Are BMX bikes?

Many cyclists don't defend BMX access rights in parks and on roads. And what about roller blades, skateboards, scooters, golf carts, horses, and segways. Are these vehicles too that should be able to travel on the road?

BMX bikes are an absolute joy for
short trips and great around potholes. If more people rode BMX we'd
have safer slower streets that are really fun.

The problem is that we have given our streets over to toxic exhaust
spewing boxes of killer steel couches. And then pay with sales taxes
after the couches deteriorate the street. And then adjust our mobility
options to only include what's feasible with autos at auto speeds. This
sets up conflicts between say boards or Segways and Pedestrian about
sidewalk usage; and bikes and pedestrians or equestrians about trail
usage- when the real conflict is happily running us over with immunity.
And then pompous city councils go out and legislate what's ok; as you
caught in the paper today.

For example the Grand Boulevard (the El Camino planning process
currently underway) should include a CurbBBB lane. Thats a curb lane,
only for Boards, Bikes, and Buses, which will work if the bus frequency
is less than 15 mins like we have here on the Peninsula. The second
lane would be the auto lane. More options and a faster commute times
would make buses feasible as a transport mode on El Camino. One
argument against this is that we need infinite capacity to accommodate
the 5PM rat run! 'nuf said.

Similarly the Air Resources Board is tying itself up in knots trying to
come up with high tech zero co2 transport modes like electric cars,
PHEVs etc. to tackle the 50% of GHGs from our steel couches which used
as directed per the owner's manual , are smoking the planet. Instead ARB
must enable zero co2 modes that exist like boards and bikes by giving
cities clean air credits to make at least two crossing streets through
a downtown 15 mph (similar to a bike boulevard like Bryant except for
the 15 mph designed in requirement.) That way drivers can continue to
kill children and grandparents and the planet everywhere else but bikes
and boards have a real option.

Give all kids much more options
that just access to one miserable park to fight BMX versus boards.

http://www.topix.com/forum/source/redwood-city-daily-news/
TLA29TF0EIK7ADMRC

At park, no bikers allowed

Officials to build fence to keep skateboarders safe

By Shaun Bishop / Daily News Staff Writer
A new fence around a popular Redwood City skate park
that would keep bikers out and skateboarders in could
be erected as soon as January, Redwood City parks
officials say.
Article continues

Bikes are sustainable and green for the planet.

Saving the planet from global warming is as simple as building up a fat savings account.

Fossil fuel usage is the cause of global warming. Producing goods for consumptions is killing the planet. Not using fossil fuels saves the planet. Lets look at the numbers

1- 40% of California green house gases come from transportation. Use transit. The $5500/- per year cost of owning a car and operating a car less the cost of bus passes for four of $1440 results in a net savings of $4060/- per year. The cost of not having a garage reduces housing cost from 15% to 30% which means a one time savings of at least $60,000/- Or like one percent of all American commuters get a bike ($20/- at Goodwill) and with a $60/- tool kit become truly independent, fit and healthy and save the $4060/-

Carbon free walking and biking with some transit are the only transport modes that can save the planet. The car is only trying to take over the planet and consume our food. A consumerist attitude would look to guide you into buying a hybrid. Don't fall for smothering the planet in less GHGs, which are still GHG. Dump the car off to a parts recycler instead. If transit is your goal use your savings from not driving to move to be on transit closer to work. Staying in the suburbs away from work only locks you into a mortgage and a lousy job.

2- 25% of GHG are produced in homes from using electricity and natural gas for cooling and heating. Instead extend your eves with corrugated tin for natural shading in the summer and open your windows. Wear a ski hat and warm clothes in the winter. Put your average $2500 PGE savings in the bank. You can reduce your $300/- per year gas cooking by building a solar oven from scrap but that's the next step. Washing dishes by hand and using the dish water for plants can save an additional $240 per year. Replacing a lawn with a vegetable patch can save an additional $1200/- per year. Remove bulbs from sockets so that they can't be left on or consume power. Unplug appliances. Junk your TV and take a hike. Net savings $600/- a year.

Consumerism would have you believe that expensive energy star appliances are the only way to a sustainable life! Its a sustainable life if you want to suck up to the rich and famous, a martha steward life. Don't buy it, sustain your bank account. Use some of your savings for better insulation at a later date. Be careful less can buy more here too.

3- 25% of GHG come from industry using fossil fuels and degrading human rights to make the throw away trinkets that junk up our homes. Put the money in the bank. If you must have junk first look at your local freecycle.org to see if you can get it for free. Then check your local goodwill or equivalent store. Then see if you can make it or make do without it. Then borrow from a neighbor. But don't choke the planet for your vanity.as the first option.

Consumerists would have you believe a house stocked with the latest power consuming gadgets is necessary for the economy. Its necessary to justify the war and some bank accounts and has nothing to do with the economy you want for a healthy planet.

4. With your savings pay off your loan, then quit your job or work less hours so you can spend more time with friends and neighbors. A healthy planet should be fun. Go to the library. Attend your water board meetings and make sure your tap water is safe to drink.

Parking landuse decisions affect bicycling

On Nov 2nd the Daily Journal reported that the parking in-lieu fee of $9000/- collected for the past three years in San Mateo was insufficient for a parking lot. The city only has $1.5M. Business wants parking and pollution but is refusing to pay to make it happen. This is clearly not sustainable.
( http://www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=82765
City on quest for parking garage)

The price mentioned for a parking spot, of $30,000/- is low. A parking spot is 10 feet by 18 feet which equals 180 sq feet. At $100/- per sq foot for unimproved land in San Mateo the spot would cost 18,000/-

However a parking spot by itself is useless. You also need to be able
to access it. Access lanes and streets space dedicated to get to parking spots raise the size of the spot to 300-350 sq feet. This is the number used when building off street parking.

Thus $30,000/- price is already at the low end for unimproved land. And we haven't paved it or added in the percent of the annual $30M Publics Works and Planning budgets for street and sewer maintenance and other issues like stormwater runoff, system overload, sewer leakage, associated with un-permeable surfaces; or police and fire services for crashes downtown while trying to access parking; or the markup for built structures that typically come in after the land cost exceed $1M like the movie garage on Second and B street. My neighbor was hit at Third and B and had his bike crushed and his tailbone broken.

The real price is closer to $44,000/-

Clearly the public handout for drivers to take away the fare box recovery of Caltrain and Samtrans and make bike access to the downtown dangerous so drivers can roam around for parking is about $35,000/- per spot. Now consider that the city is willing to replace local recreation access like the tennis court with this giveaway. What price do you put on the necessity for an athletic club membership? What's the price of the quality of downtown
life that has been privatized away? What is the price of asthma downtown? These are called external costs. A EU study said that they are typically two more for every one real dollar.

Instead of looking at other funding options we request that the city put a
fair price on parking. Borrow a page from Redwood City and give residents real options and a better quality of life. An air quality grant from the CCAG can get a delivery program started for merchant downtown, taking away the need to drive. A parking assessment district can be used to get to zero traffic housing and pay for delivery.

We realize that San Mateo is not the only one giving away valuable land resources. San Carlos has an in-lieu parking fee of $7000/-. Belmont has an in-lieu fee of zero. But at $100/- a barrel of oil people don’t have a lot of options. Improving quality of life for downtown residents, reducing large capital costs, taking away traffic that causes pollution, crashes and road wear, having a cash positive land resource that was previously fallow, and providing an incentive for people to walk and shop has to be sustainable and profitable in the long run. The sustainable return on investment can be furthur improved by building unbundled parking housing and provide parking cashout for employees on what used to be parking lots.

Create one slow street in a city

Cities need to take one street and make it usable at 15 mph. That means a bike freeway. Make it comfortable. Take away stop signs. Put in diverters so that automobiles don't have a direct speedway but can still use the street to get to and from home. Obviously an arterial with bus traffic won't qualify.

Bicyclists complain about the lack of space on the road. And about the need to defend that space from cars. And the scare caused by speeding traffic. And the fumes they breathe and the difficult choices at intersections and the problems with large vehicles like buses slowing down to stop.

Pedestrians have essentially the same issues including the unpleasantness of having it to walk on the sidewalk while traffic zooms by only feet away.

Even drivers have these problems preferring to enter their parked cars when blocked off from traffic by a bike lane.

A slow street would make for a pleasant neighborhood street.

Getting there takes energy

We know how to build pedestrian friendly cities and we know that they are low carbon cities. We lament the fact that bicycle use is dropping in China from 60% a few years ago to 25% today. And while we know all this we don't know how to incetivize pedestrian friendly cities.

Community is illegal today because regulations that limit the ingestion of poison are against the law. In some communities its against the law to hang your clothes out to dry. Lowering speed limits to keep children from getting killed and saving energy is illegal. The hybrid Prius, energy-efficient appliances, florescent bulbs, bicycles, and clean air regulations are examples of policies that have addressed failures of the market place and show how dinosaur industries have shot themselves in the foot.

Buildings are no different. A buildings location is very important with respect to how much energy it uses. We can't keep planting them like rice in remote places and expect a better plane to a hybrid commute plan.

In a study on the transporation energy footprint of a building
http://www.buildinggreen.com/auth/article.cfm?fileName=160901a.xml
these conclusions are drawn

The fact remains that the additional energy use from more employees driving to work may well exceed the energy savings realized by a green building.

Buildings are responsible for much more energy use getting people to and from those buildings. For an average office building in the United States, calculations done by Environmental Building News (EBN) show that commuting by office workers accounts for 30% more energy than the building itself uses.
For an average new office building built to code, transportation accounts for more than twice as much energy use as building operation.

Measures to reduce transportation energy use can have very significant ancillary benefits relating to water runoff, urban heat island mitigation, and habitat protection, while creating more vibrant, livable communities.

Transport spending is making our lives worse

Here's the problem with MTC RTP 2035. I and my friends already ride our bikes and walk. The government can take the $109B transport budget for the Bay Area and blow it on Iraq. We don't need another road or transit, or livable community or Transit Oriented Development. What we need is more people doing what we do. And how is that going to happen if the average person says "you would never walk if you saw the way I drive!"

We would benefit from incentives for everyone to use the present infrastructure the way we do. And so that MTC might actually complies with its air and water quality goals and meets its SIP. Incentives, such as parking cashout, and systemic traffic calming like bicycle boulevards, and eliminating the CA speed creep and speed trap laws so that prima facie and safety laws can be enforced and speed limits reduced. Of course MTC does not have law writing capability but it can provide incentives for reduced speed and bike boulevards.

There is no attempt to reduce the growth in driving infrastructure except for redirecting about $1B from the $109B over the next 25 years to bikes and peds. Examples of external costs subsidized by this $108B include air pollution, noise, 10,000 traffic deaths a year, pollution and speeding from road construction and repair, traffic law enforcement, facility expansion at the expense of walking and biking, get out of jail card for hitting a pedestrian or a bicyclist, reduced health care for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity, inflation reduction of the vehicle license fee and gas tax, future generation indebtedness from bond financing, lack of text books in schools, no school buses, no health care, etc. Of course if none of this paid for in the real cost of driving we don't get enforcement, clean air, drivers in jail, reduced CO2, working emergency clinics, etc.

RTP 2035: http://www.mtc.ca.gov/planning/
CA SIP:
http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-AIR/2005/January/Day-07/a346.htm
Parking Cashout: http://www.arb.ca.gov/planning/tsaq/cashout/cashout.htm
Bicycle Boulevards: http://www.sfbike.org/?page
Speed Trap laws: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d17/vc40802.htm
Prima Facie Speeds: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d11/vc22352.htm
Speed Safety: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d11/vc22358_4.htm
Speed Limits Reduced: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/320/7243/1160

Vehicle Miles Travelled

Why should bicyclists focus on Vehicle Miles Travelled?

Because of our speed- average less that 20 mph we can cover much less of the city than a car average speed 60 mph. Traveling five or ten miles in a a day is within the reach of most people. Thus cities that place all the landuse within 2.5 miles to 5 miles of a bicyclist are useful. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Chicago have high bicycle populations because of the accessibility of travel destination in a small area.

Our bicycle speeds are still ten times faster than a pedestrian uses to cover a city. Cities designed around pedestrian and bicycle speeds are accessible by fossil fuel free transportation modes. Such cities are called slow cities. And ideally a slow city is based on the mobility speeds of a child.

Fast cities on the other hand take away the mobility choice of travelling fossil free. The result is that people have to drive for many of their trips- dropping the kids of at school, going to the movies, picking up the groceries, going to work. And with driving comes crowding, since every car is zonned for 7 spots at the end of these trips, and congestion, pollution and hostility to fossil fuels free modes of mobility which are now seen as impediments to traffic. These trips measured in Vehicle Miles Travelled or VMT add up.

MTC data shows that in the Bay Area
http://www.mtc.ca.gov/maps_and_data/datamart/stats/vmt.htm

in 1990 we covered 107,707,600/238712 VMT per day which is equal to 450 round trips to the moon (RTM) each day. An RTM is 238712 miles.

In 2007 data our VMT data of 154,172,000 equaled about 650 RTM

In 2030 our VMT of 202,756,400 will equal 850 RTM

San Mateo is about 20% of these trips. To accommodate all these RTMs engineers take away space from impediments. Thus bike and pedestrian infrastructure for access decrease.

Continuous space

Cycling in California can be discontinuous. Freeway overcrossings may not have enough room to share a lane with a bicycle and a car. Freqeuntly arterials may have this same problem at interections.

One way around this is for jurisdictions to paint bicycles allowed full use of lane in the right most through lane.