I read this New York Times article yesterday about First Lady Michelle Obama’s successful campaign to persuade Wal Mart, Walgreens, and other retailers to provide healthier food choices and reduce the prevalence of “food deserts” in our communities. A food desert is an area where more than 500 people live further than one mile from a reliable source of healthy food.

After thinking about it for a second, I realized that I live right in the middle of such a place. So I went to the USDA’s Food Desert Locator to make sure.

It turns out that an awful lot of Tucsonans live in a food desert, and Arizona ranks nearly five times the national average for urban housing units inside food deserts, at 10.2 percent. Nearly fourteen percent of all Arizonans live in a food desert.

I am no fan of Wal Mart and I’m not going to start shopping there, but I have to salute them for taking this step, and I admire the work Mrs. Obama has done on this issue. I wonder if fixing our food desert problem might go a long ways toward fixing our bike-friendliness problem, too.

–Erik Ryberg

Now, I would never want to live in Cheyenne because it is too cold and windy most of the year. And it certainly did not make the list of America’s Most Bike-Friendly Cities. But I got to spend a few moments walking around downtown and what struck me is that Cheyenne, Wyoming, population 55,000, has a downtown that is probably three times the size of Tucson’s. (It’s not that easy to measure such a thing but I’m talking about streets and blocks that contain storefronts and services people are likely to need or at least want regularly, and that are close enough together that you would always walk from one to the other.) Here’s a picture:

It would be really easy to make this place bike-friendly if the city administrators wanted to. I saw a fair number of people riding, and like most western cities, the roads have plenty of room to spare for bike lanes. It’s flat there and things seem to be pretty close together. And unlike Tucson, they’ve had the sense not to run their freeways through the middle of town. Let’s hope they contain the sprawl better than we have!

P.S. On the flight home I got to an old issue of The New Yorker that has this article about a Rwandan bike racing team financed in part by Tom Ritchey. It’s a touching and uplifting story with much to say about that country’s terrible history. I have always been an admirer of the Rwandan approach to the awful killings that happened there, and this article gives insight into the process and the legacy of that, all while talking about bike racing.

–Erik Ryberg

Pedestrian struck in crosswalk dies

A 79-year-old man who was struck by a vehicle on the west side last week died Sunday.

The vehicle hit Jose Jesus Garcia in a marked crosswalk near the intersection of West St. Mary’s Road and North Cherokee Avenue around 4 p.m. Wednesday, said Sgt. Diana Lopez, a spokeswoman for the Tucson Police Department.

The driver, whose name hasn’t been released, is facing a citation.

Marisa Gerber

I was talking to my friend Collin the other day. He has invented some clever computer robots that compile crash data in Tucson and he runs various analyses on the data. He has enough information now to learn some interesting things about when most crashes occur and (possibly) why. For example, his database showed that cyclists are less likely to be hit on Mondays. He found that to be puzzling until he realized that some Mondays are holidays, which probably accounts for the dip.

Anyway, during the conversation he said, “After looking at this crash data all I can say is I am glad I’m not a pedestrian. Those guys have it way worse than us cyclists do.”

My condolences to Mr. Garcia’s family. I hope one day this city is safer for all of us who, like Mr. Garcia, choose alternative means to get to the places we want to go.

–Erik Ryberg

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile. Is it right to put someone in prison for the rest of his life after pulling him over with 0.10 blood-alcohol content? Even if it’s the 16th time it has happened?

Readers of this blog know that I am critical of our DUI laws. I want more enforcement and I want penalties that result in the loss of driving privileges, but lower fines. I believe the financial costs to the defendant of a DUI are too high right now (they run in the thousands of dollars even for a first-time DUI) because they put people in truly desperate situations. But I think a loss of driving privileges for a significant amount of time is warranted, and I think after two or possibly three DUIs that loss should be forever.

But prison? Forever? Obviously you have to enforce a situation where a person just plain refuses to stop driving no matter what the court says, but this seems excessive to me, even draconian. What about three years or so after each offense? The person in the video above has a drinking problem, obviously. Wouldn’t it be cheaper and safer for everyone to find a way to get that person into a lifestyle where driving is not necessary and he can drink himself to death without risking the lives of others? Do we need to punish him for the rest of his life in a prison cell?

–Erik Ryberg

Tucson is probably the only community rated Silver or higher by the League of American Bicyclists that does not have an active bike advocacy organization. How can Tucson become a more liveable community where the bike is seen as a valid mobility tool instead of just as a recreational tool, if no one is working on building consensus on what that vision is? We have some super active individuals in this community who serve on numerous boards and committees, and who volunteer their time encouraging folks to ride, or teach folks how to be more confident riders. But we don’t have a group who has the time to work the many hours needed to define or implement such a vision for better bicycling in Tucson. This is a real weak spot that the League of American Bicyclists have pointed out. Until a group mobilizes and defines their vision, the leadership of this community will continue to focus on other issues.

I have thought about this a lot. I think the problem is that, first, we really do have a lot of people who are doing great work around here. We have Mike M over at tucsonvelo.com, we have BICAS, the BAC, Jean Gorman, the El Tour folks, active involvement by many local bike shops and riding clubs, and then we have folks in the City who are accessible, thoughtful, and hard-working.

Independent advocacy groups tend to flourish where there is a demonstrable bureaucratic vacuum in local government, where some kind of injustice or neglect is undeniably occurring. But here in Tucson’s governmental infrastructure we have people like Tom Thivener, Ann Chanecka, Jennifer Donofrio, Matt Zoll, and lots of others who are quite obviously doing their level best to implement the vision Thivener is talking about. Their very presence (and competence) is one reason we don’t have an independent advocacy group!

But this isn’t to say one wouldn’t help. Such organizations give cover to local bureaucrats who are hoping to make changes but cannot show their superiors that the changes are justified. The problem is, a community has to really want such a group in order for one to form. It doesn’t seem as if Tucson is there yet, and part of the problem is that when Tucson cyclists call up City Hall, one of the people I’ve named above answers the phone, and actually listens.

The one area where this isn’t true, of course, is with law enforcement. I predict that if anything finally mobilizes Tucson bike advocates, it is going to be a failure of law enforcement. Probably a tragic one.

–Erik Ryberg

. . . we don’t have great examples in town yet except for parts of 3rd Street and University Blvd. That facility only has two out of the five core elements that make up a bike boulevard. We have some work to do on that corridor to prioritize bikes better in removing some stop signs, adding better wayfinding signage, adding pavement markings and in calming traffic better. The two core elements that it has today are the bike/pedestrian signals to help cross busy roads and it has pretty low traffic volumes.

The same recipe should work well on other local streets given that not everybody in town lives off of 3rd Street. We have over 600 miles of bike lanes in Tucson, yet only 96 miles of residential bike route. Most of the 96 miles lack the five core elements that make up a bike boulevard. Tucson’s urban core is as dense as Portland’s neighborhoods where bike boulevards are thriving (both at about 5,000 people per square mile). These residential bike routes should be upgraded. If we can do that we might then some new riders out on the streets.

Anyway, below is how Boulder, now a “Platinum” bike-friendly city, does it.

EBR

It seems that some members of the Tucson/Pima County Bike Advisory Committee disagree that money on bike boulevards is well spent — they want to see the money spent on bike lanes. I’ve heard lots of arguments for this, some which I regard to be outright specious (“Bike boulevards will take people off the main streets and thus make cycling more dangerous because there will be fewer of us on the busy streets”) and some less so (“You get way more bang for your buck with a bike lane”).

In my opinion, and it seems to be shared by most cyclists who spend a fair amount of time riding their bikes in urban environments, the bike boulevard is pretty much the holy grail of urban bike infrastructure outside of bike-dedicated greenways. A bike boulevard may not go right where you want it to, and it may not be perfect (there is usually some minimal auto traffic permitted on a bike boulevard), but the bike boulevard offers people a way to use a bike safely in the city, and, hopefully, this will give them the experience and courage to branch off the boulevard and start using their bike more often.

Here’s fellow bike lawyer Bob Mionske on the subject in his current Bicycling Magazine column:

[I]f we want to get more people on bikes, we have to build the infrastructure that will help them feel safer while riding. As the great cycling cities of Europe have learned, when bicycling feels safe for children and the elderly, everybody feels safer, and more people ride—and that is a benefit for all cyclists, and others as well, since as the roads become safer for cyclists, there’s also less danger for both motorists and pedestrians.

And that’s the part that does it for me. We need places where people can feel safe when they ride, and those places need to intersect with each other and be in urban centers.

I don’t like to question anyone’s motives, but the pro bike-lane/anti bike-boulevard arguments sound selfish to me. We have bike lanes all over the place, some of which are extremely dangerous to ride in, and many of which have very few takers. The Speedway bike lane is never going to be safe to ride in. And it is true that bike boulevards serve a geographically smaller community. But they convey the message that bikes are a legitimate form of transportation that our city supports, and that we are not always simply to be shunted into the shoulder and protected by a painted white stripe.

On that subject, more and more cities are painting sharrows instead of white stripes. Perhaps even more than bike boulevards, sharrows tell drivers that bikes belong, and that they must make way for and accommodate cyclists safely. My friend L, a vocal critic of bike lanes like those on South Stone and South Sixth Avenues that confine cyclists right in the “door” zone of parked cars, pointed me to this article from the L.A. Times about the increasing use of sharrows. Tucson has a few of these — including some on South Sixth Avenue — but I’d like to see a lot more.

Please visit www.tucsonbikesurvey.com for more information on supporting bike boulevards, bike sharrows, and other bike infrastructure in Tucson.

–Erik Ryberg

But I recently moved and my commute now includes a significant stretch of the Santa Cruz River Path. I noticed the other day that after my meandering route through quiet residential streets (I often get on the River Path at 19th Street), the instant I get on the bike path it is as if a giant load is lifted from my shoulders. I suddenly feel much more relaxed and at ease, and . . . happy.

It’s because I don’t have to worry about cars. I can ride along and look at the lizards and roadrunners and rabbits and groundsquirrels and I don’t have to think a bit about getting doored, left-hooked, hit from behind, yelled at, honked at, pushed over, made fun of, turned into, and run over.

Until I started crossing this boundary-line from street to bike-path on a daily basis, I didn’t realize how my own brain responds to riding a bike on the street with traffic. Judging from the sigh of relief that comes out of me every time I get on that bike path, it’s a pretty heavy kind of a deal. It stresses me out. I guess I just got used to it.

So you can mark me down as a convert to separated bike infrastructure. But of course I’d rather see separated car infrastructure. Separate those infernal things out to the edges of town where they belong.

Update: My friend B characteristically chastises me for this post:

Hi Erik,

I was very heartened to read your column yesterday about the bike path. As you know, a good portion of my commute was along the bike path when I lived in Tucson, and I always felt that either I was an inadequate or you were an alien when you pooh-poohed my extreme preference for the path and my disdain/fear of the street. On the path, I would daily see roadrunners, lizards, quail, hawks, snakes, creosote, flowers, etc, all doing their thing, while I pedaled along feeling like my commute was a much-needed break from the hectic day. On the road all I felt was tension. To be fair, it’s not just about the lack of cars; it is also all the things that flourish in the absence of cars.

Say hi to the roadrunners for me.

B

Erik Ryberg

Later that day the bicyclist gets back from the hospital to discover his bike has been stolen.

One of the reasons I started this blog back in 2007 was because I kept encountering similar stories here in Tucson of bicyclists being treated extremely badly by the police.

But I am seeing less and less of that now. Police reports seem to be getting better and better, and only rarely do I find the police blaming the rider for being right-hooked, left-hooked, and hit from behind.

This is not to say there isn’t an awful lot of work to be done, but as I have said many times before, I think things are getting better. And one reason for that is that stories like the one above are getting a lot of play, and embarrassing the agencies that are at fault.

–Erik Ryberg

The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income.

Did someone say Tuesday Night Bike Ride?

-Erik Ryberg