Welcome to what will be a great week. I just have a feeling. Hope you enjoyed the nice weekend. Before I share videos of Council President Pirtle-Guiney riding on Sandy Blvd and the Bike Summer Kickoff Ride, let’s eat our vegetables and get caught up with the news from last week.
Here are the most notable stories that came across my desk in the past seven days…
Build it and they will come: We must push beyond paint-only bikeways if we want to increase cycling, says a major new research paper that used 6 years of longitudinal data in 28 US cities that found: “Protected bicycle lane mileage installed was significantly associated with bicycle commuter increases 52.5% stronger than standard bicycle lane mileage and 281.2% stronger than shared-lane marking mileage.” (Nature)
No more excuses: Every politician who supports projects that will increase VMT must be asked how they square that decision with the fact that global temperature rises in the next five years are likely to lead to crop failures and wide swaths of our planet baking in extreme heat. (Financial Times)
Carfree living, but do it in the Italian Alps: An Italian couple shocked their friends and family when they moved to a home in a rural, mountainous neighborhood and decided to forego a car and use two cargo bikes as their vehicles. (The Guardian)
Vehicular assault and social unraveling: As much as the topic pains me to think about, I’m glad that a major media outlet is treating it as more than just a one-off phenomenon and giving what they call the rise in “vehicle ramming” incidents the serious thought it deserves. (Washington Post)
E-bike power debate: Interesting new paper from a German e-bike industry association that is pushing to define e-bikes in a way that prevents them from becoming e-motorcycles, and how some folks feel that limitation could stifle key parts of the sector. (Bike Radar)
Why DOTs are broke: This must-read on the Highway Trust Fund should be required reading for every single elected official who thinks drivers already pay there fair share. (T4 America)
Way-no: Robo-taxi company Waymo is surging across the country and they’re very likely to make a bid for Portland. If they do, they’ll face a lot of scrutiny and skepticism from advocates and politicians — starting with this here media outlet! These things feel like just the latest tech-bro “fix” that’s riddled with downsides, the largest one being an increase in VMT. Bring it on, Waymo! (Wall Street Journal)
Less regulation: In a case watched closely by freeway fighters and other transportation reformers, the Supreme Court ruled to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, in an attempt to make infrastructure megaprojects easier to get over the finish line. (NPR)
Sensible cars: Contrary to popular opinion, I am not anti-car. I’m against car overuse and abuse. Take these wonderfully small and affordable “mibot” e-cars from Japan, which would probably not be terrible to share the road with. (EVXL)
Thanks to everyone who sent in links this week. The Monday Roundup is a community effort, so please feel free to send us any great stories you come across.
Thanks for reading.
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This article has one thing wrong and one thing right. On the correct side, it’s the mass of vehicles that has the enlightened concerned. As a truck driver people fear my vehicle even at 5mph. Why? You are dead in front of a truck at 5mph. It’s not the same for a Honda insight. You have a good chance and even a child has a chance of living. Yet we keep allowing larger and larger.
On the scary gas we exhale gonna kill us, this publication sounds like a tin foil black helicopter has been publication. I get it many are gonna believe it but it’s just literally, all hot air. Focus on things you can actually see and prove. Like mass. Not a common gas gonna kill us. Local pollution? Sure. Greenhouse gas? Nope.
“Focus on things you can actually see and prove. Like mass.”
One of the great things about the Bike Portland comment section, is the occasional perspective of a commenter from the 1700s!
Unlikely; you’d probably just get scooted along. Same if a fully loaded freight train struck you at that speed.
Not even. The human body is pushed under and crushed. If you aren’t dead from an immovable object whacking you in the body/head. And then under the tires…but hey if you wanna try getting “scooted along”….
Ok, that’s a whole different thing. If you fell under the tires, even a Honda could easily kill you. Probably the most likely serious injury from a very-low-speed impact is being knocked to the ground and hitting your head on the concrete, something that can happen by hitting another bike.
Mass isn’t really the critical factor you make it out to be.
It’s absurd that this kind of ignorance is still so commonplace and even celebrated in some corners. Svante Arrhenius postulated the greenhouse effect 130 years ago. Just because you don’t understand climate change doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug, and the oil and gas lobby has a lot of money to produce a lot of it.
I’m always reminded of Dizzy Dean’s famous rejoinder to being told curve balls were an optical illusion:
The human race is about to get whomped by global warming whether we believe in it or not.
In regards to the mibot from japan and it’s CEO,
Kusunoki highlights this necessity, noting, “In rural parts of the country, public transportation systems are in shambles. This might be hard for someone living in Tokyo to understand but at some point, it becomes necessary to have one car per person, not per household.”
Founder and CEO Kazunari Kusunoki emphasizes this practicality, stating, “Cars are simply too big. Seeing so many big cars traveling Japan’s narrow streets — that’s where this all began for me.”
Both of these can be and frequently are true. Personal vehicles are definitely too big and this article segues nicely with the piece on ongoing, deliberate vehicular violence.
The best thing we as a country could do is pass laws that create a tiered system for automobile use. The bigger the vehicle, the more stringent and exhaustive the training and more expensive the insurance. Start out with something like the mibot as a “standard” and then for every weight category (to be designated) increase the class time and testing exponentially. To get to the point of driving something like a large truck (Ford F150, Dodge Ram, etc) one should have to pass a test equivalent to what a semi truck driver has to pass now and pay a lot in mandatory insurance for the potential destruction such a vehicle is capable of doing to other drivers and pedestrians.
Also, Kusunoki acknowledges that if we as a society can’t pay for public transportation out in the rural areas, we are never going to get rid of cars. I personally wouldn’t mind a national debate on the merits of transportation and the future rather than the ongoing debate on the merits of energy wasting and foolish endeavors such as AI, the next generation of fighter planes and a whole lot of other items from the defense budget.
I’ve been driving various full sized pickup trucks since the 1990s and they are little different than the various cars I’ve had, so no, don’t need semi-truck driver training for that.
I think, just in general, drivers for ALL vehicles need more training, and re-training. People that break laws need more consequences. No more of this “I need to drive 20 miles so I should keep my vehicle even though I’m a drunk.” Let’em walk!
Or, if you want to actually change outcomes (because they’re not going to walk), let ’em take the Mibot autotaxi.
Have you noticed that the trucks and cars are a bit bigger than they were in the 1990’s?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240207-are-cars-getting-too-big-for-the-road
https://www.finn.com/en-DE/campaign/supersized
https://shunauto.com/article/how-big-is-the-average-car-compared-to-people
As much as I would like the world to be stuck in the late 80’s early 90’s, time just keeps marching on and the vehicles keep getting bigger and deadlier to anyone not in them.
A tiered licensing program reflects that vehicles of differing sizes inflict differing amounts of damage to the environment and have different amounts of damage they can do to the environment. To reduce the number of larger vehicles we must make it more difficult to obtain them and one very effective way is for people to have to pay a lot in time, study and then high yearly insurance payments. The bigger the vehicle, the greater the cost to all in its vicinity and the greater in cost (in time and money) the owner needs to pay to reflect that.
In preparation for driving an M1a1 Abrams (70ish tons, depending on fuel and weapons load) we spent many seasick filled hours in hydraulic boxes with crude computer graphics and an instructor (literally) screaming in our ear that we were doing it all wrong and killing people with our mistakes.
When we finally graduated to driving an actual Abrams, we were all very cautious and focused and what could have been a danger to others was mitigated. That is the kind of training ALL drivers need and the bigger the vehicle, the longer the training and more exhaustive the testing. Trucks and cars are deadly weapons as the “Vehicle assault and social unraveling” article proves and to operate them we as a society need a tiered system of licensing.
This wasn’t in question. They’ve been driving various full-sized trucks *since* the 1990’s — not *from* the 1990’s.
Don’t forget about those giant Buicks and Dodges from the 60s and 70s. Big lumbering vehicles aren’t new.
Transportation agencies can build an environment that selects for vehicles like the Japanese mibot or an environment that selects for Monster Trucks.
The absolute intellectual failure of transportation planning in the US, is to treat destinations (house, work, shopping) as immutable fixed objects, while treating the built and mobile elements of transportation (roads and vehicles) as flexible and creating them to accommodate destinations.
Transportation should be designed with intentional limitations that result in healthy, efficient communities. The size of roads and vehicles, the speed of roads and vehicles, the pollution, the negative externalities should all be actively minimized for the sake of better transportation, but also to control the growth and distribution of habitat and resources. Austerity should be allocated to thees elements that cause harm, whereas, walking, gathering, playing should be liberalized to the fullest extent that is possible.
The greater the difference between a vehicle and walking, the more that vehicle and its required infrastructure conflicts with healthy human habitat (and every other living thing.) There is a margin of conflict that is acceptable and can be managed, but the people at USDOT, ODOT and Metro and their predecessors are fumbling around lost with blinders on.
Most of the streets that are going to be built have been built. The time for creating a new standard for vehicle size so we can build streets (slightly) narrower has passed, just as rail systems will never change gauge again.
Right… because one thing we’ve learned over the past 100 years compared to the last 300,000 of human evolution is that nothing ever changes. This is obviously true for transportation because cities never change, roads are never resurfaced, highways and bike lanes are never built and speed limits never change. Major cities across the world that have shifted to limit oversized vehicles are imaginary or inconsequential. The construction on NE Broadway is a hallucination. Laws that regulate automobile size and incentives to buy oversized vehicles were brought down from the mountain on stone tablets.
You know I don’t believe that — see my comment, just below, where I said “We’re entering what I expect will be a period of the most rapid technological and societal change in human history.”
There are already plenty of restrictions on vehicle size and mass, so it would hardly be revolutionary if those changed and we applied some downward regulatory pressure on vehicle size. But I am skeptical that it will happen because cities start building infrastructure too small for existing passenger vehicles (and therefore police vehicles, delivery trucks, fire trucks, etc.) NE Broadway hardly qualifies; any existing vehicle will be able to comfortably drive there. What downward pressure is that project is exerting?
If you can point to a North American city that has started building streets that are actually too narrow for the existing fleet of vehicles to navigate, you might convince me. Alternatively, I if misunderstood your point, and you arguing merely that some streets might have narrower lanes in the future, but would still be navigable by the existing fleet, then we have no argument — we’ve been doing that for decades (even as vehicles have continued to increase in size), and I expect that will continue in the future.
What is a lot of fun is to carefully view old pictures of downtowns before and after automobiles became common (e.g. 1910 versus 1930 versus 1960) and how much narrower sidewalks have become, often even building setbacks increased as older 1890s buildings gave way to 1960s parking lots and parking garages. Portland was certainly transformed, but so were most US cities and quite a few overseas, particularly those bombed out during WW2. Car widths were maximized somewhere between 1950 and 1975.
Unfortunately, while cars maxed out decades ago, pedestrian widths continued to increase until recently.
You love this canard.
The thing that makes those streets so expensive is the unfunded maintenance they require. They are constantly being rebuilt. There is nothing stopping them from being rebuilt differently, which we have literally seen happen.
“Most of the streets that are going to be built have been built” is a canard?
Most streets are not constantly being rebuilt. Some are repaved every few decades, but I’m nearly certain that the vast majority of Portland’s streets have never been rebuilt (and a number still have their original paving, including some, sadly, on designated greenways).
And I challenge you to name even a single one that was rebuilt in a way that restricted the size of vehicles that could be used on it in order to exert the sort of downward pressure on vehicle sizes the comment I was responding to described.
Fantasize about it all you want, but it’s just not going to happen that way.
I didn’t suggest that roads should be narrowed to a width that only allows very small vehicles. That was your idea. There are a ton of other changes that can be made that create incentives for appropriately sized vehicles in urban areas. There are examples from cities around the world that Portland and Oregon could be pursuing and in some cases are implementing.
Could be more specific about how road design can encourage smaller vehicles without physically impeding larger ones that would be suitable for use in Portland? It sounds like you have several examples in mind.
It seems to me that one likely evolution of self-driving cars (which BikePortland readers keep telling me will never work) is the deployment of a fleet of mibot scale vehicles for quick trips around the city. While I think that sort of vehicle is unattractive as a vehicle to own, it would probably be quite attractive as a vehicle to make a short hop through the city.
Until you get crushed by a distracted driver in an F350.
Self-driving vehicle usage will continue to grow, but we won’t see a massive shift in general consumer behavior around cars for a very very long time.
You may be right, but economics and improved capability are likely to change that at some point. We’re entering what I expect will be a period of the most rapid technological and societal change in human history, so making any firm predictions with confidence is difficult.
Just bought a used Fiat 500e, which is only a bit bigger than the mibot, and it’s shockingly fun to drive! Suspension is a bit of an afterthought, but it has healthy torque and can fit anywhere. Full disclosure: it will replace some trips that we previously walked or biked…but it will also replace some ICE trips, so not sure how the total carbon footprint changes. I think a key use case for something like this is, unfortunately, as a second car. At least in the US, it’s a tough sell as a primary car.
But I’ll bet it would be an easy sell as a taxi for short hops.
Watts, any thoughts on the nature article and study showing that protected bike infrastructure does increase ridership? I may be remembering wrong, but I thought you had commented in the past that you didn’t think there was strong enough evidence of a link between protected bike lanes and increased ridership to support investment in protected bike lanes.
I haven’t read that article yet, so can’t comment on it, but my comments in the past have been that in recent years, there is a negative correlation between bike infrastructure and riding rates in Portland, so I am skeptical that infrastructure is the one weird trick we need to turn things around.
There are plausible reasons to think that the dynamics of cycling may be different in different cities; one example is that Portland saw a huge boom in cycling even before there were significant infrastructure improvements, while no such boom occurred in other cities.
My argument is that even if infrastructure would help induce ridership (which is certainly plausible), there are other factors that have proven more dominant here, and figuring out and addressing those is likely to have a greater impact on cycling rates than infrastructure would.
In other words, my position doesn’t depend on whether infrastructure can increase rates of riding; it can (and I believe probably does), it’s just that we’ve demonstrated other things are more important in Portland, even if we don’t yet know what they are.
I appreciate the clarification on your past comments. I agree that other factors might be playing a bigger role than infrastructure, but I see those other factors being mainly: 1) the rise of work from home pre-pandemic; and 2) the pandemic. Portland’s most precipitous fall came with the pandemic, along with most other major cities in America (figure 3.1.5 at the bottom of this page is helpful). After spending time in DC, Seattle, and San Francisco, I don’t find Portland notable for its bike infrastructure, especially protected bike lanes (and especially protected bike lane networks) which the study in Nature finds to be the most effective at increasing ridership.
I don’t see why Portland would be particularly unique or different from any other American city (or a study of a two dozen American cities), and in the chart I link above, Portland’s general biking trends pretty closely track Chicago, LA, Philly, and SF from 2005 forward, showing a pretty steady increase from 05 to 2015, then a plateau or slow decline until the pandemic, then a sharp decline.
This is a lot of somewhat disjointed thoughts, but my general take after reading the study in Nature is that: 1) we have good evidence that protected bike lanes lead to significantly increased ridership; 2) Portland hasn’t done a good job of adding the kinds of networked protected bike lanes that are the most effective at increasing ridership; and 3) in a situation where we want to increase biking and reduce miles driven (and we need to do so quickly), we should be adding more protected bike lanes as one of our first options, because we have good evidence that it has an impact, and if there are other factors at play, we don’t have good evidence on what those might be or levers to affect them, so let’s go with what we have.
Anyway, like I said, I appreciate your clarification.
Did work from home really become a big thing before the pandemic? If so, we’d expect to see a parallel fall off in other modes as well.
An obvious culprit, except the precipitous fall in bike riding started years before the pandemic, so it’s at best a partial explanation. There we did see a fall off in all modes, but driving was the only one that fully recovered. I can see why people might not return to transit (people and germs in a confined space), but cycling doesn’t suffer from that problem.
It’s not. But since Portland has such a comprehensive network of “back streets”, it might not need as much dedicated bike infrastructure as cities with more transportation bottlenecks might need. That’s one example of how these issues are geography-specific. At least compared to places I’ve spent time, Portland is a much better place to ride than almost anywhere because of this network. You can almost always find a nice, wide open, low traffic street to ride on (unless you are in E Portland or the West Hills, which are a completely different ballgame and probably would benefit from more dedicated bike infrastructure).
I’ll accept your characterization of the Nature article, that protected bike lanes correlate with an increase in ridership on the projects they studied (though I should read the article to see how they differentiated between recruiting new riders and merely attracting people who were already riding, but along different routes*). How do we know that given our geography we’d benefit as much as other cities that don’t share our natural bike-positive attributes? I think the question of why cycling grew so rapidly in Portland with almost no protected infrastructure at all could suggest that the answer is that we might not benefit as much as other cities. We know Portland does not need protected infrastructure to attract many more people to bikes. To the extent we don’t need it, it won’t help.
As I’ve said many times before, I do not oppose improving bike infrastructure — it directly benefits me, my friends, and my family. Now that the numbers have thinned out, I like the bikeway along Naito; it feels like my own private highway. The more we build, the better off I am (with the obvious exception of some of the dafter PBOT projects).
But at a policy level, if you are advocating for a relatively expensive (financially and politically) effort of building a network of protected bike lanes throughout the city, I think it is unsupportable to claim it will reverse the collapse of biking. It might help, but it is very unclear to what extent. It might just focus riders on a particular route, drawing them away from parallel options, which doesn’t really accomplish much.
If the goal is to rebuild the cycling levels we enjoyed in 2013 (and beyond), then we really need to better understand why so many people started riding when there was minimal infrastructure, and stopped riding when there was more. It may be that we could have a greater impact on cycling by focusing those resources on other factors, such as driving behavior, secure bike parking/storage, incentives, propaganda, etc.
*A very quick skimming reveals the “at the block level” qualifier throughout, which suggests researchers did not evaluate whether the riders they saw were in fact new. Does the study really say what you think it does?
I’m not one of them!
I hope by the time I’m old and grey (well I’m almost there LOL) there will be self-driving cars as I’ve seen many elderly folks who should not be on the roads at all.
Yes, there are many older folks out there who absolutely shouldn’t be driving, but the way our cities and suburbs are built, they have no choice. More victims of our blinkered view of transportation
I think you had an extra word in there.
I’m not necessarily against Waymo. It seems like they’re much more willing to share the road with a cyclist than most human drivers.
The insolvency of the Highway Trust Fund is a huge story and I’m surprised it isn’t talked about more. Advocates for active transportation need to rally to end this program and let it finally wind down. Nothing else will do more to stop highway expansion projects nationwide.