Category: Transportation

Tuesday roundup: High-speed rail and Asian carp

January 5, 2010 / / 0 Comments

A collection of links and news stories I liked yesterday, Monday, June 4, 2010, the first business day of a new year and new decade. I hope you’ve started on this new year’s resolution.

  • Riding The Rails: How $8 Billion in Stimulus Funding for High-Speed rail Could Change the Face of the midwest—or Get Derailed* (Mindful Metropolis – The article presents nothing new, but for novices on the topic, it combines all of the talks, plans, and dollar amounts that have been discussed over the past few years. New to me, though, is feedback from a meeting of train advocates and industry types at the Spertus Institute in October 2009. *Links to Flash version of entire magazine issue. Download accessible PDF, look for page 28.
  • Columnist warns of forced porch-sitting, with possible mandatory neighbor interaction (Sprawled Out) – John Michlig takes Milwaukee Sentinel writer to task about shoddy journalism and defends real, walkable neighborhood designs. Also, a mention of a new neighborhood design called “coving.”
  • ‘Fewer’ people use fast train (China.org.cn) – The world’s fastest high-speed rail opens in China (Wuhan to Guangzhou); two weeks later there’s subtle criticism of low ridership reports. China.org.cn is interesting; known as “China Internet Information Center” and “published under the auspices of the State Council Information Office and the China International Publishing Group in Beijing.” It’s hard to know what information comes from the government and what doesn’t.
  • Fight Against Asian Carp Threatens Fragile Great Lakes Unity (New York Times) – The State of New York has joined the State of Michigan’s lawsuit against the State of Illinois to force Illinois to close the waterway connection between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River. The states fear that Asian carp will soon invade the Great Lakes and destroy the ecology. The State of Illinois operates eight locks and dams along the Illinois Waterway and Illinois River. See map below (made with Google My Maps).


View Lake Michigan to the Mississippi in a larger map

Update on BikeLink electronic bike lockers

January 3, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Two weeks ago I wrote about BikeLink electronic bike locker from eLock Technologies in Improving bike access to airports. I discovered some new information about the lockers about changes being made to a bike parking facility in San Francisco, California. Later, after watching a Streetsfilm video on the novel system, I realized I mistakenly identified the electronic access method.

BikeLink news in San Francisco

In October 2009, the Embarcadero BART station switched from a valet-based bike parking facility to using a BikeLink-controlled cage. The San Francisco Examiner thinks the lack of a hired attendant will deter people from parking here. The reason was cost: The labor needed to staff the cage cost $3.22 per bike while the electronic system costs only $0.42 per bike. Members pay only 3 cents per hour between 8 AM and 8 PM, and only 1 cent per hour at all other times.

The writer found three people to go along with the story and question the converted facility’s safety/security.*

The article doesn’t give up further details, but Alameda Bicycle (a local bike shop) fills in the missing information:

  • New members sign up and pay for an access card from BikeLink online or one of several physical locations.
  • The member opens the cage with their card and finds a place to park inside the cage. This is the sign-in.
  • The member locks their bike (there may not actually be an object to which one can lock their bike) and removes any easily-removed parts (like lights and bags) and exits the cage.
  • The member then exits the cage and inserts their card into the read to perform the sign-out. If 10 minutes has passed and the member has no signed out, an audible alarm will go off, and the cage operator (Alameda Bicycle) will be alerted.

There are some other rules that apply to cage use. You have to also register your bicycle so that the operator knows which bicycle belongs to which member so they can better track misuse of the facility. The operator will conduct random checks to verify this. Because of the way this electronic cage works, members have an incentive to not let non-members into the cage.

*The San Francisco Examiner article went so low as to publish this worthless quote from an individual, “I have plenty of cards already in my wallet,” said E.M., who takes his bike from Richmond to the Embarcadero station daily. “Why do I need another one for parking my bike?” The benefit of having a card to lock your bike is that you can use the same card to securely lock your bike at lockers up and down the state.

Smart card, not magnetic stripe card

I wrote that the “debit card” is a magnetic stripe card (like a credit card or transit fare card), but instead is a smart card, with the member’s data and current balance stored on an integrated circuit chip. Occasionally, some people equate smart cards with proximity, contactless, or RFID cards. It seems more popular though to only identify a smart card as one that has a gold-plated chip visible on the front side. These are more popular in Europe and Asia.

Streetfilms (a sibling of Streetsblog) visited Oakland and El Cerrito, California, in 2007, to show how they work and how they compare to traditional, leased lockers (short story: electronic lockers are on demand and can serve multiple, unique users in a day or week, while the leased locker has one unique user). Watch the video:

Helmets, hygiene, hair… help?

December 29, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I subscribe to a Google News feed for “bike parking” where I find many articles about grander issues but they get caught in the search. When people talk about increasing or improving bicycling, they almost always talk about parking (it’s a necessity). A recent article talked little about bike parking; The short blurb about a hygiene “problem” of helmet hair piqued my attention.

A bicyclist on her first commute by bicycle wears a helmet in San Jose, California.

Helmets

“As DOTS pushes biking, gender gap persists” (by Lauren Redding in the Diamondback, student newspaper from University of Maryland). DOTS is the University’s Department of Transportation Services, which has a goal of 9% of students getting to campus by bike and recently conducted a count that found only 20% of biking students are female. The article cites DOTS as saying that safety and hygiene are the major barriers that keep the frequency of women bikers low. Somehow, hygiene is related to helmet hair.

Helmet hair is not as important as building safe bicycling routes to the school, educating students on how to ride safely and locking their bikes correctly. The article in no way describes the University’s Transportation Services group as “helmet pushers,” but this comment bothers me: “For women especially — when you put on a helmet, you mess up your hair.”

Let’s stop building bike lanes and deal with this, stat! Okay, for real: There is a gender gap, but dealing with helmet hair will never match the effects of making cycling safe (or normal) on increasing the number of women who bike.

After I began an obsession with Dutch bikes and bicycling “culture” (a culture of safety and high numbers riding bikes), I learned more about helmets and the reasons people use them. My position about wearing and promoting helmets has changed somewhat, but my behavior, so far, hasn’t. Rarely does a Dutch person wear a helmet. From the research:

In the Netherlands, a survey of pediatricians found that 94% never wear helmet, but that 82% agree that helmet use should be advised for children (source). Overall, “less than 1% of adult cyclists wear helmets, and even among children, only 3–5% wear helmets” (source: “Making Cycling Irresistible” [PDF], the best article describing bicycling in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, comparing it to countries with low bicycling rates, United States, United Kingdom, and Australia).

I bought this new helmet in Summer 2009, to be more comfortable and to look better. Like I said, my position has changed, but my behavior hasn’t. I think everyone should make their own decision about helmets; helmets are only useful to prevent head injuries once a collision or crash has occurred. It’s more important to build facilities and educate people to reduce the likelihood of a collision or crash.

My Dutch fixation continued to the end of the last semester – I presented and wrote a paper for my Sustainable Development Techniques class about what makes bicycling in the Netherlands safe and easy, and how the United States can learn. Dutch bicycling presentation for class (PDF) and the Dutch bicycling presentation for class (DOC).

The bike helmet-American relationship is amusing. I can’t explain it as eloquently as Mikael Kolville-Anderson in Copenhagen: he mentions it a hundred times (search of Copenhagenize for the term “helmet”). The latest news, although not about America, but relatable: Israel is getting ready to repeal part of the all-ages helmet law, which is seen as discouraging bicycling in the country.

TOD doesn’t have to be fancy

December 27, 2009 / / 38 Comments

Developers and real estate workers like buzz words. They’re a great way to grab attention. But a development doesn’t need “TOD,” “near trains,” or “transit friendly” written on marketing materials, or subsidies and tax breaks from the municipality, to pass as Transit Oriented Development.

A photo of the Los Angeles Gold Line light rail passing the Mission Meridian “transit oriented development” (above, top) and marketing materials for the project (above, bottom).

Sometimes you just need a stairway and a sidewalk.

Townhomes on Carey Trail (view in map) in Wood Dale, Illinois, have easy access to the Wood Dale Metra station on the Milwaukee District West line. Look at the map to see how the neighboring developments fare in access to the station.

Video: Bicycling next to Phoenix Valley light rail train

December 23, 2009 / / 0 Comments

UPDATE: View overhead photos of all of the bicycling treatments on Jefferson and Washington streets (the one-way couplet) between 7th and 24th Streets in Phoenix, Arizona, courtesy of the Coalition of Arizona Bicyclists.

My dad and I rode our bikes in the inside left-hand bike lane on eastbound, one-way, Washington Street in Phoenix, Arizona (purely to take this video).

The left-hand travel lane is for home and business access while the one-way light rail track (and its stations) run in the middle of the street. The lane is here so that there aren’t gobs of driveways and track crossings – it’s a safety feature. I think the bike lane is here instead of on the right side of the street (and next to the curb) because less traffic drives here. Also, there are few opportunities for right turns in front of the bicyclists.

Eventually, though, going east, the bike lane moves over to the right side through the use of a “perpendicular bike lane” adjacent to a crosswalk in a signalized intersection. The perpendicular bike lane looks like a bike box. This happens at 24th Street because the left-hand access lane disappears and Jefferson Street merges into Washington Street, between 25th and 27th Streets, which becomes a two-way street with the light rail tracks dividing the travel directions. (I would add links to Google Maps, but the imagery is outdated and doesn’t show the 1-year old train line; it does show some construction.)

I would call all of these features innovative designs and good solutions. I think tomorrow I will ride the area again (probably alone) to get a better feel for how it works and how safe bicyclists would perceive the design.

The video is sped up by 20% to be less droll. The audio drops out a few times because I was talking (giving my dad directions like a movie producer), but you can still hear the electronic sounds of the train as it approaches and departs the station. I didn’t have my camera’s bike mount so I held it in my hand. I want to come back to take photos instead of video. It was fun to make this video!