26 November 2009

Report on the 25 October 2009 Roland Avenue Sunday Streets pilot

Prepared by

Mike McQuestion, co-Chair, Sustainability Initiative (mike.mcquestion@gmail.com)

Phil Spevak, President (pjspevak@gmail.com)

Roland Park Civic League

Background

Through its Sunday Streets Program, the City of Baltimore proposes to close off selected streets to motorized traffic during Sunday mornings, making them available for recreational use. Sunday Streets is modeled on Bogota, Colombia’s ciclovia. Every Sunday, from 8AM until 1PM, a network of normally busy Bogota streets is closed to motorists, allowing up to 1.7m residents to traverse the city on bicycles, rollerblades, skateboards or on foot. Bogota’s ciclovia has operated weekly since the early 1980s, providing residents in 70% of the city’s neighborhoods with easily accessible recreational opportunities. The idea is catching on. European examples include Copenhagen and Paris. In Switzerland’s Slow Up Program, 35-50km segments of particularly scenic roads are closed on consecutive Sundays during the summer months for pedestrians, skaters and cyclists to use. At this writing, 38 cities in eleven countries have organized ciclovias. Routes range from 1 to 121 km in length. Duration of ciclovia events ranges from 2 to 12 hours. The number of events ranges from 18 to 64 per year. Annual budgets range from US$45k to US$2.08m. In Seattle WA, Cambridge MA, San Francisco CA and El Paso TX, ciclovias happen at least every month during the cycling season. Ciclovia programs are credited with improving physical fitness, engaging young people in constructive social activities and increasing neighborhood cohesiveness (Sarmiento et al 2008).

Sunday Streets is an integral part of Baltimore’s 2009 Sustainability Plan.

The City’s street network is particularly conducive to Sunday Streets. (For more on this, see Baltimore’s 2006 Master Bicycle Plan.

City planners prepared a detailed Sunday Streets implementation plan nearly three years ago. The plan identifies specific streets and outlines logistic and security procedures for the Police and Transportation Department to follow. However, it has never been implemented, ostensibly for budgetary reasons.

Supporters of Baltimore’s Sunday Streets Program include the local bicycling advocacy group One Less Car. In 2008, One Less Car developed a 5-mile Sunday Streets pilot route which runs from Lake Montebello to Druid Hill Park along 33^rd Street. This “lake-to-lake” pilot, proposed for August 2008, was not implemented, again for budgetary reasons (see below).

On October 25, 2009, a modest, one-mile long Sunday Streets pilot was carried out successfully on Roland Avenue, sponsored by the Roland Park Civic League. Details of that experience are described below. Most notably, the activity was successfully executed from plan to completion in 8 weeks.

Google told us last month that they were working on bike directions, but they didn’t make a big deal out of telling us how to help. Well, I could be mistaken, but it looks like the offer to ‘partner’ on bike directions (and all sorts of ‘mappy’ features) is just sitting there, waiting for folks to get to it.

If you speak ‘nerd’, or know someone who does, then the rest of this could apply to you. There are some high-level FAQs about data formats, and a link to a form to fill-out if you have some data and you want to partner with Google to get your data integrated into Google Maps. The data we most care about here, of course, is bike-related data — bike lanes, routes, paths, etc.

Who has bike data? Well, cities and bicycle coalitions, probably — and/or the folks who hold the copyrights on maps/data, if they are copyrighted. [Of course you know how we feel about this type of data -- it should be free free free.]

If you are a planner/GIS-type person in the Bicycle division of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, then maybe you can help Google get us some bike directions — just fill out the form and see what happens. Could the good folks of our local bike coalition (the folks who put out the bike map) possibly work with Google to get this done? Got me — there’s one way to find out. [SFBC is up to 11,000+ members, now.]

Whatever city or town you live in, do your best to convince someone — I’d start with your local walk/bike/transit advocacy organization, if you have one — to contact the city/town/municipal government and ask them to follow up on this.

What does bike data look like? A lot of it is over my head, but we can look at Google’s “Complete Map Content Specifications“. There are lots of details, of course, but the human-understandable parts are very cool. If you’ve wondered what the GTFS format for bikes was going to be, we may have our first draft.

Can the data format handle wide curbs vs. bike lanes vs. one-ways vs. two-ways vs. high-speed arterials vs. bike boulevards vs. contraflow lanes vs. buffered bike lanes? I’m not sure, but it looks like it’s pretty flexible and can handle most if not all of the crazy configurations and complexities that occur in road networks.

-> "STATE HIGHWAYS AS MAIN STREETS: A STUDY OF..."
"...Community Design and Visioning;" WSDOT Research Report; by Nichols, Payne, Gear, and Miller; Washington State Dept. of Transportation, Office of Research & Library Services. Oct. 2009 (general info and link to 895kb pdf)
http://tinyurl.com/yjs4u55

-> "TRAVEL DEMAND IN THE CONTEXT OF GROWING DIVERSITY..."
"...Considerations for Policy, Planning, and Forecasting;" by Heather Contrino and Nancy McGuckin; TR News 264 Sept-Oct 2009. (general info and link to 741kb pdf)
http://tinyurl.com/yjrf3tu

-> "REALIZING THE POTENTIAL FOR SUSTAINABLE AND EQUITABLE..."
"...T.O.D.: Recommendations to the Interagency Partnership on Sustainable Communities;" a Policy White Paper by Reconnecting America. November 18, 2009 (473kb pdf)
http://tinyurl.com/ydmvatz

-> "MAKING THE LINK FROM TRANSPORTATION TO PHYSICAL..."
"...Activity and Obesity;" by Daniel A. Rodriguez, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Summer 2009 (563kb pdf)
http://tinyurl.com/y926bcj

From the Fast Lane: The Official Blog of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation

Last week, our friends at Transportation For America and the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership released a valuable report called Dangerous By Design. Yesterday I met with James Corless of t4America and a few of his colleagues from other interest groups about this report and its conclusions.

Now, "Dangerous By Design" has turned a lot of heads and for good reason. It shows that 11.8% of all traffic fatalities in America are pedestrians.

Look, no amount of engineering to make the insides of our vehicles safer for occupants is going to protect pedestrians and bicyclists. We need safer roadways. We need roadways designed to account for the needs of everyone who uses them, whether driving, walking, or riding in a wheelchair or on a bicycle.

The great thing about this Complete Streets approach to road planning is that it's actually cheaper to plan for multiple road uses ahead of time than to retrofit roadways after they are built and someone gets injured or killed.

The problem with this approach is that it does cost a little extra up front. And states and communities facing budget shortfalls may be tempted to let road safety features--wide sidewalks, safe crosswalks--get cut along the way.

That's why the groups I met with yesterday are asking for federal leadership. And that's where this DOT comes in. It turns out that a complete streets approach offers the perfect intersection of my twin guideposts: safety and livable communities.

Tour De Greater Homewood / Jack Yates Memorial Ride from Liam Quigley on Vimeo.

By Bob Mionske
Susanne Kibler-Hacker, 42, a highly experienced cyclist, is the coordinator for New Hampshire’s ride-to-work days at her office. The morning of October 15, 2009, she was riding her bike to work. She never arrived. She was wearing a reflective fluorescent vest, but a driver still hit her from behind. Kibler-Hacker, who survived the collision, was listed in serious condition at Dartmouth-Hitch*censored* Medical Center. Although New Hampshire has the best safe passing law in the nation, the driver was not cited for violating that law, or any other. Instead, police issued the driver a warning to exercise due care.