Cycling for Cities, Struggling for Streets

by Tony Chavira

This story begins with two guys: former city bike coordinator and now planning consultant Mia Birk and current City of Portland Traffic Engineer Rob Burchfield.  After teasing through the intricacies of federal cycling policies and dealing with the ridiculous walls the planning community tend to slam into when trying to figure out how to accommodate bicyclists, they decided to tackle the completely outdated and underutilized federal biking policies with an interesting plan:

Currently in America, street design guidelines are largely the domain of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). AASHTO (and others) partner with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to publish the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) — a set of guidelines considered to be the bible for traffic engineers. The MUTCD offers persuasive guidance on what types of facilities can and can’t be installed.

Unfortunately, the FHWA and the MUTCD are painfully slow to innovate and their lack of official recognition of new bikeway designs is a significant barrier to a more bike-friendly America.

The problem boils down to this: If a bikeway design treatment — like bike boxes, bike-only signals, cycle tracks, bike boulevards, and so on — is not listed as an approved design in the MUTCD, many engineers are unlikely to use them. Engineers can still install these innovative facilities, but they must apply for a “Request to Experiment” and be subject to FHWA oversight. But the majority of city traffic engineers don’t take that step, either because bikeways aren’t a high enough priority, or they don’t have the time to go through the process, or they’re simply intimidated by the FHWA and have concerns about legal liability for doing anything not wholly approved by the MUTCD.

The result of not being able to develop state-of-the-art bikeway networks has made it difficult for America to make significant gains in bike use. Currently, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, only 0.55 percent of Americans use a bicycle as their primary means of getting to work.

Appropriately, a Planetizen article today provides a nifty checklist for what it'll take to create a rich street scene... almost like a recipe for urbanism.  In terms of aiming to put together trails for bicyclists, I think two of their points hit the nail right on the head:

• Identify Strategies That are Appropriate for Your City

Capitalize on your city's assets and methods; every city has its own tested approaches to implementing new policy initiatives. Seattle is famous for its pilot projects and has used various pilot programs to test out street design recommendations that later became standards. Los Angeles, a city of many different neighborhoods, decided to take a macro approach to urban design before delving into the specifics. The Los Angeles Urban Design Studio developed a set of overarching design principles, rather than specific design strategies.

• Explain Ties to the Bigger Picture

Help build the argument for “Why Design Matters” by describing how your manual fits with in the larger movement to rethink the streetspace. Building public awareness and support in one city helps increase attention and understanding at the local, regional, and federal level, in terms of policy and funding.

The two most important questions for us might be "which communities in Southern California are most conducive to biking?" and "Where exactly is implementing a comprehensive biking strategy appropriate?"  Right away images of bike trails and pathways flash through my thoughts that mostly have Downtown backdrops (since they're obviously the most dense population-areas), but adding a new bike lane or trail to an already-dense area might not be the best way to manage always difficult traffic flow issues.  Also, it gets kind of expensive to tease through the zoning laws each Downtown area might follow to distribute cyclists evenly through a dense urban space that previously had no cyclists.

Instead, it might be interesting to re-consider the stupid sprawl we already have in Southern California as a unique opportunity to implement new and innovative suburban biking policies!  I mean, we already have wide roads, suburban park space and lots and lots of surburban law enforcement to help keep those pesky drivers from dominating the road.  Communities like Woodland Hills, Van Nuys, East Los Angeles and Greater Monterey Park, the Crenshaw District, Venice, and the Lakewood area would all be perfect test communities to begin a simple, slowly implemented plan to bring creative bicycling-friendly policy to Southern California and maybe even promote a cool sense of localism!  I'm sure that the communities wouldn't mind, as long as the larger goals are patiently explained to their citizens.  I mean, who doesn't want safer streets?

So get on it cities.  Needless to say, driving isn't getting any easier.

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