My vision for Sacramento (San Francisco, Citrus Heights: sales, city hall, motels)

[wburg]

[slo1318]

Nice pic wburg, but Majin's dream is seriously flawed.

[Majin]

I wish Sacramento still looked like that. The automobile completely destoryed this city.

[Curmudgeon]

If it still looked like that I might still be there but government at all levels would have to take a trip back in time as well.

Of course, air conditioning would help too!

[kim racer]

Originally Posted by wburg

That type of back-in directional parking is in use in the Newton Booth neighborhood in Sacramento--the city is trying it out and may extend it into other neighborhoods.

Directional parking is good in that it provides more spaces in front of local business. But the trade off as far as people in bikes is that bikes tend to be in the blind side of people backing out of the directional parking, so front directional parking creates bike/auto collisions. The back in directional parking tends to resolve that problem. When people are backing in the biker's see you and there is no conflict and when the driver is pulling out he has great visibility and can much more easily see the person on a bike.

The other work around for directional parking is to install a cycle track between the directional parking and the sidewalk. If you do that, again the people in bikes aren't riding in drivers blind spots.

Because people are being annoyed with my references to Europe, here is an example of Portland's first cycle track.

BikePortland.org » Blog Archive » First look at Portland’s inaugural cycle track

[kim racer]

I am a bit more skeptical of streetcars. First streetcars aren't a mobility improvement over buses. Generally they don't go any faster than the buses they replace. Second, operationally, they don't provide a labor cost advantage over buses. You can find bi-articulated buses that carry as many people as a streetcar. On a busy corridor with light rail, you can have one driver link many different light rail vehicles together, so if your route is busy enough in theory, light rail operationally becomes much cheaper to operate than buses on that route. In San Francisco along Geary Street, they are running so many buses so often, it would be dramatically cheaper for SF to turn that corridor into a light rail corridor. If the region starts producing more corridors like Geary Street, light rail seems to make a lot of sense in that situation. Human Transit has a good discussion here.

Human Transit: streetcars: an inconvenient truth

The trade off with streetcars is that they are a lot more expensive to build than the bus routes they replace. A streetcar line is about half as expensive to build as a light rail line, but it provides no mobility improvement over buses and no operational cost savings that light rail provides on really busy routes.

Instead the additional costs are justified as a cost of redevelopment. Streetcar advocates generally cite what happened in Portland after streetcars were introduced to the Pearl District in Portland where lots of redevelopment seemed to follow the street cars.

But these same people seem to ignore what happened in Detroit after it re-introduced streetcars. Detroit reintroduced streetcars from 1976 to 2003. But there was no redevelopment boom along that route. In 1979 the route was carrying 79,000 riders by 1998, it was down to 3,350

Detroit Overview
Detroit - November 2003
Detroit, MI
Michigan Streetcar Systems by John Smatlak

Randal O'Toole argues that main reason that Portland's Streetcars turned the Pearl District around was that the Pearl District received $665 million in redevelopment subsidies. I acknowledge he is a gadfly. But I also do wonder how much of the redevelopment in the Pearl District really is the consquence of the streetcars vs the consquences of just more redevelopment funds flowing into the neighborhood.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-596.pdf

Streetcars totally failed in Detroit and yet succeed in Portland. Is the difference in outcomes driven by streetcars or to the redevelopment funds that Portland put into the neighborhood concurrent with the introduction of streetcars? Because if the redevelopment is driven more by the redevelopment funds than the actual streetcar, its probably better to spend the difference in price between the bus and the streetcar on the actual redevelopment funds.

I am not permanently writing off streetcars for all time. I just want to see what happens when a lot more cities introduce them and see what results. If we see more Detroits happeninig, I am going to think the difference in outcomes was less the re-introduction of streetcars and more the amount of redevelopment funds. If streetcars do keep sparking redevelopment in these other areas, then I think it probably is the streetcars.

[wburg]

Streetcars are a catalyst--they magnify the effects of other ongoing projects. They work best in conjunction with redevelopment efforts, and make those dollars better-spent. Historically they were built just before suburban subdivisions, before public-funded roads and highways put private streetcar companies out of business. They make developers more comfortable with spending because there is concrete evidence of a city's dedication to a transit system--they are less flexible than buses, but far more permanent. People get that same sense of permancence, too--even in Sacramento, when people talk about "transit" they are primarily talking about light rail, because the stations and tracks are solid, prominent and permanent. They may not like it--but they know where the light rail station is. Bus stops are ephemeral: a post with a sign, and maybe a bench to sit on, that can disappear next week.

Take a look at some other cities that put in streetcars: Little Rock, or Tampa. Look at the F line in San Francisco for clear evidence of how people like streetcars more than buses: I have seen people let buses go past on Market so they can get on one of the historic streetcars. Even non-historic streetcars tend to draw more positive attention than buses--people just seem to like them.

As to Detroit, forgetting downtown Detroit's other obvious problems, that streetcar line is little more than a glorified carnival ride--a one-mile run from one part of downtown to another, running on 3' wide narrow-gauge track. It's cute, but cuteness is not an inherent property of streetcars. They have to perform a useful function--does a 1-mile line in downtown Detroit serve commuters or downtown residents? If not, no wonder it went under.

That "cycle track" idea is fantastic--I'd love to see that done on Midtown's two-lane conversions like L, Q and R, where bikes and pedestrians often have to share the sidewalk even though there are technically bike lanes, because the bike lane can seem nearly suicidal between weaving cars and randomly-opening car doors. Although I'm now kind of obsessed with the idea of turning K Street into a "bike boulevard," with a connector around the Memorial Auditorium so bike riders can continue onto the K Street mall, where the ban on bikes is about to be lifted.

I'm not even going to dignify that Cato Institute report with a response. Don't go all Joel Kotkin on me now!

[Curmudgeon]

Second only to red light runners, the biggest and most annoying traffic hazards in Sacratomato are bicyclists who think they own the road, have an entitlement issue and are foolish enough to joust with real vehicles.

Sorry, Kim. You haven't won me over.

I will now leave you and wburg to return to your regularly scheduled programming!

[kim racer]

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

Second only to red light runners, the biggest and most annoying traffic hazards in Sacratomato are bicyclists who think they own the road, have an entitlement issue and are foolish enough to joust with real vehicles.

Sorry, Kim. You haven't won me over.

I will now leave you and wburg to return to your regularly scheduled programming!

First, the California Vehicle Code legally recognizes bicycles as vehicles with the same rights and responsibilities as any other vehicle. So under current law in California, they are legally entitled to use the same roads that everyone else does. Legally they are entitled to be on the road as much as any other vehicle.

Within the League of American Bicyclists, there are actually two separate groups. There are the proponents of vehicular cycling and their are people like me, people who think the best way and ultimately the safest way to get more people to bike safely is by building proper bike infrastructure.

Vehicular cycling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BWY Controv
http://www.vtpi.org/puchertq2.pdf

But I think its fair to acknowledge the legitimate points of the vehicular cycling advocates. The vehicular cycling advocates argue that cycling is the most safe when people on bikes act like any other type of vehicle. They say when you are in mixed traffic, you should take the lane, if you want to make a left turn, you should use hand signals and put yourself in the left lane. They think the entire practice of segregating bikes from traffic makes cycling more dangerous. They point out that if you are in traffic, you are visible by other cars. Road traffic tends to sweep debris from the main part of the road to the side of the road, so bike lanes have more debris. They also say when you are in a bike lane, you are more likely to be in a drivers blind spot, so you are more likely to get hit. When people are parallel parking, bike lanes generally put you in the door zone, so again, you are more likely to be injured. Lastly when car drivers want to make right hand turns and people on bikes want to go forward, there is a conflict that causes accidents. These people particularly hate cycle tracks which they say puts people in bikes in blind spots that drivers can never see.

In the seventies when a lot of the bike lane legislation was being rolled out, the empirical evidence seemed to support the vehicular cyclists. When the new bike infrastructure (like cycle tracks) were rolled out it seemed to increase bike accidents. This is how California got its current state of bike regulation.

But then there started to be more cross cultural research. Researchers like John Pucher at Rutgers, were asking why is this same bike infrastructure causing so few accidents in Europe and yet managed to create so many accidents when it was introduced in the US? More importantly why after the US gave up on bike infrastructure and the Dutch and Danish kept building it, why is riding a bike so much less dangerous in Europe. Especially when the US has bike helmet laws and none of these European countries had any type of mandatory bike helmet laws. The big difference seems to be how other many people are biking in a given area. If there aren't many people biking in an area, the drivers in the area basically don't expect and don't bother looking for people on bikes. But the more people in an area who bike, the safer it is for everyone to bike. The second thing that occurred is that in Europe when there was a lot of the same types of accidents, the local governments responded by continuing to roll out new and better bike infrastructure.

One of the things that made cycle tracks so dangerous in the 1970's was the absence of bike boxes. Bike Boxes let people in bikes turn left without having to take a lane. The bike scramble intersection is another way of addressing the same problem. Mia Birk went to Denmark and brought back modern dutch practices to Portland.

Portland's Bike Boxes: The Movie : TreeHugger
Bicycle Signal at Interstate and Oregon

The big reason I am such a proponent of bike infrastructure is that it increases the perceived safety of biking. Yes, I have taken the lane on Fair Oaks Blvd to merge over to the left turn lane to turn left. But I am about the only person I know who will take a lane on a street as busy as Fair Oaks Blvd. If you want to get the masses to ride there bikes, you need to get them infrastructure that they feel safe riding along.

But in like Sacramento where so few people do ride bikes, and the state of bike infrastructure is often still pretty weak, vehicular cycling still is probably the safest form of cycling.

Here is a real quick video showing basics of vehicular cycling, including taking a lane.


YouTube - The Rights and Duties of Cyclists - Bicycle Safety

[Curmudgeon]

OK, Fine!