Category: Transportation

Some disjointed thoughts about bike commuting rates and how we get them

January 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments
  1. In November 2010, I wrote that Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, have a higher percentage of workers (16 and older) commuting to work by bicycle.
  2. Yesterday, I updated an article about how the frequency of women in Chicago bicycling to work is decreasing.
  3. Today, I started updating the November Minnesota article to include the 2007-2009 3-year estimates from the American Community Survey (which shows that bicycling to work is growing faster in Minneapolis than Chicago). View the rudimentary spreadsheet. Bottom line: MPLS jumped from 3.55% bike mode share to 4.14% and Chicago only went from 1.04% to 1.13% (but again, only counting employed people!). Can we get some recession job statistics?
  4. Unemployment rate in Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI MSA is 6.5%; Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI MSA is 9.0%. See the table on Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But now I must pause and look at what I’m analyzing.

Someone pointed out in the comments on Chicago bicycling (and working) women that the sample size is low and the margin of error high meaning it’s hard to make accurate interpretations of the change in ridership from year to year. He suggested increasing the sample size.

Add this to the fact that the Census Bureau only collects data on trips to WORK and not everywhere else that people go daily. In this recession, fewer people are working. In fact, perhaps women lost their jobs more frequently than men. That could perhaps explain the drop in women bicycling to work. To increase the number of women bicycling to work, perhaps we just need to find more jobs for women. See points 3 and 4 above for evidence on the number of people who bicycle for transportation that we’re not counting.

After thinking these things over, my point is that gauging a city’s ridership based on Census Bureau home to work data is insufficient.

If these Phoenix bike riders aren’t going to work, they aren’t being counted.

To move from a bicycle subculture to a bicycle culture, we’ll need to know when we get there. We need a better picture on who is riding and for what purpose. CMAP rarely performs their household transportation survey (which gathers data on all trips on all modes and in many counties) and when they do, they don’t single out cities. In essence, Chicago doesn’t know where or why people are riding their bicycles (except for the limited and noisy information the Census or American Community Survey provides) – we have no good data!

Both New York City, New York, and Portland, Oregon, methodically perform bicycle counts annually. Both cities also count ridership on their bridges: Portland has at least 5 to count, NYC has over 10 (also called a screenline count). They can report how many people are riding bikes on the street, blind to their trip purpose and destination. It’s easy to note changes in ridership when you count all trips over work trips.

Improving transit: CTA launches train tracker

January 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I was invited by Tony Coppoletta, External Electronic Communications Manager at the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), and of recent Streetsfilms fame, to test and provide feedback on the new Train Tracker (still in beta). Launched to the public on Saturday, January 8, 2011, I peeked at it in mid-December, 2010.

Tony first showed us the website version and how it had slick transitions between updates (every 30 seconds). As you might expect, the mobile version looked great on the iPhone and Droid smartphones. I was more concerned about how it would look on my Opera Mini web browser on my Samsung Slash from Virgin Mobile*. I tediously entered the URL (mobile site) on my T9 keyboard and selected a station on the Red Line.

I was excited that it loaded quickly and looked completely normal and like its full-web browser counterparts. That’s to be expected when you design using web standards. Kevin Forsyth discussed the design further:

…it’s the layout of the site that really gets me going. It all feels so immediately familiar, because it closely adheres to CTA’s current graphic design standards for the system as a whole. Station names are displayed in white Helvetica on a dark grey background. All the colors of the train lines are spot-on likenesses of their printed versions, not just web-standard blue, green, orange, etc.

The mobile version of the site is a clean, stripped-down version of the same, and fits nicely onto a first-generation iPhone screen. It’s so neatly arranged, in fact, that I doubt an actual iPhone app could improve on its appearance.

It doesn’t look perfect on my tinny screen though – some elements are pushed to the next line and the boxes don’t expand to include them, but the readability remains. I was extremely impressed and had very limited feedback – I think the CTA’s internal testing efforts gave the public a wonderful “first version” product that I thought could have been launched right then and there in mid-December.

I’ve only tested the predictions (or “estimator” as Kevin calls it) a few times and so far it’s been accurate. The CTA does expect to offer a Train Tracker API just like it offers for Bus Tracker. Have you tried Train Tracker yet? What do you think?

To use CTA Train Tracker on your web-enabled phone (should work in most browsers), go to http://m.transitchicago.com and select “Train Tracker” (first item in the list).

Select your route.

Then select your station.

And view 15 minutes of upcoming train times.

*I prepay for Virgin Mobile phone service (Sprint owns Virgin Mobile) at a cost of $27 (including tax) per month that gives me 300 voice minutes, and unlimited messaging and data/internet. I highly recommend it. Virgin offers Blackberry, Android, and other smartphones.

Wildly different priorities

January 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

The people of the Netherlands show how they place priority on a multitude of transportation modes on every block.

Take for example this Hard Rock Cafe in Amsterdam, a restaurant known around the world – there’s always one in each country’s largest cities.

The only way to arrive is by foot or by bicycle! There’s no car drop off or parking lot. The rear of the restaurant has patio seating along the canal so it might even be possible to dock your boat here!

Mayoral candidate Miguel del Valle’s view on sustainable transportation

January 15, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Active Transportation Alliance executive director Ron Burke wrote a blog on Friday (January 14, 2011) about his meeting with mayoral candidate Miguel del Valle (the current Chicago City Clerk).

Despite those caveats, he talked about his fondness for bicycling, its importance to the city and how his son is an avid cyclist. He also talked about one of the reasons he opposes the city’s parking meter contract, and has joined a lawsuit to overturn it: It’s because it limits the city’s ability to take away parking spaces for building bike lanes and sidewalks, and slowing traffic. We [Active Trans] share these concerns! [emphasis mine]

This meshes with a report Active Transportation Alliance released in June 2009 but recalled parts of the report five months later. But the message that report gave us remains true today and Miguel del Valle is repeating it. Margo O’Hare wrote announcing the report:

This limits any potential projects that use streets with metered spaces: bus rapid transit, bicycle lanes, street festivals, sidewalk expansion, streetscaping, pedestrian bulb-outs, loading zones, rush hour parking control, mid-block crossing, and temporary open spaces. The City’s ability to use streets in fresh, people-centric ways is now dictated, controlled and limited by the arrangements and penalties within the parking meters lease.

In November 2009, the Chicago Reader reported how the Active Transportation Alliance was going to release a new version of the report. Mick Dumke wrote:

Yet Monday night the Active Transportation Alliance inducted Mayor Daley into its “hall of fame,” and the group will soon release a new version of the report—screened beforehand by city officials—that will recant many of the criticisms it made in June.

Said Rob Sadowsky, “On behalf of the Active Transportation Alliance, I would like to simply state that we should not have published this report. I am embarrassed that it not only contains factual errors, but that it also paints an incorrect interpretation of the lease’s overall goals.” Regardless of any errors or misinterpretations, the original report’s essence will prove to be correct and foretelling: The City lost control over its own streets, the most basic and widely used element of neighborhoods and our  transportation system.

I look forward to voting for a mayoral candidate who opposes Mayor Richard M. Daley’s parking meter “lockout” with Morgan Stanley and other investors.

Along with the parking meter lease came the removal of approximately 30,000 high-quality bike parking spaces.

I’ve written a few times about the mayoral election, including the two forums I’ve been to (one at UIC about the economy and higher education, and the second about public school systems at the Chicago Teachers Union).

A place to rest

January 14, 2011 / / 0 Comments

While in Copenhagen this past weekend for about 60 hours, I hung out with Mikael of Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycle Chic.

After several drinks in a classy basement restaurant, we took a little tour of some neat bicycling infrastructure and “landed” on this hand and foot rest for people waiting at the light. This nifty device means you don’t have to take your feet off the pedals or you can use it as a launch pad.

The message on the foot rest says, “Hi, cyclist! Rest your foot here… and thank you for cycling in the city.”

Mikael has written much more about how cyclists in Copenhagen “hold on” to their city.

(When I passed it on Monday morning, I saw a leftover high heel shoe hanging on the footrest. Did somebody lose it or is someone trying to make a joke?)

Photos by Mikael.