Thank you, thankyou thankyou thankyou thankyou thankyou! (Also, thank you to the League of American Bicyclists for dropping the e-mail with the news.)

http://maps.google.com/biking

Color-coded differentiation between dedicated bike paths, easy-biking streets, and user-submitted preferred streets. Getting directions will plot a route that may avoid hills, and can offer alternative routes or click-drag modifications to the route. Minty!

Of course, I’m also proud that Boston took some initiative in the last two years to publish their own map, but c’mon this is Google Maps!

Honestly today’s blog post is more to get me to write something because I know I have been lazy. Nothing particularly new happened, this is one of those oft-told stories of harrowing experience, conversation with a motorist, and acclaim from a nearby witness.

For starters, it was a rainy morning. Often this means I wear extra-vibrant clothes to make myself more easily visible to the armored ones I share the road with, but today I sufficed with a light-reflective courier bag and one reflective ankle-cuff. These, combined with my lights, make me relatively conspicuous.

Except if you drive a blue Honda minivan. But, we’ll get back to that after some more build-up….

This morning I went on an errand to the local RCN building (in Arlington) to drop off a couple of cable converters. It was a light rain, and the temperature wasn’t horrible, so I was mostly enjoying the ride except for the occasional red light when I would stop and my glasses would fog up. Note to self: start wearing contact lenses again until the warmer months return.

I was all done with this chore and beginning to switch to the next one (gathering my costume apparel) when I headed back towards Cambridge and Boston via Mass. Ave. For those not familiar with the area of Mass. Ave. in Arlington and Medford: it’s quite wide, but typically problematic with cracks and wrinkles all over. No problems here, though, vehicles were quite respectful this morning.

After I passed the turn towards Alewife the road feature I call the bike share “line” appeared. Cambridge has done some funky things with Mass. Ave., it seems they couldn’t quite figure out what to do to help cyclists – there’s sections with bike lanes, sharrows, and a line with intermittent bike stencils, depending on what area you’re in. The line is my least favorite, even though the area with the sharrows is practically impossible to ride within as it has quite poor road conditions.

Bike lane

sharrow

Bike stencil

So, it was a short time after passing the turn-off towards Alewife that I was buzzed by her. Blue Honda minivan. One occupant: driver. I quickly read the license plate and committed it to short-term memory, but before long I had quite forgotten it. (Well, it was short term memory. *shrug*)

Then the usual Mass. Ave. thing happened: I caught up within the next light or two, and passed her. This is not unusual, I stop at all the red lights but being a bike with some marked space on the road I stop right up at the light. Other areas where it’s too sketchy to do this safely I’ll hang back behind the last car in line I come up to and take the lane until the light goes “green”. But, good ol’ Mass. Ave. lets me creep up to the front almost every time.

When I caught up to her I leered over and kind of gave her “the look” as I passed her, then proceeded to wait dutifully at the light. Light went green, traffic went into motion, all the vehicles passed me with at least two feet distance (not the legal amount, but whatever,) until blue minivan comes zooming past within a few inches. Again.

Well, it was still Mass. Ave. and there were plenty of lights ahead. I caught up to her just before Harvard Square at the bus stop. I stopped, waved, and she rolled down her automatic window.

“Hi,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know that you passed me, twice, with very little space between us. Just inches.”

Now, most conversations I’ve had with drivers in similar circumstances would usually cause me to prepare for the usual response in the next moment: my life being threatened. But, it was not so! I may have found one of the nicest, albeit somewhat daft, motorist of the day! “I’d really appreciate if you’d give a little more room.” She nodded and her eyes told a whole story of unexpected shock. She said not a word.

Maybe she didn’t know that what she was doing was endangering me. She had had a couple of feet of space between her left side and the normal lane lines, but hugged the right anyways despite my presence there.

At that moment the light we were at turned green and I cut the one-sided conversation short. I said my piece, she seemed to take it in. I looked to the right at the bus stop and see a dude in bright yellow, bike balanced in one hand, giving the thumbs-up with the other, and he gave a smiling nod which I gladly returned.

Thumbs up

You, my few readers, may recall the recent Boston.com article on Boston’s unruly riders, or the op-ed that left a particular vomit-taste in any cyclist’s mouth. Finally we may have something sane to consider and discuss: roads are designed to kill (which is another op-ed.) Excerpt:

I took a photograph of the scene where I had found the runner. When I showed this picture to friends from Sweden they asked, “This is where you live? This is your neighborhood? Your streets are designed to kill people.’’ They said that the thin painted white lines at the intersection could not be seen at dawn, nor was there a raised bump to or a narrowing of the road to demarcate the intersection and slow down traffic. They said the speed limit should be 30 kilometers per hour (about 18.6 miles per hour) or less if we wanted pedestrians to have much of a chance of surviving. They also said traffic lights increased the number of deaths because people often speed up when the light turns yellow.

 

When Sweden removed red lights from intersections and replaced them with traffic circles or rotaries, death rates at these intersections fell by 80 to 90 percent.

This is the closest article I’ve yet seen that seems in line with Liveable Streets: the engineering is directly related to the use of the system. The usual discussion page is also available.

In addition to this op-ed there is a letter in response to the Unruly riders article as written by MassBike. (Here is the discussion page.) Concluding excerpt:

By all means, let us build better roads, which lead people into safer behavior by design. But each of us can help make everyone safer now, today, by more often following the rules of the road whether driving, bicycling, or walking.

We need more of this!

There’s an article today on Boston.com introducing a bike sharing proposal. (There’s also a sweet video with Nicole Freedman performing a small track stand in rainy conditions while waiting in traffic.)

From the article:

Over the next few weeks, officials expect to name the company with which they would negotiate a contract on how to run the system. They hope the program will lead to tens of thousands of people saddling up in Boston daily.
…
Bike sharing is the next step. The city envisions making available between 1,000 and 3,000 bikes at stations 300 or 400 yards apart, located at subway and bus stops, main squares, tourist sites, and across city neighborhoods.

This makes me wonder, would I ride my bike around as much if there were publicly accessible ones available? I guess we’ll have to wait and see, either way I’ll be very happy that a program like this will be made available.

Boston.com has an interactive map up right now that you can use to view noted potholes in the Boston area. You can submit your own doozies as well.

Remember, ride safely everyone! Keep an extra buffer around you if you can: with increased numbers of potholes comes more unexpected swerving from clunky cars and conscientious cyclists. (Ahh, who’m I kidding – most of you know this already, amiright?!)

Looks like somebody in D.C. hit a pedestrian while driving and took off. A nearby bicycle commuter witnessed and obliged himself to catch up and halt the offending car and stopped them. As it turns out, the driver was Bob Novak.

A quote Mr. Novak made previous to this incident:

Novak explained to the paper: “He was crossing on the red light. I really hate jaywalkers. I despise them. Since I don’t run the country, all I can do is yell at ‘em. The other option is to run ‘em over, but as a compassionate conservative, I would never do that.”

Thank you David Bono for being an upstanding citizen and model cyclist in our country’s most political city.

Update 20080729

Bob Novak is in a Boston hospital after recently falling ill on Cape Cod and being diagnosed with having a brain tumor.

Do we have any bike lanes as short as this one? Found via Digg.

Last night I watched the documentary “Red Light Go,” which highlights a few NYC bike messengers and Alleycat races.

Netflix link

My riding habits haven’t guided me full-on into many of the different bike subcultures like SCUL or messengering, so I don’t know much about what goes on within them. Much of what I have learned I have picked up from discrete observation or small conversation. Every club has their own rules, their own lingo, styles and presence. To learn more you generally need to be ‘in’. So I enjoyed the peek into part of one of these cultures that I know little about.

What I found great was some filling-in of informational gaps I’ve had. Some may scoff, but I only heard about Allycat races about two weeks ago. Before watching this documentary I thought the cards tacked in to the wheel spokes I see from time to time were just stylistic flair, not racing badges. I’ll have a closer look next time I see one, as my curiosity has been piqued.

This wouldn’t be a film I’d sit down with a budding young mind, it has adult themes beyond the occasional scenes of street riding in auto and pedestrian traffic. It’s a documentary, so it’s a catalog of a small piece of life with a lot of the child-filters removed. Partying, drinking, plenty of drug references, even some glorification of fighting. Nothing the average R-rated film wouldn’t have. I’d recommend it to most people I know.

This past Wednesday my rear tire went flat on the way to a LiveableStreets Alliance lecture. My innertube needed to be replaced (the presta valve tip broke off) but the lecture lightened my mood with some interesting information on how roads are engineered.

Backtracking for just a moment, I have had some brushes with LiveableStreets folks before at some other bike events. The group seems pretty solid despite their small size, dedicating themselves to presenting a fresh vision of street design engineered to meet human needs as much as motor vehicular ones. Basically, they’re working to change Boston.

The talk was entitled “Dirty Little Engineering Secrets Revealed,” and it was a powerpoint presentation given by former LiveableStreets Alliance co-founder and president Jeffrey Rosenblum. (Jeff now works for the City of Cambridge, helping their street planning.)

The talk spanned elements of psychology, engineering and design. The dirty secrets revealed were completely expected: there was a whole generation of engineering that devoted itself to the car and that is reflected in street design. This extends into the urban areas and the purpose of the street as a functioning place of commerce and burgeoning life has been replaced with one of traffic and single-minded transport.

When a street is designed there are studies done, stages of planning and review, lots of referencing to standards guides, and usually after all of that is there any public involvement. (Then, of course the street is constructed with whatever variance, no construction job ever goes 100% to plan.)

The studies are generally car-centric. Traffic numbers, connections, types of vehicles and their purposes, types of streets connected, etc. The result of a study is a report a few inches thick. How much of that for bikes? Nil.

The street gets planned following guidelines. The guidelines used were printed with some degree of flexibility which in practice is never used. When challenged why lane widths can’t be made more narrow to accommodate a bike lane they often reference the Green Book, but neglect the flexibility it allows for.

LiveableStreets works to draw attention to that flexibility factor. The current generation of engineers are still following the idea that streets need to be designed to achieve maximum throughput, with multi-lane highways often considered the pinnacle. In urban arenas this does not make sense. The next generation of engineers may have a more modern view but it will take a while for their designs to become commonplace. Political pressure and general public knowledge can help to advance this progress.

Bikes aren’t the only things that lose out to the current models of street design. Pedestrians and anyone with a permanent or temporary handicap are often considered only in the later design revisions. Engineers understand that at any one time a certain percentage of the population will have their mobility hindered and may require more time for crossing, ramps, adequate sidewalk conditions for wheels, and usually as short of a distance between entering and exiting the road as possible. That doesn’t mean design works all of this in all the time.

Highlighting the lapse in thinking with pedestrians in mind was a series of photos of the Longfellow Bridge. On one end there are no crosswalks to get someone walking from one area to the sidewalk that spans the bridge. The sidewalk itself is less than the normal width, and is peppered with obstructions. One argument states there aren’t enough pedestrians using the bridge to warrant improving the sidewalks. This is a backwards argument – if it was a better medium there would be more usage. Realistically the issue here is the same issue with any redevelopment: money.

Along with more flexible engineering there was also an example of a more radical approach which plays much more with social engineering aspects: naked streets (in large part due to late Hans Monderman. The idea here being that you should treat motorists like adults, they’ll know how to react with people walking all around them even with no signs regulating them to be courteous and yield. Intersections with no signs, which makes motorists behave differently. The result: rational decisions are made by all street users.

There was more in the talk and the discussion that followed. Time was up and I was left wanting more so I hope there will be other presentations in the future. The more we know about the limitations, the more we can maneuver within them.

Recently I marginally helped an intriguing venture to assess several Boston roads for possible bike lane inclusion. I wish I could have spared more time to the effort, and I guess I’m not the only one saying that since in a little over a month’s allotment only 16 of a desired 50 roads were surveyed. This was work spread out over several individuals who volunteered, and of which I probably helped the least or near least. (I’d offer excuses, but this is a bike story, not a work-woe story. If you need to ask: woe is work.)

The idea behind the activity was to find out what roads are already wide enough to support a bike lane, with particular preference to roads that connect any other already-established bike networking routes or major areas of the city. Ideally some roads are already wide enough to include a bike lane, and those would be cheapest and fastest for the city to adapt. The survey work involved detailing any observations from a biker’s point of view, such as metal plates in the road or incorrect alignment of gutter plates, as well as measuring road cross-sections with one of these:

The wheel I was loaned took measurements in .12″. Everyone else’s read in .10″. I have no idea why the wheel I used was any different, nor what the significance of .12″ is (anyone care to fill me in?), but that’s what I had to walk across the road many times with and note the distance of the center of every line of paint (parking, white lines, yellow lines, etc.) The person who collected all the data we obtained had to write a conversion routine and apply it to all of my collected numbers.

Someone brought up the point of “why do we have to take these measurements, wouldn’t the city already know all of this?” And the answer I heard given started out as “well, ya see…” and sorrowfully explained that the measurements currently available are all too inaccurate to be of much use. Our measurements, as accurate as they can be, still need to account for several inches for error or variance between measured points. We took measurements wherever the road widths changed a recognizable amount, which may be often but not necessarily often enough. Whatever our measurements come out to be will be better than what was there before, and up to date.

I hope that something comes of this attempt, and that we’re not left oggling the void of another action->no-action response from the city. I am disappointed about how little I chipped in for this, but would feel cheated if it all amounts to nothing. Kudos to LiveableStreets for putting up the measurement wheels that we got on loan, and to the Boston Bikes initiative that was all under the auspices of: I hope to be of more use on the next venture.