TheWashCycle

Tuesday Morning Commute - grand thoroughfares

Good morning. Hope everyone had a great weekend.

• Montgomery County has made a commitment to finishing the Capital Crescent Trail into Silver Spring. Unfortunately it's tied to state plans for the Purple Line, and there the commitment isn't as strong.
• Andrew Ferguson at Time does not care for the young people in DC or for their bike-sharing, which is clearly a sign of their ill-earned affluence. He also doesn't seem to care that much for facts. He writes: "Bike-share racks have sprung up downtown and in the close-in suburbs to take advantage of the newly painted bike lanes that have squeezed grand thoroughfares like 14th Street down to two lanes." Now we can argue about whether or not 14th street is a "grand thoroughfare" but nowhere am I aware of 14th Street being squeezed down to 2 lanes by bike lanes. 
• Thanks to WABA, the Advoc8te ends a 20-year hiatus from cycling. 
• More on CaBi's April statistics. Tpbpd were up to 4.5 from 3.7 last year. And there were 196, 800 miles ridden, also a new record for one month. 
• David Byrne writes about the coming of bike-sharing in NYC, and a GWU professor writes about how bikable, walkable neighborhoods are desirable. "People are clearly willing to pay more for homes that allow them to walk rather than drive. Biking is part of the picture, too. Biking and walking are part of a “complete streets” strategy that public rights of way should be for all of society — not just cars."

Wednesday Afternoon Commute - Pawns

Good afternoon 

• Any deal to change pawn shop rules in DC to allow for the sale of vintage records and second-hand items should include the sale of used bikes.
• Who are the scofflaws now? "I asked him what they did about the fact that most drivers drive 5 to 10 mph over speed limits. The car has two modes, he said. If you’re going 75 mph and you put it in one mode, it will maintain that speed where it is safe to do so, slowing down as appropriate for curves, traffic, and other appropriate reasons. If you put it in the other mode, it will strictly obey all traffic laws, getting into the righthand lane if everyone else is going faster. No doubt they will eventually have “plus-5-mph” modes or whatever to take into account that many roads are signed for slower than the speeds people actually drive."
• I'm pretty sure DC will be getting a lot of new bike lanes soon.
• The Atlantic wonders if an uptick of bike share cyclists, who - according to one study - don't wear helmets as much as regular cyclists, will result in more crashes and injuries. If only there were some cities outside of NYC that existed, and if only one of those cities already had bike share. Then you could look at the impact bikesharing had on cyclist safety. If only...
• Those students in Michigan who rode their bikes to school as a prank that would slow traffic on a nearby rode were punished for not doing anything illegal or against the rules. But then parents and people in the community condemned the principal for overreacting. So I guess that's progress. 

Friday Afternoon Commute - "They're what?" said Amsterdam

Good afternoon

• European embassies are hosting open houses on Saturday as part of a tourism sales pitch called "Shortcut to Europe" The Danish embassy will be celebrating bike culture since "since Copenhagen is the Bike Capital of the World."
• Despite recent opinion pieces, some writers at the WaTimes are big fans of biking. "Riding a bicycle in a city like DC is the best, and if you’ve been riding for a while you might say its theonly, way to get around.  Let me just preface this by saying that I had not been on a bike in 20 years.  My husband first brought up the idea when we were dating and I was initially steadfastly against it.  It took him two years, but I finally got a bike and got on the road.   I was hesitant at first, as every new rider should be, but now my bike has become my favorite mode of transportation, even in the winter.  I have had my bike for 14 months now and I hate to admit it but at this point I’d rather give up my car than my bike."
• Boston and DC reach out to low-income communities to expand bikesharing.

Friday Morning Commute - BikeFest

Good morning. Bikefest is this evening.

• Check out the new, neighborhood-branded bike parking in Adams Morgan. Meanwhile Michael Niebauer is unhappy that DDOT awarded WABA a $60,000 no-bid contract for bike rack installation. "While WABA certainly has experience in rack installation and bike education, it seems odd to paint all other potential contractors as inferior. Maybe, if DDOT put the contract up for bid, another business would emerge with a better deal. Maybe not." But in the rest of the article he makes it clear that the answer is probably not. DDOT has tried at least a couple of vendors before and had poor results. They often found that they had to send a staff member out to watch the installation or else it would be installed wrong (against a wall for example). WABA has a vested interest in seeing the racks installed properly. In fact they probably care more about proper rack installation then they do about the money. 
• Tom Elliot - a producer for the Peter Schiff Show, Mayor Gray and others have a debate about Capital Bikeshare and Gray defends the system. The producer wants DC to follow NYC's lead and sell the naming rights to CaBi, and Gray is too polite to say that he can't do that, because Anthony Williams already sold it. Gray does point out that even though CaBi costs taxpayers more than Citibike does, it costs users less. Elliot also questions why the poor are subsidizing recreational cycling for the wealthy - which many twitter users knock down. Although, I'd also add that if we don't want the city subsidizing recreational facilities, we're going to have to shut down a lot of parks[Bikesharing is going to be SOOOO much better in NYC].
• Another great advantage of bike sharing is that the stations are great for placemaking and Triangulation, because they're great conversation starters, they attract a diverse group of users at all times of the day and they act as landmarks.
• MPD Chief Cathy Lanier on the guy who stole his bike back "He hopped in a cab and asked police to send undercover officers. By that time, he was already arriving at the destination. We didn't refuse to support him, we wanted him to give us time to react so we could make sure nobody got hurt. He did steal is bike back. If you have one, please hang on to the serial number, because we recover a lot of those. If you lock your bike, take the seat off. It helps alert our officers that a bike is stolen." I'd add that it's not a bad idea to get your bike on one of the National bike registries and add a sticker, Taking your seat with you every time though - that can be a real pain. 

Thursday Afternoon Commute - hunker down

Good afternoon

• The River to Rockets Bik Rally is a week from Saturday in Bladensburg
• The Law Enforcement United bike ride set off for Washington DC today. 
• UMd students are mildly excited about having Capital Bikeshare on campus. "If I were to rush to class, I probably wouldn’t use it,” Yu said. “[In other situations], it would be superuseful.”
• "We should hunker down and look to maintaining the transportation network we have now, while seeking less costly but more realistic solutions such as increased telecommuting, more bus options, more bike lanes and better sidewalks."
• The National Park Service is soliciting public comments on a proposed extension of the 22  mile long Western Maryland Rail Trail to Paw Paw, W.Va. They'll have a meeting on May 16th to discuss adding two paved segments over a total of  8.1 miles. The extension will be in two segments because the tunnel that currently connects them will be closed to protect bats. Cyclists will use the C&O canal towpath as the connector. 
• What's wrong with bank-branded bikesharing? Nothing. 

Wednesday Afternoon Commute - Hearings

Hopefully my morning link dump is still on my computer at home. 

• Maryland Senator Ben Cardin is working to ensure that funding for bike programs is included in a federal transportation bill.
• The other thing I didn't mention about citywide performance parking is that by properly pricing parking it should make biking a more appealing option - assuming that parking is underpriced right now. 
• At a recent hearing of  the Energy and Commerce Oversight Subcommittee Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., opened the hearing by describing the GAO HHS as rife with waste. To make his point, he focused on community public health grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that were used to set up municipal bike-share programs. [I've looked for this testimony online but could not find it. 
• At another congressional hearing, this one on the federal transportation bill that is currently being hammered out by a House and Senate conference committee, Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) expressed concern about the federally-mandated transportation enhancement program which he feels is a waste of transportation dollars. But bike advocates released the results of a telephone poll found that 84% of those surveyed support federal funding for sidewalks and bike lanes, and that 91 percent of those under the age of 30 backed the spending.

Tuesday Afternoon Commute - Take my car...please

Good afternoon

• The Atlantic has a good response to those who are complaining that CitiBike is too expensive for those who want to go on a 6 hour ride or ride around Governor's Island. In a nutshell, it's the punchline to a Henny Youngman joke ("Doc, it hurts when I do this", "Well then, don't do that.") It's kind of shocking that this criticism is being heard in NYC, when DC's has been up and running for so long. We heard the same stuff here and it proved to be unfounded. It's like no one bothered to call CaBi and ask them about it. And I'll note that while the fees are higher, you also get 45 minutes before overage fees kick in. So you're probably paying the same amount per minute. 
• Bike to school day is Wednesday.
• More on the Capital Bikeshare expansion into Maryland. "Fred Shaffer, chairman of the Prince George’s County Bicycle and Trails Advisory Group, said the county will focus the study on the Anacostia Trails Heritage Area inside the Capital Beltway, which includes Hyattsville, Riverdale, Bladensburg, Colmar Manor, Cottage City and Edmonston. The area was chosen because it is adjacent to Washington, D.C., and Montgomery County, which also has received funds to implement a Bikeshare program, and its network of trails, Shaffer said." Also it sounds like the College Park stations identified earlier are only proposals. 

CitiBike criticism starts early

As mentioned earlier today in this morning's commute, NYC's bike sharing system will be called CitiBike by CitiBank. A few other local blogs have written about this today as well.

Lydia DePillis notes that even though the ad deal covers the cost of the system, NYC will still be charging users more for the system than DC does. 

The base rates are $10 per day, $25 per week, and $95 per year, plus $4 per hour and more beyond the first 30 minutes

As she notes, it's not a bad idea for the system to make money in the beginning so that it can expand faster; though eventually I think the goal should be to get to a revenue neutral position, which is what DDOT says their goal is - though I'm not sure about other jurisdictions. But it's also possible that this is more of a congestion charge than anything. Making the system too cheap could overwhelm it. [Couple of nits: She keeps calling SmartBike a failure - which I of course disagree with, but we'll just have to agree to disagree; and she erroneously writes that SmartBike was run by Comcast, when actually it was ClearChannel.]

Felix Salmon also worries the program is too expensive. I personally doubt they'll have a lot of trouble getting people to use it. The annual cost is still way cheaper than anything else, and while the single day cost is expensive, it is likely to be used mostly by tourists who will likely make several trips a day anyway.

Meanwhile, Alexis Garcia at conservative blog Town Hall is still mostly upset that Citibank got a bailout,

Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the program will operate at no cost to the taxpayers, but that claim is laughable considering the billions taxpayers pumped into the too-big-to-fail bank following the 2008 financial crisis.

So is this the wisest expenditure of bailout money? I think most consumers would prefer Citigroup to pay back their debt or lower ATM fees over bikes, but you can be the judge of that.

Of course, Citicorp paid it back nearly three years ago and, in fact, the government turned a profit on it - which means none of this is bailout money. Conservatives don't like spending government money on bike share, but Garcia doesn't even want to see a company that once got help from the government (without costing the government a dime) buying advertising on a bikeshare system - which she calls derisively "TARP getaway bikes". I wonder if she feels that way about other advertising. She's had 3 years to complain about Citicorp ads on TV, but has she? Who could sponsor bike sharing and still have it be OK with her? Does she so hate the idea of bikesharing that any funding scheme will be suspect?

Though somehow, the idea of setting thousands of tourists loose on government-owned bikes onto the streets of Manhattan seems like a counter-intuitive plan for reducing the city's traffic woes.

Well, most of the riders won't be tourists - so that's a mischaracterization. And there is plenty of research out there showing that cyclists reduce congestion. 

Tuesday Morning Commute - Bless you

Good morning

• I like this idea. It reminds me of the "Blessing of the Fleet". Dumbarton United Methodist Church will hold a “blessing of the bicycles” for all riders on May 12, from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. at Fletcher’s Cove, where two bike paths intersect. Pedalers on a Saturday morning outing will be able to take their bikes to a quiet setting of trees and grass near Fletcher’s Boat House and receive a brief blessing from the church pastor, Rev. Mary Kay Totty.
• Georgetown's ANC is worried that it has given its blessing to too many bike rides and foot races. 
• Alexandria took out parking meters and replaced them with multispace meters, but failed to add bike parking in there place. Why does that sound so familiar..?
• Images of the new bridge Multi-Use Trap Road Bridge over Dulles Toll Road at Wolf Trap
• VDOT guidance on the use of sharrows. 
• NYC Bikeshare will be called Citibike by Citibank, which sets us up well for Capital One Capital Bikeshare - What's on your key chain?

Capital Bikeshare's next expansion - Maryland

To kick off bike month, Governor O'Malley announced the first seven recipients of bikeshare grants totally $2.5 million. 

The winners are divided into two categories – funding to implement a bikeshare facility and funding for a feasibility study to determine potential bikeshare station locations.  The Bikeshare Grant Program is funded through the Maryland Department of Transportation’s Federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) Program and will cover 80 percent of the total project cost.  Local jurisdictions are required to pay a 20 percent match.

Locally Montgomery County and joint partners with University of Maryland at College Park and the City of College Park won a grant to implement a bikesharing system and Prince George’s County and the City of Greenbelt won a grant for feasibility studies of potential bikeshare stations.

Feasibility studies and Bikeshare implementation projects could begin any time after July 1st with project or study completion expected to be complete in about a year’s time.  Jurisdictions will be in charge of the project and the exact timeline.

In Montgomery County, officials have already named some of the sites they have in mind and yes, they will be Capital Bikeshare stations:

Friendship Heights, Bethesda, the Medical Center Metro station area, Takoma Park and Silver Spring. The 350 bikes and 50 bike-docking stations should be up and running in about 12 months.

As for money

The program is estimated to cost $2.15 million to establish. The new state grant of $1 million brings the total committed to the project to about $1.5 million. The other funding includes another recently approved state grant for $250,000 and an additional $250,000 pledged by the private sector. County funding will make up the rest, Bowring said.

The program is expected to cost $500,000 annually to operate and maintain, Bowring said. About $200,000 of that should be covered by membership fees and private sponsorships, she said, with the county covering the rest.

Also:

In March, the State also opened the application process for the 2013 Bikeways Grants.  These applications are due by this Friday, May 4, 2012 (WC: the link they give goes to the 2012 page).