(Photo © J. Maus/BikePortland)
This week’s Monday Roundup is brought to you by Lumberyard Bike Park, who reminds you to sign your kids up for Summer Shred Academy camps.
Welcome to Monday! Before we get rolling, let’s look back at the best stories you might have missed last week…
The book on bikepacking: Salsa Cycles has long focused on adventure bikes. Now the company can say they wrote the book on it with their latest publication, The Bikepacker’s Guide.
What women want in New York City: Is it fear of traffic? Helmet hair? The New York Times delves into one of the Big Cycling Debates; how to get more women riding bikes.
More on that topic: Speaking of the gender gap debate; an article in The Globe and Mail spurred a pointed and pugnacious response by Toronto-based blogger Claire McFarlane.
DOT chief says we should let some roads die: Hearing a Department of Transportation director spout clear common sense about the future of roads shouldn’t be amazing — but it is.
Enough with Copenhagen already: Local transportation advocate Steph Routh thinks it’s time to look beyond northern Europe’s examples when it comes to bike-centric and low-car planning and projects.
Turning up density debate to 11: A committee tasked with finding solutions to the housing crunch in Seattle is considering doing away with single-family zoning altogether.
Smarter cycling signals: London is using radar and thermal imaging to optimize signal timing for people riding bicycles.
Advertisement
Paris updates signals: Bicycling demands a completely different traffic regulatory system than driving. Paris is the latest city to embrace that with new signals that have separate phases for people riding bicycles.
Big trucks = big fuel use: When we talk about reducing emissions from transportation, we must focus on big-rigs because they use a quarter of all motor-vehicle fuel, says the Brookings Institution.
Build it (with our taxes): The tide seems to have turned when it comes to raising money for infrastructure. Pew says dozens of states are making progress to pay for roads by methods like a gas tax hike. Come on Oregon! Let’s get with it!
Washington’s auto-centric transportation plan has a silver lining: Seattle Bike Blogger Tom Fucoloro holds his nose as he reports on on the highway heavy new transportation package up north — which also happens to include a sevenfold increase in funding for biking and walking.
Archetypal advocrat: City of Seattle traffic engineer Dongo Chang is the best kind of bureaucrat. He gets it. And more importantly, he isn’t afraid to get things — even bold and potentially controversial things — done.
Bike politics: A political party in Rotterdam (a Dutch city with over 1 million people) hopes to curry voters’ favor by giving free bikes to every high school student.
Helmet-less riding rationale: In America it takes guts to take a public stance against wearing a helmet while cycling. Even so, this reporter from Spokane did just that, but not without explaining her decision.
New York City’s carfree park binge: In the course of a few weeks, New York City has decided to prohibit driving in Central Park and Prospect Park. It’s a major victory for all humans in that city and hopefully will inspire other cities (cough, Portland, cough) to follow suit.
If you come across a noteworthy bicycle story, send it in via email, Tweet @bikeportland, or whatever else and we’ll consider adding it to next Monday’s roundup.
Thanks for reading.
BikePortland has served this community with independent community journalism since 2005. We rely on subscriptions from readers like you to survive. Your financial support is vital in keeping this valuable resource alive and well.
Please subscribe today to strengthen and expand our work.
Big rigs haul roofing materials, unlike tax-free Teslas.
These guys forget what hauls all the materials to build their hip new apartments and coffee shops.
so do I with my bike and trailer.
And some smokers live to be 90, but it’s a minority, like people who use their bikes to haul roofing material or other heavy objects., your a commendable minority.
I fail to see your point.
Europe is (surprise) once again far ahead of us in terms of recognizing the cargo capabilities of bike-mobiles.
Since this seems beyond my means, how many loads does are we talking to remove a roof, haul it off and bring in the new roofing material?
I mean, for me, it’s 8 miles and 700 feet of elevation gain each way to the dump (14 miles if I avoid the big hill). Maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit, but I doubt I could do it if I gave myself a whole summer…
The point isn’t how long it takes or how arduous it is. The point is that it can be done.
We once built entire civilizations using only human power, and we may get a chance to do so again.
Just because it is difficult to imagine the details doesn’t have any bearing on whether we’ll be presented with the opportunity to discover just how arduous it is.
Oh. I thought you actually were doing this sort of thing and I was feeling a bit inferior.
Oh, I am/have been. Sorry to be confusing. One thing we’ll rediscover when we have to rely more on human power for hauling stuff is that it is much easier to build with local materials, and to cascade/reuse the materials on site once they’ve outlived their first useful life. Cuts down on the hauling. 🙂
Most of my building materials come from dumpsters, neighbor’s remodeling projects, my brother’s sawmill, or the nearest lumber yard. Getting rid of an old asphalt roof is a pain in the ass, and to haul that to the dump I’ve also borrowed a friend’s pickup, but that is more an artifact of asphalt roofs than any necessary truck dependency. Shake roofs or metal roofs are far less heavy, and are more easily reused on site.
Say…twenty guys on bikes, linked together with harnesses, hitched ahead of a wagon, could possibly haul some fairly heavy loads; wallboard, rock, concrete, etc. How big or heavy a load might they be able to lug, compared to that of a flatbed semi or a dump truck? Maybe the guys cooped up in Oregon’s prisons and jails would be interested in being part of a team pedaling that kind of rig.
If you are referencing a time where oil has dried up without a suitable power replacement you must realize that bicycles wouldn’t last long in that world either.
The manufacturing and maintenance of the bicycle uses oil as well. Be it for lubricants, tires (rubber), materials (carbon fiber is nearly all oil). Some manufacturing processes need to be mechanicalized o a large scale like metal tube, wire, and ball bearings for a consistent and reliable product. Can they be done by hand? Sure but not at a consistent or reliable level.
The bicycle isn’t going to be much of a tool shortly – likely less than a decade- after the oil supply dries up, the scenario you imply is back to horses and buggy time – not bicycle time.
“The bicycle isn’t going to be much of a tool shortly – likely less than a decade- after the oil supply dries up”
I’m not so sure, gutterbunny.
The idea as I understand it isn’t that oil disappears, but that cheap oil is no longer available. We will discover that we can’t afford to burn it anymore. But for noncombustive uses I think we’ll be delighted to keep using it.
For that matter as a technology a bicycle is something that I imagine will be much more easily reproduced without reliance on fossil fuels than, say, a car. Bamboo, cogged belt, wood. Don’t we still have rubber trees? The amount of rubber I’ve gone through in brake pads over the past thirty years, I’d guess to be on the order of a pound.
One more qualification I’d like to add.
Our present infrastructure was built with fossil fuels. Dismantling what we’ve got without fossil fuels (e.g., hauling asphalt roofing to the dump) is going to be a royal pain. But that, in and of itself, is not something we can or should hold against human powered cargo hauling. If our present infrastructure had been built without fossil fuels, the supply chains would have been shorter and it would be much easier to imagine reproducing this infrastructure with human power.
What price point do you have in mind where people are forced to switch to bikes instead of more fuel efficient gas engines, electric or natural gas etc…powered conventional sized cars, or smaller golf cart sized vehicles?
In 1992, for the Cubans, it wasn’t price it was the (un)availability of oil that prompted the reevaluation of the bicycle.
I have no idea what price will make the difference. 2008 saw a big shift (by some measures) and that was only $4/gal. People (with money) can get used to all kinds of price increases. I mean the Europeans pay up to ten times more in fuel taxes than we do, and haven’t exactly shed the car. But they have seen fit to spend the revenue on building up world class multimodal transport infrastructure that represents a resilience our elected officials have seen fit to skip right over, treat as it if it didn’t concern us in the least.
My favorite graph:
from Grist: http://grist.org/climate-energy/why-we-should-raise-the-gas-tax-and-why-we-wont/
“There is a counterintuitive relationship between gas prices and the burden they place on the average citizen’s finances: The more gas costs, the less gas people buy, and so the less they are weighed down by gas costs. Just look at this chart, courtesy of Bloomberg, which shows that the U.S. has the world’s 50th highest gasoline prices, $3.66 per gallon in September, but the fifth highest proportion of annual income spent on gas purchases. Those rankings are almost exactly reversed in European countries with high gas taxes. The Netherlands has the world’s third highest gas price, $8.89 per gallon, but the 34th highest proportion of income spent on gasoline. Italy ranks fourth highest in gas prices, $8.61 per gallon, and 38th in proportional spending on gas. Gas taxes in Italy and the Netherlands, like most of Europe, are about 10 times higher than those in the U.S. Furthermore, in a country such as Norway, where gas currently costs $10.08 per gallon, that revenue comes back to the public in the form of government programs, such as free college tuition. Lower gas consumption also means better local air quality and reduced greenhouse emissions, and more exercise and less obesity among the populace.”
It is not of course quite that simple, but still not a bad angle.
And here’s the chart from Bloomberg:
http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/gas-prices/
I think you hit upon an point that I have found challenging: debris. I have found that hauling wood off to Wood Waste Recycling can be a chore, and it is something that I will have done with a friend’s truck. That said, I usually haul off material by bike, bring it home, and when I get enough material to merit a run to Wood Waste, then I call up my buddy. Getting material to jobs can be easy, if you do research on suppliers located near a job site. For example: If I were to do a job at N. Williams and Killingsworth, then I will source new materials from Parr Lumber on MLK. Similarly, if I am doing a job in Reed College/East Moreland, then I will get in touch with 52nd Ave. Lumber or Wichita Lumber. The beauty of Portland, is that we still have a lot of locally owned material suppliers embedded in the neighborhoods, which makes it wildly convenient for me.
because you can do it, you fail to recognize that the average person isn’t equipped physically, mentally or with the equipment to move a roof down the street.
FYI- I live in Europe and don’t see what your suggesting, most roofing is on a truck and is tile not asphalt shingles so it weighs a lot more and it’s basically impossible to move with a bike-even if you had all summer and no job to distract you. An E-bike with a trailer might help you some.
“because you can do it, you fail to recognize that the average person isn’t equipped physically, mentally or with the equipment to move a roof down the street.”
What does that have to do with anything?
We weren’t talking about my grandma reroofing a house with a bicycle; we were talking about whether we need big rigs to accomplish this task in the future. My answer is no, quite apart from how many of us are inclined or physically equipped to do this particular task. A bike trailer makes the job easier; that is all I was saying.
Maybe if there were an endless supply of free labor, it would be practical to haul commercially meaningful quantities of construction materials and debris with a bike. But pay a normal hourly rate, and it becomes nonsensical to have a guy on a bike take twenty long rides, instead of having one guy with a truck take one quick trip. Just because you can do something at a hobby scale, doesn’t mean it’s practical to do it at a commercial scale.
Modern civilization with for the present, and ever increasing population size, relies upon massive amounts of goods transported over distances far greater than either human or beast power alone can move it in a practical manner. I doubt many people really would choose to revert to the various means earlier civilizations used to build their cities without motor vehicles…unless they have some desire to work as a slave.
“I doubt many people really would choose to revert to the various means earlier civilizations used to build their cities without motor vehicles”
A curious if also exceedingly common retort here. No one is talking about *voluntary*. The fact that I haul crap around with my bike trailers (voluntarily) is not informing my conviction that one of these fine days the circumstances will have shifted (involuntarily) such that we’ll be very pleased to use whatever is at hand: bike trailers, horses, mules, oxen to move our stuff. Although beasts of burden have more of a history, energetically I think the bike trailer wins. Also I can rent you one today. I can’t rent you an ox and a cart, and I don’t know anyone set up to do this in Multnomah Co.
Nobody says get rid of the big rigs, but making strides in making them more efficient will have a bigger impact than trying to get more people into Teslas.
“Nobody says get rid of the big rigs”
I am happy to go on record saying something related: let’s plan for the sunsetting of big rigs. Let’s figure out how to do what we think we need to do without them.
Even in 1998 the trucking industry in Midwest was looking skittishly forward to a rapidly approaching future of ALL truck loads only traveling from the nearest rail yard.
Nationalized public roads are quick, cheap and reliable.
Privatized American railroads are single track, slow, unreliable and utterly irrelevant unless you are hauling gigatons of a cheap commodity (coal) that can afford to be weeks late.
Want to get rid of trucks and their emissions? Fix the American rail system so that every business can use it cost effectively, not just Warren Buffett.
Bingo. Rail is the way to greatly reduce our emissions. Every major city in the US should be linked with double track electrified rail. It is so absurd that we haven’t done this yet.
The sad thing is that through rail line electrification you could eliminate over 90% of our rail system’s diesel emissions with minimal wiring ONLY at:
() the acceleration and deceleration paths in and out of a city
() the the slopes graded 2% or higher
Most power is used accelerating and ascending inclines. Fortunately every locomotive power unit in service has been Series Hybrid for decades. Consequently they already can run off the appropriate voltage and current supplied externally rather than the diesel generators. This is further simplified by the small number of large rail companies, the even smaller locomotive supplier market.
I don’t know for certain but I suspect that most power units use very close to the same, if not identical, voltage and current specifications.
Electrifying every mile would be expensive and not necessarily cost effective. Allowing the diesels to be off all of the most intensive low fuel efficient miles and off for some of the rest would save most of the fuel use.
If a standard for train power units to dump power back in to the rail power lines on downgrades and deceleration paths the overall power usage could approach wind drag and electrical conversion losses. This would be VERY good.
“…but making strides in making them more efficient…” Fozman
Increasing efficiency is a good objective, though recently to a different story, someone mentioned in a comment, a statistic they’d read, that reflected the already considerable efficiency of big rigs per pound of freight moved per gallon of fuel burned, compared to cars. Trains are good too, but for flexibility and efficiency, on the road trucks are hard to beat.
Anyone else been hearing all the radio spots for the per mile charge pilot that ODOT is trying to push? I wonder how much money we are wasting promoting a tax structure that subsidizes larger lower gas mileage motor vehicles at the expense of smaller higher gas mileage vehicles? Big trucks will actually pay less under the program than they pay in gas tax currently.
This is just a test. The state can charge incrementally higher rates for lower gas mileage vehicles, but that’s not the point now. The point is to make sure they can collect the information in a way that preserves privacy and maintains effectiveness.
I signed up and installed my mileage device. I think it’s an innovative approach to an obviously big problem with gas tax over next 20-30 years.
Finally, government agencies need to market what they do, particularly when they are looking for the rest of us to participate more. Otherwise, all you hear about what government is doing from media and we know what sells a story…
Kudos to the woman who wrote about her decision against wearing a helmet when she’s riding. I probably rode thousands of miles when I was growing up and well into adulthood before I ever heard of a helmet for cyclists. When I was a kid, sure, I fell a couple of times, but my worst injury was probably a skinned knee. And I fell in the middle of a shopping mall parking lot (must have an audience!) due to not clipping out when I should have, but I bruised a knee and my dignity, and that’s all. Riding a bike is probably the most freeing thing I’ve done as an adult, and she’s right, there’s something about putting on a helmet that takes away from that experience. Great article. Thanks for linking to it.
That article sums up much of my non-helmet wearing philosophy as well.
Though I disagree with her on one point, there is a huge mass of data being collected now with automated bike counters, apps, and bikeshare. Which is slowly proving that bicycling is much safer than it has been perceived to be.
As an example, the Hawthorne bridge on a average hosts as many bicycle trips in about 8 minutes then there will likely be serious injuries or fatalities in the city of portland for the year – even if fatalities and injuries double which is highly unlikely, the Hawthorne bridge covers it in less than a half hour.
I also like how she brushed the subject of how a more upright riding position increases your ability to see and be seen.
I don’t want to re-start the helmet debate, because I think it should be each individual’s personal choice to wear one or not.
I object to people telling me that I’m taking away from my bicycling experience by wearing a helmet (or not wearing a helmet). I wear one because my parents, my employer, and I paid a lot for the info in my brains and I want to protect it.
I don’t go around telling you that you’re doing it wrong by wearing something that I don’t, or not wearing something that I do, please do me the courtesy and treat me the same as I am treating you.
I wear my helmet on my commute, because I have some high-speed runs and some higher-risk roadway segments. I don’t wear my helmet to the local store because I can get there on lazy streets or trails, and I don’t have opportunity to go much more than 15 mph.
I also dislike being told—directly or indirectly—that if I wear a helmet (or lycra, or bright colors, etc.), I’m essentially ruining cycling for somebody else because they’ll see li’l ol’ me and what, somehow think I’m the prime example of how a “cyclist” should be?
One area of helmet conflict for me is when it comes to my kids: for them, wearing a helmet is mandatory, even when they are passengers on our cargo bike. So if I take them to the store with me, along the trails and lazy streets, I wear my helmet so as to reduce confusion. I also struggle because my wife firmly believes in the protection of helmets and I feel like I am defying her wishes any time I go without.
But man, do I arrive about half as sweaty without the helmet as I would with it…frickin’ styrofoam head-oven.
I totally relate to your comment about your wife. I’m not particularly invested one way or other in the helmet debate, but my wife *really* wants me to wear one. So, I do. Why not? It’s not hurting anyone and it’s good for my marriage.
Happy wife, happy life… 😉
“…But man, do I arrive about half as sweaty without the helmet as I would with it…frickin’ styrofoam head-oven.” bic
Excessive retained heat suggests your helmet’s too small, or for some other reason, doesn’t have adequate ventilation.
Haven’t yet read the lady’s article, but do recognize that wearing of helmets poses a challenge to people with lots of hair and complicated do’s.
I kind of remember the wild feeling of the breeze blowing freely through my hair while riding. For me, the charm of that of feeling is limited. Too often the temperature when riding is either too hot or too cold, so I wound up wearing some kind of hat to deal with that.
Then it eventually occurred to me that there are bike helmet designs that do a much better job of moderating heat variances than most conventional hats do. In short, I’d say my use of a bike helmet definitely enhances my own biking experience. They do look kind of funny on people’s heads. Relative to the overall challenges of biking, particularly in traffic amongst motor vehicles, looks are the least of my worries.
“Excessive retained heat suggests your helmet’s too small, or for some other reason, doesn’t have adequate ventilation.”
Well, you’ll have to define “excessive” and “adequate”. I know how to fit a helmet, but no helmet has better ventilation than no helmet (at least in my price range—I’m not paying $200 for a helmet; here’s mine), especially standing still at a light.
Also, “heat” and “sweat” are not necessarily equivalent. I said I arrived half as sweaty without a helmet, probably because “ventilation” and “evaporation” are not necessarily equivalent either. All helmets will retain sweat even if they are very good at releasing heat.
I didn’t tell you not to wear a helmet. I said her statements/beliefs mirror mine.
And she didn’t tell you not to wear a helmet, she gave you what her perspective was on the subject, and nowhere did she say not to wear one, she just pointed out why she doesn’t wear one.
“And so the reality is, the system is going to shrink.”
Exactly. I’ve always maintained that we should start discussing the decommissioning of roads in Portland. I live adjacent to a small bit of unpaved road and I love it. In fact, I would like to see entire neighborhoods lose their paved streets via intentional neglect…just think of the cost savings!
Until I see otherwise, I believe the quote should be read as “they number of roads may shrink but the remaining roads will get much wider.”
When this statement is made into policy we can stand up and applaud.
This coming from a native Iowan.
Don’t you have a dust problem? Or do you always have your windows closed?
Not to mention riding through mud every winter would get really old. And don’t even get started on the ADA issues. Mountain bikes shouldn’t be required to commute in a major US city (well maybe Minneapolis in the winter).
“ADA issues”
this is a separate issue. sidewalks are important and have little to do with whether we continue to fund the enormous swathes of asphalts and concrete in low-traffic residential areas.
We live on one and we love it. A big part of the fun is the freedom the city gives you to garden it, etc.
the road has enough packed gravel that mud and dust is not a big issue.
Rotterdam link is to a wikipedia page about the city, not to an article about the proposed bike giveaway [*Sorry 9watts, I fixed that– JM]. What seems a bit odd, at least to me, is that I’d have assumed every high school student in Rotterdam already had a bike, or would have no trouble finding one cheap if theirs had gotten pinched.
“Stop. Talking. About Copenhagen.”
Yes this. Copenhagen has 5x the density of Portland and is 4x smaller in area. It’s in a highly centralized country with 50% income tax and a 25% sales (VAT) tax.
Fantastic article and we should start talking about all these other examples too. It makes it harder to hand wave away Copenhagen as an outlier example of good infrastructure.
Simultaneous green for peds and bikes. Why do we force pedestrians to make copenhagen lefts? Why do we design infrastructure around such an inconvenience for people walking or biking?
Because when people have something Really Important to do, they drive a car. Also, drivers pay 100% of road costs. Therefore drivers, being the Most Important People, deserve to have the greatest level of convenience. Furthermore, if walking were too convenient, what motivation would Pedestrians have to work harder to improve their lot in life and get a car? It is the lot of Bicyclists and Pedestrians to envy their princely counterparts who drive around in the comfort of their powerful motorized vehicles. Without something to which they might aspire, Bicyclists and Pedestrians both would be wont to remain lazy and shiftless.
[/sarcasm]
I like wearing a helmet. There, I said it and I am not ashamed.
I hate it, but I don’t feel safe enough in the US without one. It just doesn’t bother me as much to go without when I bike in Germany or The Netherlands.
I’ve had way too many high-speed crashes to feel safe riding without a helmet. I’d wear it even if there were no cars on the road. Most of the times I’ve hit the pavement it has been the fault of another rider, environmental hazards, or my own stupidity.
Nothing to be ashamed of. I also do, too, because I know I’m a klutz and could totally see me hurting myself doing something dumb.
There is a link to a Vimeo short about Medellin in Steph Routh’s article that’s well worth a watch. They are out Portlanding us big time down there.
That BBC article about Paris is a bit misleading. It’s not “signals that have separate phases for bikes”; it’s just a traffic sign underneath the normal signals that shows the movements that bikes can do any time. And it’s nationwide in France – I saw plenty of them in Nantes last month for example.
Trucks “consume over a quarter of all gasoline”? I think he means fuel, yet they produce less than a quarter of emissions. This sounds like they’re doing better than the rest. Sadly, ~2006 emissions regulations have ruined VW TDI engines for burning biodiesel (because of post-ignition injection approach to burn off the DPF, which is ironically far less necessary with biodiesel.) Also, trimet isn’t really powered by biodiesel (B5 maybe) or the bus would smell better. I run B99 year-round without a problem (garage and preheat help morning startup, but the bus runs all day every day.) That closed-carbon-cycle renewable biodiesel costs more than carcinogenic climate-changing petro diesel says something about our priorities here.
That Iowa DOT guy makes a point…how many highways do we really need? We took out Harbor Drive and replaced it with Waterfront Park and the ped / bike trail. Oregon DOT is reusing some old sections of US 30 thru the Columbia Gorge for the Columbia Gorge State Trail. A section of the I-205 trail near Gateway uses an old section of the old Rocky Butte Jail Road. Sections of old Route 66 are being reused as bike/ped trails. We talk about rail trail conversions all the time. Turning no longer needed roads into ped / bike routes make sense, and if done right, can actually be a plus.
Harbor drive was closed a year after i405 was finished and a lot of the traffic moved to the new highway. If the model is build a new road to modern standards then shrink the old road some because it is no longer needed to add a park that is uncomfortable to walk in because some cyclists don’t like the choice of bike fast in the road with cars or bike slow to be courteous to pedestrians then you’re following a bad model.
Or for that matter, how many intersections do we need. Add a thousand diverters to SE until the vehicle routes look like SW. (Add a hundred elevators to SW until the bike routes look like SE.)