bicycle – The Naked City Blog

“Why I ‘cheated’ at the light, while cycling”

Keihy Moore on her bicycle. Photo: Keihly Moore

Got this email from my friend Keihly Moore (one of the key architects behind some of Charlotte’s Park(ing) Day events in previous years). After getting her dual degree in architecture and urban design from UNC Charlotte she’s now working in Boston.

Anyone who knows her knows she’s a dedicated and avid bicyclist. She even rode to work during the extremely deep snows in Boston last winter, getting featured in an article by the Boston Globe. (See “Employees get creative to reach work.”)

Her note highlights one of many challenges cyclists face when riding in traffic. Though she’s a careful, law-abiding cyclist, she realized that in some situations, it felt safer to violate the traffic signal. What do you think?:

Bike lanes and sharrows can’t solve the traffic light issue.

“I rode a different route in today because I had to drop my car off at an auto-body place. Most of the way in on the new route had bike lanes (thank God) but traffic was still moving 40+ mph, when it wasn’t stop and go – mostly stop. I’m not the cyclist that runs red lights. I follow the rules. But this morning, with aggravated, distracted, grumpy drivers surrounding me, all I wanted to do was to get out in front of them, away from them. And I realized it’s because cyclists have the odds stacked against us. The rules are not set up for us. Admittedly, today, I stopped at all the lights, but I left sooner than the other cars on three lights because I wanted to get out in front – and it worked. I was still safe, but I left the exhaust, anger, and dirt behind me.

It seems to me cyclists should have advance green lights (like pedestrians do). It’s safer for everyone, and cyclists are more visible.

I still hate it when other cyclists are dangerous and run red lights, weaving in and out of traffic. But I think there is a certain threshold where it is OK to get out in front before the light changes.
So I never thought I’d say I liked beating those lights, but I felt it was necessary for my safety and sanity.
Thoughts? Glad I wasn’t hit this morning,
Keihly

Better signaling and separated lanes, of course, could help prevent this kind of dilemma. But most U.S. cities, Charlotte included, are a long way from being able to offer those things. In the meantime, what’s a careful cyclist to do?

Why slow-growing light rail ridership should not surprise anyone

A bus in uptown Charlotte, where most bus routes begin and end. Photo: Claire Apaliski

Today’s Charlotte Observer brings an article from Steve Harrison noting that ridership on Charlotte’s light rail line, the LYNX Blue Line, has finally rebounded to its pre-recession levels but has not increased dramatically despite rapid growth in apartments along part of its route. See “Lynx light rail ridership back to 2008 levels.”

Some background: Charlotte’s first and only light rail line opened in late 2007, just in time for the massive 2008-09 recession that had Charlotte unemployment lingering in double-digits or near it for months. The northern couple of miles of the 9-mile route, closest to uptown, have seen massive apartment development in the past several years. The southern part of the route? Nada.

But the South End neighborhood – an area of old industrial buildings dating from the 1960s back to the late 1800s – is popping with hundreds of new apartments, and hopping with new microbreweries and trendy restaurants.

Car-free in Charlotte? It isn’t easy by Carolyn Reid, published last June at the PlanCharlotte.org website I run, helps explain why ridership may not be growing as quickly as you’d think.

Even in South End there’s little easy or walkable access to routine shopping needs like grocery and drug stores, no easily accessed, widely connected network of bike routes, nor robust bus service with headways under 10 minutes that spreads cross town. Because of lack of funding, the city’s bus service – while much improved over 1990s levels – still focuses on delivering workers to uptown rather than building a widely connected network.

South End remains a place with better transit, bike and pedestrian connections than almost any other Charlotte neighborhood. But it’s still not a place where living without a car is going to be easy. Unless you’re trying to go uptown, the light rail can’t deliver you where you want to go.

My prediction: Ridership will zoom when the Blue Line Extension opens in 2017, taking riders to the 27,000-student UNC Charlotte campus about 10 miles northeast of uptown.

Watch Charlotte grow … foot and bicycle traffic

Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park is one of Chicago’s treasured public spaces. Photo: Mary Newsom

CHICAGO – Can Charlotte ever become an authentically walkable and bikable city?

I’ve just spent three days at a conference encouraging cities to overcome obstacles that keep them from achieving that goal.

The conference was sponsored by a group called 8-80 Cities. The idea behind that name is that cities should be designed for kids of 8 as well as adults of 80. The first group can’t drive and must walk or bicycle; the 80-year-olds may have already lost or be about to lose the ability to drive from hearing, vision, mental acuity or other age-related factors.

As 8-80 Cities executive director Gil Penalosa put it, “We have to stop building cities as if everyone is 30 years old and athletic.”

The 8-80 Cities Forum conference was named “The doable city” to encourage participants to consider the art of the possible in their cities. Co-sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, most participants were from some of the 26 cities where Knight has a special relationship, among them Charlotte; Akron, Ohio; Detroit; Macon, Ga. ; Miami; Philadelphia; Saint Paul, Minn.; and San Jose, Calif. (Disclosure: The Knight Foundation paid my travel expenses.)

Millennium Park’s “Cloud Gate” offers dry space during a rain.

We were shown numerous examples of efforts in cities from as far away as Melbourne, Australia, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Bogota, Colombia, to as close as Raleigh – events and campaigns and years-long projects to bring more public spaces (read parks and greenways) to cities and to find ways to encourage residents to view their city streets as public spaces, too – which of course they are.

Here’s an apt metaphor: impatiens or orchids? The idea was to encourage activists and public officials at the conference not to try to cultivate orchids, exotic, beautiful and needing expert
care, but to aim for the equivalent of impatiens, a colorful – and much easier – flower to grow.

For Charlotte, even a “grow impatiens” approach might be akin to, say, trying to cultivate roses in thick clay. After all, a recent study of large metro areas, Dangerous By Design, ranked Charlotte the tenth most dangerous metro for pedestrians. A new ranking from the Trust For Public Land ranked Charlotte No. 57 of 60 cities for “ParkScore.”

Red and white impatiens, with caladiums

But Charlotte has changed some important city policies, and its residents are changing, also. The city has adopted a set of street-design standards to require sidewalks and encourage bike lanes and that will, over time, add significantly to bicycle- and pedestrian-friendliness. Not that I will live long enough to see all of them, but still…

And more and more cyclists have been spotted on city streets and commuting to jobs. Here’s a recent set of articles from PlanCharlotte about folks who’ve chosen not to drive. “Car free in Charlotte? It isn’t easy” and “They’d rather not drive, thank you.”

In Chicago, speaker after speaker encouraged the conference attendees to work toward making their cities and towns more attractive to people, well, from age 8 to 80. As Dan Burden of the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute put it, we all need to stop worrying so much about whether people dislike residential density: “What they don’t want to do,” he said, “is live in ugly places.”

The 606 rail-trail under construction. Photo: Mary Newsom

Stefanie Seskin of the National Complete Streets Coalition (whose report ranked Charlotte as 10^th most dangerous), noted that speed is a factor in 1 in 3 traffic fatalities. Additionally, from 2003 to through 2012, more than 47,000 people died while walking on U.S. streets – 16 times the number who died in natural disasters during in the same period.

“We have a moral imperative to do better,” said Seskin.

The Charlotte contingent included several city officials, including Mike Davis and Liz Babson of Charlotte Department of Transportation and Deputy City Engineer Tim Richards, as well as Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Director Jim Garges.
We toured the Chicago’s stunning Millennium Park – built atop parking garages and a set of railway lines – as well as the under-construction 606 Project, a linear park on an unused, elevated freight line through neighborhoods west of downtown Chicago. (Both, I note, were made possible in part due to the city already owning the land.)

Millennium Park benefited from a number of extremely generous philanthropic donors; 115 donors gave at least $1 million. In other words, private donors in Chicago made their support for parks very public.

We who were on the Charlotte team are putting our heads together to see what events or improvements might happen relatively quickly here. We know local governments won’t be doling out Chicago-sized dollars, nor do we expect more than 100 local donors to pony up $1 million each.

But I think the soil here is more fertile than some folks might recognize. And although I’m someone who has owned an orchid that hasn’t bloomed in five years, even I can grow impatiens. I think Charlotte can, too.

Conducting a visual “audit” of sidewalks, we noted how planting squares offer informal seating. Photo: Mary Newsom

Biking, in brief (briefs?)

I don’t have time to post this but I can’t resist. My friend and excellent writer Jay Walljasper envisions a future in which “Bikes will be ‘incredibly sexy and utterly normal’ “ His point is this:

“So how do we get more Americans to bike? The biggest obstacle right now is that people see bicyclists as an exotic species—macho, ultra-fit, almost entirely young, white and male, clad in Lycra or spandex, who ride like madmen all over city streets. Some of us admire them, some revile them, but most people can’t imagine joining their ranks.

Yet, the reality is that most bikers today are ordinary people: office workers commuting, schoolkids going to piano practice or a soccer game, moms with a trailer on the back, grandparents getting exercise.”

But — and you have to follow the link to see the photo — while riding on his bicycle to the July Fourth fireworks in Minneapolis he encountered an Underwear Bike Ride.

Now, I’m thinking about how incredibly hot it gets in Charlotte in the summertime. Who’ll dare to organize the Charlotte version of a bicycling in briefs event?