Vote ‘Yes’ For Capital Improvements Tax

Tomorrow is election day, and among the chances you have to make Springfield a better place to live is renewing the 1/4-cent Capital Improvements Sales Tax.

Please vote “Yes.”

This tax pays for numerous infrastructure improvements including projects that benefit pedestrians and bicyclists.

You may have noticed sharrows appearing on the streets of the city’s bicycle route system. These shared-lane marking indicate that bicyclists should control the lane. Springfield offers the world a model for how to handle the placement of sharrows well.

Sadly, I cannot say the same for the city’s handling of bicycle lanes. Far too many of the recently-painted lanes fail to meet even the minimum standards of the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials. For an example on Cherry, see this recent post and this video. The gutter lane that you’ll see pictured violates an important standard — no part of a gutter pan should be counted in the width of the bicycle lane. Gutter lanes, such as the one on Cherry, typically include differences in  surface angles and pavement seams — both are crash hazards for bicyclists. Further, the picture shows a lane painted on a 13-foot travel lane. The minimum standard for sharable width — in which a car and bicycle may safely occupy the same lane at the same time — is 14 feet.

Another example, the city continues to paint door-zone lanes, in which the lane takes you perilously close to parked cars. Click here for a quick lesson about why this is bad. Door-zone crashes can be deadly. Why anyone would paint a bicycle lane next to parked cars is beyond belief given what we know about where it is safe to ride: at least five feet from parked cars, six feet would be even better. See this video for a lesson in riding near parked cars.

I’m not at all sure what’s going on that the city should be handling sharrows so well and lanes so poorly, but that is the reality.

We should vote yes for the tax renewal. And then we must keep and eye on what the city builds and complain when dangerous, out-of-compliance infrastructure is built.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

On The Showing Of Photos

What does it mean to show a photograph of a poorly-designed bicycle lane?

Recent chatter from the lane-painting wing of bicycle-advocacy-land has taken the publishing of such images to task for the oft-imagined sin of over-generalizing about all bicycle infrastructure. For a good example of this, just read my post from yesterday.

Let’s re-visit a photo that I have published before — taken in Springfield by local bicyclist Jim Phillips and originally published on the Bicycle Friendly Springfield group on Facebook — to learn the excellent reasons I have for publishing such pictures.

This is a gutter lane. There might be a more technical term for it, but, basically, I’m using that term to indicate a bicycle lane in which the gutter pan is counted as part of the lane. You can watch the video I posted yesterday to see the measurements (note: the lane symbols had not yet been painted when I made the video).

This is a bad design. It is a dangerous design. The street in question has a less-than-sharable width of 13 feet. The bicycle lane is 4 feet wide with the gutter pan making up fully half of the width. The pan and street surface are angled differently. The seam runs down the middle of the lane. Those who teach, and have taken, bicycle education courses such as those offered by CyclingSavvy (CS) and the League of American Bicyclists (LAB) know that seams are a potential crash hazard.

Now this lane was painted less than a year ago. How did this get approved? With all we know about facilities design, how did this happen?

Let me tell you how (among other reasons/rationalizations), and it has to do with why I show photographs of poorly-designed bicycle lanes.

That lane you see in the picture is not a generalization. It is real. It exists. It is dangerous. But in some bicycle advocacy circles, it’s OK that it is dangerous because the purpose of it isn’t to facilitate safe movement in traffic. The purpose is to attract more people to bicycling and win bicycle-friendly community awards.

But even worse than that, this lane and other dangerous lanes that I have photographed (including newly-painted door-zone lanes) will be counted among Springfield’s achievements in the next Bicycle Friendly Community application to the LAB. If Springfield keeps its bronze-level status or moves up a level, lanes such as the one shown above will be cited as improvements.

In a sane world, the LAB would take one look at that (and other gutter lanes and door-zone lanes in Springfield) and tell us we lose our current status and don’t bother applying again until we correct the errors. In a sane world, that lane would never have been approved and painted. In a sane world, that lane would have been ripped up shortly after its errors were pointed out by the majority of commenters on Facebook when the picture was first published. But the LAB is now one of the primary lane-painting advocacy organizations in America. That lane you see right there in that picture will be praised and counted in our favor.

So what will happen next? Assuming we continue as a Bicycle Friendly Community, you can expect to see more such lanes painted.

And that is why I show photographs of poorly-designed bicycle lanes. If we don’t speak up, we will get more and more of this. The day will come when some politician decides there needs to be a required-use law because, well, we spent all that damned money on those damned bicyclists so they damned well better use the lanes and stay out of the way of motorists.

That is what’s coming.

It will suck.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , ,

More Stories We Tell About Bicycling

Here is the response (click for large image):

iamtraffic_story

And here is the video:

Savvy Cyclist — Bill Edmonds from Keri Caffrey on Vimeo.

Yep. We’re a bunch of nefarious traffic cyclists out to stop progress for everyone. Because, yeah, no one would ever mislead you about bicycle infrastructure. Right?

Something New On Cherry from acline on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

IMF Says Gasoline Too Cheap

Check out this report from NPR about the true costs of gasoline as reported by the International Monetary Fund.

One problem: We are far too enamored of growth and short-term gain to ever take this seriously — that is until it’s too late. Then we will do the next thing we do best: Look for someone to blame.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Inner Space of the Downtown Loft

My wife and I visited our loft yesterday to measure the space that our belongings will occupy. Hence the blue tape you see in the picture.

We’re downsizing from about 2,500 square feet to about 1,000 square feet. So, yeah, be watching for the garage sale :-)

There will be no bicycles in that sale because we rented two parking spaces.

This move will add about a mile to my morning commute — along routes you have seen many times in video I have published here. The first part of the route is on fairly narrow downtown streets with a 20 mph speed limit. The rest of the route follows the bicycle route system — along Walnut to Hammons to Cherry — that is rapidly being improved with sharrows. But, in any case, no street along the route is particularly busy or otherwise difficult for even a novice to manage.

The rental agent told us yesterday that our building at 211 S. Main will have a bicycle rack outside for visitors– and residents who don’t rent extra parking space ;-)

Technorati Tags:

Quotes We Narrate By

Regarding my earlier post today and the beginning of Keri Caffrey’s series entitled The Stories We Tell, here are the essential plots of two very different narratives of bicycling in the United States today:

The Stories of the Unsuccessful Bicyclist

I’m a second class citizen.
I’m at the mercy of others.
Most motorists are careless and mean.
Bicycling is difficult and frustrating and won’t be safe until other people change and we have special facilities.

and…

The Stories of the Successful Bicyclist

I’m a first class citizen.
I’m in control of my safety.
Most motorists are safe and courteous.
Bicycling is safe, easy and a great way to connect with the community. I don’t need special infrastructure, but there are some ways better infrastructure could enhance my travels.

If you care to go back to August 2008 on Carbon Trace and begin reading, you’ll note that much of what I have experienced, thought, and written has been the story of my moving away from the first narrative to my embracing of the second narrative. It’s a story nearly five years in the making — a little more than half the time I have been using a bicycle for basic transportation in Springfield.

I committed to using a bicycle as basic transportation when I moved here from Kansas City because I saw in the flat terrain and grid street pattern the opportunity to change my life for the better.

Mission accomplished.

My elevator speech for those who are curious about my use of bicycle for basic transportation: “If it were difficult or dangerous, I wouldn’t be doing it.”

That is 100 percent true. What I do is neither difficult nor dangerous. And, really, that was something of a complete surprise to me. I just assumed that I would have many days in which I would choose to drive a car instead because of conditions that might make it difficult or situations that might make it dangerous. Hasn’t happened. My longest stretch without driving was a little more than three months. And I regularly go more than week without driving. This has allowed my family to reduce its car-dependence to one Prius — a great financial savings that made it possible to afford a Prius in the first place :-)

Granted, the life choices some people make (e.g. where to live) can make it more difficult to use a bicycle for basic transportation than what I experience. That is why I dreamed up the 1-Mile Solution (I dreamed up the meme, not the idea).

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

On Narrative and Reality

Long-time Carbon Trace readers know that I occasionally enjoy mixing my academic passion for rhetoric with my transportation passion for bicycling. This is not a stretch because, as with most academic disciplines, the whole point is to understand the world — all of it — in terms of a particular subject, e.g. politics, history, or literature.

It does not require an advanced degree in any particular discipline to do this intellectual work (although I do not mean to suggest it is easy). The fact of the matter is: Much of higher education is exactly the project of teaching young adults to think exactly this way.

Keri Caffrey, writing for I Am Traffic, has posted the first in a series entitled The Stories We Tell, in which she examines the power of narrative to influence our experience of traffic as bicyclists. It’s one hell of a great rhetorical analysis.

I wish I had written it.

So go read the whole thing now.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Culture, Daydreams, and Hypothesis

I drove my bicycle to the grocery this morning.

That is a very odd statement. The statement is odd because I’m admitting doing something out of the cultural norm in the United States. It is also odd because I am deliberately appropriating language used and understood by motorists to refer to what they do with motor vehicles — specifically the verb “drive.”

One might argue that I am merely being accurate or factual in referring to the proper way the operator of any vehicle ought to move from place to place on city streets. And I would agree to a certain extent and then remind my interlocutor that facts are very often wispy things under the gaze of culture. An example I use with my students: They think the sky is blue. I prove to them — with facts! — that it is not. But none of them will pledge to refer to it in the future as anything but blue. Thus, the power of culture.

I was daydreaming a bit as I drove through the parking lot on my way home. I wondered what a Dutch person, specifically from Amsterdam, might think if they were whisked from home to that grocery parking lot (further assuming they had never been to the U.S. before) and saw me driving home on my European-style townie. Oh, and sans helmet, too, because none of my helmet-wearing criteria applied this morning. They would also have seen several other bicycles parked at the rack near the door. To be sure, they would have seen nothing like, say, the city market pictured below that was just outside the B&B apartment we rented in Amsterdam last summer.

DSCN3066

But I assume the person might take note that, yes, a few Americans … what … what verb would a Dutch person use? Drive? Ride? I have no idea. So let’s go with “drive/ride” for the time being. So I assume they would note my bicycle driving/riding despite a lack of infrastructure. And I think it is possible, given the propaganda, that they might assume that more people hereabouts don’t drive/ride bicycles because it’s dangerous to do so without infrastructure.

I further daydreamed that the Dutch person talked to me about my bicycle driving/riding and was shocked, SHOCKED, to learn that not only do I feel perfectly safe and comfortable on city streets hereabouts but that the one time that I felt the most danger driving/riding a bicycle in my entire life was on the streets on Amsterdam. In fact, I was so frightened at the thought of driving/riding a bicycle in that city (after walking two miles from the B&B to the bicycle rental shop) that I nearly decided not to do it. Then the thought of admitting to Carbon Trace readers that I had been a big weenie frightened me even more ;-)

I hear tell that bicycling in Amsterdam is safer than other cities. Maybe that’s true. So as I continued on my way home, a hypothesis began forming:

The system of bicycle lanes and tracks in Amsterdam is full of conflicts and manufactured dangers that do not exist in the system of traffic around the urban core of Springfield. But given that Amsterdam does have a system of sorts and people are used to it —  and further given their cultural propensity to drive/ride bicycles — it appears unproblematic to me to suggest that they have learned the system and know how to use it (and, perhaps, how to abuse it). Here in Springfield, I feel very confident claiming that most people do not know how to use the system of traffic when driving/riding a bicycle (or believe that cannot or should not use that system). That leads me to this hypothesis: If people in Springfield knew how to drive a bicycle in traffic — thus mitigating most motorist-bicyclist conflicts as taught by CyclingSavvy — and accepted it as a normal transportation method, then our streets would be safer than the streets of Amsterdam for bicyclists.

So what you would have is more people enjoying what I show in the movie trailer below. And, BTW,  the darn thing is almost finished. I’ll keep you posted :-)


Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

The Whole Money Thing

My wife and I get many different reactions from people when we mention our moving to a loft in downtown Springfield. A few are interested because the same thought has crossed their minds. A few are amused because our move seems the trendy thing to do. Still others are perplexed and simply nod.

We were discussing our move yesterday and it occurred to us that while empty-nesters are starting to move into more urban areas, this is not necessarily a trend that has hit southwest Missouri yet. We still qualify as odd. I prefer to say we’re trend-setting example-makers :-)

Another in the long list of reasons to do this: money.

Our rent payment will be a few dollars more than our current mortgage payment without the attendant maintenance expenses (e.g. $8,000 in the last 12 months for sewer and roof repairs).  Further, this move will also cut our transportation costs — already lowered by owning one car instead of two. I will continue to walk and drive a bicycle to work (and the Bear Line also comes into play for me now). And we’ll cut out nearly all use of the car to move around downtown — our most frequent destination for entertainment and some shopping.

As it turns out, car-centric planning has cost Americans dearly. One way to get off the congested-traffic rat race is to move close to employment and other frequent destinations.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

I Am Traffic: Wrap-Up

The fine group of people pictured here will begin the work of creating a governing structure for the tentatively-titled bicycle education organization I Am Traffic.

Members of the founding board of I Am Traffic (L to R): Lisa Walker, Dan Gutierrez, Waco Moore, Jenn Bowers, and Mighk Wilson.

Once that work is done, we will form a governing body typical for any non-profit organization, including the usual slate of officers and a Board of Directors.

I was greatly honored to be among those invited to attend the colloquium and help found this organization. A further treat: I met people that, up until this past weekend, I had only known as readers/commenters of Carbon Trace and as important traffic bicycling advocates.

There’s still much that needs to be hammered out. But the main thrust of this group will be to promote bicycle education at all levels and to advocate for bicycle driving as the safest, most efficient way to understand the role of human-powered vehicles in our transportation system.

I Am Traffic will not be anti-infrastructure for bicyclists. I would characterize it this way: We are for any infrastructure that does not violate the well-establish rules of safe movement in traffic. We are against any infrastructure that creates conflicts with other traffic users or otherwise puts bicyclists in danger. Examples of the kinds of infrastructure that violate safe movement may be viewed on Carbon Trace, including gutter lanes (in which the gutter pan is included in the width of the lane) and door-zone lanes (in which open car doors encroach on the width of the lane).

Warning: Do not be fooled. Do not drive your bicycle in lanes where the gutter pan is included in the width of the lane (min. 4-foot lane) or where a lane puts you next to parked cars.

I’ll keep you posted as work continues with I Am Traffic.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

I Am Traffic: Hard Work

The work that goes into starting a new national organization is much like sausage making :-) We’re making sausage here in Orlando today was we hammer out the structure and governance for I Am Traffic.

This morning we’re working on vision and mission statements and core values. This afternoon, we’ll decide how to govern I Am Traffic and who will do the governing.

Stay tuned…

Update: The members of the foundation board are (those who will create the governing structure for I Am Traffic):

Dan Gutierrez

Lisa Walker

Waco Moore

Jenn Bowers

Mighk Wilson

I think we’re in good hands. All of these people has years of experience in bicycle education and organizational management.

Technorati Tags: , ,

I Am Traffic: The Beginning

8:50 a.m.: We are 10 minutes away from the beginning or the creation of a new national bicycle education program. I’m in Orlando for the I Am Traffic bicycle education colloquium. I’ll be posting updates on this post through the weekend.

10:00 a.m.: Keri Caffrey’s opening remarks entitled Achieving A Vision.

10:05 a.m.: Dan Gutierrez is giving a presentation about the six Es: Equality, education, engineering, enforcement, encouragement, and evaluation. I Am Traffic will be a national organization to “move the six Es forward.”

10:10 a.m.: “Lane control is normal and reasonable and should be codified in law.”

10:40 a.m.: Motorists use the street by privilege; they require training, state licencing, and mandated insurance. Pedestrians and bicyclists use the street by right as users of a public commons.

11:10 a.m.: Next talk is Journeys From Home by Robert Seidler. JFH is an education program for empowering children — it teaches the identification of edges ( searching and seeing skills) to help children navigate their environments.

11:35 a.m.: Pedestrian and bicycle education is in every state education mandate, according to Roger DiBrito. So what is Missouri doing to empower children to travel the streets of our communities?

11:40 a.m.: DiBrito challenges the idea of “safe routes” to school Instead, children should be empowered with the knowledge of safe movement to make their own choices how to negotiate their environments.

1:30 p.m.: Next up, Mighk Wilson and Keri Caffrey talk about CyclingSavvy. I’ll post a podcast after they finish,

2:30 p.m.: Keri Caffrey talks about CyclingSavvy:

2:30 p.m.: Mighk Wilson talks about CyclingSavvy:

2:30 p.m.: Next up, Kirby Beck, an IPMBA instructor (has a huge resume in police cycling), talks about bicycling, law enforcement,and police education.

3:30 p.m.: Remarks by Kirby Beck:

3:50 p.m.: Next up, Dan Gutierrez talks about Understanding Bicycle Transportation.

4:00 p.m.: Remarks about Understanding Bicycle Transportation:

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Movin’ On Up

I’m on my way to the I Am Traffic bicycle education colloquium in Orlando. I’ll try to post regular updates here and on Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s the program:

Saturday Agenda

8:00 to 9:00 a.m. Check-In
9:00 to 9:15 Introductions — Mighk
9:15 to 9:45 Achieving a Vision — Keri
9:45 to 10:45 6 Es — Dan G.
10:45 to 11:00 Break
11:00 to 12:00 Journeys from Home — Roger, Robert
12:00 to 1:30 Lunch
1:30 to 2:30 CyclingSavvy — Keri & Mighk
2:30 to 3:30 Law Enforcement — Kirby Beck
3:30 to 3:45 Break
3:45 to 4:55 Understanding Bicycle Transportation — Dan Gutierrez
4:55 to 5:00 Day One Wrap-up — Mighk

Sunday Agenda

Vision & Mission
Principles
Governance
Business Model
Naming
Strategic Planning
Membership
Election of Officers
Next Steps

Technorati Tags: ,

Don’t Be Mad At Me

I know nothing about psychology beyond the introductory class I took in college in the 1970s. That said, and given the discussion in my post yesterday about the psychology of motorist anger, I want to propose this: People, in general, do not like being the focus of anger.

I believe, with nothing more than anecdotal evidence, that many bicyclists simply assume that the default attitude of most motorists toward bicyclists is anger. I, however, do not believe most motorists are angered by bicyclists. I have no idea what’s going on in the head of your average motorist as they travel from point A to point B unless said person communicates anger in some fashion (and subject, obviously, to my interpretation of said communication).

I want to propose a far more troubling attitude on the part of (all kinds of) vehicle  drivers that we may want to pay more attention to: I call it a dangerous nexus of objectification, complacency, and hubris. To coin a term, let’s call it “objectibrisplacency.”

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time watching car crash videos, such as the one below, on YouTube. There are tons of these things because, apparently, people in Russia and other Eastern European and Near Eastern countries routinely run a dash cam (I assume for insurance purposes). While cultural differences in road behavior obviously play a role here (e.g. guessing alcohol, and, perhaps, uniquely European attitudes of social hierarchy), I think we can also learn some lessons about “objectibrisplacency.”

Here’s that I see: Time and time again people making terrible choices based upon objectifying other people, showing very little care for the danger they might be creating, and acting as if they are the by-god only road users who matter. Thus, ”objectibrisplacency.”

I have worked very hard not to care about the rare outbursts of anger from motorists. As long as I am following the law, helping create a safe street environment, and showing appropriate courtesy to my fellow road users, I believe anger directed toward me is misplaced and safely to be ignored. And, yes, hard work to get to that point because of the psych 101 assertion I made to begin this short essay.

What worries me is “objectibrisplacency.” That’s what I have my eye out for anytime I’m driving any kind of vehicle.

When it comes right down to it, I’d trade anger for ”objectibrisplacency” any day.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Of Motorist Rage and the Free-Rider Bicyclist

The BBC published an interesting column yesterday about the psychology of motorist rage toward bicyclists. The upshot is that, apparently, motorists are upset most because bicyclists are free-riders in traffic: they do not pay for the system, and many do not follow the rules. Here’s the money quote:

So now we can see why there is an evolutionary pressure pushing motorists towards hatred of cyclists. Deep within the human psyche, fostered there because it helps us co-ordinate with strangers and so build the global society that is a hallmark of our species, is an anger at people who break the rules, who take the benefits without contributing to the cost. And cyclists trigger this anger when they use the roads but don’t follow the same rules as cars.

I think the hypothesis that some motorists may be angered by the perceived status of bicyclists as free-riders is sound enough to warrant a proper (academic) study.

This column, however, is seriously flawed and represents a poor first step in understanding how motorists perceptions might play a role in anger toward bicyclists.

Let’s consider the opening paragraph:

Something about cyclists seems to provoke fury in other road users. If you doubt this, try a search for the word “cyclist” on Twitter. As I write this one of the latest tweets is this: “Had enough of cyclists today! Just wanna ram them with my car.” This kind of sentiment would get people locked up if directed against an ethic minority or religion, but it seems to be fair game, in many people’s minds, when directed against cyclists. Why all the rage?

No one should mistake this for a serious investigation. This is the stuff of journalistic “trend” pieces — the kind of thing that should cause embarrassment but doesn’t.  Something about bicyclists provokes fury? Sez who? A Twitter search? Are you kidding me?

I can only speak for my own experience on the streets of Springfield, Missouri. I rarely experience motorist fury — a mental state assumed from some outward expression of anger such as an inappropriate honk, a shout, or a thrown object. The first two are rare for me and the third has yet to happen in 9 years of using a bicycle as basic transportation.

Now I have had people tell me they suffer these things “all the time” in Springfield. What I suspect is the case: A few bad experiences earn the status of salient exemplars and evolve into the assumption that all motorists must be angry.

By my experience, hardly any motorists are angry. Now that is not a positive claim of reality. I have no idea what motorists are thinking unless they tell me by one or more of the means listed above (or others I have neither thought of nor experienced).

The second thing wrong with this column is that the writer accepts the foundations of his hypothesis as if they are accepted fact: that bicyclists do not pay for the system, and many do not follow the rules. The first of these assertions is pure bunk in the American system and is probably pure bunk in the British system, too. The second assertion may be true, but we’d need a proper study to determine the extent of bicyclist compliance with the law (including the whys of particular choices) and motorist reaction to compliance or non-compliance.

So, really, all we have here is an interesting idea. What’s necessary is for a serious thinker to do the hard work of discovering if this hypothesis may become theory.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,