Bikes in Rush Hour

Hat tip to CH for the following:

Bike Computer Study Proves Rush-Hour Cycling Is Faster Than Driving

The title might be a bit misleading, because the study is only concerned with the city of Lyon, France. The Velo'v bikeshare program there enjoys robust ridership, and now has data to show that using it is the most efficient means of transportation during rush hour.

According to MIT's Physics arXiv Blog, the average speed of cyclists was approximately six miles an hour (the average inner city car speed in Europe). But during rush hour, cyclists traveled faster, at an average of nine miles an hour, beating local vehicles. For the first time, researchers have confirmation that cyclists pedal faster between 7:45 am and 8:45 am on weekdays, suggesting a rush to get to work.

Cyclists went especially fast on Wednesday mornings. This is probably a quirk of French culture, according to the researchers; women often stay home to take care of kids on Wednesdays, so the bike pool is mostly composed of men, who pedal more quickly.

The fact that the data showed average faster speeds on Wednesdays due to higher proportions of male riders is simply outstanding. Data!

And crazily enough, Lyon doesn't even have bike lanes--which seems incongruous in light of how successful its bike share program is. I am not familiar with the city at all, so perhaps the streets are such that bicyclists do not feel as threatened as I do when biking on bike lane-less city roads in Boston or San Francisco. The article suggests that cyclists use the bus lane, which if properly separated from car traffic, could be quite useful.

And on the comments board, a reader made the claim that Top Gear, the BBC automobile TV show, knew about the bicycle advantage years ago. As a longtime fan of Top Gear, I investigated. The following episode originally aired in November of 2007, and featured a race across rush hour London. The contestants: a bicycle, a car, public transit, and a speed boat. Skip to half way through the video, and enjoy.


Top Gear Season 10 Episode 5 - Full 'Epi

Tolls! In SF and LA

People hate tolls.

SJ Mercury News covers the congestion pricing scheme, and lays it on thick:

Welcome to San Francisco. That'll be three bucks to enter, and three more bucks to leave.

Sound nuts? Not to the San Francisco Transportation Authority. The agency is considering a proposal to turn the line with San Mateo County into a virtual toll plaza, charging rush-hour commuters up to $6 each weekday to cross into -- and out of -- the city by the bay.

 Ouch.

Buried at the bottom:

Tilly Chang, a deputy director at the agency, argued that the toll would decrease traffic because people would alter their commute times and take transit to save money. The authority predicts that with tolls, traffic at the city's southern border would drop 20 percent during commute times.

"The cost of anything needs to be taken in context," Chang said. "It's not free right now. People are paying in time and having to pad their trip."

Battle lines!

And in LA, the MTA has received a grant for a demonstration project to test the expansion of HOT lanes. If it works--if traffic is reduced and vehicle throughput increased--any number of five additional locations could see a permanent addition. The locations are currently being vetted in more detail.

SF Pulling Out All Stops

Two proposed underground subway lines into downtown.

Congestion pricing for SF's northeast quadrant.

Parking lot in the Mission slated to become a park.

MTA proposes 250 miles of bus only lanes, 100 miles of dedicated bike lanes.

And a month ago, SF Bike Coalition's plan for major, city-wide bicycle infrastructure, striping, and safety improvements.

Topsy-turvy up in here. Exciting to think about how these projects could transform the city--if any of them come to pass.

San Francisco Proposes Congestion Pricing

The San Francisco County Transportation Authority just got some great press for its proposal to implement congestion pricing. From the Chronicle:

Drivers crossing greater downtown San Francisco and the southern border with San Mateo County could be hit with a new toll costing them as much as $1,560 a year.
Everyone from workers to parents dropping off their kids at school could have to pay the new charge, which is designed to ease congestion and raise revenue for extra bus service, pothole repairs and bike and pedestrian improvements.

811 comments, and counting. SFCTA's got some nerve with the timing of their announcement, what with the general perception that government is overly spendthrift, recession, state debt, etc.

I'm of two minds here.

1) Congestion pricing discourages driving, which is in the long run a win for dense urban spaces with good public transit, like San Francisco.  But these taxes are regressive, in that they hit the poorest the hardest. So I'm curious to see how the name-checked plan to give discounts to "disabled and low-income drivers, residents who live in a toll zone, drivers who also pay bridge tolls and businesses with a fleet of trucks" gets rolled out.

2) The communications team at the SFCTA must be tone deaf, otherwise they would have frontloaded their media campaign with something besides the obvious: you, yes you, will now need to pay for something you used to do for free. Namely, they should have made crystal clear, dollar by dollar, why congestion pricing offsets the unpaid costs that driving always already incurs--the pollution, the amortized cost of parking & roads, the realization that the city's population will grow but its automobile infrastructure is at capacity (barring road widening, etc), and that as such congestion pricing is a necessary response.

Is it? I would say yes, but I don't live there. If I lived there, and drove, I'd be indignant. This whole proposal comes across looking like a bunch of bureaucrats have arbitrarily decided that they want a city with fewer cars, and could also use a bigger budget for their pet projects, thank you very much. No taxation without representation, c'mon, let's go dump some goddamn tea in the water.

You can't just drop a proposal of this type like any other news story; something like this needs set up work, it needs a proper PR campaign. Get out the information about hidden costs of driving, of the time wasted in congested streets, then slap a dollar sign on it to give the issue some context and help us all understand what costs are already being paid, and why something needs to be done about it. Get some economist up there to talk about how when a desirable good is underpriced, demand will always outpace supply and shortages, e.g., congestion, occur. Maybe they tried some PR pump-priming, and this happened anyway. Maybe they have no time and no funding for public relations. Either way, the SFCTA is catching flak like it's going out of style.

In an interesting comment, SFWeekly notes that a congestion pricing plan would likely fall victim to Prop 26, which requires all fees to be approved by a two-thirds majority vote in the state legislature. Good pick-up.