Cyclelicious

Environmental lawsuit to block Los Angeles bike path

2012-05-24T21:27:23Z

A group of homeowners in West Los Angeles are fighting planned construction of a bike path across their backyards with an environmental lawsuit.

The Los Angeles Expo Line Phase 2 construction between Culver City and Santa Monica includes four miles of bike path. A handful of residents on Northvale Road in West Los Angeles have filed suit against the Federal Highway Administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation, Caltrans, the City of Los Angeles and its Metropolitan Transit Authority to block this bike path. Their backyards adjoin the light right and bike path right of way.

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The homeowners claim in their suit that the bike path has “several adverse and potentially adverse impacts.” They seek an immediate injunction against work on the bike path because “possible traffic congestion and other environmental impacts were disregarded when the project received funding.” Ted (and others) suggest the homeowners don’t want a bike path because they fear the intrusion of sweaty bike hippies, outsiders, and other assorted undesirables into their demesne.

More at Courthouse News and Curbed LA.

“Bike the Muni Shutdown” makes mainstream news

2012-05-24T20:25:37Z

Transit users will need to walk or bike to get around while San Francisco Muni shuts down the N-Judah and J-Church lines and portions of other transit lines for nine days beginning Friday night. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalitions “bike trains” to help commuters get to their destinations have been mentioned in local news stories about the shutdown.

Several Muni rail and bus routes will be closed or re-routed for street and rail construction in San Francisco beginning this weekend. Muni will provide bus bridges to route around the construction zones, but buses don’t have nearly the capacity or speed of rail. Muni asks riders to consider walking or biking to avoid delays, and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition will run bike trains along the N-Judah and J-Church routes every day of the long shutdown.

Local radio traffic reports have highlighted this bike train in their stories about the long shutdown. Online postings include these stories from NBC and KTVU.

The Duboce Bikeway portion of “The Wiggle” behind Safeway will also close during this construction shutdown. SF Muni will post detour signs for bicyclists.

Sunnyvale Council: “We like traffic sewers!”

2012-05-24T17:17:21Z

Sunnyvale City Council nixes Bus Rapid Transit planning for El Camino Real.

The Santa Clara County Valley Transportation Agency (VTA) is the transportation planning agency and transit provider for Silicon Valley in California. 20% of VTA’s bus passengers ride bus routes 22 & 522 along the historic El Camino Real (ECR). TO handle the transportation needs of projected population growth along the ECR corridor, VTA plans a Bus Rapid Transit line (BRT) along the historic El Camino Real between downtown San Jose and Palo Alto, California.

ECR is a state highway (California Route 82), so I’m not certain local approval is required for projects like this, but VTA would like to have buy in from the South Bay cities ECR runs through. The City of Santa Clara council already recently gave their whole-hearted approval for the BRT project. At the city council meeting in Sunnyvale last Tuesday evening, though, the council voted 4-3 against planning for BRT on El Camino Real through the city of Sunnyvale.

Six lanes of traffic across 120 feet of right-of-way on El Camino Real bisect the city of Sunnyvale, with a traffic Level of Service “D” along the entire congested route. With population and job growth and no room to build new highways, traffic congestion through Sunnyvale will only get worse. VTA’s Bus Rapid Transit plan will change those six lane into a pair of BRT down the middle of the road and a pair of auto lanes for each direction of ECR between Lawrence Expressway and Bernardo AVenue.

BRT proponents believe their plan will also create a more livable, walkable and bike friendly transportation corridor. BRT stations at major intersections create pedestrian refuges that break up the huge swaths of concrete and asphalt we have now, and BRT changes include room for bike facilities.

BRT advocates showed up en-masse at Tuesday night’s council meeting to speak on behalf of better transportation on El Camino Real, outnumbering opponents at least two-to-one. Opponents pitted this as a “car versus bus rider” issue, while proponents talked about the benefits BRT will have for all users of El Camino Real, including the people who live and own businesses and pay taxes in Sunnyvale.

The strongest opposition came from the numerous auto dealerships along El Camino Real, saying BRT will destroy their businesses and reduce tax revenues to the city.

Sunnyvale council members Mayor Tony Spitaleri, Vice Mayor David Whittum, Pat Meyering and Jim Davis want none of that, voting instead for more congestion, more pollution, more death, more sickness, more traffic noise, higher gas prices, fewer jobs, less revenue for the city, and, overall, a more slum-like feel to their town by voting against the city resolution to move forward on BRT. In response to concerns that traffic is getting worse in Sunnyvale, the council directed staff to investigate increasing speeds on Mathilda Avenue (which currently has traffic Level of Service “F” for “FAIL”) to help move things along. As if. I can save the city a few thousand dollars of staff time and tell you what the findings will be.

More info on this meeting at the Mercury News. H/T to Eugene / Silicon Valley Transit Users for the meeting info. See also Facebook / Friends of Silicon Valley BRT to see how you can help.

National map shows cyclist fatalities

2012-05-23T23:36:04Z

The League of American Cyclists announced their “Every Bicyclist Counts” project, which will chronicle news and police reports of cyclists killed on America’s roadways.

The LAB’s Every Bicyclist Counts” website is a memorial and collection of news and information about cyclists killed since January 1, 2012. It’s an expansion to the national level of the effort Ted Rogers has put into tracking southern California fatalities over at Biking In LA.

Besides the narratives, the LAB websites also includes a national map of cycling fatalities.

This is as good a place as any to mention a little something I whipped up over the weekend: my real time map of California bike crashes. Right now, it shows bicycle crashes reported to the California Highway Patrol since Monday evening, when this project went live, with today’s crashes highlighted in yellow.

Every Bicyclist Counts: TL;DR Summary

Every Bicyclist Counts website and national map of cyclist fatalities in the United States.

My Work In Progress Realtime California Bicycle Crash Map (with an appeal to an artist for better icons).

Index of all bicycle crashes reported to CHP since 2010.

This is an expansion of my 3 year collection of CHP crash data, and it’s obviously still a work in progress. I can use better icons, for example. The UI is still a little wiggy: to zoom into a specific ‘incident,’ click on the X; double click if you’d like to see the complete details. To go back to the entire state map, you need to refresh the page or zoom out).

On my TODO list for this California crash map:

Better icons, and special icons to display hit & runs and fatalities. (Any artists in the house who’d like to help?)
Pop up text. Show incident reports as a popup box within the map. This is just a matter of coding up the CSS and DOM elements.
Date Matching. Most of the time, CHP dispatchers enter dates as numeric month, day and year such as “5/23/2012.” Sometimes, though, I see “May 23 2012″ instead. Matching on the current date to highlight today’s bike crashes is imperfect as a result.
Geocode efficiency. Google Maps rate-limits geocode requests, which is how street addresses are translated into latitude / longitude required for mapping. Right now, I meter the requests out slowly using a timer function, which is why you’ll see the markers pop up one by one over a few seconds. The better solution to this is to cache the geocode responses on my server so I don’t need to repeat geocode for each map load.
Database query. Somebody I might get fancy and allow for queries based on county, dates, etc. I’ve built my crash database to allow for this, but the actual user query engine for this is at least a year away.

I also have issues with the actual data collection that I should fix. I’ve slowly been improving them over time, but these are still problems:

Motorcycle false positives. My code to grab CHP’s incident reports gets many false positives for motorcycle crashes too. Many (most? all?) motorcycle crashes will mention “biker” or “bike.” For example, “Motorcycle vs Honda. Biker injured. Ambulance required.” I’ve thought about just filtering out every report that mentions a motorcycle, but I have seen a couple of instances of bicycle vs motorcycle crashes. Should I allow the false positives to retain those rare bike vs motorcycle reports? Or should I filter them out and miss those occasional motorcycle vs bicycle crashes?
Bike lane false positives. The CHP incident reports come from dispatchers who use code words and jargon, but free text entry is also allowed so I’ll sometimes see reports like “Dead animal in bike lane” or “Chevy Tahoe vs Bike Lane sign.”
Geocoding. This is different from the geocoding efficiency item above. A responding police officer in Santa Barbara county knows that Sr217 E Sandpit Rd Ofr is by Goleta State Beach. Google Maps freaks out because it can’t find the address — the dispatcher misspelled “Sandsspit” Road. I think the CHP hired a lot of new dispatchers about six months ago, too, because that’s when I began seeing inconsistent capitalization and misspellings for commonly used abbreviations.
The other geocoding issue I need to solve: multiple county coverage among CHP regional offices. The dispatches come from one of several CHP offices around the state, but a few offices cover multiple counties. The “Golden Gate Communication Center” covers the entire 9 County San Francisco Bay Area, so if all you have is a street address like “Fillmore Street and McAlester Street“, which County do you tell Google Maps to search in? My easy workaround for now: I punt and just use San Francisco. The real solution is to use Google Maps geocode API to make a more educated guess and search all counties until I find a reasonable hit.

Mr Roadshow and wrong way cycling

2012-05-23T20:55:55Z

Gary Richards aka “Mr Roadshow” answers reader questions about the safety of wrong way cycling.

Richards is the traffic and transportation columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. He published a couple of recent reader questions on wrong way cycling. One reader from Pleasonton writes that he’s been cycling for 60 years and he was taught to ride against traffic for safety. Another cyclist in Concord says riding with traffic in the bike lane doesn’t feel safe to him; when he’s riding westbound, he’d rather ride against traffic in what he calls the “parking lane,” which I think means the parallel parking spaces along Concord Boulevard.

Today’s column was a quick Q&A on numerous issues, so Richards gave a quick “Don’t ride against traffic because it’s against the law,” but he doesn’t really say why cyclists should obey this law except to mention a $150 fine. And we all know the police never ticket cyclists, right?

Why should you avoid riding against the flow of traffic? Or do you bike against traffic and live to tell the tale?

Car free downtown Redwood City THIS AFTERNOON

2012-05-23T17:42:56Z

President Barack Obama’s visit to the Fox Theater in downtown Redwood City, California could mean an impromptou Open Streets Event for you as the Secret Service will close several downtown streets but leave many open for pedestrians and (probably) bikes.

Here’s the map of street closures as published by the Redwood City police this morning. Green shows streets that will close to motor vehicle traffic at 3 PM this afternoon. Red shows the streets that will be closed to pedestrian traffic (except for those holding tickets to the event). You might even catch a glimpse of Mr President. I didn’t mark it, but the west side of Theater Way (the side along the Fox Theater and, incidentally, the side with the bicycle racks) will be closed to pedestrian traffic too; the east side of Theater Way along the Century 21 movie theater will remain open to pedestrians.

View Redwood City Obama visit street closures 5/24/2012 in a larger map

I strongly advise against any kind of jokes or pranks that can be construed as a threat against the President or the United States — the Secret Service does not kid around about this kind of stuff.

California 3 feet passing vote Thursday

2012-05-23T16:02:48Z

The California Senate will vote Thursday on Senate Bill 1464 — the 3 feet passing for cyclists bill introduced by Long Beach Senator Alan Lowenthal and cosponsored by the California Bicycle Coalition and the City of Los Angeles with support from every bike advocacy group in the state of California.

SB 1464 would allow drivers to cross a double yellow centerline, when safe, in order to give a bicyclist at least three feet of clearance. Where three feet is not available, a driver can only pass by slowing down and giving as much space as feasible. The 3-foot requirement would not apply where bicyclists ride in a bike lane or on the shoulder.

The bill was approved 8-0 by the Senate Transportation & Housing Committee last month. The bill faces a June 1 deadline to win approval in the Senate.

Similar legislation passed last year was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown over a provision requiring drivers to slow to 15 MPH if they could not give a bicyclist three feet of clearance when passing. This provision is not part of SB 1464.

By creating a buffer around bicyclists riding on the road, SB 1464 can help reduce fatal collisions and dangerous falls, thus giving more would-be bicyclists the confidence to ride more often. In addition to health and environmental benefits, increased bicycle ridership has been shown to reduce the incidence of all types of bike-motor vehicle collisions.

So far some 1,800 Californians have contacted their State Senator to urge a yes vote on SB 1464, an unprecedented response to this kind of legislation.

More info at California Bicycle Coalition, including details on how you can contact your state Senator.

Advocacy & transpo jobs and internships

2012-05-22T20:59:14Z

Volagi Cycles is hiring an inside sales rep in Cotati, CA, which is about halfway between Santa Rosa and Petaluma.

More Bicycle & fitness industry and transportation jobs

Bicycle assembly and repair teacher for Folsom High School, Folsom, CA.

A bike shop in the San Francisco South Bay is opening a shop cafe. They’re looking for a bike nerd foodie to manage this thing.

Assistant Transportation Planner for the newly created newly created Alameda County Transportation Commission (Oakland, California).

SQL Developer at Quality Bike Products in Bloomington, Minnesota.

Alchemy Goods in Seattle seeks a bag maker.

Field Traffic Data technician in San Antonio, Texas.

Portland OR TriMet wants you as a Service Planning and Scheduling summer intern.

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has several summer internships.

Delivery girl with bicycle wanted for a “high end kosher establishment” in New York City.

Osmo Nutrition in Fairfax, CA seeks shipping / receiving & customer service person.

Accessories Distributor for Performance Bicycles in Raleigh, NC. Also, online marketing manager.

Product Manager for Cyclesport in Tualatin, OR.

Dumbarton Bridge closed Memorial Day Weekend

2012-05-22T23:09:33Z

The Dumbarton Bridge will be closed to all traffic – including pedestrian and bicycle traffic — over Memorial Day weekend for seismic refit work.

Caltrans will close the Dumbarton Bridge across San Francisco Bay from 10 p.m. Friday, May 25 to 5 a.m. Tuesday, May 29 for a seismic refit of the main channel crossing, which is the central portion of the bridge. A pedestrian & bicycle path on the south side of the bridge provides human-powered access for people traveling between the Peninsula and the East Bay.

A full bridge closure is necessary in order for crews to replace the existing expansion joint on the western side of the bridge with a state-of-the-art seismic joint that will absorb and dissipate energy during an earthquake. The joint spans across all lanes of traffic; therefore, there can be no motor vehicle, pedestrian, or bicycle traffic on the bridge during this operation.

Currently, the roadway on the bridge are steel and concrete boxes that sit on top of the columns supporting the bridge. During a major quake, these boxes can shift and shear the bolts connecting the road to the columns, causing bikes, cars, and people to plummet 85 feet to the Bay below.

Caltrans will jack the entire central span up five inches to install “friction pendulum bearings” on top of piers 17 through 30 this weekend. These devices absorb and dissipate the energy of a quake.

During this weekend’s closure, Caltrans suggests using the San Mateo to cross the Bay, but no bikes or pedestrians are allowed on that bridge. Cyclists can use the Bay Trail (where it exists) around the South Bay to the East Bay.

More at Dumbarton Bridge Info.

Students suspended for biking to school

2012-05-23T16:00:47Z

60 seniors at Kenowa Hills High School in Walker, MI were suspended from the last day of school because they rode their bicycles to school the day before.

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The students had a police escort, and Mayor Robe Verheulen (a Republican running for the state House) even joined along and handed donuts out to the students.

Some school staff and other commuters in this suburb of Grand Rapids, though, apparently took issue with sharing the road with these cyclists, and had the seniors suspended on the final day of classes today.

The school principal really went off on the seniors about causing a huge backup and a safety problem, while the police officer providing the escort said there was no safety issue, and traffic was able to get past with no problem. Much of the community is in a complete uproar about the suspension, which apparently was administered by the high school ~~principle~~ principal Katharine Pennington.

While early reports of this bike ride to Kenowa was described as a “Senior Prank,” the Senior who organized this ride with the support of his parents, Zac Totten, said he planned this ride as a fun, senior send-off. School principal Pennington sent a letter to parents explaining the suspension, claiming the event was “extremely disruptive to traffic” and was “dangerous due to the traffic.”

More –>

Update: Furious parents (including the school board president) respond to Principal Pennington’s suspension and reverse her decision.

WOOD TV: Bike ride caused traffic jam. The video story at that link has more of the story than the text.

FOX 17: More than 60 Kenowa Hills Seniors Suspended for Bike Prank.

H/T to Eric.

Taqueria Stickers

2012-05-22T16:32:05Z

I don’t often post stolen bike alerts, but this one belongs to a friend. Distinctive color and stickers should make this easily identifiable.

2008 Cannondale Six13 with orange / yellow fade. Fenders were off when the bike was swiped in downtown San Jose a couple of weeks ago. Kitten of Flanders and Taqueria stickers. More photos and owner details here.

Video: How Princeton Tec designs and makes bicycle lights

2012-05-21T23:06:47Z

I’m a fan of Princeton Tec. If you’ve ever wondered what electronics design and manufacturing looks like, it looks exactly like this. This video will be familiar to everybody who’s spent time in electronics manufacturing.

Princeton Tec makes dive lights, outdoor lights, bike lights and “tactical lights” to “meet the highly specialized needs of outdoor sportsmen and the U.S. military.” Hooah.