New GHSA Report Gets It Wrong

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A recent report by the Governors Highway Safety Association attracted a great deal of attention, but the way they present the data is misleading. The report implies that riding a bike in California has gotten more dangerous in the past few years. In fact, bicycling is almost twice as safe in California as it was in 2010. And it’s getting safer.

The report highlights the increase in the total number of bicycle-related injuries and fatalities, noting that California has the most fatalities among the 50 states, with 138 fatal motor vehicle/bicycle collisions in 2012. The report fails to consider that these numbers are high because California is the most populous state, with more bicycle trips than any other state. In fact, he number of people riding bikes has nearly doubled since 2010. A review of the official numbers provided by the California Highway Patrol (including all bicycle injuries) in the context of the official transportation report provided by Caltrans, gives a very different picture of bicycle safety trends.

Trends from 2000 to 2012 in California (from our analysis of SWITRS data):
Bicycling is up 88{850a63fa8a72bae4d6bfa3f1eda9f619cddace10f9053ede128e2914f9ca5a15}.
The bicycle injury rate per trip is down 45{850a63fa8a72bae4d6bfa3f1eda9f619cddace10f9053ede128e2914f9ca5a15}.
The bicycle fatality rate per trip is down 39{850a63fa8a72bae4d6bfa3f1eda9f619cddace10f9053ede128e2914f9ca5a15}.

An LA Times article on the report didn’t catch any of these positive trends either. The report’s misinterpretation of the data can easily skew public perception of riding a bike as a risky activity.

First things first: riding a bike is not dangerous. The rate of bicycle accidents is on the decline throughout the United States, as emphasized in the strong reaction to the study from bicycling advocates around the country.

Once you dive into the details of the report, especially the calls to action, it starts to seem less anti-bike. “Roads were built to accommodate motor vehicles with little concern for pedestrians and bicyclists.”

The report’s intention seems to be to compel policy leaders to invest in better bike infrastructure and more encouragement of bicycling. They highlight some benefits of an increase in bicycle riding — health and environmental — but fail to recognize that more bikes on the road make our communities safer overall, or that the more people ride bicycles, the safer bike riding gets. It’s interesting to note that the economic benefits of biking, although highlighted in the sources they cite, have been completely ignored in the report.

Although the report’s call for more infrastructure is good, its specific prescriptions are outdated. Of course “cycle paths” (It’s unclear, but class I bikeways, we assume) are not always feasible because our communities have been built “to accommodate motor vehicles.” So building bikeways that give the same protection as off-street cycle paths built on existing roadways seems logical, right?

Here were the suggestions in the report:

Painted bike lanes are good, but often are not enough. Bicycle boulevards are pleasant, but often out of the way, and can have too many stop signs to be an efficient transportation route. Their last two suggestions, which would separate bicyclists from motor traffic at the intersections are good ones.

Personal safety is not the only reason to promote protected bike lanes, but they are essential to to make direct, efficient, welcoming bicycle infrastructure built for everyone ages 8-80. The report recognizes that protected bike lanes that are being implemented across the country both increase user safety and compel more people to ride a bike:

“Research indicates that bicyclists prefer separate street facilities over purely recreational paths (Nuworsoo & Cooper, 2013) and states are responding by attempting to improve on-road bike lane safety. For example, Illinois is piloting a barrier-protected bike lane. In Washington D.C., two innovative treatments have been instituted – a buffered center median bike lane and a two-way cycle track (Goodno et al., 2012). Both treatments, which involve dedicated road space with buffers between bicycles and motor vehicles, have increased bicycle use.”

This might be the first time that the GHSA has recognized that modern bikeways are imperative to get more people to ride bikes. California lawmakers know how important it is. Pledge your support today to win more protected bike lanes in your community at calbike.org/protectedbikeways.

 

Caltrans Developing Protected Bike Lane Guidelines

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Your California Bicycle Coalition is advising Caltrans on the guidelines for protected bike lanes as part of a select committee that is reviewing the current draft. The committee is working fast to meet the official deadline of December 31 set by our bill, the Protected Bikeway Act of 2014 (AB 1193, Ting), that defined a new class of bike facility. The early draft of the guidance gives some clues to the direction Caltrans is taking with this new facility type.

Available in a “Design Information Bulletin,” draft guidance so far indicates a few priorities. First, the official name of what is colloquially called a “protected bike lane” and what some planners call a “cycle track” is a “class 4 separated bikeway.” This distinction preserves the legal right to ride a bicycle in the roadway adjacent to a so-called protected bike lane.

Caltrans is choosing to emulate existing design manuals rather than start from scratch, directing engineers to the FHWA’s new manual on separated bikeways. However, the guidelines do not direct engineers to some of the best manuals in the world, like the CROW manual from the Netherlands, NACTO’s Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Focus on Cycling from Copenhagen, and some elements from the Massachusetts guidelines which have yet to be released.

The proposed guidelines fail to address several issues we are working to get included. They do not provide guidance on how to continue a separated bikeway through an intersection, even though California’s own City of Davis has already installed a similar intersection. It must do better to address the “safety of vulnerable populations, such as children, seniors, persons with impaired vision, and persons of limited mobility.”

Your California Bicycle Coalition is working to improve the draft guidelines to lead to the best guidance in the United States. Our goal is to ensure that local engineers have the guidance and resources necessary to meet the needs of local communities and the designs that fit every community’s needs.

We’ve recruited a team of advisors including some writers from the FHWA guide, the designer behind the website protectedintersection.com, folks from our friends at Alta design, along with several passionate local advocates who are working to ensure the best user experience. Caltrans must not make the same mistakes and listen to the same voices and pontifications that have been killing people riding bikes on California streets for decades. We must do better.

 

Caltrans sets familiar-sounding goal to triple bicycling by 2020

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Last week, Caltrans released a new Strategic Management Plan to chart the course of the Department’s work for the next 5 years. The Plan outlines five cross-cutting goals and dozens of strategic objectives that Caltrans aims to achieve by 2020, under categories that range from ‘safety and health’ to ‘sustainability, livability, and economy’.

There are a number of objectives in the plan worth highlighting, but chief among them from our perspective is the strategic objective to triple the bicycling mode share statewide by 2020 relative to 2010-2012 levels. Why does that sound so familiar? Because it’s identical to the California Bicycle Coalition’s lead goal from our current Strategic Plan.

In addition to tripling bicycling, Caltrans also aims to double walking, double transit use, and reduce vehicle-miles traveled per capita by 15 percent, all while increasing safety across all travel modes by 10 percent! These goals are more ambitious than any we’ve seen in a statewide or regional transportation plan in California. With this Strategic Plan, Caltrans is clearly aiming to establish itself as the new leader in the State’s effort to transform the transportation sector and create sustainable, active communities.

Here at the California Bicycle Coalition and along with our state coalition partners, we are thrilled to see this new direction out of Caltrans and commend the leadership at the Department for the strong statement in support of active transportation. In my first week as the new CalBike Policy Director, the timing of this opportunity to partner with Caltrans to achieve our shared goals couldn’t be better! One near-term action that would advance these goals would be to increase funding for the Active Transportation Program by $100 million in the 2015-16 state budget, and ensure the ATP is adequately staffed and resourced at Caltrans to be effective.

Our coalition will be meeting with Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty and management staff in the coming weeks to discuss how we can work together to collectively advance the Strategic Plan goals. Join us in this effort by signing the petition to increase ATP funding and renewing your commitment to CalBike today!

-Jeanie Ward-Waller
Policy Director

ATP Funded projects have been released

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Comment by Dave Snyder

The California Transportation Commission (CTC) released the list of projects recommended for funding in the first part of the first cycle of the Active Transportation Program, the only state pot of funding dedicated exclusively to walking and biking. So far, we can draw three conclusions:

  1. The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) staff can do amazing things when they have to; April Nitsos and Teresa McMillan pulled together an all-hands-on-deck team of ten Caltrans staffers from throughout the agency to evaluate more than 772 applications for more than $768 million in requests;
  2. bicycle projects probably did not benefit from the recent increase in funding;
  3. there’s not enough money in the ATP.

In all, staff recommended 145 projects to be given $184 million of the statewide pot and the $37 million in the small urban/rural pot of funding. An additional $147m will be available from metropolitan planning organizations who will manage their own competitive grant processes in the next few months. Together, the $368 million at stake represents three fiscal years of ATP funding.

Remember: this may sound like a lot of money, but California’s total state and federal transportation budget this year is more than $18 billion.

It’s hard to tell from the project list — which is a problem in itself — but it appears that stand-alone bike projects got about $12 million and mixed bike/ped projects for adult transportation (such as multi-use trails) got about $104 million. Safe Routes to School projects received about $119 million.

The Active Transportation Program is a novel combination of various programs that formerly funded biking and walking, including the now-defunct Bicycle Transportation Account. The California Bicycle Coalition supported it because it provided a 30{850a63fa8a72bae4d6bfa3f1eda9f619cddace10f9053ede128e2914f9ca5a15} increase in funding for bike/ped projects, because the bigger pot — $129 million annually — provided more opportunities for funding whole networks of bikeways, and because it attracted more political attention than a series of smaller projects. At $129 million, the ATP is 18 times larger than the $7.2 million Bicycle Transportation Account.

There was not a single network-oriented project funded, but there were 16 projects funded at more than $3 million each, including the biggest award of $10.9 million for a long multi-use trail (multi-use includes golf carts!) in Coachella Valley.

The long list of unfunded projects totaling $547 million represents a sad tale of backward priorities. Safety improvements on the route my partner uses to ride home, a kickoff of San Francisco’s Vision Zero campaign, and improvements to a Santa Monica bike path are just three of many worthy projects that will have to wait at least two to three years before funding is released, unless other funding is found.

Our next steps are to

  1. find additional funding for the worthy projects that did not get funded by the paltry Active Transportation Program;
  2. recommend improvements for the ATP’s next round; and
  3. seek to increase the size of the ATP so it has a better chance of coming close to meeting the need.

Governor’s May revised budget ignores Active Transportation Program

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On May 14 (Bike to Work Day in LA and the Bay Area), the Governor released his “May revise” budget proposal, and despite over $1 billion in new available revenues, we were disappointed that the Active Transportation Program (ATP) did not see an increase in funding. Earlier this spring, 120 organizations statewide called for an additional $100 million to build out bicycling and walking networks statewide, and high demand for the program at the local level far outpaced available funding in the first grant cycle. A hallmark of Caltrans sustainability efforts, the ATP is California’s statewide competitive grant program dedicated to increasing walking and bicycling, especially in underserved communities.

The May revise includes an expenditure plan for $2.2 billion in Cap-and-Trade revenue from auction proceeds–more than twice the amount in the January budget proposal–which is the most likely source of new ATP dollars. However, most of the Cap-and-Trade revenue is slated to boost funding to the same set of programs in the January expenditure plan, with a small portion directed to a few new programs related to drought management, energy efficiency, and healthy soils.

While walking and bicycling improvements are technically eligible in several of the Cap-and-Trade programs that received a boost in the May revise, these programs primarily focus on public transit and affordable housing development. These programs’ constraints on project financing and development limit their ability to fund meaningful walking and bicycling projects critical for shifting the nearly ⅔ of trips in California under 1 mile that are currently taken by car. Walking and biking must be a core component of the Cap-and-Trade expenditures in order to reduce vehicles miles traveled (VMT) and ultimately, to help the California achieve our ambitious climate change goals.

The ATP continues to be the most effective source for robust bicycling and walking projects that create safe travel corridors, connect people to transit, provide Safe Routes to School, improve intersections, and close key gaps between destinations for people who walk and bicycle. Furthermore, these projects are essential to improving access to transit and regional economic opportunity for California’s rural disadvantaged communities. Our broad coalition–which includes environmental, affordable housing, transit, parks, public health, social equity, and walking and bicycling advocates, among others–will continue to push for $100 million directly into the Active Transportation Program in the final budget.

The Legislature will review the May revise in a second round of budget hearings over the next few weeks, and the final 2015-16 State Budget must be adopted by June 15.

Support the push for more ATP funding at bit.ly/IncreaseATP.

Statement issued by the Coalition for Active Transportation Leadership including the California Bicycle Coalition, California Walks, California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, California Park and Recreation Society, Safe Routes to School National Partnership, Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, TransForm, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, and PolicyLink.

SSTI review of Caltrans scathing and hopeful

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I just took advantage of a long plane trip to finish reading this long and thorough review of Caltrans written by the State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI). It’s surprising to see such stinging criticism of a state agency commissioned by another agency and it’s hopeful to see a roadmap for transformation of the agency.

SSTI calls for a major “culture change” at Caltrans. It lauds a 2010 Caltrans effort called Smart Mobility then goes on to say that Caltrans “has almost completely ignored the report and failed to implement its important recommendations.” The report reveals with undisguised disdain a number of senior managers who think that “bicycle and pedestrian facilities are not part of Caltrans’ mission.” One of four “first priorities” perfectly matches our top legislative goal: the “department should support … legislation to end the archaic practice of imposing state rules on local streets for bicycle facilities.”

The report backs up my own perspective of Caltrans. The agency reminds me of the early 1990s in San Francisco, when I got my start in advocacy. We had allies, including one bicycle coordinator in a position we worked hard to create. Even the agency director was supportive. But the mission of the agency was to move cars, and bikes were just not important. We had to argue for every accommodation. Coming to Caltrans is like going back 20 years.

With the SSTI report backing up the good work of our allies at Caltrans including Director Malcolm Dougherty and with the leadership of Transportation Secretary Brian Kelly and his deputy Kate White (who got her start in San Francisco in the 1990s), I am optimistic that we can expect culture change at Caltrans. It won’t happen overnight, but in far sooner than twenty years Caltrans will be where the San Francisco agency is today. The SFMTA’s traffic division is called the Sustainable Streets and their goal is to move people, not cars, and they understand they need to increase biking and walking to achieve their goal.

Congratulations to Brian Kelly and everyone at the Transportation Agency and Caltrans for heartily accepting this report and thanks in advance for implementing its recommendations. You have our support and we’ll have your back as you make the bold changes necessary to become a leader for sustainable transportation.

 

SSTI Independent Caltrans Review 1.28.14

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SSTI Independent Caltrans Review 1.28.14

This report, commissioned by the California State Transportation Agency, thoroughly reviews Caltrans and finds an agency in dire need of a culture change. Its indictment of the agency’s processes and perspective is scathing but it also provides a roadmap to leverage the agency’s strengths to transform it into an modern leader of sustainable transportation.

How NYC is Stifling the Critics

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According to a new study, bicyclists are more law-abiding since the City revitalized its infrastructure with bikeways, bike sharing, and a commitment to Vision Zero. It seems that when bicyclists are respected by the City, they respect the City’s laws in kind.

In New York and elsewhere, significant opposition to pro-bike initiatives has been justified with the perception that bike riders act like they are superior to other road users by showing a contempt for the rules of the road and posing a danger to pedestrians, motorists, and themselves. Critics thought that the bike-share program would make it worse and increase injuries along with the millions of new trips on public roads. Contrary to those concerns, this study, released in January by Hunter College, shows that the behavior of people riding bikes has become more legal and that bicycling-related injuries are decreasing. While safety for bicyclists is much more dependent on infrastructure and the behavior of drivers than the behavior of bicyclists, this study should stifle the argument that scofflaws don’t deserve safe infrastructure.

Compared to four years ago, more riders are using “bikeways” and stopping or pausing at red lights. Fewer riders are pedaling against traffic, which is probably because the City has been installing counter-flow lanes on one-way streets, providing bikeways in the directions that people are actually riding. Most importantly, more people (including more women), are riding their bikes. With more people on the roads, there is safety in numbers; as former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg explained: “The bottom line is that since we’ve had more bicycle lanes and more bicycles — there’s always accidents, and I’m not making light of it — but total accidents and deaths continues to go down.”

The study, Bike Lanes + Bike Share = Bike Safety, includes observational data about 4,316 bicyclists at 98 intersections. Students recorded behavior and demographic information. The authors of the study, Dr. William Milczarski and Dr. Peter Tuckel, compared this data with a similar study they conducted in 2009.

“Everybody had predicted with the Citi Bike [bike-share program] riders that there would be a spike in the number of accidents,” says Tuckel. “I think it was the same people that predicted that the Broncos were going to win the Super Bowl. It didn’t materialize.” Indeed, the study found that Citi Bike riders were especially law-abiding, and injuries have been minor and rare.

Tuckel continues, “I think what is happening now in New York City is that drivers realize that even though they have had a dominant position on the road, the roads now have to be shared. Drivers are becoming more aware of cyclists, and cyclists are becoming more aware of drivers. It’s going to result in safer habits for drivers and cyclists.”

This is a perfect example of how better infrastructure shouldn’t be stalled because of perceived problems in how people are using the road — better infrastructure solves those problems. Right now, building modern bicycle infrastructure like the protected bikeways that have been pioneered in New York is too difficult or banned in California. Join CalBike as a member today and help us pass AB 1193 to build better bikeways for everyone.

Influencing the Active Transportation Guidelines

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The California Bicycle Coalition is representing local advocates and bicycle programs as we advise the California Transportation Commission on the guidelines for the new Active Transportation Program. The ATP replaces five other funding sources for which bike projects were  eligible and represents a 35{850a63fa8a72bae4d6bfa3f1eda9f619cddace10f9053ede128e2914f9ca5a15} increase in funding for biking and walking projects. This spring $130 million will be distributed to local agencies and the state will hold a $130 million competitive call for projects

Our advocacy is designed to focus the ATP on three goals:

  • What will do the most to increase the proportion of trips by bike?
  • How can we use the ATP to leverage funds from other sources whether federal, state, or local?
  • How can the ATP foster good planning?

Among our key recommendations is a request to use the ATP as leverage to get Caltrans to update their design guidelines. We also want to use it to compel local agencies to implement complete streets policies. It makes sense that the state should not be funding bike and ped projects for jurisdictions that don’t carefully be sure to include bike and ped accommodations in existing projects.

Finally, we’re working to update the requirements to have a bicycle plan in place. One of the benefits of the now-defunct Bicycle Transportation Account was its requirement that an applicant must have an approved bicycle plan that addressed certain goals. In the next iteration, we seek to update that requirement to encourage bike plans that don’t merely address a range of topics — i.e. indicate where you’re putting bike parking — but require certain benchmarks to be met — i.e. indicate how much bike parking is necessary to meet projected demand at every significant transit station. We look forward to working with local partners and the California Transportation Commission to fine tune our recommendations.

The future of California’s transportation in light of proposed changes

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A new federal transportation program has cut dedicated bike/ped funding by a third, but it  maintained the program’s flexibility. The California Transportation Agency has proposed using that flexibility to actually increase bike/ped funding. However, the increase of approximately 30{850a63fa8a72bae4d6bfa3f1eda9f619cddace10f9053ede128e2914f9ca5a15} is part of a plan to eliminate a number of long standing bike/ped programs into a larger consolidated Active Transportation Program (ATP).

Read the full report: CaliforniaBikeBudgetProposal2013

The California Bicycle Coalition supports the consolidation of existing programs into the ATP because it supports the single most important strategy to accomplish our goal of tripling bicycling by 2020: increasing the state’s investment in bicycling infrastructure. As this report shows, the ATP’s funding is a small fraction of the $8 billion needed to build the necessary bicycle networks, but it is an incredibly cost-effective investment as this report also shows. The ATP is a good start, but its size should dramatically increase and its rules should leverage much more local funding and locally-controlled funding. These proposals will enable more Californians to bike and induce millions more bike trips every day.

Eight billion dollars over the next ten years, say, is a small fraction of the nearly $300 billion expected to be spent on transportation in that time frame, and it will have sensational benefits. For every $1 million invested in bicycle infrastructure there is a $2.8 million dollar return on healthcare. Replacing short distance trips (2-mile trips account for 40{850a63fa8a72bae4d6bfa3f1eda9f619cddace10f9053ede128e2914f9ca5a15} of all trips in California) with bike trips could change communities and help achieve our state’s greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. In communities with safe biking networks bikers shop more frequently, closer to home, and spend more per capita, partially because 75{850a63fa8a72bae4d6bfa3f1eda9f619cddace10f9053ede128e2914f9ca5a15} of every dollar spent on gas is dedicated to crude oil.

We propose a number of ways that the state can induce the increase in bicycling investment necessary to triple the amount of biking in California:

  1. Establish an official goal of tripling biking, and require annual reporting.
  2. Require transit capital projects to dedicate 1{850a63fa8a72bae4d6bfa3f1eda9f619cddace10f9053ede128e2914f9ca5a15} of funding to strictly bicycle access.
  3. Strengthen the complete streets requirement by requiring safe bike accommodations on every project or a set-aside 1{850a63fa8a72bae4d6bfa3f1eda9f619cddace10f9053ede128e2914f9ca5a15} of the budget for bike safety.
  4. Increase the ATP to at least $300 million per year.

We also propose a number of ways the state’s investment can leverage the greatest change on behalf of more bicycle-friendly communities:

  1. Provide some very large grants, in the range of $25-$50 million, for communities that are prepared to develop whole networks that meet certain standards and who are willing to match state funding with a similar amount of local money.
  2. Provide some relatively small grants to projects that are similar to the projects currently funded by the Safe Routes to School program and the Bicycle Transportation Account.
  3. Require the adoption of strong complete streets policies to qualify for state funding.
  4. Hire staff at the California Transportation Commission to ensure the success of the Active Transportation Program.
  5. Require the incorporation of best practice in bikeway designs including the use of protected bikeways.

 

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