advocacy

Things are not looking good, from MassBike.

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Things have gone from bad to worse. On the House side, there has been an all-out assault not only on bike funding, but also transit, environmental review, and basically anything other than highways and bridges. The House Bill (H.R. 7) is one of the most extreme examples of slash and burn politics, described as “uniquely terrible,” (NY Times) “disastrous,” (Rep. Nadler) and “The worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen.” (Sec. LaHood) Because the Petri Amendment failed, the consensus among a wide variety of groups is that the best hope for biking and walking is to kill the House Bill entirely and start over. Transportation for America, a national transportation advocacy group, notes,

“More than 75 national organizations signed the letter of opposition to H.R. 7 – including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, AARP, the American Public Transportation Association, the National Rural Assembly, American Society of Civil Engineers, LOCUS (real estate developers), National Association of Counties- and a huge list of other individuals and state & local groups, including the governors of Oregon and Washington, several state DOTs, state and local Chambers of Commerce, and hundreds of state and local organizations nationwide.”

You may be seeing Action Alerts from national organizations asking you to contact your Representatives to ask them to vote against the bill. Here in Massachusetts, MassBike and our T4MA partners are contacting all our Representatives, who we expect will all strongly oppose the bill.

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With an incredibly diverse array of groups (including the Tea Party!) aligned in opposition to the House Bill, MassBike and our partners are concentrating on what’s happening in the Senate. You may remember our post several weeks ago about MAP-21, the senate’s version of the transportation bill. Amendments are still possible in the Senate Bill, including one expected to be filed by Senator Cardin. There may be new amendments by tomorrow or Monday, and we want to have everything on the table before you spend time getting in touch with Senators Brown and Kerry.

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We are working hard with our organizational partners to make sure that the votes are there to kill the House Bill and to improve the Senate Bill. (In fact, Executive Director David Watson is at a Rails to Trails Conservancy meeting in Philadelphia right now to coordinate the national campaign.) Because the Massachusetts delegation has consistently supported biking in this process so far, and we are contacting them on your behalf, we aren’t asking you to engage your Representative now. And the situation in the Senate is still very fluid, so we want to be sure that the time is right before we call on you to contact our Senators.

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We are expecting to issue an Action Alert by Monday as things become more clear in the Senate, so stay tuned! When we do send out the Alert, we will need you to take action immediately.

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Got this in the email, looks like fun.

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“The LIFT Bike Project, an organization dedicated to donating refurbished bicycles to homeless and low-income residents of Cambridge, Boston, and Somerville, will be holding“refurb nights” Every Wednesday from 7-9 PM, volunteers will gather at Quad Bikes (http://www.quadbikes.org) to help fix up bikes for a giveaway on the Green Streets Initiative’s April Walk/RIde Day, when 100 people will become the proud new owners of a great
set of wheels.

Refurb nights are both fun and a great way to meet a range of people with a passion for community service and biking. While no mechanic experience is required, volunteers should come prepared to learn something new. Whether you’re a refurb night veteran or hearing about this opportunity for the first time, come on down – everyone is welcome.

For those who can’t make it to refurb nights, there are other ways to help. Maybe you have an old bike lying in your basement – LIFT would love for you to donate it.

Please feel free to contact Ben at liftbostonbikeproject@gmail.com with any
questions, visit liftbikeproject.blogspot.com, or check us out on facebook
at http://www.facebook.com/LIFTbikeproject“

Our congress critters are once again trying to cut funding for cycling, here is yet another way to help stop them.

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more info here.

From a href=”http://www.massbike.org”MassBike/a

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The situation in the House is even more dire than we a href=”http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=icjv4hcabamp;et=1109187941021amp;s=4131amp;e=001P2MYbu32_vABjMZtijG_z8-F6U2ZhgukDDu2pJ3VRirkaJrI9ca-yJJIL0nc9A7WYPOQ2nCG7pCdcKnltwv7QaxYrL2CnDVyfKiFXkdIy-2bQ8IXP1lHu6ALCQAiJ5UO_R7izh7U4_yf-YaJTZIdh35qfQ1z_fJuzaMkmuzPGHWBe4RL9sTabEpTFBYY2h1emuOdBvFn0cIZNsJCLEQcCA==” shape=”rect” target=”_blank”reported last week/a. We’re alerting you again because your representative, Michael Capuano, is a leading member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. (If you do not live in his district, you do not need to take action yet.)

strong /strong

strongIf you contacted Mr. Capuano last week, thank you! But if you have not yet contacted him, a href=”http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=icjv4hcabamp;et=1109187941021amp;s=4131amp;e=001P2MYbu32_vBtlFg71JHVOrUcm0LeA8h9ho0OAgqZZmyKFJ3jbaFTeKhDvkj6BvvVZwENp3yPtMsImzb0jBq7Rr8cNDr-CIqfgiljyobvjQBmfP7hRs9Ks_s822tX2IySM1Ay2f1jFJ6uoQr7g6nUfQ==” shape=”rect” target=”_blank”right now is the time!/a/strong

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Today, the House releases its transportation bill, the American Energy and Infrastructure Act. When we got in touch with you last week, we knew the bill would be bad news for biking and walking. But we didn’t think it would go so far as to completely cut bicycling and walking out of federal transportation policy.

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We now know that the bill would do much more damage than initially thought, including:
ul
liDestroys Transportation Enhancements by making the program optional/li
liRepeals the Safe Routes to School program, reversing years of progress in creating safe ways for kids to walk and ride bicycles to school/li
liAllows states to build bridges without safe access for pedestrians and bicycles/li
liEliminates bicycle and pedestrian coordinators in state DOTs/li
liEliminates language requiring that rumble strips “do not adversely affect the safety or mobility of bicyclists, pedestrians or the disabled”/li
/ul
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But there is still hope. Representative Petri (R-WI) will stand up for bicycling and walking by offering an amendment that restores dedicated funding for Transportation Enhancements and Safe Routes to School, and hopefully goes even further to address the other problems. strongWe need you to a href=”http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=icjv4hcabamp;et=1109187941021amp;s=4131amp;e=001P2MYbu32_vBtlFg71JHVOrUcm0LeA8h9ho0OAgqZZmyKFJ3jbaFTeKhDvkj6BvvVZwENp3yPtMsImzb0jBq7Rr8cNDr-CIqfgiljyobvjQBmfP7hRs9Ks_s822tX2IySM1Ay2f1jFJ6uoQr7g6nUfQ==” shape=”rect” target=”_blank”contact Representative Capuano/a TODAY and ask him to SUPPORT the Petri amendment!/strong

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This is as urgent as it gets. Even if we do win this amendment, there will be a long road ahead. But if we lose here, we risk losing decades of progress.

Let Mr. Capuano know what biking and walking mean to you. In his district alone:
ul
liNearly $2 million in Safe Routes to School funding has gone to making the streets safer for children trying to walk or bike to school;/li
liTransportation Enhancements has supported over $34 million in bike and pedestrian infrastructure, improving the experience for all users of the road;/li
liNationally, biking and walking make up 12% of all trips, and 14% of traffic fatalities, but only receive 1.5% of federal funding./li
/ul
Representative Capuano’s office phone number is a href=”tel:%28202%29%20225-5111″ target=”_blank”(202) 225-5111/a, or you can email him by clicking a href=”http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=icjv4hcabamp;et=1109187941021amp;s=4131amp;e=001P2MYbu32_vBtlFg71JHVOrUcm0LeA8h9ho0OAgqZZmyKFJ3jbaFTeKhDvkj6BvvVZwENp3yPtMsImzb0jBq7Rr8cNDr-CIqfgiljyobvjQBmfP7hRs9Ks_s822tX2IySM1Ay2f1jFJ6uoQr7g6nUfQ==” shape=”rect” target=”_blank”here/a. Please take action today.

1. Call and/or email Representative Capuano TODAY, tell him why bicycling is important to you, and ask him to do two things:
ul
liSUPPORT the Petri amendment to maintain funding for bicycle and pedestrian programs/li
liOPPOSE any move to eliminate funding for bicycle and pedestrian programs/li
/ul
2. Email a href=”mailto:action@massbike.org” target=”_blank”action@massbike.org/a and let us know you contacted him.

If you don’t have time to call or email, then you can fill out an automated form a href=”http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=icjv4hcabamp;et=1109187941021amp;s=4131amp;e=001P2MYbu32_vDLqKfe0NJTAG5JiNngsCFkuc8HC5gSXNYXZfDqzGq-9OPN-PG8W5mPJy5fFpX80o3ZxgBnogm7_8PXJCkpX__l_BFewX8ve_YCuLgXxCH707-JwdqvTwfGXwe-c2L0GAGr06DZS9srxQQJTHrHrBM3Z0qgjisUfPC6QWAF79r7dfs2qAVLuLTUvDKBAv4O-yo=” shape=”rect” target=”_blank”here/a, though personalized messages are always preferable.

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We know we are asking a lot of you and we thank you for all you’re doing to preserve biking and walking.

4th Annual Boston Bikes Update (New Date) – Tuesday Feb. 28th 6:15 – 8 p.m. Boston Public Library, Copley Square, 700 Boylston Street / Rabb Lecture Hall

Free and open to the public

Nicole Freedman, Director of the Boston Bikes Program, will present her fourth report on past achievements, challenges, and future goals of the Mayor’s effort to create a “world class bicycling city.” Come hear details on Hubway bike share, the Bike Network Plan, parking facilities, youth programs, festivals, and more.

And this year the Mayor is scheduled to make an appearance.

Ultimately a good public transportation system is good for cyclists, so even if you ride your bike every single day all year long you should fight to keep the MBTA system healthy. Here are some emails from local groups working on this issue.

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Livable Streets

Another awesome job offer from Bikes Not Bombs

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Hiring Bicycle Mechanic at the Bike Shop
Bikes Not Bombs Retail Bike Shop is now accepting applications for full time skilled bicycle mechanics for the 2012 season.

Bikes Not Bombs is a non-profit located in Jamaica Plain Ma, which ships bicycles overseas, runs youth programs in Boston and recycles bicycles locally. The BNB Bike Shop sells refurbished and new bicycles as well as providing expert repairs.

Applicants should have experience working on bikes, a strong customer service orientation, and experience working in bike shops.

Please email a short cover letter and resume to matt@bikesnotbombs.org.

I originally posted this in 2010, but its highly relevant to the comments that have been springing up around recent posts here.

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There has been a battle raging in the bike advocacy world for the last 30 years. A battle that in my mind was put to rest several years ago, but like that Japanese guy after world war 2 some people continue to fight this fight long after both sides have announced a peace treaty.

A Vehicular cyclist sees this as a deadly door zone bike lane, everyone else sees it as a great place to ride.

What is this decisive rift that until the last couple years was tearing apart the bike advocacy world? Vehicular cycling, or VC for short. Back in 1976, during the last oil crisis, cycling was getting pretty popular in America and a man named John Forrester wrote a little book called Effective Cycling. In it he laid out the basis for what was and still is “Vehicular Cycling” or the idea that cars and bikes should act the same on the road, be treated under the same laws, and importantly that education of cyclists and motorists is the main component of safety.

So what is the problem? Sounds like a good idea right? Bikes and cars, follow the same rules, educate everyone, bike nirvana! The problem is it just doesn’t work. Below I will try to give a reasonable argument for why it failed.

It doesn’t reflect what people want or think.

Hard core vehicular cyclists don’t like the idea of things like bike lanes, sharrows, bike boxes, cycle tracks, or pretty much any other bicycle infrastructure. They see it as a step towards creating a divide between cyclists and motorist, who the VC crowd think should be treated identically.

Talk to a strong vehicular cyclist and it will quickly become apparent that they don’t just not like bike lanes, they will go out of their way to fight against them. This puts them in direct opposition with EVERY major bicycle advocacy group in America. Even the League of American Bicyclists (a strong supporter of vehicular cycling) endorses these sort of bicycle infrastructure improvements. It also puts the VCs at odds with just about everyone I have ever talked to. I start talking about biking with random strangers and the first thing out of their mouths is “I wish there was more bike lanes.”

It gives the appearance that cycling advocated are confused, or at odds

In the bike advocacy world 99.9% of the time bike advocates want more and better bike infrastructure (lanes, sharrows, etc), but a very vocal minority of VCs will make enough fuss to give the appearance that there is a debate. Like the “debate” over global warming this divide is entirely fictional. Pretty much everyone in the bike advocacy world agrees bike lanes are the way to go, but the media love to have a “this side vs that side” article and will go out of their way to find someone (anyone really) to give “the other side.”

A perfect example of this was the recent article in the JP Gazette in which one side of the bike lane “debate” (the side that wanted lanes on center/south st) is every advocacy group in the city and most of the public, and the other side is two guys (and to be fair, one of the two guys just wanted the lanes to be well designed, he wasn’t really against them, so really it was ONE guy against the world).

The is partly the medias fault for failing to realize there is not an equivalence between the two sides (and wanting a more interesting article) and partly the VC’s fault for being so stubbornly opposed to admitting the world has changed and that their ideas don’t have much relevance anymore.

This “debate” actually hurts cycling advocacy. Law makers, and the people who control the money are not always big fans of cycling. Sometimes these people in power will say something to the effect of “the advocates don’t even know what they want, why should we give them any money!” This effect can be seen from the local town meeting, all the way up to state and federal funding decisions.

For years nothing happened in Boston around cycling because the “advocates” actively fought against bicycle infrastructure! It wasn’t until the VCs got out of the way that things started happening in this city.

It doesn’t take into account the mental landscape of new riders

Vehicular cycling is simply not an option for most people. If you took someone who had driven in Boston, but never ridden a bicycle here and you said to them “just get out there and act like a car” they would laugh in your face and go get in their SUV. As much as the VCs would like to think so most people are not ready to ride around in traffic like an automobile. They are too scared to take the lane, and don’t want to interact with traffic in that way. The reality is that cars are big and heavy and metal and human beings on bicycles are small and fragile. No amount of education will get new riders out on to the streets.

This is a big problem. How will we convince people in their cars that they should ride a bike if they are too scared? You talk to people and repeatedly they will tell you that they feel safer when they have a bike lane, or a sign, or a sharrow, or a cycle track. This sets the VCs head to steaming as they start talking about safety this and statistics that and freedom of choice etc etc etc. What the VCs miss is that it doesn’t matter if bike lanes make you safer or not. Let me type that again…

It doesn’t matter if bike lanes make you safer or not!

Obviously I don’t want someone to design a bike lane that puts a cyclist in more danger. The reality is that for the most part bike lanes are safety neutral. They don’t make a rider more or less safe than if they were on a road without bike lanes. The important function of bike lanes is that they make people FEEL safer.

It’s the placebo affect of transportation. Safer or not, bike infrastructure (including bike lanes) gets more people to ride. More people ridding means less people driving cars. More people riding means less pollution. More people riding means less obesity. I could go on and on.

If hanging golf balls painted red off of little poles would get people to ride their bicycles in this city, I would be out there tomorrow with a can of balls and some red paint. it doesn’t matter one wit if bike lanes make you safer or not, the fact is they get people riding and that is what we want.

There is also a fair amount of evidence that when you get more people riding bicycles the overall safety of everyone goes up. I can still not say conclusively if this is so but what I do know is that it is more dangerous for large numbers of people to drive cars around all day, than it is for people to drive bikes around all day. In any way you slice it having millions of people drive cars is more dangerous than having the same number of people ride bikes. One simply has to take a good look at global warming, or obesity, or political issues and you will quickly see the danger of having the majority of us drive cars.

The VC’s had their chance, they didn’t produce results.

For the last 30 years (give or take) the cycling advocacy world has been dominated by John Forrester’s ideas. The VCs pretty much had it their way. One would think that 30 years later we would be living in a bike utopia where 30% of people rode bicycles as their main form of transportation. Oh wait that’s Amsterdam, who for the last 30 years have been building bicycle infrastructure. Here in America where VC’s have ruled the day we still have about 1% of our population using bicycles as their main form of transportation. Simply put, the VCs had their chance, they had 30 years of chances and they failed to produce results. While other countries that pursued a more infrastructure heavy complete streets model have reaped massive increases in cycling.

One need not travel far from home to see a perfect example of this. Cambridge which has been hard at work supporting cycling infrastructure for the last decade or so and has seen a very large increase in the numbers of people riding, while Boston which until recently didn’t do much of anything for cycling (expect stress education) did not. Now that Boston is starting to take infrastructure seriously the number of riders, and the number of people thinking about riding is going up.

The battle is over, the VC’s lost

The battle between VCs and the complete streets movement (the idea that streets should be designed with everyone in mind, not just cars) is over. Every major advocacy group in America has moved towards complete streets. The model has been proven successful in Europe and elsewhere, and the VC model has failed miserably over the last 3 decades to produce large amounts of cyclists on the streets.

You will continue to find (even on this very website) a small handful of people that will scream till they are blue in the face that bike lanes will be the death of us all. That cycling infrastructure removes freedom of choice, that building separate facilities will cause cycling to get regulated to a legal black hole…none of which is true.

VCs get focused on the minutia of widths of lanes, and angles of turns and instead miss the point. We (and by we I mean people who want cycling to be a dominant form of transportation) are trying to change a culture. We are trying to convince people to get out of their cars, and ride their bike around this city. They get so focused on treating motorists and cyclists identically that they miss the obvious point, THEY ARE NOT IDENTICAL.

We have already seen great progress in this city by taking the best parts of VC and merging them with an infrastructure that takes into account the needs of all road users. We will only see more benefits from this marriage of ideas moving forward. The thing that really makes me shake my head in wonder is why a handful of vocal proponents still try to push the straight VC point of view?

In my mind we can take the good parts of VC (education, cyclists rights, the idea that everyone must follow the law, etc) and incorporate them into a system of top notch cycling infrastructure. The debate over which ideas are better is over because a strict VC point of view is no longer relevant to the discussion. The idea that cyclists will be served best by using the same infrastructure as automobiles (with a heavy dose of education) is simply foolish. Cars are not bikes, and bikes are not cars. The VC model has been absorbed and improved upon by the complete streets model.

Vehicular Cycling proponents are quickly being regulated to the dust bin of transportation planning ideas. Sadly this will not keep them from filling our comment sections, our town hall meetings, and our news paper articles with their well intentioned but misguided ideas. If they really wanted to help they would do well to see that their ideas have merit, and play well with the ideas of building good cycling infrastructure, but don’t work alone. Only by combining infrastructure with good education will we ever see the kind of cycling revolution that most of us want.

Some great video from Greg over at his site documenting the new bike lanes on the BU bridge. Thanks Greg!

Cambridge to Boston

Boston to Cambridge

Motor traffic moved quite swimmingly over the BU Bridge today as I rode over on my bicycle in its brand-spanking-new freshly painted bike lanes; not quite the “spur” of “road rage” Boston Globe columnist Stephanie Ebbert predicted some two years ago that I was looking forward to seeing. Have a look for yourself:

Read more of Greg’s great analysis here.

Got this in the email today looks like a good time for a good cause, plus for you season cyclists it will keep them legs looking good!

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Race to Anyplace 2012
Spin-bike race for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society
Spynergy, Wellesley, MA
Saturday, February 25, 2011 11 AM – 2 PM
Teams of 3-6 will raise money to clock the most mileage. Teammates will switch riders in 10 minute heats.
http://www.racetoanyplace.org/ma

Registration is only $25, and team goals are set at $600