I didn’t have a chance to get on a bike and explore it all, here are some shots which demonstrate the commitment the City is making:
Pandora at Government
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Pandora looking west to new Johnson Street Bridge
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Fort Street lane waiting to open
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Frontage lane at 525 Superior Street – a new provincial government office building
Inside the building, there are large bike rooms with lockers – but the designers provided parking capacity based on counts of use in other buildings with departments that were consolidated in this new one. Guess what? With better facilities, the numbers of cyclists so increased that the architects are trying to figure out to repurpose space for the demand.
Another lesson: this nicely designed bike ramp in the centre of the stairs leading to the bike rooms isn’t used all that much. There’s a car ramp immediately to the left, and cyclists use it instead of having to dismount and carry their bike up the stair ramp.
28 Wednesday Mar 2018
While proposed by the Fire Chief in Surrey as a way to give more parking back to communities, Chief Garis’ willingness to review the sacrosanct five meters of parking clearance required curbside beside fire hydrants opens up the potential for all kinds of new street use. Working for a municipality the requirements for fire hydrant clearances are never questioned, and even in the computer age where every hydrant is tracked and marked on line, even landscaping is ordinanced and suppressed around fire hydrants. Chief Garis questioned the five metre clearances with Surrey’s City Engineer and while he found that most North American by-laws limit parking to five or three metres away from a hydrant, the requirement could be reduced to half of that.As noted in the Vancouver Courier “The National Fire Protection Association in the United States recommends a minimum buffer of five feet, or about 1.5 metres.”
A study showed that parked cars only impeded hydrant access if the setback was two metres or less, and noted that “with the advancement of GPS mapping and related technologies, along with local drivers’ awareness of hydrant locations, visibility is less of an issue in compact urban settings. The space doesn’t need to be large enough for a fire engine to park either, since they rarely pull right up to the curb, and instead block traffic lanes.”
While the Fire Chief saw this as a way to give back space to parking for cars, is this not another opportunity to create more parkettes and widen facilities for pedestrians and cyclists? If there are thousands of fire hydrants in each Metro Vancouver municipality could this not be a way to improve the public realm for active transportation users with benches and other amenities? While the Minister of Transportation is prepared to consider the changes to clearances, the proposal will be going to the Union of B.C. Municipalities for consideration. This might also be an opportune time to explore how else this newly acquired space on almost every block of a municipality can potentially be repurposed to the benefit of pedestrian and cyclists.
26 Monday Mar 2018
In the “you just can’t make this stuff up” department, Bike Biz notes that Manuel Marsilio, general manager of the Confederation for the European Bicycle Industry has spoken out about the need for cyclists to “identify” themselves for autonomous vehicles. With the salvo that lives will be saved with “cycle to vehicle” sensors, Marsilio made his comments at the Geneva Motor Show in Switzerland. “It is the goal of the “connected car” industry to make cyclists wear sensors or beacons so they can be detected more easily. Currently, “erratic” cyclists are hard to detect by autonomous vehicles. And pedestrians, too, are often not spotted by a plethora of detection devices on the most tricked-out “driverless cars.”
Of course the example of the lady killed by a self-driving Uber car in Arizona was also trotted out as an example of why pedestrians could benefit from wearing a “vehicle tracker”. While there have been previous iterations of bicycle to vehicle communication systems, “B2V is a new addition to the Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything technology. C-V2X connects equipped vehicles to a larger communications system allowing them to communicate with other vehicles, pedestrian devices, cyclists and roadside infrastructure, such as traffic signs and construction zones.”
It has been pointed out that if cyclists need to have beacons and pedestrians need trackers that “smart” cars are not yet smart. While cycling is growing for health and to get around congestion, Mr. Marsilio stated that the main concern was cycling safety, and the need for communication with other road users, and a good legislative environment was needed for users to adopt tracker technology. Mr. Marsilio observed “Bicycles of the near future will have sensors that will allow cyclists to be detected by car drivers. It’s not a [case] of putting a chip in bodies or to force everybody to have a smart watch, the main idea is to have bicycles equipped with the necessary equipment in order to be able to be connected with all vehicles.”
As expected, there has been plenty of reaction to this story and the motordom based solution to have beacons on all road users. And once again, it shows how the embracing of a new technology can warp the understanding that active transportation users and pedestrians need to be embraced and embedded into a city’s living fabric. Should cyclists and pedestrians be bowing to the new needs of autonomous motordom? Not so much.
19 Monday Mar 2018
Tags
By Jeff Leigh
The Vancouver Sun has posted an editorial about the controversy regarding the proposed Kits Beach Park bike route, “Don’t Wreck Kits Beach Park with Unnecessary Bike Lane”
Leaving aside the quip about chanting anti-car slogans (the advocacy group I work with has as a guiding principle respect for all transportation stakeholders – there aren’t winners and losers), there are numerous fallacies presented in the op-ed piece. Starting with the title. The proposal is for a low-speed path, not a bike lane.
Cyclists, on the hand, cannot safely ride through the throngs of pedestrians on the existing path — although many try — and want a route that allows them to complete a seaside circuit without interruption or the inconvenience of vehicular traffic.
We agree that riding through a throng of people walking on the existing shared path isn’t safe. But diverting people on bikes (especially families with children) to a busy street and through a parking lot, particularly in summer, isn’t about inconvenience. It is about safety. It is about respecting the principles established in our city for movement, with people walking at the top of the pyramid, and people on bikes next. Not last. And certainly not behind preserving all of the space for cars that is being championed here.
This is about park planning. Note the photo the Vancouver Park Board use on their web site:
The matter was supposed to be decided at a Vancouver Park Board meeting this past Monday, but the board voted to refer it back to the engineering department for further study.
The construction of a bike route wasn’t supposed to be decided by Park Board Commissioners. The recommendation by Park Board staff was simply for staff to work with City transportation engineering staff to advance designs, and develop budget cost estimates, in preparation for a full public consultation. The Park Board Commissioners did not refer it back to Engineering, as Engineering isn’t a Park Board department. They failed to refer it back. They left it in limbo. References were made in the meeting to next year’s Park Board commissioners dealing with it.
Considering that a bike lane through this park has been debated for five years or so, one might have thought that all the study would be done. But the total cost, the number of trees to be lost and other details are still unknown.
All the study was not done as Park Board staff did not start work on it until late in 2017, in response to community pressure to deal with a worsening problem. That pressure came from the cycling community. But also at the table with Park Board staff were local residents and representatives of various park user groups. The costs and potential tree impacts are unknown because that work hasn’t been done yet. The staff recommendation was for that work to be done. Park Board staff will struggle to do it without hiring outside expertise, or working collaboratively with Engineering staff, who had offered to help.
The route from Balsam Street and Cornwall Avenue in the west to Ogden Avenue and Maple Street in the northeast would result in the loss of about 930 square meters of green space, roughly the size of two basketball courts. Demonstrators before the meeting carried signs reading: “Is concrete the new green?”
There are many options that reduce that impact, and offsets that result in no net increase in paving if that is desired. Those options are open to the Park Board. Utilizing existing pavement would be the first way to answer the concern. That means dealing with the question of retaining all existing parking, designing a safe route down the existing service lane to the restaurant, and so on.
But if the goal is to remove paving, fine. Should we start with the tennis courts, the basketball courts, or one or more of the three parking lots? Or should we instead simply find a way not to encroach further. A basketball player and a tennis player holding signs saying “No Paving in the Park” may be inclined to opt for the latter.
Lowering the tone of the debate doesn’t help. Why is a safe path through the park called a cycling speedway? Why the references to the Tour de France by path opponents? There is already a Seaside Bypass route on the street, for faster cyclists, just as there is along Charleson Road in South False Creek, and along 1st Avenue near Burrard. Are the tennis courts in the park a Wimbledon venue? Are the basketball courts a professional arena? Or are all of these simply park amenities, used by people enjoying the park?
A little more balance, please. Vancouver has a wonderful treasure in our Seaside Greenway, and the bike paths around Stanley Park, around False Creek and the length of the Seaside Greenway are heavily used and widely appreciated. They are a tourist draw. Kitsilano Beach Park, and both residents and visitors who want to use our bike paths, deserve better than this.
Jeff Leigh is the chair of the Vancouver UBC Local Committee of HUB Cycling.
15 Thursday Mar 2018
Posted in Active Transportation, Annals of Cycling, Bicycling
San Diego Merchants Call for Halt to Dockless Bikeshare Operations
Public bikeshare arrived in San Diego in 2014. Last month, three companies unleashed thousands of dockless bikes, cluttering sidewalks in three business districts to the chagrin of merchants who want a time-out so the city can develop regulations.
Discover ® Bike, operating in partnership with the city of San Diego, was the first to offer bikeshare in California’s second largest city, with docking stations opening on October 30, 2014. Customers knew where to find bikes and where to drop them off. Life was orderly in the bikeshare business.
Then came dockless bikeshare companies LimeBike and Ofo on February 15. A week later, Mobike arrived. Santa Monica-based Bird, maker of electric (stand-up) scooters, beat them all, arriving in mid-January.
[San Diego Union-Tribune video and news article: “Is Southern California’s ‘dockless’ electric scooter fad a public safety hazard? Mark Platte and environment reporter Joshua Emerson Smith discuss the abundance of ‘dockless’ bikes and electric scooters in San Diego.” March 6.]
“Merchant groups from the Gaslamp to Mission Hills and La Jolla have expressed frustration with the dockless bikes since thousands of them began arriving…,” reports David Garrick for the San Diego Union-Tribune on March 8.
They are complaining that bikes are strewn about the sidewalks of high-traffic business districts and that community leaders got no notice the flood of bikes was coming, depriving them of a chance to weigh in on possible regulations.
“We completely understand the concept of a dockless system, however there needs to be more control and order in communities that are highly congested and have high pedestrian usage,” said Chris Gomez, manager of the Little Italy Association.
The new bikeshare operators have supporters in the environmental community who welcome the new bikes, seeing them as alternatives to motor vehicles.
“They have become an overnight sensation,” said Nicole Capretz, executive director of Climate Action Campaign. “It has changed everything about how people view our transportation future.”
Origins of the problem
“San Diego’s dockless bike experience has been more of a free-for-all than in most cities, because San Diego couldn’t make an exclusive deal with one operator without violating a previous exclusive deal with a rental company that requires bikes to be returned to docking stations,” explains Garrick.
Price Tags: So what happens if (when) dockless bikes show up in Vancouver? Can the City regulate them, or are we in the same situation as San Diego – committed to a contractual relationship with Mobi that prevents approving any competition (and hence regulation) of dockless bikes?
13 Tuesday Mar 2018
Tags
On the surface the conflict on Kits Point is about a continuation of the Seaside Route through and around park space. The Park Board has punted that decision.
Delay and indecision is pretty much the Park Board strategy everywhere within their jurisdiction. See Jericho:
But the way some of the Kits Point residents (the most successfully parochial community in the city) have framed the debate, it’s also about a larger policy issue. Is cycling for all an activity to be accommodated and encouraged in parks?
Two Park Board commissioners (John Coupar and Sarah Kirby-Young, NPA) used concerns over lack of details – no route, no costing – to avoid a decision to proceed. That no doubt surprised the staff who must have been instructed to prepare a report without those details in order not to inflame the community with the impression of a foregone decision.
So the Park Board failed to affirm or reject the position of the opponents, which (without quite saying it) is that cycling should be kept out of their park. Quote: “ ‘I’m happy with that. It’s a reprieve for the moment,’ said Peter Labrie, a Kits Point resident who believes a bike lane through the park is unnecessary.”
If the Park Board refuses to make a decision on a properly designed bike route to connect and continue the Seaside, they would be affirming that position. Their position by default would be that an activity which promotes healthy recreation, is necessary for active transportation and advances the city’s sustainability goals is not something to be encouraged in their parks. (You can see why they don’t want to have to say that.)
This protest is also about an even larger agenda, as articulated by Howard Kelsey of the Kitsilano Beach Coalition.
(Kelsey) suggested the decision represented a broader win against cycling advocates he believes had held sway over the city’s agenda.”
“The cycling agenda was just put on hold,” he told supporters. “They are not driving the agenda anymore.
Conclusion: Many Kits Point residents and allies want to discourage cycling in the city by preventing the funding and construction of safe cycling routes for all. And they have come very close to saying that.
The question now is whether those running for office will also support or reject that de facto position. Or will they pursue the NPA strategy of never saying no but never articulating a positive alternative, and where possible never voting for anything decisive. Cycling will simply be suffocated.
