Transit Falling. Cycling Rising. The Ideal Transportation Mix?
Public transit is getting wacked all over the U.S. - especially in New York. Who knows what kind of cuts SF might still see, but I think the situation is very interesting.
At a time when New York is about to introduce the ‘Public Transit Doomsday’ scenario - something which will probably make life considerably more difficult and expensive for tens of thousands (at least) of New Yorkers, they also have someone who has been leading the charge in building real bike infrastructure all over New York City. To me, it seems like there’s almost a race going on - can you build enough real bike infrastructure quickly enough to handle the new influx of bike riders - disgruntled former public transit riders?
The biggest race is in New York City, but there are similar races — competitions? — going on all over the U.S.
Over the past-few-months-to-a-year-or-so, at the same time Janette Sadik-Khan was pushing through all this new bike infrastructure, she had a lot of help from insane gas prices (even though they went down year over year) and outfits like StreetFilms and Streetsblog and TOPP and TA and etc. Now, gas prices have plummeted, but new bike infrastructure may be seeing continued new life because public transit is about to undergo draconian cuts.
Some advocates are happy enough to see the walk/bike/transit crowd team up and battle the evil car crowd, but I’m still not so sure. For now, I go with the Green Transportation Hierarchy - which means I advocate walking, then biking (and other active transport), then mass transit — in that order. And that seems to be the explicit stance of Transportation Alternatives, too.
I haven’t been doing this long, but as soon as I started looking into transit I saw a possible alternative to biking, and that didn’t seem too appealing to me. I like cycling too much - I don’t want it threatened by anything - even transit. If we had decent public transit in San Francisco I would have never taken up cycling. That worries me.
The conclusion? Cycling and Transit are in competition with one another.
Neither really competes with the automobile effectively in most of America. New York City is a bit of an exceptional case - it’s almost a real city. And that warms the heart. But it remains an exception.
So what to do about it? Develop a plan for how these modes of transport should work together.
The reason we might be interested in developing this plan, of course, is because cars are killing us, and it might be a good idea to work together to defeat car culture.
It might sound obvious, but I haven’t read anything about this yet. Lots of us advocate folks are talking about specific policies to improve or increase cycling or transit or safety or whatever, and some folks will throw out a ‘TOD’ or something once in a while, but on the whole, I don’t see a lot of ‘big picture’ talking/blogging/discussion. It’s very possible I’m just looking in the wrong places, or am just missing it somehow. If you know of something, please let me know.
I’ve been trying to figure this problem out for a couple of months now - how transit and active transport (walk/bike/skate/etc.) could work together, and was kind of curious what solution I would come to on my own - without mentorship or anything - based on my experiences and reading, what did I think could work? What did I think the future should look like? After all, if I’m advocating for all these transportation and development and social and public policies for San Francisco, shouldn’t I have some vague notion of what I wanted things in the future to look like?
It’s incredibly walkable and bikable streets, with a complement of rail, running along high-capacity ‘trunk lines.’ There could be room for (light rail) streetcars, but there would be no buses.
That’s pretty much it. That’s what I’ve come up with in round one. Obviously there are plenty of details, but this is the gist of it.
The other day I listened to Tom Radulovich, Executive Director of Livable City, give a presentation on lots of cool livable streets concepts, and he pointed out Copenhagen’s Finger Plan (wiki) for the suburbs (yes, there is a middle finger). It seemed to fit the ‘cycling with rail’ future I had started to envision.
I’m guessing this type of development pattern is part of any standard urban planning or sustainability degree/training. I think it could be a good thing that someone without any formal training in planning could come to the same type of conclusion about what a good urban plan might look like as some urban planners in Copenhagen from 60 years earlier. Maybe that’s meaningless, but maybe not.
It should be noted that the Finger Plan is nothing more than a bicycle wheel (’hub and spokes’) urban design strategy - only restricted by water. This is interesting because San Francisco is restricted by water, too. It is also interesting because bicycles are awesome.
[p.s. The Forums are open for participation.]
