. . . 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

Popular culture is showing increasing reception to stories about how riding a bike is fun. I think this is so important for our message — riding a bike is not work, it’s fun.

As my friend M used to say, “Get out of your car and get off on your bike.”

–Erik Ryberg

I guess I am not in principle opposed to this idea, but I do have a nagging voice telling me that riding a bike should be a right, not a privilege.

Unlike cars, guns, the banking industry, and genetic engineering, bikes have very little potential to do material harm to the polis. Bike riding is already regulated through our traffic laws, of course, assuming it is done on city property. But why should bikes themselves need to be licensed and regulated?

–Erik Ryberg

But it’s a different matter in Pima County Justice Court. This is where you end up if you get pulled over by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.

There, the judges do not, apparently, have the ability to keep the information from the DMV. They use a different form.

I learned this, of course, the hard way — and my client now has to not only pay the fine but suffer the consequences to her driver’s license. (The judge did reduce the fine amount substantially, because he said he appreciated the argument and would like to be able to do what I asked.)

Shortly after that hearing I received an email from another person who tried this argument on his own. He had the same experience but he said the judge decided to let him take the Tucson bicycle safety class in lieu of payment, even though officially Pima County does not recognize these classes! That’s quite a step, and I am sure it is because the judge is gradually getting educated about these tickets.

Even when you lose a case like this, you still make progress. Judges are human beings, and they think about things, and their behavior and approaches to problems will change. I suspect that Pima County will soon adopt the Tucson bicycle safety program, especially if the judge who handles these matters starts sending people over there whether they have adopted it or not.

–Erik Ryberg

Jennifer and Richard Cox were injured in a motor vehicle accident and incurred medical expenses of $25,000.00. They obtained a total of $30,000.00 from the motorist who hit them. They were insured through a state plan. The court ruled that the state could take up to 100 percent of a person’s injury settlement, but not more, to reimburse the state for the medical expenses.

Up until this decision, the normal practice would be that the state would be reimbursed for, at the most, 66 percent of the medical bills under the so-called “common fund” doctrine. The idea of the common-fund doctrine is that because the Coxes had to hire an attorney to get that settlement, and since the state directly benefited from that attorney’s work and would have most likely collected nothing without it, the state should contribute to the attorney fees. Otherwise the attorney is working for the state, for free.

What the common-fund doctrine does is it gives an attorney some incentive to take a case that otherwise wouldn’t pay. Cases like the Cox case, where the medical bills are high and the tortfeasor’s insurance (the torfeasor is the person at fault) is low. The common-fund doctrine lets the victim get an attorney, make at least some recovery, gets the state back most of its money, and pays the attorney.

Without the common-fund doctrine, the attorney has no reason to take the case since he or she will literally be working for free, and possibly for no other reason than to reimburse the state, which can now literally take 100 percent of a victim’s settlement.

I think this is an insane decision that benefits no one except the insurance companies. It is only going to result in the state obtaining less money over the long run, because tort victims are not going to be able to secure representation and there is no way insurance companies are going to pay the state anything if they don’t have to — which they won’t.

And of course the decision hits bicyclists harder than most, because bicyclists (and pedestrians) are much more likely to rack up large medical bills if hit by a car.

The decision does not affect people who are privately insured.

–Erik Ryberg

Video found at Bob Mionske’s Road Rights column.

Any article in the local paper about bicyclists will be sure to attract many on-line comments about scofflaw cyclists who never stop at stop signs. And it’s been debated in this website, too, with several of my readers wondering why cyclists don’t always come to a complete stop at every stop sign. They argue that we need to start doing so if we wish to be respected by motorists.

But I’ve been thinking about this a lot and have started watching the way motorists deal with intersections more carefully. My conclusion is that whether you are on a bike or in a car, you make a series of identical calculations based on your perceived safety of the intersection, along with the chances of getting caught for rolling through the stop sign.

The difference is that if you are in a car, you can’t determine as quickly how dangerous the intersection is, and this means you tend to slow down quite a bit, or, in rare cases, come to a complete stop. On a bike, you can figure things out pretty quickly, and you aren’t going as fast to begin with.

Take a look at any intersection with a stop sign and watch for the tell-tale backwards motion of a car when its suspension deals with the weight of the chassis on fully-stopped wheels. How often do you see it? Pretty much never, if the intersection is clear. People slow down, look both ways, and carry on.

The video of the intersection above shows this behavior perfectly. The intersection is full of stop signs and flashing lights, but it appears to be very safe, and designed wholly to serve pedestrians (there is no cross traffic). Note the cyclists flying through the intersection. They can see in an instant that there are no pedestrians or oncoming cars and they keep going. The cars themselves slow just enough to make sure there isn’t a pedestrian preparing to leap into the crosswalk.

I admit that you see more cyclists doing stupid things at stop signs than you do motorists, but I think most of us are making the exact same choices based on the information we have available, whether on a bike or in a car. The only real difference is that our speed differential at an intersection is low: we only need to slow down a little bit to satisfy ourselves the intersection is safe; a motorist needs to slow down quite a bit to reach the same conclusion.

The proof would be in the accident data. I don’t know how many cyclists get injured because of stop-sign running, but I bet the percentage is about the same as it is for motorists. Anybody know?

–Erik Ryberg