Last night Josh Cohen touched on a very salient point that I have felt for a while. Put simply the four year old Bicycle Master Plan (BMP) feels incredibly out of date. Check out the whole piece here.
The BMP language does illustrate how fast the best practices for building bike facilities have evolved and how important the BMP five-year review (scheduled to begin in 2011) will be for Seattle’s bike infrastructure.
Portland and New York City are leading the way in America’s experiments with separated on-road bicycle infrastructure. Portland has a parking-protected cycletrack similar to the proposed lanes on Dexter Ave. and Admiral Way in Seattle. NYC has a few cycletracks separated by raised cement islands and raised lane-divider poles (as seen in the photo above). But these separated facilities were all installed within the last year or two. When Seattle set to work on the BMP in 2006 and 2007, Portland and NYC’s separated infrastructure was but a twinkle in some ambitious planner’s eyes.
Bicycle infrastructure planning has come a long way in the four years since the BMP’s was introduced. With goals to “increase the comfort of bicyclists on roadways” and “indicate the appropriate location to ride on the roadway with respect to moving traffic and parked cars,” it’s clear that the vehicular cycling school of riding had a major influence on the original draft. Though the tenets of vehicular cycling are useful for safe bicycling, the school’s opposition to separated facilities are fairly outdated. Unsurprisingly, Portland’s own BMP has a thorough and detailed facilities best practice section (a valuable read for the geekiest of our transportation-loving readers).
If you want to learn more about the BMP and segregated facilities come to the Great City brown bag today. It promises an interesting and very well attending meeting.
Is anyone planning on going to the BrownBag today? I think I’ll be there.
I’ll be there.
i wonder if Seattle could do what Copenhagen did?
One thing that I noticed that seems to be missing from the bike master plan is: there is not much (if any) to encourage developers and land owners to provide bike parking.
I use to live at an apartment building with about 240 units yet there was only one bike rack with enough space for about 12 bikes and just before I left there was a apartment that finished behind ours that had 50+ units and had a bike rack out front which I can understand if it was for the ground floor office/retail (our apartments had none for the ground floor retail) but was unsure if there was a bike rack somewhere else for tenants.
Some thing in many apartments in SLU where I live. I’ve advocated at the office and our building *may* be getting an additional bike parking area next year which would cost a small fee. GGLO was the architect so it’s baffling to me that there is a massive parking garage but a tiny “bike storage” room??? I guess they assumed everyone would want to bring their bikes up to their unit via elevator, that’s pretty fun.
How bad of a parent do you have to be to have your baby on a bike without a helmet? Adults, whatever, they can do what they like, but a baby? It does not take much of an impact to do serious damage to their still forming skulls.
It’s hard to tell the from the angle, but is the big shield on the front large enough to keep the strapped in kid from hitting the pavement if there was a fall over?
Not if it tipped over. Plus I don’t think I’d want my kids head slamming into that either.
Maybe I am not communicating it clearly, but I am talking about the shield being big enough that with the pedals would keep the kid from hitting the pavement if it fell over. It is strapped in, so that would also keep it from hitting the shield.
Babies bounce. Plus they don’t remember anything till they’re like 2 or 3.
According to the flickr page this is in the Netherlands. “The UK’s CTC say that cycling in the Netherlands and Denmark is perceived as a “normal” activity requiring no special clothing or equipment.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet#Legislation_and_culture
While I’d probably put helmets on my kids even in Antwerp, there are many other dangerous activities that kids do without helmets! My first was very cautious, but my younger daughter is a daredevil. Even at that age she would crawl off the couch and stuff like that.
I’d say ridding around on a rather fast moving vehicle is a somewhat special risk. I mean driving is a normal activity that one does not dress up for, but we still put kids in car seats.
Plus that kid looks really young. Its not till about 2 when the soft spots on a babies head firm up. An adult going a reasonable speed with the great infrastructure they have in the Netherlands is probably fine without a helmet, but a baby could get serious brain damage if the bike just fell over.
Well then I guess every parent in the Netherlands is a bad parent. There is not a single bicycle helmet anywhere within that country’s boundaries.
Then
Now
Car seats are uncommon in lots of places to, still doesn’t mean its a good idea to just strap a kid in or hold them on your lap while driving.
Wow, reserve your rather ignorant, very Seattle assumption and finger-pointing. You not only judged this young parent, but the entire culture of many dutch. Riding a bike is much different there than here; it’s a very safe activity, thus why no one even blinks an eye when 99.9% of cyclists riding by do not don a helmet. Further, unless you are perfect, farting fresh oxygen, and destined to raise the next Dali Lama, you may want to keep such judgments inside; especially with regard to someone’s parenting skills.
Man I hate helmet zealots…can’t leave us alone.
Studies of helmet use have suggested that wearing helmets is actually more dangerous than riding without helmets. People apparently take more risks when they mistakenly believe they are “safer.”
I’m not sure how much I buy that, however, since that same argument undercuts every safety measure in existence – dedicated bike lanes, for example.
And seat belts in cars as well as airbags
I don’t believe we have good data on how helmet laws alter behavior–the increased risk taking argument is a theoretical concern. However, we do have objective evidence that helmet laws (like King County’s) do cut bike ridership by a large chunk (e.g. half), and reduced ridership seems to be associated with increased rates of injury. I wish the Cascade Bike Club would stop their silly helmet advocacy campaign for this reason.
On the bad parenting point, it could certainly be argued that the parent who straps the kid into the car seat for the drive down to the mall is the worse parent for teaching the kid that sedentary/car based lifestyles are normal. The kid dies at 55 of obesity-related disease; meanwhile the kid who grew up on the bike is still pedalling away merrily. Regardless of world cup thuggery, the Dutch don’t seem to be dealing with a rash of head injuries in little kids, so I say leave them alone.
Anyone attend the debate? I’d love to hear a recap.
It wasn’t so much a debate as a dicussion of new facility types and state of the practice.
Seattle Bike Blog has a sort of recap. The two points that left the most impression for me were, first, that pretty much every municipality is making these things up as they go along, with no national guidelines. There’s no data on what works well or where it works well vis-a-vis other sorts of facilities in terms of acceptable driveway frequency, minimum widths, optimal number of users, etc.
Second, cycle tracks are a means of getting more folks to ride, especially the majority of the general population who would ride (or ride more) if they didn’t think existing facilities were so intimidating or dangerous. The irony is that separated facilities appear to actually be more dangerous than on-street facilities, and so you’re basically increasing the perception of safety, and decreasing actual safety. But of course, perception is all that matters.
How much more dangerous? That seems like an important point. Biking is already “more dangerous” than, for example, riding the bus but the tradeoffs still make it a good option for many of my trips.
This wikipedia article has some numbers on rates of collisions with cycle tracks. I believe the number quoted at the brown-bag was a 20% increase per capita in risk of being in a collision. That seemss significant to me, but then again, if you’re already 10x more likely to get in an accident on bicycle than in a car, maybe bumping that up to 12x isn’t really significant difference for people.
Oh, and the 20% number was specific to Copenhagen, I believe.
Personally, I think the BMP is a bandaid on a problem that the city hasn’t really dealt with. I see too many streets with ineffective “sharrows” or bike lanes that just completely disappear or streets that have no lanes or sharrows (23rd Avenue) and many intersections that don’t even have dropped curbs while other areas get multiples of dropped curbs next to existing ones. I don’t particularly like to ride a bicycle on the sidewalks on 23rd, but there’s not much alternative. People rarely go the 30 MPH speed limit.
Honestly, I have a bigger issue with the road surface onto which the sharrows are being painted. Fix the effing potholes , not just put lipstick on a pig
at the session, one could read between the lines that the Broadway two-way cycle track, as suggested by the community council and as under study by the SDOT streetcar crew, may have some safety issues. first, it may be too narrow for two-way cycle travel by cyclists of differing speeds. second, at the south end and north of Madison, Broadway has hills; downhill and uphill cyclists may be going at very different rates of speed. third, it is not clear how the southbound cyclists will transfer to the west side of Broadway at the endpoints of the cycle track. fourth, the cross traffic may be a safety issue, as motor vehicles crossing the cycle track at side streets, driveways, and making turns to and from Broadway may not have time to see rapidly traveling cyclists (they have enough trouble seeing pedestrians. (this issue is prevalent with the mixed use path on Alaskan Way, as motorists turn across it). I asked about the two-way cycle track in Brooklyn that was only eight feet wide and both speakers said they thought it was too narrow. the Brooklyn street is one-way and Broadway is two-way. A sixth issue, southbound cyclists making local trips will face the streetcar track hazard as those two stations are positioned to the west.