The Forum at Redwood City, with Michael Ronkin
Michael Ronkin is a nationally-recognized ‘Complete Streets’ guy - he was in Redwood City last night to speak at an ongoing lecture series called The Forum at Redwood City.
The event showed up in one of my news feeds after the event last month, and then Cyclelicious posted a reminder about it the other day. I decided at the last minute to swing by.
My bike is once again out of commission - think I need some decent rim tape (and a new tube, of course) - so I did the walk+transit thing. I made it from the Tenderloin down to the Little Fox Theatre in Redwood City in just over an hour - BART Civic Center to Millbrae to Caltrain express to Redwood City. After riding Caltrain on and off for several years, I still have no idea how to tell which trains are which - express or local, which stops the express trains will decide to stop at, etc. Another guy on the train - obviously lost and confused - asked me if the train was stopping at Mountain View. Having some experience being in his position, I said, “Probably not.” I checked, and no - it wasn’t stopping at MV. Told him to get off at Redwood City and wait. “Ask the conductor as you’re getting on the next train just to make sure,” - like I do every time, I told him. I think Caltrain and other transit systems like that we’re kept helpless and dependent. It’s one of the main reasons I choose to ride my bike.
Did you know that BART WAS REALLY LOUD? It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done the ’south of Civic Center’ route, and damn - I really thought my ears might start bleeding.
Michael Ronkin was very good. I didn’t take notes, but I enjoyed the talk very much - learned a lot - and I’d highly recommend him for the various training things his company does. Think he has several lined up in California already, since we just got our Complete Streets law.
I took a few seconds of video here and there - it’s not really watchable, but it might give you a feel for what things were like.
Some things that stood out:
- The Little Fox Theatre seems cool, and they have have Stella on tap.
- There were a few bikes parked outside - presumably attendees - up to 10, maybe.
- Total attendance I’d guess was about 70-80 people, which the organizers seemed very pleased with.
- At least a few attendees were not planner-types, which I think is very important.
- During the Q&A session, one persistent lady wanted to see a bunch of streets disappeared. Ronkin suggested that she was probably just identifying streets as being belonged by cars, and we didn’t really want streets to go away, just some of the cars. She persisted - he resisted. It finally ended when she realized that Ronkin was right, that we wanted streets, and that most of the paved over earth in any city or town is not the streets but the parking lots all over the place. It was fun, and a bit funny. I issued the obligatory, “Burn!” sort of under my breath from the back of the room, but I don’t suspect anyone knew what I meant - it was a planner crowd. I thought computer folks were stodgy.
- The most common type of road diet is the 4-lane to 3-lane road diet, where the middle lane is the turn (or ’suicide’) lane. Extensive studies show that there is little to no impact in the amount of traffic carried on these roads before and after the conversions. [This reminds me of a book/study I've been meaning to read forever, now, but I'll be darned if I've been able to find out if it actually exists or not. I can see that someone somewhere has in theory written some kind of pamphlet called "Handbook for Livable Streets, Reversing Trends by Applying the ‘Road Diet’," but I don't think it ever went to print or saw the light of day. Here's a slide show (PDF) of the type of material we might find in that non-existent monograph, and here's a page that lists that and other apparently non-existent monographs.]
- Ronkin said that a lot of SF’s one-way boulevards/highways are ripe (perfect?) for road diets.
- Somewhat non-intuitively (??), one-way streets seem to be good for pedestrian safety. I could see that, and I can see how they’d be great for bicyclist safety, because no sane bicyclist would choose to ride on SF’s one-way highways.
- The section on making transit and other options available for older folks was powerful. I definitely feel like we’ve left our older generations to fend for themselves, and that shows in, among other things, the number of pedestrian deaths that involve older folks, the number of older folks stuck at home, etc. It’s definitely one of the shames of our society. And it should be instructive for us cyclist advocates - if we can’t convince elderly folks to ride down some particular street on a bike, because they’re afraid for their safety, then it’s not safe for bikes, and therefore it is unacceptable, and we need to do better. If we want to allow a few, select people to ride their bikes in the City, then bike lanes are good enough, but if we want to allow the elderly and women and children to ride, then we need much more and much better infrastructure - bike lanes are just the beginning of the beginning.
- Ronkin made a big deal out of ‘context.’ Different areas and road types and town types and etc. deserve to be treated differently.
- Of the 9-points that every Complete Streets legislation should include, Ronkin has only ever seen legislation that includes 5 or 6 of them.
- Ronkin made this trip for free - the organizers just covered expenses.
- The Oregon Bike Bill (PDF) (more) (passed in 1971 - damn!) is the original bike bill and still the strongest in the nation. I was a bit confused about this next part, but Ronkin said the language in the bill used language like ‘could’ or ‘recommends’ as opposed to ‘will’ and ’shall’ - something more definitive, obligatory, etc. He wants to see a state step up and create a stronger bill.
- I forget which part of the discussion this was in, but Ronkin mentioned that retrofitting existing roads could be horribly expensive, but that any major construction or overhaul on a street should require that the road be put back together in a ‘complete streets’ way. And this goes for any mass transit projects - which would be part of my contention for the BRT projects on Geary and Van Ness and everywhere else. If we’re going to demolish those streets and build them from scratch to support BRT or LRT or anything else, they have to include physically-separated bike paths.
[p.s. The Forums are open for participation.]
