Take the twelve minutes and watch this video put out by the Chicago Bicycle Program geared towards their city’s bus drivers and cyclists.

Share the Road – Buses and Bicycles from Chicago Bicycle Program on Vimeo.

Via: Treehugger.

A couple of questions:

• I don’t know any riders from the area, are the public transportation buses as accommodating as they appear to be in the video – can anyone share their experience?
• Is the video effective – have you spotted something you didn’t know before that now makes you feel more understanding towards your fellow bus driver or cyclist counterpart?
• Does the city of Boston and/or MBTA have any equivalent bicycle educational videos for their staff? If not, should they?

DCR CREWS WORKING ON BU BRIDGE

Cambridge-to-Boston traffic will be detoured to the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge

WHAT: Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) crews will be installing barriers in preparation for the first phase of construction on the BU Bridge, which carries traffic over the Charles River between Cambridge and Boston. During the work, all Cambridge-to-Boston lanes will be closed and traffic will be detoured to the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge. Only buses and emergency vehicles will be allowed in the Cambridge-to-Boston direction. One lane of Boston-to-Cambridge traffic will remain open.

WHEN: Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night October 28, 29, 30 7 p.m. – 5 a.m. each night

WHERE: BU Bridge Between Cambridge and Boston

Honestly today’s blog post is more to get me to write something because I know I have been lazy. Nothing particularly new happened, this is one of those oft-told stories of harrowing experience, conversation with a motorist, and acclaim from a nearby witness.

For starters, it was a rainy morning. Often this means I wear extra-vibrant clothes to make myself more easily visible to the armored ones I share the road with, but today I sufficed with a light-reflective courier bag and one reflective ankle-cuff. These, combined with my lights, make me relatively conspicuous.

Except if you drive a blue Honda minivan. But, we’ll get back to that after some more build-up….

This morning I went on an errand to the local RCN building (in Arlington) to drop off a couple of cable converters. It was a light rain, and the temperature wasn’t horrible, so I was mostly enjoying the ride except for the occasional red light when I would stop and my glasses would fog up. Note to self: start wearing contact lenses again until the warmer months return.

I was all done with this chore and beginning to switch to the next one (gathering my costume apparel) when I headed back towards Cambridge and Boston via Mass. Ave. For those not familiar with the area of Mass. Ave. in Arlington and Medford: it’s quite wide, but typically problematic with cracks and wrinkles all over. No problems here, though, vehicles were quite respectful this morning.

After I passed the turn towards Alewife the road feature I call the bike share “line” appeared. Cambridge has done some funky things with Mass. Ave., it seems they couldn’t quite figure out what to do to help cyclists – there’s sections with bike lanes, sharrows, and a line with intermittent bike stencils, depending on what area you’re in. The line is my least favorite, even though the area with the sharrows is practically impossible to ride within as it has quite poor road conditions.

Bike lane

sharrow

Bike stencil

So, it was a short time after passing the turn-off towards Alewife that I was buzzed by her. Blue Honda minivan. One occupant: driver. I quickly read the license plate and committed it to short-term memory, but before long I had quite forgotten it. (Well, it was short term memory. *shrug*)

Then the usual Mass. Ave. thing happened: I caught up within the next light or two, and passed her. This is not unusual, I stop at all the red lights but being a bike with some marked space on the road I stop right up at the light. Other areas where it’s too sketchy to do this safely I’ll hang back behind the last car in line I come up to and take the lane until the light goes “green”. But, good ol’ Mass. Ave. lets me creep up to the front almost every time.

When I caught up to her I leered over and kind of gave her “the look” as I passed her, then proceeded to wait dutifully at the light. Light went green, traffic went into motion, all the vehicles passed me with at least two feet distance (not the legal amount, but whatever,) until blue minivan comes zooming past within a few inches. Again.

Well, it was still Mass. Ave. and there were plenty of lights ahead. I caught up to her just before Harvard Square at the bus stop. I stopped, waved, and she rolled down her automatic window.

“Hi,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know that you passed me, twice, with very little space between us. Just inches.”

Now, most conversations I’ve had with drivers in similar circumstances would usually cause me to prepare for the usual response in the next moment: my life being threatened. But, it was not so! I may have found one of the nicest, albeit somewhat daft, motorist of the day! “I’d really appreciate if you’d give a little more room.” She nodded and her eyes told a whole story of unexpected shock. She said not a word.

Maybe she didn’t know that what she was doing was endangering me. She had had a couple of feet of space between her left side and the normal lane lines, but hugged the right anyways despite my presence there.

At that moment the light we were at turned green and I cut the one-sided conversation short. I said my piece, she seemed to take it in. I looked to the right at the bus stop and see a dude in bright yellow, bike balanced in one hand, giving the thumbs-up with the other, and he gave a smiling nod which I gladly returned.

Thumbs up

For those who are interested in “green” ideas I encourage you to check out this write-up by Alex Wilson (Green Building Advisor) entitled “Transportation Energy Intensity” of Buildings. Via: TreeHugger

I wanted to come up with a metric for the transportation energy use associated with buildings that was parallel to the metric used to measure the energy intensity of a building–for heating, cooling, lighting, computers and other uses. This is commonly reported in thousands of British Thermal Units, or Btus, of energy per square foot per year (kBtu/sf-yr). The U.S. Department of Energy reports that the average energy intensity of office buildings in the U.S. is 93 kBtu/sf-yr. If I could calculate the average energy consumption for commuting using this same metric, I’d be able to show how the commuting energy use compared with the direct building energy use. I called this value “transportation energy intensity.”

How Americans Get to Work

The results were really interesting. Using these admittedly crude assumptions, I found that office building energy use for commuting averages 121 kBtu/sf-yr. That’s 30% more energy than an average office building uses itself. So it takes more energy to get to and from our office buildings than those buildings use directly!

So, buildings are supposed to be more efficient, but we spend off so much energy getting to these buildings that even the most noble attempt to “green” a living or office space may be countermanded by our transportation expenditures. This is definitely something to consider for improved sustainability.

Alex concluded brilliantly:

For me, even though I live in a rural area, seven miles from my office, this understanding of transportation energy intensity inspires me to get on my bike and enjoy that invigorating (and sometimes mentally productive) ride to work.

Here, here! Riding a bike to/from home/work is an excellent move towards improving one’s own energy intensity – and you’ll develop some fantastic leg muscles in the process.

This will probably be relevant to you if you bike over this dam, be warned.

DCR CREWS WORKING ON CRAIGIE DAM

Expect occasional delays by the Museum of Science

WHAT: Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) crews will be making repairs to the Craigie Dam Bridge Road by the Museum of Science. During the work, traffic will be stopped occasionally to allow the movement of machinery.

WHEN: Friday, Monday, Tuesday August 28, August 31, September 1, 9 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. each day

WHERE: Craigie Dam Bridge Road between Cambridge and Boston. Near the Museum of Science

You, my few readers, may recall the recent Boston.com article on Boston’s unruly riders, or the op-ed that left a particular vomit-taste in any cyclist’s mouth. Finally we may have something sane to consider and discuss: roads are designed to kill (which is another op-ed.) Excerpt:

I took a photograph of the scene where I had found the runner. When I showed this picture to friends from Sweden they asked, “This is where you live? This is your neighborhood? Your streets are designed to kill people.’’ They said that the thin painted white lines at the intersection could not be seen at dawn, nor was there a raised bump to or a narrowing of the road to demarcate the intersection and slow down traffic. They said the speed limit should be 30 kilometers per hour (about 18.6 miles per hour) or less if we wanted pedestrians to have much of a chance of surviving. They also said traffic lights increased the number of deaths because people often speed up when the light turns yellow.

 

When Sweden removed red lights from intersections and replaced them with traffic circles or rotaries, death rates at these intersections fell by 80 to 90 percent.

This is the closest article I’ve yet seen that seems in line with Liveable Streets: the engineering is directly related to the use of the system. The usual discussion page is also available.

In addition to this op-ed there is a letter in response to the Unruly riders article as written by MassBike. (Here is the discussion page.) Concluding excerpt:

By all means, let us build better roads, which lead people into safer behavior by design. But each of us can help make everyone safer now, today, by more often following the rules of the road whether driving, bicycling, or walking.

We need more of this!

From the NYT Freakonomics blog:

The city of Vancouver has turned one lane of traffic on the busy Burrard Bridge into a bicycle route. Critics predicted chaos, but the first day of the experiment found traffic moving smoothly. This seems to be in line with recent studies suggesting that road closures actually lead to fewer traffic jams.

Wait a minute, a bridge is losing a car lane to bike lanes? Critics predicted chaos? Hmm, something about all this this sounds too familiar.

In fact, the Burrard Bridge in Vancouver is not too unlike the BU bridge: it’s a busy commuter bridge, with a geographical locale not too unlike Boston’s:

Though, unlike the BU bridge which has four lanes, the Burrard bridge has six lanes, and the lane closure conversion to a bike lane is just a non-permanent six-month experiment until the next round of planning as opposed to the immediate permanent painted bike lanes the BU bridge is getting. The other major difference is that the Burrard bridge bike lanes are configured differently:

The entire width of one of its two sidewalks is a dedicated northbound bike lane, while the entire width of the car lane is the other directional bike lane. And best of all, both of these bike lanes are protected from moving traffic by concrete barriers. Compare that to the unprotected lanes the BU bridge is getting:

Since the Burrard Bridge lane openings last Monday, there have been indeed mixed feelings since last week’s opening of the bike lane about whether traffic has improved or not. Regardless, it will be interesting to see further effects of the lane closure over the next six months as a possible indicator of what could be the shape of things to come here in Boston.

The research paper mentioned in the Freakonomics post makes an interesting case for road closure actually causing more efficient traffic, seemingly counter-intuitive to the notion that road closures always cause delays. This article sums up the point that “when individual drivers seek the quickest route, they sometimes end up slowing things down for everybody.” Defining traffic inefficiency as the “Price of Anarchy”, a ratio of equilibrium flow of traffic to  the socially optimal flow of traffic,  the authors of the paper suggest that by closing certain roads, the Price of Anarchy would decrease; people would be forced to take a less selfish route, improving overall traffic flow for everybody.

Boston was actually one of the cities chosen for theoretical analysis:

Using Google maps, some assumptions such as constant traffic of 10,000 cars/hour on each point-to-point road and a speed limit of 35mph, the authors ran some mathematical analysis, they found that closing the roads indicated by the dotted lines in the map above would actually improve overall traffic going from Harvard Square to Boston Common. In other words, shutting off that entire dotted section of Mass. Ave. in Cambridge would actually improve overall congestion and reduce overall delays. On the other hand, shutting off the Comm. Ave Section colored in red would worsen overall congestion and increase delays. All the roads in blue are neutral to road delays if closed off, meaning that theoretically the BU bridge could be shut off and traffic would neither flow worse nor better, with zero delays

Based on the evidence from the research, could we infer that perhaps overall congestion in Boston isn’t affected much by the BU bridge’s cut to three lanes from four, and won’t be any worse when it’s cut to two during renovation or when it eventually turns into three plus two bike lanes? Maybe. Although, the research makes the case for road closures, not lane closures, meaning a road has to be shut off for drivers to seek alternate routes. So theoretically closing the bridge completely during rush hour wouldn’t have any effect on overall traffic flow. Motorists might grumble, but they’d get home in same amount of time if they knew alternative routes.

As a cyclist, my advice to car commuters in the Boston area to avoiding traffic congestion would be to simply get on a bike and bike-commute to work, like it appears many motorists in Vancouver already have since last week. Some of the motorists who spoke at the last DCR meeting to complain about the lane reconfigurations drove from Brookline to Cambridge on a daily basis, a very easily biked distance.  Bike lanes are coming, so why not join the fun?

I love the New England Aquarium.

On a visit there earlier this summer, I found myself with a stupid smile on my face, grinning at the penguins and pointing at the sharks like a [well-mannered] 5 year old. After oogling the jellyfish exhibit, we burst out into the sunshine to hop back on our bikes, weaving through traffic and unpredictable taxis.

And while I am definitely small fry on my bike, the ability to pedal through stand still traffic still makes me feel like a shark. Or maybe a ray.

I almost want to keep this hat – it’s one of my all-time favorites. But hey, I’m sure a real Boston shark out there could put it to good use.

Recently I marginally helped an intriguing venture to assess several Boston roads for possible bike lane inclusion. I wish I could have spared more time to the effort, and I guess I’m not the only one saying that since in a little over a month’s allotment only 16 of a desired 50 roads were surveyed. This was work spread out over several individuals who volunteered, and of which I probably helped the least or near least. (I’d offer excuses, but this is a bike story, not a work-woe story. If you need to ask: woe is work.)

The idea behind the activity was to find out what roads are already wide enough to support a bike lane, with particular preference to roads that connect any other already-established bike networking routes or major areas of the city. Ideally some roads are already wide enough to include a bike lane, and those would be cheapest and fastest for the city to adapt. The survey work involved detailing any observations from a biker’s point of view, such as metal plates in the road or incorrect alignment of gutter plates, as well as measuring road cross-sections with one of these:

The wheel I was loaned took measurements in .12″. Everyone else’s read in .10″. I have no idea why the wheel I used was any different, nor what the significance of .12″ is (anyone care to fill me in?), but that’s what I had to walk across the road many times with and note the distance of the center of every line of paint (parking, white lines, yellow lines, etc.) The person who collected all the data we obtained had to write a conversion routine and apply it to all of my collected numbers.

Someone brought up the point of “why do we have to take these measurements, wouldn’t the city already know all of this?” And the answer I heard given started out as “well, ya see…” and sorrowfully explained that the measurements currently available are all too inaccurate to be of much use. Our measurements, as accurate as they can be, still need to account for several inches for error or variance between measured points. We took measurements wherever the road widths changed a recognizable amount, which may be often but not necessarily often enough. Whatever our measurements come out to be will be better than what was there before, and up to date.

I hope that something comes of this attempt, and that we’re not left oggling the void of another action->no-action response from the city. I am disappointed about how little I chipped in for this, but would feel cheated if it all amounts to nothing. Kudos to LiveableStreets for putting up the measurement wheels that we got on loan, and to the Boston Bikes initiative that was all under the auspices of: I hope to be of more use on the next venture.

Bike vs. cars vs. bus. How much space do these modes of transportation take up for the same number of people? Thank you for finding out for us, Muenster.

From the site:

• Bicycle: 72 people are transported on 72 bikes, which requires 90 square meters.
• Car: Based on an average occupancy of 1.2 people per car, 60 cars are needed to transport 72 people, which takes 1,000 square meters.
• Bus: 72 people can be transported on 1 bus, which only requires 30 square meters of space and no permanent parking space, since it can be parked elsewhere.

I really like the looks of this. This is a good solution to accommodate bicycling and pedestrian needs while calming motorist traffic.

I am left wondering how this could ever be adopted in Boston. Yeah, right.

I really like the looks of this. This is a good solution to accommodate bicycling and pedestrian needs while calming motorist traffic.

I am left wondering how this could ever be adopted in Boston. Yeah, right.