What Fits In The Box?

Why should we encourage people to give up their steering wheels for handlebars?  Here is one possible answer:

You have a box, and it holds only so much, and once it gets beyond that--then you start to have problems.

The "box" to which economic development specialist Einar Tangen was referring is a city--in this case, Beijing.  But he could have been describing just about any old European or Asian capital--or a few US cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco.

Tangen was describing a reality of the Chinese capital:  It simply wasn't designed for 22 million people--or, even more to the point (for the purposes of this blog, anyway), 5 million cars.  To put that in perspective, Beijing has almost two and a half times as many people, and cars, as New York City.  

From what I've read, I don't think anyone even began to realize Beijing's limits until, maybe, two decades ago.  That is when industrialization--and, with it, migrations from the countryside to the cities--accelerated.  

Beijing traffic jam,  1975

In 1995, Beijing and New York had roughly the same population--around 8 million.  Commuters and visitors to New York--especially the central areas of Manhattan--complained about traffic jams.  Driving from the Hudson to the East River along 14th Street--a distance of about 4 kilometers, or 2.5 miles--could, and can, take as much as 45 minutes, while a bus ride along the same route might cost an hour.  Meanwhile, even if a Beijing cyclist encountered a traffic jam, it would mean that the road was clogged with other bikes, not cars.  That cyclist could pedal the same distance in half as much time as it took transverse Manhattan.

Today, both cities contend with traffic jams.  Starting in the early 2000s, the ones in the Big Apple started to ease up a bit, at least for a decade or so.  But since 2015 or thereabouts, motor traffic is on the rise once again, in spite of Uber's boast that its services would take a million cars off this city's streets.  Uber and similar services, unbound from many of the regulations that govern New York's taxis and limousines, put thousands of new for-hire drivers on the city's streets.  Also, Amazon and other online shopping services began to offer free shipping for very small orders (Previously, most had a minimum number of items or dollar amount for no-charge shipping), which meant more deliveries, nearly all of which come in trucks.

Beijing's traffic jams, on the other hand, now have the same composition of the ones in most other major cities:  cars and trucks--but especially cars, in Beijing's case. 

Beijing traffic jam, 2015

New York, Beijing and other cities are facing or denying this reality:  They simply can't shoehorn any more motor vehicles onto their streets.  If anything, those places, and others, should encourge bicycling--but make it truly safe and convenient for people going to and from work, not merely a way for the affluent to stretch when they get bored with the gym.

As Einar Tangen said, each of these cities is a box that's already holding more than it was designed to hold.  To keep that box from bursting, planners need to start thinking out of the (auto-centric) box.

Chasing Zero In The Emerald City

Nearly four years ago, Bill de Blasio began his first term as Mayor of New York City.  One of his first major acts was to implement Vision Zero, a project with the goal of eliminating traffic fatalities.  It began in Sweden two decades ago and, since then, most European nations, as well as Canada, Japan and other countries, have adopted it.  So have a number of US cites besides New York.

One such city is Seattle.  The stated goal of the Emerald City is zero fatalities by 2030.  Casualties have certainly decreased since its implementation, but questions remain as to how much this reduction has to do with the program itself or the demographics of the city.

by Gabriel Campanario, The Seattle Times

To its credit, Seattle has achieved decreases in traffic casualties, particularly among pedestrians and cyclists, even though it is the fastest-growing large city in the nation.  It has among the largest percentages of commuters who cycle or walk to work among large cities, though those percentages have remained unchanged since 2012 and had changed little for several years before it. It should be noted, however, that mass transit usage has increased at a faster pace than the population growth, in part because of changes to bus routes and new light-rail stations in key locations.

It's also interesting to compare Seattle's statistics with those of other comparably-sized cities.  In 2016, the number of police-reported traffic collisions increased to 11,603 from 10,930 in 2015.  That followed a decade of steady decreases in both the number of collisions (15,744 in 2005) and the collision rate per traffic volume (79.4 to 55.5 from 2005 to 2015).  The 2016 collisions resulted in more serious injuries than those in 2015, but in 20 fatalities, compared to 21 in 2015.  In all, five pedestrians and three cyclists were killed in 2016:  both numbers were down by one from the previous year.  

(It should also be noted that 23 percent of the 2015 fatalities occurred in just one crash on the Aurora Bridge.)

While one fatality is too many, I think it's fair to let Seattle take some pride in its numbers.  While it witnessed a total of eight fatalities among cyclists and pedestrians, in Nashville, with roughly the same number of people, 50 cyclists and pedestrians died in traffic crashes.  Meanwhile, Washington DC and Portland OR, with slightly fewer people than Seattle, had 26 and 13 such deaths, respectively.  And, in the same year, my hometown of New York, which has about twelve times the population, recorded 162 deaths (18 cyclists and 144 pedestrians).

Will any city or country ever reach "zero"?  If so, which will be first?  If not, which will come closest?

Ice Bikes For Parkinson's In The City Of Light

Sometimes it's hard to believe we're in the same state.

I'm talking about New York City--my hometown--and Buffalo.

While The Big Apple is known for its Bright Lights on Broadway, the Queen City of the Great Lakes was once called--without irony or sarcasm--America's City of Light.

That was the image it tried to portray at the Pan-American Exposition it hosted  in 1901.  At that time, Buffalo was the nation's eighth-largest city, just edging out San Francisco and well ahead of Pittsburgh and Washington DC.  Two decades earlier, it had become the nation's first electrified city; the city fathers wanted to use the Expostion to show that the Nickel City was ready to take its position as an industrial powerhouse to rival Birmingham or Manchester, a center of commerce like London or New York and a mecca of beacon of culture akin to Paris. (The Exposition featured a dazzling display of electrically-illuminated buildings called "The City of Light".) 

"The City of Light":  The Pan American Exhibition, Buffalo, 1901

Well, a number of things conspired against Buffalo becoming a world-class city.  The first was the Exposition itself:  For all of its dazzling displays, it was also widely panned for exhibits that were, frankly, hokey or simply racist and imperialist. (Yes, people levelled such charges even in those decidedly-less-PC times!)  Also, on the night of 6 July, a powerful thunderstorm knocked out transmission lines and flooded the power station as well as other cities.  In other words, the biggest attraction of the Exposition--its electricity--was short-circuited by an electrical storm!

But the "nail in the coffin", so to speak, was the assassination of President William McKinley on the Fairgrounds.  The Exposition ended a few weeks later and most of its structures were quickly razed.  Today there is scarcely a trace of the fair.  On the other hand, the Unisphere, fountains and other monuments of the 1964-65 and 1939-40 Worlds' Fairs in New York have been preserved.

Today, Buffalo seems to be known for two things:  spicy chicken wings and weather--specifically, winter weather.  Even as New York City winters become less winter-like by the year, Buffalo never seems to escape the months between Halloween and Easter without at least a couple of major snowstorms.  And, as cold as the waters of the East and Hudson Rivers may be, they rarely form ice, and then only along the edges.  At the other end of the Empire State, Lakes Erie and Ontario, which are really inland freshwater seas with their own tidal systems, routinely freeze over.

That last climatic characteristic has actually been a blessing for some.  I'm not talking about ice fishermen.  Rather, I'm referring to a group of people you might not expect:  sufferers of Parkinson's Disease.

How's that?, you ask.  Well, since this is a cycling blog, you probably have surmised that it has something to do with bicycles.  And it does.

For the past three years, the National Parkinson Foundation of Western New York has held ice bike events at Canalside.  "Bicycling has been discovered to be very, very good therapy for Parkinsons," says Chris Jamele of NPFWNY.  He explains that cycling provides the low-impact exercise people with Parkinson's need.  But riding an ice bike has one distinctive advantage, he adds:  It's very difficult to tip over.

Hmm...There's a bit of technology to be developed: A bicycle like the ice bike that can be ridden on other kinds of surfaces.  That would be an innovation as revolutionary as any shown in the Pan-American Exhibit!  Could ice bikes make Buffalo rise again?

Does Congestion Pricing Save Lives?

Here in the US, there's one very easy way for a politician to ensure that he or she will not be elected:  Proposing a tax increase.

Forget that.  If it even sounds like a tax increase--or the government, in any way, shape or form taking more money--it will destroy the aspirations of any candidate.

That is one of the reasons why no New York City mayoral candidate has ever proposed it.  Michael Bloomberg, in the middle of his second term as Hizzoner, made it part of his long-term sustainability program for the Big Apple.  Then-City Council Speaker Christine Quinn favored it.  So did the conservative Republican leader of the New York State Senate, Joseph Bruno.  And then-Governor Eliot Spitzer liked the idea, too.

The somewhat-modified plan was approved, 30 votes to 20, by the New York City Council on 31 March 2008.  To qualify for Federal funds to research and implement the plan, the State Assembly had to vote for it  by 7 April.  That day, after a closed-door meeting, the Assembly's Democratic Council decided not to vote on the proposal, citing "overwhelming opposition", in the words of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Within three months, the price of gasoline would spike to $4.00 a gallon. (I know that for you Europeans, that is cheap. But I can recall my father filling up the gas tank of the family station wagon for $5.00 when I was in my early teens!)  That, ironically, would cause a five percent decrease in automobile trips into Manhattan below 60th Street, the area that would have been affected by a congestion-pricing plan.

I think it was Woody Allen who said, "Life is hard.  But what's the alternative?"  Something like that might be said about congestion pricing.  Yes, it would cost money and it might mean giving up something else.  But if it saves lives--forget "lives" plural, let's talk about just one, perhaps your own--wouldn't it be better than the alternative?

Turns out, a claim that congestion pricing could save lives is not hyperbole.  There's evidence to support it, courtesy of in Colin Green and his fellow researchers.

Professor Green is a health economist at the University of Exeter Medical School.   This month, he and his colleagues will present a study at the Royal Economic Society's annual conference in which they show that in the congestion zone, there has been, not only a dramatic decrease in the number of accidents, but also an even more dramatic drop in the accident rate, i.e., the number of accidents per vehicle mile driven.  

That was a significant finding because a decline in the number of accidents could be attributed to other factors--or could be seen as a statistical aberration--more easily than such a shrinkage in the rate per mile.

Moreover, Dr. Green and his cohort found that fewer accidents were occurring in the rest of London, outside the congestion zone.  What that suggests is that one of the objectives of congestion pricing is being achieved:  People's behavior is changing.  More are riding bikes and walking; fewer are driving.  And the revenue collected from congesting pricing is used to improve mass transit and cycling infrastructure, which causes more people to see them as realistic alternatives to their (usually short) driving trips.

Milan, Singapore and Stockholm all have plans similar to London's in place.  As far as I know, no one has studied them in the way Dr. Green has examined London's plan.  But I would suspect that similar, if less dramatic, results have been achieved.  Whatever the results, if lives are saved, I think it's worth whatever would be charged to drive and park in the center of the city.

 

Bound For Glory: A Sailor On A Bike

Yesterday I mentioned the beginning of Fleet Week here in New York City.  I recounted tales of Sailors Doing Strange Things, like holding doors open for people like me.

Now, when I say that's strange, I'm not denigrating it.  Nor do I intend to disparage another sailor who did something even stranger after a famous actor, who used to be a sailor himself, put him up to it.


The sailor in question was bound to do what he did.  Once he started, he was locked in.  He would not be released until he finished; the only person who could let him go was the Mayor of this city.





Everything I said In the previous paragraph is completely true. Literally.  You see, 95 years ago yesterday, a failed actor named Tony Pizzo set out from Los Angeles astride two wheels.  Fellow sailor C.J. Devine joined him on a planned bicycle trip to New York.


A transcontinental cycling expedition was no doubt more difficult in those days, as there were fewer paved roads and other facilities, especially in and around the Rocky Mountains and high deserts, were far more primitive than they are now.  So was much of the equipment cyclists used then.


But what made the trip so extraordinary is that both Pizzo and Devine were handcuffed to their bicycles.  Yes, you read that right.  Fatty Arbuckle shackled Pizzo's wrists to the handlebars at a ceremony in Venice Beach.  Arbuckle had bet him $3500 (in those days, more than most working people made in three years) that he wouldn't make it to New York by 1 November. 


Pizzo beat that deadline by two days and checked into a room at the Hotel McAlpin still locked to his bike.  The next day, Mayor John Hylan separated him from his machine.


About two months before that, Pizzo was separated from his partner when Devine was struck by a car in Kansas.


As if it weren't enough to ride several hours a day shacked to his handlebars, Pizzo ate, drank, washed and otherwise took care of himself while cuffed to his cycle.





Even more incredibly, the following year, he took the same trip--yes, cuffed to his bike.  And, the year after that, he got on his bike and pedaled to visit the governors of all 48 states.


You can read another--and possibly better--account of Pizzo's exploits on "The Bowery Boys," one of my favorite non-bike blogs.

A Detour From The Worlds' Fairs

Just recently, the Big Apple (a.k.a. my hometown) celebrated the 75th and 50th Anniversaries of its most recent Worlds' Fairs.  (It also hosted one of the earliest Fairs, in 1853.)  As I have mentioned in one of my earliest posts, I attended the 1964 Fair with my family when I was--well, let's say I was very young.  Very, very young.


 

I'd love to say that my family and I rode there together.  Well, my parents were like about 99.99 percent of American adults of the time in that they didn't ride bikes.  And of the Valinotti children, I was the only one who had graduated from tricycles.  I think my youngest brother was only a few months old when we went to the Fair.

But someone named Jay Kenney rode there. In fact, he pedaled about 1300 miles to get there:  He started in Richfield, Minnesota, with a group of cyclists about his age (16 at the time) on an American Youth Hostels tour.

I stumbled over his photo album when I was researching something else about the Worlds' Fairs.  But it made my day.  This photo--of the Ludington Light in Michigan--was worth the "detour".



Now, what was I researching again?

"Death By Bike"

I don't mean to pick on one political party or another.  But I simply must ask:  Why do some conservatives go totally apopleptic when the subject of bicycles comes up?

I think Dorothy Rabinowiz's rant about the New York's new bike share program takes the cake:



Now I will say, in her defense, that I used to respect and even admire Ms. Rabinowitz.  Sure, she has always been more "conservative" (whatever that means) than I am on most issues.  However, she took a courageous--and, as it turned out, correct--stance back in the days when it seemed that every week, some hapless day care worker was  being incarcerated over testimony that included "recovered memories" and other since-discredited evidence.

Please note that I am as disgusted as anyone can be by adults who abuse children sexually or otherwise. However, I also don't want to see people punished for crimes they didn't commit.  That, in essence, was Ms. Rabinowitz's stance when Kelly Michaels and others lost years or decades of their lives over the wildest stories imaginable.

What's happened to her since?  Why exactly does she think bikes are such a scourge?  While I agree, to some degree, with her criticisms of Mayor Bloomberg, I think that she doesn't represent the majority of citizens, as she believes she does.