(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)
Happy new year, Portland — we’ve had some much-needed rest on Team BikePortland and we’re happy to be back from the holidays with you. Here, as usual, are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Lane lights: A proposed Florida law would require Florida-made solar-powered lights to be installed along every bike path or lane. (Cost: $75 each.)
DIY snow tires: For those of you with disc brakes, this might be a good day to consider this creative use of zip-ties.
Depaving streets: Facing vast maintenance backlogs, 27 states are now turning some paved roads to gravel (PDF), or letting them naturally crumble.
Sunlight disinfection: When the police report blames a woman for causing the bike collision that killed her, local media are more likely to ask questions if she happens to be well-off and politically connected. And when they do, the police report sometimes comes off looking really bad.
Helmet reviews: The Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute looks at 2016’s models.
Apodment living: “I didn’t really choose the pod life,” writes car-free Seattle journalist Suzanne Jacobs in a personal review of tiny apartments. “The pod life chose me.”
Bike Autobahn: Germany is setting out to build a 62-mile bike highway — “no red lights, no trucks, just clear sailing” — on old rail routes through its Ruhr region.
Unlicensed driving: France’s novel way to reduce danger from unlicensed drivers is to let them drive two-seater cars that can move up to 28 mph.
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Football bikers: A “growing number” of NFL players biking for offseason training have found “improved leg turnover, fresher legs, and nearly everything else.”
Growth industry: Years of booming bike sales in the UK have the BBC talking about “the unstoppable growth of cycling.”
Delhi pollution: India’s smoggy capital will test a rule that lets you drive a given car only on alternating days.
Italian pollution: Rome has also been using an alternating-day system, and Milan simply banned all cars for six hours each of three days to reduce smog.
Crime prevention: Juvenile curfews (like Portland’s) seem to increase gunfire after hours, presumably because they push law-abiding eyes off the street.
Slower biking: For whatever reason, people traveling at less than 8 mph are three times more likely to be hit.
Bus perspective: TriMet operator Dan Christensen tells a story of the sort of incident that makes a bus driver grumpy.
Immoral engineering: Continuing to design roads around “a futile effort to move more cars faster” shows “essentially the same respect for life as the one driver in five who flees the scene after killing someone on foot,” writes Tom Fuculoro.
If you come across a noteworthy story, send it in via email, Tweet @bikeportland, or whatever else and we’ll consider adding it to next Monday’s roundup.
— Michael Andersen, (503) 333-7824 – michael@bikeportland.org
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Regarding the slower riding, I can definitely see why that would be the case. I normally ride slowly and get harassed and passed dangerously so much more by drivers than when I’m coasting downhill at 20 mph.
Had to laugh at the picture accompanying this story: …a bunch of roadies six abreast, some up out of the saddle, charging around a curve. Not a slow paced commuting rider in sight, not a woman, girl or child in sight.
It seems reasonable that increasing the road mode share of people riding bikes, very likely will mean more people on the road biking, that will prefer to cruise around 8 mph on the flats, rather than 12, 15, 20 or faster. I wonder what types of people this would be, but don’t have a really good idea. Obviously, people that may be inherently slower for various reasons…but there may be people entirely capable of riding fast, but that choose to ride relatively slow nonetheless.
Some of them may not even wish to travel very fast downhill. People choosing to hold to that speed will oblige an adjustment from more road users than just those that drive or travel by motor vehicle.
More people riding slow could help move towards broader support for better biking infrastructure such as protected bike lanes/cycle tracks.
The one on the far left with panniers and sloped-tube flat-bar bike appears (to me) to be female, but excellent point. This is the type of thing I keep trying to point out to our city councils who believe that now that they’ve built one narrow MUP off of a main artery, they’ve accommodated “the bicyclists.” There are many, many ‘fast’ cyclists using the roads where I live now, and it’s the ‘slow’ cyclists that we want to encourage. What we try to discourage is lumping us all into one group for a singular solution (e.g., protected lanes), particularly at the cost of safe access to a wider array of routes.
Designing solely for the fast cyclists sets us up for failure since we are not designing for the “average” commuter who doesn’t want to wear special clothing, spend a lot of money on a racing bike, or arrive to work covered in sweat.
This is why we should build protected bike lanes while also limiting motor traffic speeds. People that ride slowly will use the protected bike lanes, while the general travel lane should be safer for fast riders due to the slower motor traffic speed. That, and repeal that pesky mandatory sidepath law.
Absolutely agree! The biggest challenge where I live is educating the motoring public as to why cyclists are riding on a wide shoulder on the side of a 45-MPH road (typically at 18-28 MPH) when a “bike path” (read: MUP) is only a block to the west. They don’t believe me when I say the likelihood of the cyclist being hit by a driver veering off the road is much lower than a cyclist hitting a pedestrian on the MUP. (They also don’t care that it’s the only way over train tracks and an interstate highway, nor could they even fathom lowering the speed limit with all the traffic… the world would come to an end!).
If you put in a protected bike lane in Oregon, our mandatory use law will require any cyclist on that road to use it. If it is a block over, then while it is true that a faster rider may be legally able to use the road, motorists will show more hostility and aggressively dangerous behavior towards any such cyclist on the road.
I’ve seen this in action many, many times over the years. In one somewhat humorous instance, a motorist almost hit my sister-in-law and then added insult to injury by yelling at her and asking what she was doing riding on that road when the next road over had a bike lane. She replied, “I live on this road. What are you doing driving here?” (Wasn’t Mia Birk involved in one of these episodes, as the motorist?)
If we’re going to put in so-called protected bike lanes, those segregated facilities need to work for all riders, otherwise we risk losing what few gains we have been able to achieve. Narrow little gutters with curbs just isn’t going to cut it, imo.
“People that ride slowly will use the protected bike lanes, while the general travel lane should be safer for fast riders due to the slower motor traffic speed. That, and repeal that pesky mandatory sidepath law.”
Exactly. “Protected” infrastructure should be a joy to use due to its optimization for bike travel efficiency, limited obstructions, and connections to desirable locations. The only reason to leave it should be because traveling with the motorists in “their” lane(s) allows you some advantage. Unless we repeal 814.420, we’ll never know whether some piece of infrastructure is a joy or a trap. Offering a choice is key, but with fully-barricaded cycleways and laws that confine us there, we’ll never know how well any particular design actually works for everyone. I suspect that regardless of any bike-intended infrastructure, traffic flow will almost always be optimized for the motorized, in which case, if I can keep up with them, I’ll be riding with the motorists—which could get me a ticket in Oregon.
There has to be a shift in rationale for creating protected bike infrastructure. Right now, I think the rationale is to comply with disembodied regulations and to keep current cyclists even more out of the way, but make it so hard to use or so disconnected that we don’t actually encourage any more people to use their bikes. What we should be asking is, “how can we make bicycling the most desirable mode of transportation out there?” Or at a minimum, “how can we make it at least as convenient as driving?” Then we’d see bikeway designs that looked like they were designed for cars, only thinner and with no cars allowed.
Speed differential is the primary cause of most auto crashes, so it would stand to reason it is the cause of most auto-bike crashes.
“Not a slow paced commuting rider in sight, not a woman, girl or child in sight.”
I smell implications
from the article
“Women were found to be more likely to be involved in crashes than men, in part due to lower average speeds of cycling.”
Don’t be so quick to assume.
The wording of that sentence leans to the idea that women are automatically slower. But it’s also funny that girls and children are two different categorizes, because what is a girl if not a child?
Exactly what I thought! Do people have more respect for cyclists traveling at higher speeds? Or do people assume that women cyclists will travel at lower speeds and work harder to pass them?
What do you mean? Those are “cyclists”—or at least the image everyone likes to conjure up of “cyclists”, you know, always riding “too fast” while simultaneously “holding up traffic”…
So small that it’s not possible to determine whether or not they can be seen, and yet “taking up the whole road”. Super powers!
I don’t like the tone of this article at all: “If you’re a woman, you’re riding slowly, therefore 3x more likely to get hit!” This is something that scares away potential new riders.
Yeah, and the actual research discusses this quite differently. See my comment below.
The Fuculoro piece: “Because road projects all across the country continue to repeat these mistakes, knowingly sacrificing the lives of people outside of cars in a futile effort to move more cars faster.”
Can we get a comment from ODOT?
Oops. Pardon me, I have to wipe the drool off my chin after reading about a bicycle—what?—su…sup…super, highway?
Glorified Rail Trail, not even as wide as US MUP. At best the comparison would be a 2 lane rural highway.
How did you find out the width? I didn’t see that in the article. I must have been distracted by phrases like, “superior right-of-way for bicyclists”, “without stopping for traffic”, “smooth sailing”, and “connect 10 cities…and four universities”.
Also, I’d bet that in Germany, riding four abreast at 8 mph on the velobahn ist verboten. I also wonder whether doodling pedestrians with long-leash dogs will be allowed, as they are on a U.S. MUP.
Long-distance MUPs are great, and I’d like to see more of them. Not sure any in Oregon approach that length, except maybe the (mostly unpaved?) OC&E Woods Line. That would change if the Salmonberry Corridor or the proposed Portland-Astoria rail-trail conversion ever happens.
I think Washington might have a couple rail-trails approaching that length too (in addition to the unpaved king of them all, the Iron Horse/John Wayne), and I think Idaho may have several.
Here in Minnesota we have about half a dozen paved rail-trails of 50-60 miles or more, and Wisconsin has at least that many:
http://files.dnr.state.mn.us/recreation/biking/bike_riding_opportunities.pdf
http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_trails/map.html
http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/parks/images/parksstatemap.jpg
Careful what you wish for, though: since they follow old railbeds that rarely exceed 1-2% grades, rail-trails tend to be exceedingly flat. After a few hours of riding it can actually get kind of tedious. But less so than dealing with cars, I guess.
There is a roughly 5-mile long MUP from Monmouth, Oregon to Rickreal, Oregon. Very rural.
Let me clarify: MUPs are terrible and I hate them with a fiery, white-hot hatred—until I feel like noodling along very slowly with kids, or a couple-dozen eggs, or some such, and I’m in a mood to not care about having to slow to a crawl for earbud-wearing pedestrians with dogs that are walking two-abreast, hogging the entire six-foot width of the MUP and can’t hear my bell. I don’t believe “MUP”, or “trail” is compatible with “Bicycle Superhighway”. What I would love is a nice, fast route with no cars and no pedestrians (or an obvious separation of bike and pedestrian space), and plenty of elbow room for passing (same- or opposite-direction)—that goes somewhere. Like a second, parallel Springwater trail that was twice as wide and off-limits to pedestrians (pedestrians could have the existing trail). Yeah, flatness is boring and wears out my legs, but if I’m just on my way to work, I don’t care as much about that. If I want hills, I’ll go for a ride somewhere else on the weekend.
I thought the width was to be four meters. While not as generous as a freeway, that’s a workable width in a region that engineers its infrastructure to work (clear zones along the sides, proper drainage, no unnecessary curves, etc) and does the required maintenance work to keep it working. I wonder if they achieve some success at getting people out of cars if they will add another meter or two to the width.
Four meters should be fine, unless it gets a lot more use than the average non-urban rail-trail. Our Luce Line Trail is narrower than most rail-trails; as a result, it’s just lovely, and more intimate than wider trails.
However, don’t forget that bicyclists are forced to use this so-called “superhighway.” It is a fascist pro-bike requirement that bans bicycles from being operated on the street.
Separate but not equal.
Crime and curfew link goes to Delhi.
Regarding slow riding, it would be great to know the types of incidents slower riders are subjected to, and, as many comments on the original article suggest, how many incidents are attributable strictly to slow speed, and how many are attributable to other behaviors that might be characteristic of slow riders, e.g., hesitation, wrong-way sidewalk riding, sidewalk riding in general, etc. This is NOT to say that all slow riders are timid or inexperienced (as some of the aforementioned original comments seem to), but more of them are than a typical “fast” rider (and we’re all comparatively slow going uphill).
I think the real problem comes down to driver respect for bicyclists and how it seems to vary depending on the perceived level of competence of a bike rider.
There are no one-way sidewalks.
Right you are. What I meant was, “riding on the sidewalk in the opposite direction of adjacent motor traffic”. Drivers exiting driveways tend not look in your direction or expect anyone going faster than 3 mph to come from your direction as they pull out, resulting in close calls or collisions.
I remember seeing something about a decade back about female riders in London being much more likely to be hit by lorries because they refused to take the lane when appropriate and found themselves along side the truck being left-hooked.
What you’re attributing to perception of competence might just come down to having seen the bike or not. Gutter riding is perhaps more dangerous than sidewalk riding.
No doubt there are numerous factors; drivers seeing you is a big one. Maybe level of respect just varies by individual driver…I’ve been close-passed a few times while taking the full lane and going 26 – 28 in a 25 mph zone. Some drivers just don’t think bicyclists matter at all, let alone deserve respect.
Not to be cynical, but regarding the Seattle Bike Blog street design article, I have no doubt that a large percentage of The Public will immediately chalk the rising share of pedestrian and cyclist deaths on roadways to scofflaw riding behavior and “distracted pedestrians” who jaywalk. Fortunately, most of those same people won’t ever see anything on the Seattle Bike Blog…
my pavement-to-gravel notes from the PDF:
found it via Peter Koonce. 242 pages. TLDR: unpaving is happening in 27 states, most roads have AADT 20-100, AADT over 170 is problematic: “significant aggregate loss, higher dust levels, and more frequent blading requirements”. “active conversion was found to be a far more common practice” (vs simply letting a road decay). “unpaving” has a political cost: “Some constituents feel they deserve a paved road regardless of the funding situation…. they believed it was their right to have the road reconstructed and paved”. Texas road conversions had to be stopped. Portland-specific stuff beginning at F19. There’s also a random mention in the text about a nursery in Washington County complaining about runoff pollution, it must be Teufels.
And the problem with alternating-day driving: it actually caused MORE pollution in Mexico City. Why? Drivers bought a second car, which was cheap (so it polluted more). Still drove the same amount.
But it does work in areas where car ownership is not a trivial expense.
Of course when rolling scrap piles are everywhere limiting by vehicle or license plate won’t work; you’d have to limit by licensed driver and put up automated plate scanners that send tickets with out any human intervention.
Regarding the solar pavement-embedded lights: lighting is a big problem on a lot of bike routes, and there should be standards for lighting and visibility on bike routes, but the bill as mentioned sounds really bad.
I think you should have lighting anywhere you have a walking path… 24/7… sidewalks and MUPs…
It’s important that any lighting on the road not create competition for bike lights. If there are a bunch of pavement LED’s then my bike light has to be much brighter in order to stand out. I don’t like the idea at all. It’s bound to feel good, but may actually increase the danger to cyclists.
What if they just glowed?
The best night time illumination increases contrast between the object to be seen and the background. Lights placed over a crosswalk wash out the view of a pedestrian. Lights placed ahead or behind a crosswalk illuminate the front of the pedestrian, with a dark background, or illuminate the background, with the pedestrian appearing as a dark shadow, respectively.
This is most important in advance of the crossing so that drivers are alerted early enough to perceive a need to slow.
With a moving cyclist, until the road illuminates in advance as the cyclist travels, the easiest way to achieve contrast…(wait for it)…
is for the cyclist to be maximally illuminated. This would imply reflective clothing, or maybe up lighting that presented the cyclist as a moving lit object against the usually dark street background.
Or people in cars could just slow down enough to where they can see what is in front of them, regardless of taxpayer-funded illumination hi-jinks or retro-reflective clothing exhortations. Let’s face it, the houseless and the ungulates aren’t going to fit your engineered-visibility-model no matter how hard you try, and those in cars would be wise to keep an eye out for both of those populations.
re: Immoral engineering
please select your words more carefully.
immoral:
violating moral principles; not conforming to the patterns of conduct usually accepted or established as consistent with principles of personal and social ethics.
licentious or lascivious.
bad, wicked, dissolute, dissipated, profligate. Immoral, abandoned, depraved describe one who makes no attempt to curb self-indulgence.
Thanks for the definition. The word choice is particularly curious considering the current nature of road design decisions in the US. Unlike the other countries that have adopted Vision Zero, in the US the road authorities usually are more of a consultant to the administrative branch of government than the final word on ‘best practice’.
Bus perspective: my first thought “isn’t this street 20 mph?” but no, it’s 20 mph everywhere except the segment with the TriMet route on it… so it’s 25 mph between 50th and 60th…
why do we let TriMet set the speed limits? this road should obviously be 20 mph…
people still shouldn’t yell at you for what they perceive is your speed… I know I’ve been yelled at for speeding when I wasn’t, just because my vehicle was loud…
but on a road that should be 20 mph I can understand people wanting you to slow down even though the road is dangerously signed as 25 mph…
It will be rezoned to 20 mph once it has been retrofitted to the greenway standard. It is one of the next five legacy greenways on the list for retrofitting, Clinton being the first.
$75 a piece lights? Forget it.
Yeah, I walked to work today and even that was treacherous. Hoping to bike home tonight – we will see.
As for the solar roadway studs, I am a big fan of them for rural or unlit / dark urban facilities…they are generally poor performers (cost and effect) in areas with a lot of ambient light…like the Portland demonstration. Portions of the Sellwood SUP MUP would have been a much better test site.
Mandating the solar lights for new bike facilities seems like it would have a chilling effect on the construction of new bike facilities.
It seems to me that once you start putting these on some roads but not others, drivers will become conditioned to expect them, making every other bike lane or shoulder more dangerous than it was before.
This might be true, but couldn’t we say the same thing about, say, traffic lights, center lane stripes, street lights—all kinds of street “upgrades”?
Not to say you’re wrong; I suspect non-auto-oriented “upgrades” register differently with drivers. My big concern is with flashing beacons at crosswalks. How many combinations of marked, unmarked, signalized, unsignalized, kinda-signalized, etc. crosswalk types do we have now? I like to “test” the recently-added trail crossings on West Union and Laidlaw by rolling up to them on my cargo bike and intentionally NOT pushing the button to trigger the flashers. The other day I saw a city bus almost rear-end another car whose driver had stopped for me to cross, even without flashers (well, strictly speaking, Your Honor, I witnessed the bus driver moving across the center line as it approached the lead vehicle from behind. I can’t say whether the bus driver was moving to the left to avoid rear-ending or just to attempt to pass another vehicle stopped at a crosswalk). It wasn’t even a sudden stop on the lead driver’s part; I think the bus driver just wasn’t planning to stop in the absence of the flashers. So, in conclusion, who knows?
On 82nd near the airport on that short freeway that used to be the aurport’s main entrance, there is a section near the foot of one of PDX’s runways where the lighting consists of lights attached to the center rail fence, pointing down at the road, just a few feet off the ground. It works surprisingly well. That kind of lighting would be ideal for the Springwater Trail section running thru the wildlife refuge, not to mention the rural sections further east. The DC subway system has used lights set into the platform to show the edge of the platform for a number of years and it works pretty well. Using them to mark the edge of the path would help at night or during a rainstorm.
The Evening Standard article about slow cyclists seems to be based on this article:
Aldred, Rachel, and Sian Crosweller. “Investigating the rates and impacts of near misses and related incidents among UK cyclists.” Journal of Transport & Health 2.3 (2015): 379-393.
Available open access here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140515002236
The news article misses a lot of the main points.
Here are the article highlights (quoting here):
Fear of injury is a barrier to cycling and experiencing non-injury incidents (near misses) may contribute to this.
• UK cyclists experience very high rates of non-injury incidents, by comparison with any reported injury rates.
• The most frightening incidents involve moving motor vehicles, particularly larger vehicles.
• Problematic passing manoeuvres are especially frequent and frightening.
• Higher rates are experienced in the morning peak and by slower cyclists.
I’m pulling out this quote, which is quite interesting:
“[This research] contradicts one commonly held view: that female cyclists are treated better on the roads than male cyclists, because they are assumed to be less experienced and hence less predictable (Walker, 2007; Love et al., 2012; but see also Walker et al. (2014) for conflicting data). These data suggest otherwise. When looking at problematic (usually close) passes, women report 50% higher rates than men per mile cycled (with no difference per hour, or per cycle trip). This is at odds with the conclusion in Walker (2007) that women cyclists are given greater passing space than are men. Walker׳s research was based on him wearing a blond wig for some trips during his study of passing distances, while this finding is based on comparing women׳s and men׳s reported experiences. Explanations could include: that (a) contrary to his belief, drivers did not assume Walker in a blond wig was female, or (b) that women are less tolerant of motor vehicle proximity than are men.”
So, basically, people in cars pass more closely when they pass women cyclists — OR, women are less tolerant of passing and more likely to report it as annoying or scary.
I’d encourage folks to browse through the article. The co-author Rachel Aldred has done done a significant amount of research on cycling in the UK, so check out her other work as well.
“two-seater cars that can move up to 28 mph” — I’m seeing those “golf carts full lane” signs again.