It’s time for the Bike News Roundup! First up, Utrecht in the Netherlands took an intersection that would be top notch in Seattle and decided it wasn’t safe enough for people on bikes. Here’s how they made it even better:
Pacific Northwest News
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- Does your airport have a 50-page bike plan? – BikePortland.org – No, but it should.
- Driver leaves Puyallup reverend with life-threatening injuries | King 5 – Reverend was biking near the fairgrounds.
- BiketoWork Barb: How I Came to Be a Bike Advocate
- Seattle bike attorney busier than ever | King 5
- Rob Johnson to Run for Seattle City Council | Seattle Met
- The Rainier Ave. Problem | Crosscut.com
- Informed Speculation: What $15 Billion Might Buy | Seattle Transit Blog – Interesting look into what could come from a Sound Transit 3 vote.
- After a Series of Failures, This Is How Vancouver Finally Built a Controversial Bike Lane – CityLab
- Driver still sought in downtown hit-and-run that killed janitor | The Seattle Times – Happened November 22 at 5th and Pike.
- ORCA fare card for the Monorail wins backing | The Seattle Times
- First Downtown Parklet Set to Open | Seattle Met – Opened today!
- Creating the bicycle leaders of tomorrow | Cascade Bicycle Club
- 4-year-old hit by car in Proctor Disrict | The News Tribune
- Creating a new bicycling culture in Seattle; start with the clothing? – MyNorthwest.com – KIRO Radio does a positive story about bicycling? How cool! Too bad Hub & Bespoke is closing their doors at the end of the year.
- Pronto Cycle Share – Pronto Cycle Share | Groupon – Gread deal on a membership if you don’t have one yet.
Halftime show! Ever bike on the Interurban South Trial? Then you might enjoy this Seattle Channel story from a few years ago about the old railway:
National & Global News
- In advance of union election, Capital Bikeshare worker fired for organizing – The Washington Post – Alta also operates Pronto.
- Florida DOT will sponsor Daytona race to highlight safety program | Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte Newspaper
- Solange Knowles Is Married! See Her & Alan Ferguson Ride Bicycles To The Church! | PerezHilton.com – Yup, I just linked to Perez Hilton. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.
- Mpls. police: Driver who hit protester was fleeing ‘the mob’ but is considered suspect | Star Tribune – Initial police reports referred to the driver as the “victim.”
- Study: Dollar for dollar, bike infrastructure pays off better than road maintenance – BikePortland.org
- Gabby Giffords completes 11-mile bike ride – CNN.com
- Seeing & Believing in Bike Equity | League of American Bicyclists – A great read in the context of Ferguson protests.
- Smart Hat designer puzzled by cyclists’ negative response | road.cc
- Why Ferguson Protests Spilled Onto Highways | Streetsblog.net
- Yes, modern protected bike lane intersections are safe | PeopleForBikes
- Hindy Schachter: Protect pedestrians and bikes from cars – NY Daily News
- SubsidizingCongestion-FINAL.pdf – A report on how bad an idea it is for the government to subsidize car parking for work.
- Just another pedestrian killed — Strong Towns – Road engineering is the culprit, or at least shares part of the blame.
- Driver Not Charged for Killing Girl, 10, and Injuring Mother in Borough Park | Streetsblog New York City
- Wide racial gap exists on speed of Boston-area commutes – The Boston Globe – Someone should study this in Seattle and/or King County.
- This Supreme Court Case Will Decide Whether Companies Can Treat Pregnant Women Like Crap | Mother Jones – UPS apparently treats drivers who get a DUI better than employees who get pregnant.
- 2 children, 1 adult killed in Tennessee school bus crash; 23 hurt | KOMO News
- Ticket Tackling, or How the NYPD Pulls Over Cyclists on Canal Street | Bowery Boogie – What’s a worse crime, running a stop sign or tackling a stranger to the ground? Insanity.
- Taxi driver faces charges for hitting bicyclist twice — with fist, then cab – Metro – The Boston Globe
- How Super-Small, European-Style Delivery Vehicles Could Make U.S. Streets Safer – CityLab
- Hit-and-run heatmap highlights danger to cyclists, and perhaps callousness of drivers – LA Times
This is an open thread.
Comments
13 responses to “Bike News Roundup: How Utrecht makes a good intersection great for bikes”
It is “Utrecht”… :)
Fixed.
I’m not sure what to think about that Groupon deal for Pronto. On the one hand, yeah, if you want a membership, that’s a good price. I’ve been considering a membership, and this is an even lower price than the “founding membership” pre-rollout offers they had. On the other hand, is this really the right financial move for Pronto? Groupon takes something like 30% as a cut, leaving Pronto with about $50 from each annual membership purchased. I’m still not sure I fully understand the economics of bike share, but from what I’ve gathered, bike share only works if a lot of day-use (tourist) memberships prop up the annual memberships. You need most of the memberships to be short-term even if nearly all of the trips are taken by annual members. I would think that this problem would only be exacerbated by cutting the annual membership price (to ~$50, in this case).
Hopefully they ran the numbers on it, though of course any such numbers would depend on some tricky forecasting. Presumably the idea is the lower price will get a lot more folks on board who weren’t planning to buy an annual membership otherwise. This seems to be restaurants’ ideas for doing a groupon, but I’ve heard lots of anecdotes how the “making it up on volume” plan usually doesn’t pan out. Plus doing this once kind of sets a precedent — whether I already paid full price or got the groupon, I’d definitely want to wait for a groupon before buying next year’s membership.
Or I guess to the extent we are seeing Pronto as another subsidized mode of mass transit in the city, this just means it’ll need a bigger subsidy.
At Pronto’s current scale its variable costs can’t be that high. With bikes sitting out in the rain all day they’ll need almost as much maintenance as if they were being used all day. It would be different if the system were being used near capacity… I guess we’ll see what happens next summer.
That intersection has some nice features, but for me personally, few things make me want to get off my bike and into my car more than a two-stage left turn. The amount of delay that kind of nonsense adds to a trip is incredible.
There are places where the two-wait left turn makes sense, like oblique crossings of in-street railroad tracks that can’t accommodate compressible gap filler.
But the added delay of a two-wait turn definitely means it shouldn’t be the default treatment. If you add just 60 seconds to the trip of a person riding at 10 mph, you’ve effectively made the intersection 880 feet wide. (That is, the delay is the same as making the trip more than 1/8 of a mile longer for each intersection with a 60-second signal delay for a two-stage turn.)
It’s worth noting that Copenhagen, home of the “Copenhagen left”, has recognized that slow cycling speeds are a contributing factor to their declining bike mode share, and are investing heavily in making their bicycle infrastructure faster.
The Dutch, meanwhile, have begun experimenting with desegregation, allowing faster cyclists to use the street instead of the sidepath, as recently reported by CROW. They’ve recognized that speed differentials on sidepaths are hazardous for slower riders, and that in urban areas, most faster riders prefer the street.
http://www.fietsberaad.nl/?section=nieuws&lang=en&mode=newsArticle&repository=Fast+bicycles+on+the+roadway
Two stage left turns just make me want to ride in traffic to get through the dang intersection, or avoid it all together by modifing my route.
I despise that “Proper” Dutch cycling infrastructure. If I have all the rights and responsibilities of all other road users, then I want to go in the most reasonably direct route to my destination – bizarre chicanes at every intersection? Multi-stage maneuvers to accomplish a simple turn? No thank you!
I’m not familiar with the laws in the Netherlands, but as long as I’m still allowed to use a general purpose lane for cycling (like we are here in Washington) I’m glad for there to be more comfortable options built for people who aren’t confident enough to ride in traffic.
Likewise, I strongly support safe alternatives for more vulnerable users, as long as those facilities aren’t promoted as a panacea for all riders.
According to CROW, the Dutch are beginning to consider desegregating their traffic, allowing faster cyclists the choice to leave sidepaths for the street.
The impetus isn’t just the convenience of the faster rider — there are increasing complaints that children and elderly riders feel unsafe sharing cycletracks with high-speed traffic.
That Interurban video has modern implications. Ride the Interurban Trail through south King County and you’ll pass through old towns that were platted for convenient pedestrian access to the Interurban Railway.
Nearly a hundred years after the railway stopped running, many of those street grids haven’t changed — they’re still islands of pedestrian-scale blocks, now surrounded by “modern” subdivisions full of cul-de-sacs and traffic sewers. And the commute from Kent or Auburn to Seattle often takes longer now than it did then.
I like the Utrecht example. It makes more sense than the two-way cycle track on the east side of Broadway on First Hill and Capitol Hill. Would’ve been better to plan for a Utrecht style system across First and Capitol hills.