Category: Transportation

Measuring gas prices and bicycling trips

March 7, 2011 / / 0 Comments

From the Chicago Tribune: Gas prices continued to rise Monday, driven higher for nearly two weeks straight by the turmoil in Libya, with analysts expecting prices to keep climbing.

Active Transportation Alliance asks, “How can we make the gas price bubble permanent?” -Essentially the same topic I write about below.

I was thinking ever since I first read in the Chicago newspapers that gas will hit $4 per gallon this year (it already has in the City) that there’s a relationship between the price of gas and the number of people on bicycling or the number of trips people make on their bicycles.

As the price of gas rises, so does the number of people out bicycling on the streets. As the price of gas falls, bicycling declines as well.

Chart from GasBuddy.com showing average gas prices in Chicago for the past 3 years.

The data available to us doesn’t necessarily support this hypothesis, but the data available* is nearly worthless. Gas prices were over $4 per gallon in 2008. That was when Chicago started seeing tons of people on the street on their bicycles. The local Fox News affiliate interviewed Mike Amsden, a city planner at the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), about the bike counts (first in five years) in a news segment about the influence of $4.65 and a “major peak, almost 350% in pedal pushers this year.”

Several newspapers published articles about the palpable increase in cycling, including a Time Out issue called “Bike Love” with messenger Jeff Perkins on the cover and interviewing 7 local cyclists inside. All of them published “how to get out and ride”-type articles. But despite the many new riders on the street in 2008, few came back the next year!

This graphic describes my point about gas prices up, bike trips up; gas prices down, bike trips down (but perhaps ending at a rate a little higher than where it started).

2009 came and the gas prices dropped – the modern heyday of Chicago cycling was gone. 2008 saw the highest numbers at 2 of 3 locations also counted in 2003, although the difference in study months makes the comparison suspect. I hope that 2011 is the start of annual and accurate counts of bicycling in Chicago.

But it’s reasonable to expect that some of the new people riding their bikes instead of taking expensive car trips will stick with it the following year, even as gas prices decline. Let’s keep these riders bicycling year after year, encouraging more to stay on the bike path than would normally otherwise with strategies like more urban-appropriate infrastructure (separated and protected bike lanes; secure bike parking at workplaces and train stations; traffic calming/slower traffic) as well as enforcement of laws that protect cyclists.

Let’s concentrate less on the “insane”  numbers of people cycling on Milwaukee Avenue at Ohio Street (3,121 bikes on September 15, 2009) and more on how to raise the number of people cycling on our other streets. Milwaukee Avenue doesn’t need anymore attention (except for its intersections). Getting people off Milwaukee and safely and efficiently onto east-west and north-south routes should be the priority. -Photo shows Halsted/Grand/Milwaukee, just 300 feet southeast of the Ohio count location.

*Available data

The American Community Survey (ACS) 3-year estimate for 2006-2008 tells us that 1.0% of working Chicagoans 16+ took their bikes to work (nevermind the tinny sample size that makes this data near worthless – it’s the only thing we have*). The 3-year estimate before (2005-2007) says 0.9% took their bikes to work. Not much of a peak or increase! For 2007-2009, the data shows 1.1% cycled to work.

Also ignore the fact that the ACS only asks about the mode you spent the most distance on. It does not collect data on multi-mode trips. So if you bike 3 miles to the train and the train is 30 miles to your destination, the ACS would only record “public transportation.”

Weighting people’s experiences in route choice

March 6, 2011 / / 0 Comments

An iPhone app is not a substitute for a paper map*, good signage on your bikeway network, or someone just telling you, “Turn right on Church, right on Chambers, left on Reade” to get to the bike shop where you left your water bottle.

At the bike shop I asked about how to get to the Williamsburg bridge so I could go “home” to Brooklyn. After looking at the map, he said, “Oh, take Grand.” -He then told me how to get to Grand.

The Williamsburg bridge. I took this one even though the Manhattan bridge was probably closer to my “home” because I hadn’t yet ridden on it!

I did. It worked. It was excellent. I even passed by the Doughnut Plant (which I had forgotten about visiting).

Doughnut Plant makes really tasty donuts. I wouldn’t get them too often, though, because each one costs $3.

Not only did I receive a “tried and true” route suggestion, I got it faster than any automated route devising device would have generated one.

Each month I’m asked by people how to get somewhere in Chicago. We have so many resources these days but we often still rely on the spoken interaction to get us to our destination.

*I’ve read or heard people suggest that “someone should make” an app that puts the bike map on their smartphone. I don’t think this app would be very useful or easy to use. But a paper map is both – and almost always free.

The power of the letter

March 4, 2011 / / 0 Comments

If you want something changed, chances are you’re going to have to write to someone about it.

I wanted a few things changed last year. I first wanted Dominick’s (Safeway) to install a bike rack at their store after they removed the shopping cart gates (which was doing a decent job of serving as bike parking). If you follow the blog, you saw the positive results from my letter to the CEO. When you want something done and you need someone else to do it, the first step is to tell someone (like calling 311 to report a pothole). But even that has its own prerequisites: You have to know what to say and who to say it to.

A friend and I wanted a bike lane “pinch point” removed from Halsted just north of the 16th Street BNSF viaduct that separates University Village and Pilsen. It wasn’t just us who wanted it out, though. We talked to our friends and I talked to some bike shop employees – they were aware of the issue and supported its removal.

It’s in the 25th Ward – my friend lives in the 25th Ward but at the time I lived in the 11th Ward). So he sent a letter explicitly and calmly describing the problem and a proposed solution to Alderman Danny Solis (now in a runoff against Cuahutemoc Morfin), cc’ing Mayor Richard M. Daley, and Ben Gomberg, coordinator of the Bicycle Program.

Demonstrating the pinch point. Not as dramatic as it is when there’s a bus or semi-truck or when the driver doesn’t drive as far to the left.

A before and after photo showing where cars could legally park and now where they cannot. The City added a tow zone sign next to the “no left turn” sign to mostly eliminate the pinch point at the start of the bike lane.

“Fast” service

The letters were mailed on October 13, 2010. The sign was installed on or before December 13, 2010. The change was felt immediately. Drivers simply stopped parking their cars in the newly created tow zone and the bike lane and this part of Halsted Street became just a little bit more pleasant to use – so thank you, Alderman Solis!

I’m finally writing this blog to tell you about the experience on March 4, 2011. Sorry – I got delayed!

You asked for it, you got it – Chicago bike count data

February 25, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Note: This post doesn’t have any analysis of the data or report, nor do I make any observations. I think it’s more significant to hear the ideas you have about what you see in the map or read in the data.

A lot of people wanted the Chicago bike crash and injury data overlaid with bike counts data.

In 2009, Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) placed automatic bike counting equipment at many locations around the city. It uses pneumatic tubes to count the number of bicyclists (excludes cars) at that point in the street – it counts ALL trips, and cannot distinguish between people going to work or going to school. This is dissimilar from Census data which asks respondents to indicate how they go to work.

Well, good news for you! CDOT today released the bike counts report from data collected in 2009 (just in time). There has been overwhelming response about the bike crash map I published – this shows how rabid the public is for information on their environments (just yesterday someone told me that they switched bike routes based on the crash frequency they noticed on their original route).

The size of the blue dot indicates the bicycle mode share for that count location. Mode share calculated by adding bikes and cars and dividing by bikes.

Get the data

A photo of the EcoCounter counting machine in action on Milwaukee Avenue (this was taken during testing phase, where CDOT compared automatic and manual counts to determine the machine’s accuracy).

How to use this map:

  1. Find a blue dot (count location) in an area you’re interested in.
  2. Zoom into that blue dot.
  3. Click on the blue dot to get the number of bikes counted there.
  4. Then observe the number of purple dots (crashes) near that count location.

What do you see that’s interesting?

What else is coming?

Now let’s hope the Active Transportation Alliance and the Chicago Park District release their Lakefront Trail counts from summer 2010. CDOT may have conducted bicycle counts in 2010 as well – I hope we don’t have to wait as long for that data.

I hope to have a tutorial on how to use GeoCommons coming soon. You should bug me about it if I don’t post it within one week.

Photos of Chicago bike commuters by Joshua Koonce.

Bike crash map in the press

February 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Thank you to the Bay Citizen, Gapers Block, and the Chicago Bicycle Advocate (lawyer Brendan Kevenides). They’ve all written about the bike crash map I produced using Google Fusion Tables. And WGN 720 AM interviewed me and aired it in April 2011.

View the map now. The map needs to be updated with injury severity, a field I mistakenly removed before uploading the data.

The Bay Citizen started this by creating their own map of bike crashes for San Francisco, albeit with more information. I had helped some UIC students obtain the data from the Illinois Department of Transportation for their GIS project and have a copy of it myself. I quickly edited it using uDig and threw it up online in an instant map created by Fusion Tables.

A guy rides his bicycle on the “hipster highway” (aka Milwaukee Avenue), the street with the most crashes, but also has the most people biking (in mode share and pure quantity).

Why did I make the map?

I made this project for two reasons: One is to continue practicing my GIS skills and to learn new software and new web applications. The second reason was to put the data out there. There’s a growing trend for governments to open up their databases, and your readers have probably seen DataSF.org’s App Showcase. But in Chicago, we’re not seeing this trend. Instead of data, we get a list of FOIA requests, or instead of searchable City Council meeting minutes, we get PDFs that link to other PDFs that you must first select from drop down boxes. But both of these are improvements from before.

I would love to help anyone else passionate about bicycling in Chicago to find ways to use this data or project to address problems. I think bicycling in Chicago is good for many people, but we can make it better and for more people.

Read the full interview.