Bike Infrastructure Hits Congressional Speed Bumps
[B' Spokes: I'm going to take excerpts from this NPR story and intermix comments relevant to Maryland and its unique rules on how it "dispenses"* federal aid. My comments in square brackets.
*Maryland has a lower then national average for spending federal aid on bike/ped projects hence the term "dispense" is being a bit generous.]
by BRIAN NAYLOR -NPR
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Cities are adding bike lanes with the help of a federal program that gets its money from the highway bill.
[Everywhere but Maryland allows building of bike lanes with Federal money. Well to be technically correct Maryland has some tolerance for funding bike lanes if they are part of the trail but no part of an on-road network.]
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Washington is hardly alone in marking off bike lanes in its streets; New York has done it, as have Seattle and Minneapolis and any number of cities across the country.
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Backers of the infrastructure point out that the amount of spending on bike paths and pedestrian improvements amounts to about 1.5 percent of transportation spending — a tiny fraction of what's needed to pay for bridge repairs, and not what's keeping those bridges from getting fixed.
David Goldberg of the advocacy group Transportation for America calls this is a "watershed moment," as communities revert to an earlier time when roads weren't owned by cars.
"We stripped [roads] down to be essentially sewers for cars, and for years we thought the throughput of vehicles was the be-all and end-all," he says. "There's been a significant change in recent years where cities, towns, large and small, are taking a very different approach, and they're going back and reclaiming a little bit of that landscape."
It's not just bike lanes that are funded by the transportation enhancements program. Pedestrian improvements such as sidewalks and better-marked crosswalks are also funded. In part, Goldberg says, the money is being spent to reduce pedestrian deaths, most of which occur on roads built to earlier federal guidelines without proper crosswalks, for example, that are unsafe for pedestrians and other users.
"This is a national issue of having created safety problems in community after community, where we need to go back and give people safe ways to get out there, to be active, to get where they need to go," he says, "and this is not a frill, this is a very critical piece of our infrastructure."
[Note the stress on "community" but in Maryland the local communities cannot spend federal money on "sidewalks and better-marked crosswalks" even though we have the 4th highest pedestrian fatality rate. These things are not allowed to be funded through federal money nor is planing to get these things fixed main streamed liked other transportation networks and other maintenance issues by the localities. If you think bridges are in disrepair, think about the bicycle infrastructure that has rotted away to dust so you can no longer tell that roads were built for the bicycle and other uses also benefited as well, roads were the first multi-use path if you will.
I can't tell you how many times I look at the location of a pedestrian fatality and there on a busy state road are two faded lines that are supposed to say crosswalk but instead say: "So many cars have zoomed by here that they have erased the crosswalks existence, you're next if you use this space." And then there is the issue of only one "crosswalk" and only on one side of a busy street, like that is really going to improve pedestrian safety. :/ You need to accommodate people near where they want to cross, this has been shown in studies and no you can't expect any reasonable person to go through 3 light cycles just to cross the street, that kind of thinking is just epic fail. ]
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It's not clear what lies ahead for the transportation enhancements program in the long term. Republicans in Congress want to give states the flexibility to opt out of it, and that worries safety advocates who say that without prodding from Washington, some states will focus only on cars to the detriment of everyone else on the road.
[Maryland with its stance of "Ya we support bikes... but never, ever on local roads." is in my opinion outrageous. Baltimore City is lucky being the only locality to mange both state roads and local roads so rather then being limited to consider bike lanes only on state roads like Fall Rd it could consider an alternate like Roland Ave., other localities are not that fortunate the state says sorry we can't put bike lanes on ____ road and we are not going to give you any money for an alternate bike route either, MDOT needs to profit whenever and wherever we don't accommodate bikes so we can show off how much under budget we can go. Baltimore got $3 million from the state for phase one of our bike master plan, other localities do not have that as an option and I really have to ask why not?]
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/22/140709484/bike-infrastructure-hits-congressional-speed-bumps