Step one: Do it like Indianapolis.
This is how Indianapolis does complete streets. Image: UrbanIndy
Of the 130 complete streets policies passed in 2012, the one passed by Indianapolis gets the highest score in a new ranking by Smart Growth America and its National Complete Streets Coalition.
“The Complete Streets movement fundamentally redefines what a street is intended to do, what goals a transportation agency is going to meet and how a community will spend its transportation money,” the Coalition writes in its report ranking last year’s policies.
Complete Streets policies challenge auto-centric design and entrench an ethic that streets are for all users, of all ages and abilities, on all modes. A street designed for cars to travel at top speeds without regard for pedestrians, bicyclists, or public transit users – now or in the future – is not a complete street.
Last year was a good one for advocates of these policies: Of all the 488 policies currently in place nationwide, more than a quarter of them were passed last year.
Number of complete ctreets policies nationwide, 2005–2012. Image: National Complete Street Coalition
Statewide policies exist in 27 states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. You might be surprised by the states with the most policies – Michigan leads the pack with 65 policies, then New Jersey with 50 and in third place – shockingly – is Florida, the most dangerous state in the nation for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Though Indianapolis leads the Coalition’s ranking, a mix of smaller and mid-size cities round out the top 10, highlighting the diversity of places well suited to complete streets. Lightly-populated suburban communities make up 37 percent of municipalities with policies. Small towns represent another 20 percent.
Policies can take the form of “legislation, resolutions, executive orders, departmental policies, policies adopted by an elected board, plans and design guidance,” the Coalition said. Disappointingly, these differences aren’t reflected in the rankings. Nearly half of the complete streets policies passed to date have been in the form of non-binding resolutions, with just 17 percent being codified in legislation. The report did, however, give points for language saying changes that “shall” or “must” be made, rather than that merely promoting those that “may be included” or “will be considered.”
The Coalition also seems to be agnostic on the question of how users are accommodated. The report spotlights Portland, Maine’s policy, commending it for being specific about what design guidance it wants to use – and Portland’s policy names three AASHTO guides before getting to more progressive ones put out by the National Association of City Transportation Officials or the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Institute of Transportation Engineers. That means cutting-edge street designs like separated bicycle lanes could get forgotten even as cities strive to do the right thing to protect cyclists and pedestrians.
So what makes for a good complete streets policy? The Coalition lays out its criteria:
Complete streets policies by type, 1971–2012. Image: National Complete Streets Coalition.
Vision and intent: The policy outlines a vision for how and why the community wants to complete its streets.
- All users and modes: The policy specifies that “all users” includes pedestrians, bicyclists and transit passengers of all ages and abilities, as well as trucks, buses and automobiles.
- All projects and phases: Both new and retrofit projects are subject to the policy, including design, planning, maintenance and operations, for the entire right-of-way.
- Clear, accountable exceptions: Any exceptions are specified and must be approved by a high-level official.
- Network: The policy encourages street connectivity and creates a comprehensive, integrated and connected network for all modes across the network.
- Jurisdiction: All other agencies can clearly understand the policy and may be involved in the process.
- Design: The policy recommends the latest and best design criteria and guidelines, while recognizing the need for flexibility in balancing user needs.
- Context sensitivity: Community context is considered in planning and design solutions.
- Performance measures: Performance standards with measurable outcomes are included.
- Implementation next steps: Specific next steps for implementing the policy are described.
It’s too soon to judge these policies based on how much the streets have changed, though the Coalition does give a point – yes, just one point – to “policies that change the way transportation projects are prioritized and thus chosen for funding and construction.” It seems that if a policy has achieved that, it’s reached the holy grail.
Whether or not progress from last year’s policies can be ascertained, the best policies establish clear and concrete criteria to judge future success. In Indianapolis, the city pledges to quantify bike lane mileage, pedestrian accommodation, new curb ramps, crosswalk and intersection improvements, transit stops accessible via sidewalks and curb ramps, crash rates by mode, and the rate of children walking or bicycling to school. Clearly, policies that have the full force of the law behind them, whether passed by legislation or executive order, will produce more impacts than those that are nothing more than nonbinding resolutions.
The top 10 policies were created by:
Research consistently shows that women shoulder more of the household responsibilities, including childcare and transportation. Whether running errands or shuttling kids, women often face additional considerations when it comes to getting around by bike.
So join us for our next Women Bike webinar — April 11, from 3:00 – 4:15 p.m. EDT — as we discuss “Getting More Moms and Families on Bikes.” We’ll explore how individual, advocacy and retailer leaders are addressing these unique but widespread considerations and helping to get more moms and families out riding.
Join us for a conversation with:
And, if you missed our first two webinars on “How to Start a Women’s Bike Club” or “The Economic Impact of Women Bicyclists,” view the recordings and download the slides here!
(Photo by Leslie Bloom, Alliance for Biking & Walking Photo Library)
Carolyn joined the League in March 2012, after two years at the Alliance for Biking & Walking. In addition to managing the League’s blog, magazine and other communications, Carolyn organized the first National Women’s Bicycling Summit and launched the League’s newest program: Women Bike. Before she crossed over to advocacy, she was a professional journalist for nearly 10 years.
If Jane Doe rides her bike a mile to the post office and then back home, is it fair to assume she just avoided two miles of driving? And can we then assume that she prevented 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide from being emitted?
Photo: Bike Reviews
That’s more or less the way most agencies calculate averted vehicle-miles traveled. One mile biked is one mile not driven.
That simple assumption masks enormous complexity, however. And with at least 33 states and hundreds of cities, towns, and counties having instituted climate action plans or emissions reduction targets, we’re going to need a better method of measuring the carbon that biking keeps out of the atmosphere.
It’s not too hard to figure out the carbon savings from reduced VMT. But looking at it the other way around — calculating the carbon-reduction benefits of increased biking — can be a challenge.
If bicycling is on the rise in your city — because of bike-share or better infrastructure, for example — what does that mean for your city’s carbon footprint? A mode shift metric that accurately captures this information could encourage municipalities to invest more in biking and walking as a carbon reduction strategy.
Not that biking always replaces driving. Some bicycle trips are primarily recreational and wouldn’t be made by any other mode. Or if someone shifts from bus commuting to bike commuting, then they’re obviously not taking a car off the highway (though the newly available space on the bus might then be filled by someone making the switch from driving to transit). Ten million U.S. households don’t have access to a car, according to the Brookings Institution, and regular cyclists are probably over-represented in that number. Shouldn’t it change the equation if a cyclists’ backup mode is transit or walking?
But there are also reasons to think that the 1:1 ratio is actually undercounting vehicle miles averted, and therefore underestimating the power of mode shift.
Blunt Instruments Overlook the Nuances of Transportation and Land Use
The Federal Highway Administration acknowledges some complexity in this problem but its tools are still remarkably blunt. The agency borrowed the San Francisco Bay Area’s measure of how many car trips will be replaced with bike trips if a new bike facility is installed. The assumption is that 1.09 percent of car trips on a project corridor will shift to bike trips. That number is then simply multiplied by the average length of a bicycle trip to calculate VMT averted.
For its Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program, FHWA estimated the additional trips that were taken by foot or by bike as a result of improvements and multiplied that by the average length of a non-motorized trip, according to the National Household Travey Survey: 2.26 miles for a one-way bicycling trip and 0.7 miles for a one-way walking trip.
But FHWA also points out that there may not be a “one-to-one mileage trade-off between vehicle trips and nonmotorized trips; it is likely that vehicle trips are often longer than walking and bicycling trips, particularly for discretionary utilitarian trips (like shopping or dining out).”
FHWA’s guidance also notes that the reduction in miles driven could be longer than the actual bicycle or pedestrian trip if those trips are linked with transit. Strategic installation of biking and walking facilities near transit can have an enormous multiplier effect. But to measure it, you need to figure out how many people wouldn’t have taken transit without the walkway or bikeway and how many of them would have driven alone all the way to their destination instead.
A Los Angeles Metro survey indicated that 27 percent of people who linked bicycle and transit trips would have taken a car the whole way if there were no bicycle connection to the transit station. Metro didn’t distinguish between those who would drive alone, carpool, or get dropped off.
Sometimes Destination Follows Mode Choice, Not the Other Way Around
Models assume that a person decides on their destination and then picks their mode of travel. But sometimes the mode choice influences the destination.
If I’m on foot, I’m often going to go to the organic grocery store four blocks away, but it’s expensive. If I have access to a car, I might decide to go to a supermarket that’s farther away, but cheaper, and stock up on essentials.
Different trip patterns on different modes can complicate the attempt to quantify how much driving is avoided when someone bikes. Studies have shown that cyclists, on average, make more shopping trips than drivers, probably because they buy only what they can carry home. Portland State University researchers found that people who drove visited a convenience story an average of 9.9 times per month, while biking customers visited the same store 14.5 times a month.
Land use and social preferences are also key factors. There are community characteristics that won’t change with the installation of a new sidewalk or bike lane.
“You can take a suburban community and put in better bike facilities, and let’s add some closer destinations — infill stuff, so people have stores nearby – but you’re dealing with the population who still lives there,” said Robert Schneider, professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “And those people moved there because they have certain preferences and might not realize the new opportunities that are there.”
All of these factors would make for some complicated modeling, to be sure. But it’s not impossible.
How the Experts Do It
Brian Gregor is a transportation analyst at Oregon DOT. He was instrumental in developing GreenSTEP, a tool that lets ODOT estimate and forecast the effects of various policies on the amount of vehicle travel, the types of vehicles and fuels used, energy consumption, and the resulting GHG emissions. GreenSTEP was used as a model for FHWA’s Energy and Emissions Reduction Policy Analysis Tool (EERPAT).
“You’ve got to have a certain amount of simplification,” he told Streetsblog. But for GreenSTEP, Gregor didn’t shy away from complexity. “You’ve got the vehicles and their different power trains,” he told me, “the different vehicle mixes; you’ve got the fuels, and then you’ve got the myriad of things that affect VMT, which include transit service levels and prices, and all the characteristics of the household, and interactions between those factors.”
To measure carbon emissions averted, Gregor doesn’t just use fuel economy averages. He looks at schedules of average fleet MPG by model year, all the way out to the year Oregon’s greenhouse gas emission goals are aiming toward, accounting for the full variety of vehicle body type and power train. Also in the mix is each fuel, including electricity, with its particular carbon intensity.
His team also factors in, at the household level, the number of people of different ages, their incomes, the land use type (urban or rural), the density of neighborhood, whether it’s a mixed-use neighborhood, the existence of transit service, and other factors — and from there, they determine the household’s likelihood of owning a vehicle, how many vehicles, the likely ages of vehicles, and their likely VMT.
That’s how they estimate carbon emissions — first at the household level and then at the state level. Could they have just multiplied the number of cars registered in the state by average VMT by average fuel economy by pounds of CO2 per gallon? Sure. But they wouldn’t have gotten very good data. Is it so preposterous to think someone might use this degree of precision to understand the carbon-reducing power of non-motorized transportation?
Gregor says he’s never tried to deduce miles not driven or carbon emissions avoided from biking and walking numbers. But he says it could be done. “That’s where urban travel demand modeling is moving,” he said. “These things are getting more sophisticated.”
As Streetfilms viewers know, many of the big cities in the U.S. are in the midst of expanding their bicycle networks by installing protected bike lanes. We’ve shown these projects in New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., but some of the newest cities installing them are smaller cities you might not be aware of. Places like Missoula, Flagstaff, Indianapolis, Austin, and Memphis have either installed protected lanes or are breaking ground shortly.
Over the next five weeks, we’ll be publishing the rest of the Streetfacts series, which we hope will come in handy in your advocacy. And if they’re a big hit, we’ll take nominations for other topics and make another batch of Streetfacts later in the year.
Challenge or charity. Fitness or friendship. There are so many motivations to start riding.
For women, the social aspects of bicycling are often a key motivation and inspiration, making rides and races particularly important in engaging and empowering more female bicyclists. At the National Women’s Bicycling Forum this month, we explored ways to break down the road blocks and turn cycling events into gateways for participation.
Moderated by Sarai Snyder, founder of Cyclofemme and Girl Bike Love, the panel touched on charity and social rides, as well as racing and charity events.
Nicole Preston, national campaign director for the Tour de Cure, discussed best practices from one of the nation’s largest charity rides — which engages nearly 25,000 women of all ages and abilities. Tara McCarthy, Race Director Certification Manager for USA Cycling, announced the work of her organization’s new “Women’s Committee” to increase the number of women members and riders from its current 13 percent. And the ever-inspiring and outspoken Jacquie Phelan shared some of her unique insight as a mountain biking champion and founder of the Women’s Mountain Bike & Tea Society.
As a take-away for Forum participants and folks around the country, the group also created a hand-out with 11 tips to engage more women in your cycling events. See below.
Carolyn joined the League in March 2012, after two years at the Alliance for Biking & Walking. In addition to managing the League’s blog, magazine and other communications, Carolyn organized the first National Women’s Bicycling Summit and launched the League’s newest program: Women Bike. Before she crossed over to advocacy, she was a professional journalist for nearly 10 years.
Yes, traffic fatalities have been (mostly) going down, but as long as cyclist and pedestrian fatalities keep going up, we can’t truly say our streets and roads are getting safer. That’s the message from 68 members of Congress to one pretty receptive audience: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.
Lawmakers say states should be making sure their streets are safe for everyone. Photo: Tiffany Robinson, Ped-Bike Images
In their letter to LaHood, sent on Saturday, the 68 lawmakers – including nine Republicans — note that between 2010 and 2011, driving got safer: Roadway fatalities dropped 2 percent overall; 4.6 percent for occupants of cars and light trucks. But bicyclist fatalists went up 9 percent and pedestrian deaths rose 3 percent in the same time period.
LaHood announced last month that U.S. DOT would be holding two bike safety summits this year. But the lawmakers want the agency to go further. And they didn’t just ask in vague terms for increased attention to safety. They got specific: U.S. DOT should create “separate performance measures for non-motorized and motorized users.”
If it sounds like they might have gotten some ideas from people deep inside the bike advocacy world, well, you got that right. Hundreds of Bike Summit participants made this their key “ask” earlier this month when they visited their representatives on Capitol Hill. Apparently their representatives listened.
SAFETEA-LU, passed in 2005, required states to set goals for reducing overall fatalities but included no specific reporting requirements for biking and walking. Without state attention, vulnerable road users have become even more vulnerable, with fatalities increasing both in real numbers and as a percentage of roadway fatalities, according to Caron Whitaker of the League of American Bicyclists.
One-third of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee signed on to the letter, giving DOT a good sense how the committee wants them to interpret MAP-21. “When Congress set performance measures areas, they were saying, ‘These are the things we are going to judge you on,’” Whitaker said in an email. “If bicyclists and pedestrians aren’t included in the performance measures, we risk being left behind.”
“In over half of all states, more than 10 percent of roadway fatalities are bicyclists and pedestrians but yet only seven states report investing in any bicycling and walking safety projects,” she added.
The lawmakers’ letter notes that MAP-21 required U.S. DOT to set performance measures for safety and increase safety funding to states. The signers hope that by setting specific metrics for bike and pedestrian safety, DOT can incentivize states to reduce fatalities, “while giving them the flexibility to choose the best methods to do so.”
Could increased focus on reducing bike and pedestrian fatalities lead states to limit or dis-incentivize bicycling? They might (incorrectly) assume that fewer people on bikes means fewer people dying on bikes. Whitaker says Metropolitan Planning Organizations will see to it that the performance measures aren’t interpreted that way, and if for some reason a state did use the focus on safety as an excuse to limit biking, they’d be hearing from activists – and mayors, and community leaders – pretty quickly.
They also note that such a measure wouldn’t divert funding from other safety needs.
The timing of the letter is good. U.S. DOT is still working on drafting MAP-21 performance measures, and the agency is paying special attention to bicycle safety this month.
Going to the gym may not be enough to keep off the pounds if you drive to work. That’s the result of a study published recently in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Bike commuters gain less weight than car commuters, an Australian study found. Image: Bikes Belong
According to an Australian research team, active commuting is an effective defense against gaining weight. Among a sample of 822 Australian adults tracked over four years, people who walked or biked to work gained about two pounds less, on average, than daily car commuters.
Lead researcher Takemi Sugiyama, a behavioral epidemiologist at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, said it may be difficult for people who drive to work to find the extra time to devote to exercise.
“In order to achieve the level of physical activity needed to prevent weight gain, it may be more realistic to accumulate physical activity through active transport, rather than adding exercise to weekly leisure-time routines,” she told the Health Behavior News Service, part of the Center for Advancing Health.
The study found that engaging in “sufficient leisure-time physical activity” also helped people avoid weight gain, but that car commuters who exercised regularly in their free time still put on more pounds than active commuters.
Street conditions, of course, will have to improve to make active commuting a viable option for more people in the U.S. “For most Americans, it is challenging to find a safe route to work or shopping due to factors such as traffic concerns, lack of sidewalks, or protected bike paths,” said Penny Gordon-Larsen, a public health expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the Health Behavior News Service.
Hat tip to Jay Walljasper at Bikes Belong for bringing this to our attention.
Two of the nation’s leading lefty commentators weighed in on transportation incentives last Friday, when both economist Paul Krugman at the New York Times and Matt Yglesias at Slate went on a congestion pricing kick.
Krugman kicked things off by remarking that the surest way to reduce the costs imposed on society by drivers is to “get the incentives right, and charge large fees for driving in congestion.”
Yglesias took it one step further, pointing out how a variable fee on roads could lead to a virtuous cycle of better transit service and higher ridership:
Congestion fees are a kind of force multiplier for transit. After all, in some big American cities the peak congestion charge would have to get quite hefty at some times of the day. Some folks will respond to that by paying the fee, some by time-shifting their driving to a less-crowded hour, and some by riding transit. A bus, after all, is a great mechanism for spreading the cost of road access across a large number of people. And while with highways the quality of the service provided declines with the number of users (traffic jams), with well-designed transit it goes the other way. The more people who want to travel on a particular transit route, the more financially viable it is to provide high-frequency service. And high-frequency service is the key to real-world transit useability.
As Krugman noted, congestion pricing is an important mechanism to account for the cost imposed by drivers on society in the form of lost time. Anything that brings the actual price of our transportation decisions in line with the cost to society will be a boon for transit, biking, and walking relative to the status quo.
The flipside of congestion pricing would be to account for the social benefits of non-automotive modes by subsidizing them. The European Cyclists Federation currently has an interesting proposal on this front. With the European Union examining the “internalisation of external costs for all modes of transport, the ECF is advocating for a policy that would function as a kind of carrot, rewarding cyclists through tax rebates and incentives. Meanwhile, in America, we actually have a “symbolic” bike tax gaining traction in Washington state.
Put high school students “in the driver’s seat” to promote walking and bicycling in your community.
