Category: Mobility

What’s up from Europe: how much is car-free when cycling on a Dutch intercity path?

June 9, 2014 / / 10 Comments

I posted this photo of Daniel riding with me from Rotterdam to Delft and Justin Haugens asked, “Was this a bike path the whole way?” and added, “[This] would be similar to my work commute.” He rides on the Chicago Lakefront Trail from Rogers Park to South Loop, but must ride off-path from Morse to Ardmore and about Monroe to Roosevelt.

Daniel lives in Rotterdam and works in Delft. The Dutch Cyclists’ Union’s (Fietsersbond) Routeplanner says the shortest path is 11.47 kilometers, or 7.12 miles. We took the short route on a Saturday, but chose the scenic route on Sunday (the day I took this photo) so Daniel could show me the airport, underground high-speed rail tracks, and various geographic features along the way.

I responded to Justin:

It was a dedicated bike path for probably 90% of the way. The thing about Dutch intercity cycle routes is that they separate cycle paths from car paths when the two modes can’t safely share. They can’t safely share when there’s a desire for moving cars quickly or moving big autos (like trucks and buses).

So, there were some points on this journey when the cycle-only path merged with a local road or a service drive [the case in that photo, actually, which you can see better here], but even then the cyclist always has priority and rarely are the junctions configured/signed so that the cyclist has to stop (not requiring the cyclist to stop is a way to make cycling a convenient mode).

In the Netherlands connectivity of bicycle-priority ways is as important as the infrastructure used. When I first visited the Netherlands, in 2010, I arrived in Amsterdam from Bremen, Germany, and rented a bike the next day. I was personally shocked that morning when I rode upon streets with conventional bike lanes (these would be the ones in door zones in the United States) on some streets.

Why was I shocked? I came to the city under the impression that all bicycle infrastructure were cycle tracks, meaning a bike path between the roadway and the sidewalk, on a level slightly above the roadway and below the sidewalk. Since then I’ve learned a lot more about why the Dutch cycle so much and how the bicycle is sometimes used more often than public transit and automobiles.

On our journey from Rotterdam to Delft we must have ridden on every kind of bicycle path the Dutch have designed. These photos sample what we encountered.

The route followed an arterial road for the first portion, but we turned off after only about a mile.

An RET metro train follows the cycle path for a portion of the route we took.

This was my favorite part of the journey to Delft: we came across a shepherd, her two sheep dogs, and her flock of sheep grazing on the bank between the cycle path and the creek.

I’m no longer in Europe but I’ve kept the title prefix, “What’s up from Europe”. Read the other posts in this series. 

Let’s get rid of beg buttons

March 9, 2014 / / 28 Comments

As much as you may believe, because you encounter them so rarely, Chicago indeed has several types of “beg buttons”. This is a mechanism wherein a person walking along a street must apply to cross another street. You are begging for permission. They are not popular, many are not even hooked up anymore, and they don’t call the pedestrian signal any sooner (their purpose is to make the green traffic signal long enough for a person to cross).

Jan Gehl et. al. succinctly demonstrate in Cities for People the opposing methods of telling a person when they can cross the street (meaning cross traffic has been halted).

The 2013 Chicago Complete Streets Design Guidelines and 2012 Pedestrian Plan reorients the city to prefer facilitating and encouraging transportation by foot over all other modes of travel.

The Pedestrian Plan says that beg buttons should have an LED light that indicates to the pusher that the button has been pushed. (The Pedestrian Plan also calls “traffic signals” a high cost pedestrian safety tool, alongside the high cost of “pedestrian hybrid beacons” and the medium cost of “rectangular rapid flash beacons”. Slow traffic, on the other hand, doesn’t have an operating cost, but it definitely has a “we’re getting there cost”.)

The Plan also says to get rid of them “except for locations where they are necessary to bring up a WALK phases for pedestrians” and without saying what makes it necessary to bring up a WALK phase (versus always having a WALK phase for that direction of traffic) and if that “necessary” is aligned with the Complete Streets Design Guidelines’ paradigm shift. Systematically removing inoperable ones is a separate, medium term milestone (alongside developing a location database).

The CSDG thankfully considers many other realities in Chicago that go against the new transportation paradigm that puts the pedestrian first. For example, it calls for the systematic removal of all slip lanes – none of which I’ve heard or seen removed in the year since CDOT created the guidelines.

Untitled

I want the city to systematically remove all beg buttons. If the green signal is too short for a person to cross the street, then it’s probably too short for a bicyclist to cross in the green signal (yes, this exists in Chicago). It also means the street is too wide to foster it being a place over being a pipe for cars. And if it’s not a place, what is it and why are people walking there? What personal needs – like a job, food, and socializing – are not being fulfilled where they live that people have to cross this road to meet those needs?

Updated March 10 at 12:56 to clarify what the Pedestrian Plan says about beg buttons.

Divvy activity in Wicker Park-Bucktown

February 13, 2014 / / 18 Comments
Divvy Bikes Outside Smoke Daddy

The Divvy bike-share station outside Smoke Daddy on Division Street at Wood Street is the fourth most popular in the Wicker Park & Bucktown neighborhoods. Photo by Daniel Rangel.

This is an analysis of the station use for Divvy bike-share stations in the Wicker Park and Bucktown neighborhoods (they blend together and it’s hard to know if the club or bar you’re going to is one neighborhood or the other).

Numbers represent a discrete trip, from one station to another (or the same station if the trip was greater than 3 minutes, to eliminate “hiccups” where the bike left the dock but didn’t actually go anywhere). Customer means someone who used a 24-hour pass and subscribers are annual members. Gender is self-reported on a member’s DivvyBikes.com user profile.

17 stations listed.

[table id=10 /]

This map of Wicker Park Divvy stations shows a residential service gap among the Damen/Cortland, Ashland/Armitage ( Metra) and North/Wood stations.

This map of Wicker Park Divvy stations shows a residential service gap among the Damen/Cortland, Ashland/Armitage (
Metra) and North/Wood stations.

Based on the popularity of the Ashland/Armitage station, which is right outside the Clybourn Metra station – a very popular train stop – I think there might be a residential service gap near Saint Mary of the Angels School. I recommend a Divvy station at Walsh Park this year because the Bloomingdale Trail will open and terminate there.

Notes

Not all of these stations were online when Divvy launched on June 28, 2013, but I haven’t yet looked into the history to see when each went online. Therefore direct comparisons are not appropriate until you have a trips per day number. Then, seasonality (very cold weather) has its own effect. At the very least, all stations were online by October 29th, with the final addition of the Lincoln Ave & Fullerton Ave (at Halsted) station.

Can someone use “R” to make a time series chart on the entire trips dataset so we can find the best cutoff time to eliminate “hiccups”?

Query used: SELECT count(`trip_id`), usertype, gender FROM `divvy_trips_distances` WHERE (start_station = ‘Claremont Ave & Hirsch St’ or end_station = ‘Claremont Ave & Hirsch St’) AND seconds > 180 GROUP BY `usertype`, gender

Where do Divvy riders go?

February 13, 2014 / / 14 Comments
Divvys

Divvy bikes fit people of almost all sizes. Photo by Mike Travis (mikeybrick).

Divvy released the 2013 trip data on Tuesday for their data challenge, and presented alongside me the data, basic system operations info, and existing visualizations and apps, at a Divvy data-focused Open Gov Hack Night I put together at the weekly meeting. Thank you Chris Whitaker at Smart Chicago Collaborative for writing the meeting recap.

I “ran the numbers” on some selected slices of the data to post on Twitter and they range from the useless to useful! I’m using the hashtag #DivvyData.

  • Average trip distance of members in 2013 is estimated to be slightly shorter than casuals: 1.81 miles versus 1.56 miles – tweet
  • Bike 321 has traveled the furthest: 989 miles. Beat the next bike by 0.2 miles – tweet
  • Women members on average took longer trips (but fewer trips overall) on @DivvyBikes than men in 2013. – tweet
  • The average trip distance of 759,788 trips (by members and casuals) in 2013 is an estimated 1.68 miles. – tweet
  • In 2013, 79.05% of member trips were by men and 20.95% by women. – tweet
  • On average in 2013, 24-hour pass holders (whom I call casuals) made trips 2.5x longer (time wise) than members. – tweet
  • Damen/Pierce Divvy station (outside the Damen Blue Line station) is most popular in Wicker Park-Bucktown – data

And other stats, presented as embedded tweets:

 

 

What if Metra employees were late to work as often as Metra passengers?

February 10, 2014 / / 8 Comments
trainmageddon

A malfunctioning Metra Electric train in January. Photo by Eric Rogers.

It was a big deal to news media this morning when new Metra CEO Don Orseno reported at an Illinois House mass transit committee hearing that the commuter-focused rail system experienced a 30% on-time rating in January, when the “polar vortex” hit. (Apparently polar vortex is not an event that happens to a place, but is the name of a climate pattern that’s always there hovering above Canada and occasionally dips down over the United States.)

Most Metra passengers are commuters, going to work. A hair over 300,000 travel each weekday; service is drastically lowered on weekends and holidays, offering less than half the service of weekdays.

What if the organization of Metra, including all 2,500 employees in addition to the contracted railroad workers (let’s say 3,000 people), showed up to work with the same performance rating that their passengers experience?

First, Orseno – a career railroader who drives to work from Manhattan where a train comes leaves three times each day – would miss 11 work days of work each year (of 260 work days), based on their overall 95.8% on-time rating in 2012. Some routes are worse and others better. But collectively 3,000 people would miss 32,760 work days each year. That’s a lot of missed work.

Put another way, everybody – all 3,000 of them – is going to show up 20.16 minutes late to work because they’re missing 87.36 hours each year (of 2,080 hours they’re supposed to work and being 4.2% hours late). But again, I have no idea who’s working 8 hours and who’s working longer. (One of the problems Metra had during #Chiberia is that many workers hit the federally mandated limit and there weren’t always workers to take their place.)

Thankfully the Chicago Transit Authority, Pace, and ever-expanding highways and tollways are available to pick up the slack in Chicagoland’s transportation supply.

Another thing, this post is full of averages of averages, so it’s really imprecise. Today, Metra was reporting delays on a single train run of 16-100 minutes – a pretty broad estimate, but another train had a possible delay of 26-110 minutes. During the worst storm Metra experienced on January 5th and 6th, some train runs dumped passengers on platforms in subzero temperature.

Orseno reported today at the committee hearing that a “I don’t want to say middle-level” manager at Union Pacific made the call to dump the passengers. This has been “corrected” by only allowing a senior level staffer at Union Pacific make this call. Metra, which doesn’t have any performance-related incentives in its contracts with the freight railroads, apparently cannot stop this decision.

I’m waiting for the day when Metra is run like a transit system and not a railroad.

Note: I excluded vacation days because, well, no law requires organizations to offer paid or unpaid vacation days and there are probably several tiers of vacation-giving at Metra that I don’t know about.