‘It Excites The Bicycling Community’
Damn straight, it does.
We talked just a tidbit about bikes on board the new Phoenix Light Rail line, but here’s a bit more:
“Every time we talk about it, it excites the bicycling community,” said Hillary Foose, spokeswoman for Metro light rail.
Metro light-rail employees have been distributing brochures explaining the process and bike etiquette on trains to bike shops and other organizations.
Rich Rumer, chairman of the Arizona Coalition of Bicyclists, said most cyclists he has talked to like the idea of bringing their bikes on the train.
“The bike community as a whole is excited about it because it’s an intermodal thing, and that should be the goal,” he said.
In addition to bringing bikes onboard, cyclists can lock their bikes at racks at any of the eight park-and-ride lots along the line.
Intermodal! They sure know the way to a biker’s heart.
I guess Phoenix beat us to bikes-on-light-rail. Grrr.
Richard Layman pointed us to all the cool pictures and videos and articles and blog posts about Phoenix light rail in the sidebar of this page. I picked out a couple of bicycle-related videos.
This one is called ‘Bike etiquette for light rail’ and it’s basically just a short bike infomercial from Phoenix light rail communications person, Hillary Foose (who I sent that earlier info request about Google Transit to):
And this is a one-minute clip from a real live newsperson with more of the same, and a bit extra:
AZCentral.com has been doing a bang-up job with coverage - here’s a dedicated Light Rail section of their website. There also appears to be a dedicated light rail blog written by a couple of reporters.
Valley Metro, the transit agency, appears to have at least one news feed so far.
Here’s what we need to do - as soon as those railcars start filling up with bikers, we need to start telling Valley Metro that they should increase rail service and, if need be, decrease bus service. We should build our mobility around a formula of walking, biking, and rail - no buses. I say we increase parking space at the park-and-rides in the short-to-near term, or incentivize more people to start biking to the stations. We’ll slowly work to make sure everyone has transit service, and if we can cut bus service, we’ll do it. If people are within three miles of rail service, then they can bike to the station, and they can keep their bikes with them. In some places, there will just not be enough density to provide only rail service, but I still think this is a strategy we can, and probably should, work towards. That strategy is one based on real transit - quality transit - dignified transit, coupled with intermodality.
Here, in San Francisco, I think this walk/bike/trains/ferry strategy can work very well. Our main footprint is 49 square miles — 7 miles by 7 miles. It should be easy enough for us to put most folks within a short walk or bike ride of a light rail or streetcar line.
I’ve tried to make some sense of the various growth figures I’ve seen for various cities and metro areas, but they all seem to say different things. I might just be reading them wrong.
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