Mayor McGinn to Rahm Emanuel: Seattle will keep its bikers, thank you

In his State of the City address Tuesday, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn responded to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s threat to lure Seattle’s tech jobs to his city by creating a world-class bike lane network.

We’re going to build world-class, safe bike lanes, too, the mayor said. And we’re going to keep those jobs here.

From his speech:

That’s true for bikes too. We are updating our Bike Master Plan, with a focus on separated cycle tracks, and a network of safe neighborhood greenways. People want safer bike routes. We’ll work to give it to them and create a new culture of cycling. And the demand is there, with cycling the fastest growing mode of transportation.
In fact, Amazon will construct a separated cycle track on 7th avenue from Dexter into downtown, because that helps them attract employees.
Other cities see the economic development potential too. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, when he announced bike routes in downtown Chicago, called out Seattle, saying he wanted our bikers and our tech jobs. We’re going to work to keep them here.

For some background on the mayoral bike lane battle, we wrote a post back in December praising Chicago for seemingly slicing through red tape and building miles and miles of protected bike lanes in a very short period of time.

At the opening of the city’s newest cycle track in the Loop, Rahm Emanuel cited our post and said, “I expect not only to take all of their [Seattle and Portland's] bikers but I also want all the jobs that come with this, all the economic growth that comes with this, all the opportunities of the future that come with this.”

Unfortunately for Chicago, the Illinois DOT has stepped in and started blocking protected bike lanes from being installed. Their excuse? They want three years of studies before they continue. I suppose decades of studies from cities around the world isn’t going to cut it for them, is it? Yeesh.

Meanwhile, Mayor McGinn pointed to the Amazon-funded cycle track on 7th Ave, the Bike Master Plan update and the upcoming center city mobility plan (which will pave the way for a downtown cycle track network) as evidence that the city is making progress on innovative and safe bike facilities.

We’ll just have to wait and see who gets a functional and safe bike network finished and on the ground first…

(oh, who am I kidding? I’m not moving to Chicago)

Related Posts

• Chicago Mayor: I want Seattle’s bikers and the jobs that come with them (Dec 17, 2012)
  Photo courtesy of Grid Chicago, used with permission. Caption is ours (a quote from Rahm Emanuel) The ...
• Broadway streetcar extention will include cycle track, open house Dec 13 (Dec 6, 2012)
  With funding for the planning phase of the First Hill Streetcar secured, the city is holding a Broadway ...

 

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Bike Maps That Give Riders the Info They Actually Need

Anyone who has ever used a bike map in an unfamiliar city knows that the colored lines showing the bike lane network can be hard to assess. Each municipality has its own system, and many of these are fairly crude, failing to give you any real clue as to what type of experience you’ll have when you’re on the ground riding.

Will the bike path marked on the map provide a pleasant pedal on a neighborhood street? Or a harrowing odyssey along a major arterial, with cars whizzing by at high speed? Even the more nuanced maps rarely take the cyclist’s level of comfort as the basis for their markings, using instead a classification approach based on the somewhat obscure terminology used by planners and engineers.

The city of Austin is doing its best to remove the mystery by using a mapping system that gives riders a quick, color-coded visual overview of its bike network, all keyed to the real-world experience a person can expect when cycling on any given street. According to Nathan Wilkes, a project designer and network planner at the Austin public works department who specializes in bike infrastructure, the map is heavily influenced by the thinking of Roger Geller, the bicycle coordinator for the city of Portland Oregon, who developed an influential taxonomy of transportation cyclist types in his city.

Geller puts riders into four categories: 1 percent or less are "strong and fearless" and will ride under any conditions; 7 percent are "enthused and confident," and feel "comfortable sharing the roadway with automotive traffic, but … prefer to do so operating on their own facilities"; 33 percent are "no way no how"; and the remaining roughly 60 percent are "interested but concerned."

In other words, the majority of people might want to give biking for transport a try, but they’re worried they might not be able to handle the stress and danger of riding on their city’s roads. That 60 percent is the coveted demographic slice that Wilkes and others want to encourage. And for Austin, a better bike map is a key part of an overall strategy to get those folks out and riding.

The city’s map prioritizes rider comfort in its symbology. "We tried to make it real intuitive," says Wilkes, who has been refining the concept for several years now. Bike trails, separated cycle tracks, and what the city terms "quiet streets" – in peaceful, low-traffic neighborhoods – are marked in vivid green. "High comfort" roads are bright blue."Medium comfort" is marked in a darker blue. "Low comfort" is indicated by a cautionary yellow. And red signifies "extremely low comfort," as in, you probably don’t want to go there unless you are one of the rodeo-riding one percent. Directional arrows indicate hills and how steep they are.

The result is a map that shows at a glance where the riding is easy and where it’s more challenging. Because the colors are parallel to those used by traffic lights (with the addition of that peaceful-looking blue) they make a deep kind of sense to our eyes and brains.

The goal, says Wilkes, is to give people the information they need when they set out to ride without getting into the terminology that engineers use when they are designing bike lanes – Class I, Class II, buffered, separated, cycle track, and so forth – which is essentially meaningless to the layperson, but which forms the basis of color-coding on most urban bike maps.

“You don’t need to know what type of lane you’re on,” says Wilkes. What you need to know is whether the streets in question will feel appropriate for your particular comfort level – which might vary. The route you might want to ride on your way to work, in dark blue perhaps, won’t be the same as the green path you’d feel comfortable sharing with your 8-year-old.

One of the things Wilkes and his colleagues are trying to achieve with the map is to show just what is available that meets the very highest comfort level. “We want people to see, hey, look at all these places you can go even with your kids.” At the same time, the map is helpful to planners because it shows comfort gaps in the network so clearly – spaces where the green and blue bits need to be filled in.

Austin is part of the Green Lane Project, which I wrote about earlier this week, and Wilkes posted on the group’s blog about the comfort maps. Here’s part of what he wrote there:

The hurdle in switching to this methodology is convincing committed riders who are well-versed in the language of bicycle infrastructure that the quality of the experience is more significant to most people than the configuration of paint and curbs on the roadway. A narrow bicycle lane on a busy high-speed street with heavy truck traffic can be a world apart from a wide bicycle lane on calmer street, yet both appear equal on a traditional bike map. In the end, map makers have to answer the question of who their target audience is and what information they need.

In Austin, they are targeting the people who don’t care about engineering classifications, and are simply looking for an honest assessment of just how comfortable they will be when they get out on the road. You could call that audience the 99 percent.               

Sarah Goodyear has written about cities for a variety of publications, including Grist and Streetsblog. She lives in Brooklyn. All posts »

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The psychology of why cyclists enrage car drivers

It’s not simply because they are annoying, argues Tom Stafford, it’s because they trigger a deep-seated rage within us by breaking the moral order of the road.

Something about cyclists seems to provoke fury in other road users. If you doubt this, try a search for the word "cyclist" on Twitter. As I write this one of the latest tweets is this: "Had enough of cyclists today! Just wanna ram them with my car." This kind of sentiment would get people locked up if directed against an ethnic minority or religion, but it seems to be fair game, in many people's minds, when directed against cyclists. Why all the rage?

I've got a theory, of course. It's not because cyclists are annoying. It isn't even because we have a selective memory for that one stand-out annoying cyclist over the hundreds of boring, non-annoying ones (although that probably is a factor). No, my theory is that motorists hate cyclists because they think they offend the moral order.

Driving is a very moral activity – there are rules of the road, both legal and informal, and there are good and bad drivers. The whole intricate dance of the rush-hour junction only works because people know the rules and by-and-large follow them: keeping in lane; indicating properly; first her turn, now mine, now yours. Then along come cyclists, innocently following what they see are the rules of the road, but doing things that drivers aren't allowed to: overtaking queues of cars, moving at well below the speed limit or undertaking on the inside.

You could argue that driving is like so much of social life, it’s a game of coordination where we have to rely on each other to do the right thing. And like all games, there's an incentive to cheat. If everyone else is taking their turn, you can jump the queue. If everyone else is paying their taxes you can dodge them, and you'll still get all the benefits of roads and police.

In economics and evolution this is known as the "free rider problem"; if you create a common benefit – like taxes or orderly roads – what's to stop some people reaping the benefit without paying their dues? The free rider problem creates a paradox for those who study evolution, because in a world of selfish genes it appears to make cooperation unlikely. Even if a bunch of selfish individuals (or genes) recognise the benefit of coming together to co-operate with each other, once the collective good has been created it is rational, in a sense, for everyone to start trying to freeload off the collective. This makes any cooperation prone to collapse. In small societies you can rely on cooperating with your friends, or kin, but as a society grows the problem of free-riding looms larger and larger.

Social collapse
Humans seem to have evolved one way of enforcing order onto potentially chaotic social arrangements. This is known as "altruistic punishment", a term used by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter in a landmark paper published in 2002. An altruistic punishment is a punishment that costs you as an individual, but doesn't bring any direct benefit. As an example, imagine I'm at a football match and I see someone climb in without buying a ticket. I could sit and enjoy the game (at no cost to myself), or I could try to find security to have the guy thrown out (at the cost of missing some of the game). That would be altruistic punishment.

Altruistic punishment, Fehr and Gachter reasoned, might just be the spark that makes groups of unrelated strangers co-operate. To test this they created a co-operation game played by constantly shifting groups of volunteers, who never meet – they played the game from a computer in a private booth. The volunteers played for real money, which they knew they would take away at the end of the experiment. On each round of the game each player received 20 credits, and could choose to contribute up to this amount to a group project. After everyone had chipped in (or not), everybody (regardless of investment) got 40% of the collective pot. Under the rules of the game, the best collective outcome would be if everyone put in all their credits, and then each player would get back more than they put in. But the best outcome for each individual was to free ride – to keep their original 20 credits, and also get the 40% of what everybody else put in. Of course, if everybody did this then that would be 40% of nothing.

In this scenario what happened looked like a textbook case of the kind of social collapse the free rider problem warns of. On each successive turn of the game, the average amount contributed by players went down and down. Everybody realised that they could get the benefit of the collective pot without the cost of contributing. Even those who started out contributing a large proportion of their credits soon found out that not everybody else was doing the same. And once you see this it's easy to stop chipping in yourself – nobody wants to be the sucker.

Rage against the machine
A simple addition to the rules reversed this collapse of co-operation, and that was the introduction of altruistic punishment. Fehr and Gachter allowed players to fine other players credits, at a cost to themselves. This is true altruistic punishment because the groups change after each round, and the players are anonymous. There may have been no direct benefit to fining other players, but players fined often and they fined hard – and, as you'd expect, they chose to fine other players who hadn't chipped in on that round. The effect on cooperation was electric. With altruistic punishment, the average amount each player contributed rose and rose, instead of declining. The fine system allowed cooperation between groups of strangers who wouldn't meet again, overcoming the challenge of the free rider problem.

How does this relate to why motorists hate cyclists? The key is in a detail from that classic 2002 paper. Did the players in this game sit there calmly calculating the odds, running game theory scenarios in their heads and reasoning about cost/benefit ratios? No, that wasn't the immediate reason people fined players. They dished out fines because they were mad as hell. Fehr and Gachter, like the good behavioural experimenters they are, made sure to measure exactly how mad that was, by asking players to rate their anger on a scale of one to seven in reaction to various scenarios. When players were confronted with a free-rider, almost everyone put themselves at the upper end of the anger scale. Fehr and Gachter describe these emotions as a “proximate mechanism”. This means that evolution has built into the human mind a hatred of free-riders and cheaters, which activates anger when we confront people acting like this – and it is this anger which prompts altruistic punishment. In this way, the emotion is evolution's way of getting us to overcome our short-term self-interest and encourage collective social life.

So now we can see why there is an evolutionary pressure pushing motorists towards hatred of cyclists. Deep within the human psyche, fostered there because it helps us co-ordinate with strangers and so build the global society that is a hallmark of our species, is an anger at people who break the rules, who take the benefits without contributing to the cost. And cyclists trigger this anger when they use the roads but don't follow the same rules as cars.

Now, cyclists reading this might think "but the rules aren't made for us – we're more vulnerable, discriminated against, we shouldn't have to follow the rules." Perhaps true, but irrelevant when other road-users perceive you as breaking rules they have to keep. Maybe the solution is to educate drivers that cyclists are playing an important role in a wider game of reducing traffic and pollution. Or maybe we should just all take it out on a more important class of free-riders, the tax-dodgers.

13/02 UPDATE: We've changed a sentence in the third paragraph that readers said implied all cyclists break rules. This was not the intended implication of the original line, and we thank the readers who pointed this out.

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More protected lanes for bicyclists pop up in cities

Cities increasingly are building protected lanes for bicyclists, finding that they bring economic as well as environmental benefits to communities.

Last year, cities built 40 of the so-called green lanes, according to the Bikes Belong Foundation's Green Lane Project, an organization working with six cities — Austin; Chicago; Memphis; Portland, Ore.; San Francisco and Washington — to add them.

That may not seem like a large number. But between 1874 and 2011, just 62 protected lane projects were build nationwide, the group says.

Protected lanes are different from traditional bike lanes that separate cyclists from motorists with just a stripe of paint. The protected lanes add a barrier, such as a curb, parked cars or plastic posts, between moving cars and bicycle traffic to make cyclists feel safer.

A big factor in their growing popularity: Recent studies show that the lanes can spur economic activity.

A study last year by the New York City Department of Transportation found that small businesses near protected bike lanes installed in 2007 saw sales grow much more sharply than the borough average. Another study by Portland State University found that people in Portland who drove to local businesses spent more money per visit than bicyclists, but cyclists visited the same businesses more often and spent more overall.

Young people, whose driving habits are shifting, also are a factor in the emergence of more green lanes.

A study by the Frontier Group think tank last year found that annual miles traveled by car among 16- to 34-year-olds dropped 23% from 2001 to 2009. It also found that people in that age group took 24% more bike trips in the same period. A 2011 study by researchers at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute found that the percentage of young drivers with licenses is declining.

The young people help comprise a group that economic forecaster Richard Florida has dubbed the "creative class," which would rather spend their money on high-end smartphones, gadgets and bicycles.

That's a class that many cities are working hard to attract, and green lanes can help.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who ran for office in 2011 on a platform of luring new tech and creative businesses to the city, pledged to build 100 miles of protected bike lanes by the end of his first term.

"They're an integral part of my economic development strategy," Emanuel says. "It's no coincidence that the first protected bike lanes were on Kinzie Street, and that's exactly where Google-Motorola Mobility is putting their headquarters with 2,800 jobs."

The city recently unveiled its Chicago Streets for Cycling plan, which aims to have 650 miles of green and traditional bike lanes in the city by 2020, which would give it more green lanes than any other city in the country and would put a bike lane of some type within a half-mile of every Chicagoan.

Other cities — including Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Mo., Lincoln, Neb., and Wichita — are adding or planning to add green lanes, says Martha Roskowski, director of the Boulder, Colo.-based Green Lane Project.

"The leaders in these cities are saying, 'We get it. If we want to be a competitive, vibrant city, we need to make our streets work better,' " Roskowski says.

In Atlanta, four protected bike lane projects are in development or planned, says Rebecca Serna, executive director of the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition.

"The thing we really like about protected bike lanes is they really get the people who are interested in cycling but are concerned about their safety," she says.

Interest in the lanes has grown in the past two years, Serna says. And young people are a driving force.

"Atlanta really is a university town," she says. "I think a lot of cities have found that bike infrastructure helps you keep your highly educated young people in the city after they graduate."

We have great kids in Coeur d’Alene – and there will be more of them in the future!   Let’s start planning now for their future.

 

Join us on February 6th to learn more about the process for updating the community’s CDA 2020 visioning project.

 

Community involvement is critical!  Please forward this email and flyer to as many people as possible who care about Coeur d’Alene.  If you have any questions, please contact Dave Yadon at 769-2270, yadon@cdaid.org> or Mike Gridley at 769-2330, mgridley@cdaid.org>

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