Category: Places and Spaces

Finding a new way to measure cities’ bike friendliness in the United States

November 3, 2012 / / 8 Comments

A really smart person could come up with a way to measure day-to-day bike friendliness based on how well cities adhere to standards that keep roads clear of obstructions that further frustrate the commute, like construction projects that squeeze bikes and cars together. 

I work at home. There are some days when I only leave my house to get milk from the Mexican grocery store at the end of my block (which makes awesome burritos). That means I ride my bike half as much as people who commute to work. on their bikes. Today I had a bunch of errands to run: drop off stuff, buy stuff, take pictures of stuff for my blog, Grid Chicago.

It was a very frustrating experience. I don’t need to go into details about how I was harassed by people who the state so graciously awarded a license to drive. But it happened. And it happens a hundred times a day to people cycle commuting in Chicago. I got to thinking about “bike friendly” cities. Is there a way to incorporate driver attitudes in there? I tweeted:

[tweet_embed id=264575958374305792]

Later I had the idea to use some very simple but objective measurements to create a new bike friendliness metric. It would help ensure that “Silver” (a ranking the League of American Bicyclists [LAB] uses) in one city means the same as “Silver”. It can expand from here but basically it works like this:

  • The share of people going to work who go by bike is a proxy for how “friendly” a city is to biking.
  • If a city has a lot of people biking to work, it must be friendly.
  • If a city has a few people biking to work, it must be non-friendly.
  • Cities are compared to each other to determine friendly and non-friendly.
  • The metric uses standard deviation to score cities.

Stop me if this has already been done.

I created a spreadsheet that lists the top 10 populous cities in the United States. I then added 10 more cities: Austin, Boston, Davis, Madison, Minneapolis, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In the next column I listed their bike commute share from the American Community Survey 2006-2010 5-year estimates. I calculated the standard deviation and mean of these shares and then in another column used Apple Numbers’s STANDARDIZE function:

The STANDARDIZE function returns a normalized value from a distribution characterized by a given mean and standard deviation.

I think that’s what I want. And the output is close to what I expected. I then found the LAB ranking for each city and found the variance of each ranking to see how far apart each city within one ranking was from another city in the same ranking. The results were interesting: the higher the ranking, the more variance there was.

Hurricane Sandy prompted a lot of New Yorkers to bike. It made headlines, even. Photo by Doug Gordon. 

I wanted to add another metric of bike friendliness, and that’s density. To me, a higher density of people would mean a higher density of places to go (shop, eat, learn, enjoy) and friends and family would be closer, too. Or the possibility of meeting new people nearby would be higher. Yeah, I’m making a lot of assumptions here. So I applied the STANDARDIZE function there as well. I added this number to the previous STANDARDIZE result and that became the city’s score.

So, in this new, weird ranking system, the most bicycle friendly cities are…drum roll please…

  1. Davis, California (Platinum)
  2. New York City (Silver) *
  3. San Francisco (Gold) *
  4. Boulder (Platinum)
  5. Boston (Silver)
  6. Philadelphia (Silver)
  7. Tie: Chicago*, Washington, D.C. (Silver)
  8. Tie: Portland* (Platinum), Minneapolis* (Gold)

Remember, I said above that any author of a list should spend at least a day cycling in each city. I’ve starred the cities where I’ve done that – I’ve cycled in 5 cities for at least a day.

I only calculated 20 cities. Ideally I’d calculate it for the top 50 most populous cities AND for every city that’s been ranked by LAB.

LAB cities list (PDF). My spreadsheet (XLS).

Be your own traffic and road planner

October 16, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Wanna know how many cars were measured to pass by on a street near you (in Chicago)?

Want to know how wide a street is?
Want to do this without leaving your house?

You can.

1. Find the “ADT” (average daily traffic) for roads in Chicago on the city’s Traffic Tracker website. Average is a misnomer, though, because that implies more than one count has been taken or estimate has been made. The last time the city counted cars in Chicago was 2006; I imagine the difference in counts taken this year would be statistically significant (meaning any differences would not be by chance or random).

To find a location in Traffic Tracker:

  1. You can pan and zoom the map until you find it, or you can select one street and then select an intersection street and click the magnifying glass.
  2. Then click the checkbox next to Traffic Signals.
  3. Click on a green dot (with number label) to find direction counts and the count date.

Okay, now let’s measure the street width.

Google Earth and Maps have this tool. For Google Earth, it’s as simple as finding the ruler tool in the toolbar, selecting your units, and then clicking on the start and end points. The distance will also be displayed live as you move your cursor.

Finding the distance in Google Maps has a few more steps:

  1. Turn on the measurement tool, in Maps Labs. Go to Google Maps and click “Maps Labs” at the bottom of the left pane.
  2. In the popup dialog pane, click the radio button next to “Enable” for Distance Measurement Tool.
  3. Click Save Changes.
  4. Find the street you want to measure.
  5. Click the ruler button in the lower left corner of the map.
  6. Click one side of the street and then click the other side of the street. You can keep clicking to get distances of a polyline (a multi-segmented line) that you draw.
  7. Change the map units to your desire (there are tens of archaic ones available).

Now you’ve got two more tools with which to arm yourself in understanding your streets and your neighborhood.

Beautiful renderings of what Bloomingdale Trail will look like in a decade

September 28, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The easiest place to get on the Bloomingdale Trail now will remain the easiest place. This access point will have three entry points, two of them are ramps. 

I say a decade because that’s how long it will take for all the plants and landscaping on the Bloomingdale Trail elevated park to look like how it appears in these fancy renderings by Michael Van Walkenburg & Associates.

Western Trailhead at Ridgeway Avenue pops up 10 feet above the trail level, over 20 feet above ground level. 

See all the photos from the meeting last Monday. Read my high praise for the project and the planning process on Grid Chicago.

Brief history of suburbs and sprawl, according to Taras Grescoe’s “Straphanger”

June 29, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The Metra station in Riverside, Illinois, a version 1.0 streetcar suburb designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. 

I’m reading another book a publisher sent to me. It seems pretty biased, and it’s biased in the direction I already feel, so it’s really easy reading. But it seems that people like me are its only audience and that it assumes I’m already pro-cities, anti-suburbs and maybe even anti-car. Definitely not a book that’s going to espouse the benefits of transit to those who don’t use it, don’t want to use it, or are on the fence for either situation.

If I could get my father or brother to read this book, that would be an accomplishment just short of a miracle.

The book is Straphanger: Saving our cities and ourselves from the automobile, by Taras Grescoe. I really like the section I just finished reading, a “condensed history of sprawl”. I had recently “argued” with my father about the development of the subdivision he lives in, east of Phoenix. He posited that suburbs were the result of consumer desires. Grescoe writes to the contrary. Here we go:

The origin of the Anglo-American suburb has been traced to Clapham, five miles south of London, where, in the 1790s, Evangelical Christians eager to remove their families from the evils of the city began living in what had formerly been their weekend villas, and commuting to the City by private carriage. In the United States, [author Kenneth] Jackson dates the beginning of the process to 1815, when regular steam ferry service to Manhattan made Brooklyn Heights the nation’s first true commuter suburb. (page 89)

American suburb version 1.0

  • When: 1853 onward
  • What it was: picturesque, full of green space, near central cities, attached by rail line
  • Who lived there: As mortgages didn’t exist, only those who could afford to buy a home outright
  • Examples: Llewellyn Park, NJ; Riverside, IL.
  • Note: Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City” design is related.

American suburb version 2.0

  • When: Post World War II
  • What it was: cheap, small housing on vast land tracts; pre-assembled homes
  • Who lived there: Families with soldiers that expanded quickly so new homes were needed fast.
  • Examples: Levittown, Long Island; Lakewood, Los Angeles.
  • Note: “The prevailing myth”, writes Kenneth Jackson, “is that the postwar suburbs blossomed because of the preference of consumers who made free choices in an open environment. Actually, most postwar families were not free to choose among several residential alternatives. Because of public policies favoring the suburbs, only one possibility was economically feasible”.

American suburb version 3.0

  • When: Late 1980s, 1990s to now
  • What it was: Found near office parks, also known as “edge cities”, “common interest communities” (gated and homeowners associations)
  • Who lived there: Single races (self-segregating), people who lean conservative
  • Examples: Silicon Valley, Nevada, Florida
  • Note: Under the George W. Bush administration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac offered easy credit and homeownership rate rose to 69% by 2004. “(By 2012, it is expected to drop to 62%, the lowest level since 1960.)”

American suburb version 4.0

  • When: 2008, easy credit crisis, underwater mortgages
  • What it is: Least glamorous, the clichéd image of the inner city has moved to the suburbs. Arizona has highest rate of property crime. Nevada and Florida, the most suburbanized states, have highest rates of violent crime (Florida also has highest rate of pedestrian and bicycle fatalities).
  • Who lives there: A diverse group of people.
  • Examples: See “What it is”
  • Note: “Humans are social animals. I [Kenneth Jackson] think the biggest fake ever perpetrated is that children like, and need, big yards. What children like are other children. I think we move children to the suburbs to control the children, not to respond to something the children want. In the city, the kids might see somebody urinate in public, but they’re much more at risk in the suburbs, where they tend to die in cars.”

What are those public policies as described in American suburb version 2.0?

The federal government had carrots and sticks. Carrots were subsidies for homeownership (could be deducted from income taxes) and no down payment required for returning soldiers. Sticks included redlining (racial segregation), propagated by the Federal Housing Administration and banks. Zoning was another stick, which dictated what could go where.

Another carrot was the federally-funded highway system, the “greatest public subside to private real estate in the history of the world”.

Pride Parade 2012: Easier on transportation system over last year

June 28, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Bodhi Spiritual Center says, “You are fabulous”. 

After last year’s near-meltown of transportation surrounding post-parade trips, parade organizers, aldermen, and the city redesigns the parade route, to make it longer and eliminate the hard to access “internal triangle” between Halsted and Broadway (with a vertex at Grace/Halsted/Broadway). The meltdown was that thousands of people tried to board at the CTA Belmont Station. The station stopped allowing new passengers 5 times to ease overcrowding. I can’t recall if trains had to skip the station because they were full.

The new design allowed for better access from more CTA train stations, more bus routes, and allowed for more even spectator dispersal along the route (with 6 pedestrian crossings operated by many police officers). The CTA, which is usually very good at communicating service changes, made a webpage dedicated to the Pride Parade and even designed their own map. That and their social media communication stressed the other stations paradeogers should use: Wilson, Sheridan, Addison, and Fullerton. That was in addition to the other bus routes that now had closer access to the changed route.

I wrote about the 2011 transportation experience on Grid Chicago in which I suggested shutting down private vehicle traffic on more streets and further away from the parade route, allowing only buses and bicyclists. I couldn’t tell if that happened this year. Last year I entered the parade “shed” on Belmont and then Addison. All east-west streets it seemed were closed to traffic from Clark Street to Halsted Street (which is a good thing). Clark Street was closed this year for a couple of blocks south of Diversey Avenue (also a good thing).

Chicago Fire Department miniature trucks. 

I didn’t notice these last year, but the fire department utilized ATV-like trucks to transport sick spectators. I didn’t see any Chicago police officers riding ATVs, but I may have read the department abandoned those because of their increased danger on crowds and the officer driving it.

I think the route changes were effective in making for a better (and safer) parade experience. Organizers and the City’s OEMC estimated attendance at 850,000, just 50,000 over last year. Because of the changes and the great weather (it was very breezy), I expected a higher increase. Some people who attended last year may have been turned off by the unease of the crowded viewing experience.