Tag Archives: Bicycles

Bicycle power!

Now that Governor Bob McDonnell and the General Assembly have restructured transportation taxes away from a user-pays system to an everybody-pays system, they have (perhaps unwittingly) undermined the justification for short-changing funding for bicycle routes. Cycling advocates Tom Bowden and Champe Burnley drive home the point in a Times-Dispatch op-ed today.

Now our streets and roads will be paid for by everyone, through the sales tax and other general revenues. … With this change comes an obligation. Our streets and roads must be designed for the benefit of all legal users. No longer will pedestrians and cyclists have to endure the snide retorts of motorists that “Roads are for cars because cyclists don’t pay gas tax.” It was never really true in the first place, but now it’s laughable.

Our local streets and roads are for people and always have been. Most roads in Virginia existed long before automobiles, and now that we all pay for them, it’s time our planners and our government acknowledged this simple fact.”

I still believe in a user/beneficiary pays system for funding roads, bridges, highways and mass transit — and bicycles, too, if I could figure out a revenue stream for them. But now that we’ve butchered that principle and stuffed its various precepts and axioms into the incinerator, it’s time to follow through on the implications. Pedestrians and cyclists are taxpayers, too. They have every right to insist upon a share of the revenue stream to support projects that benefit them as well.

– JAB

What can happen when you leave your bike leaning against a tree too long.

It’s one thing to say you want to create a bicycle-friendly community, it’s quite another to pull it off. In the abstract, it sounds pretty easy. The devil is in the details.

A case in point: Richmond City Council is pondering an ordinance to authorize police to attach a bicycle, motorcycle or moped to a city-owned tree, post, sign or other property after 72 consecutive hours if they are inoperable, or after 10 days if they are abandoned.

This is the kind of thing that comes up when more people use — and abuse — bicycles. In a column today, Times-Dispatch columnist Michael Paul Williams recalls an incident from two years ago in which two guys were visiting a friend and secured their bikes to a no-parking sign. A bit later, the discovered a police officer digging up the sign and threatening to confiscate their bikes. Writes Williams: “The episode embodied the city’s uneasy coexistence with bicycles.”

In the most recent case, however, City Council appears to be responding to a real problem — the “dead bike” issue. It’s a fact: People leave inoperable bikes tethered to trees and city property, taking up public space and creating an eyesore. “They are blight,” Williams quotes City Council member Parker C. Angelasto as saying.

I’m a big proponent of cyclist’s rights. But rights come with responsibilities, and cyclists need to be good citizens. Their rights don’t extend to chaining their bicycles to city property for days or weeks on end. The ordinance sounds reasonable to me.

– JAB

Bicycle parking at a Bogota, Colombia, transit station.

What’s with General Assembly Republicans? They’re willing to raise taxes to fund automobile and mass-transit projects but they’re not willing to support a bill that would make bicycling safer without costing the state a dime. The House version of a bill submitted by Sen. Chap Peterson, D-Fairfax, was defeated yesterday in a tie vote in the House Transportation Committee.

The bill, which would have required drivers and passengers to wait for a reasonable opportunity to open vehicle doors adjacent to moving traffic, was just too much for Republicans to swallow. Of the seven delegates voting for the bill, only one was Republican, while of the seven voting against, six were. Tie votes prevented the bill from passing, thus killing it.

It’s a small bill, hardly as consequential as the legislative proposals restructuring gasoline and sales taxes to raise billions of dollars for new transportation construction projects. But, symbolically, it speaks just as loud. By their actions, Republicans appear to embrace the traffic engineering mentality that the purpose of roads is to move vehicles as rapidly and efficiently as possible, even if it means sacrificing the idea of “complete streets” in which cars share roads with pedestrians and bicycles.

It is ironic that Republicans are comfortable with the idea of increasing funding for mass transit, as seen in their support of Governor Bob McDonnell’s transportation funding package, while refusing to support a measure that would help make mass transit economically viable. Successful transit requires several elements: One is mixed-use development; rail stations should serve a mix of residential, commercial and amenities. A second is higher density; the more people who live and work within a quarter mile of light and heavy rail stations, the more who are willing to walk to the station. A third is a walkable-bikable street environment. Bicycles increase transit ridership by making a station accessible from distances greater than a quarter mile. And unlike cars, they take up only a tiny amount of parking space.

Bottom line: If we want Virginians to ride the mass transit assets we plan to spend billions of dollars on, we need to make streets more hospitable to pedestrians and bicyclists.

Astoundingly, Republicans are willing to throw millions of dollars at mass transit without any understanding of the urban context it takes to make transit successful. It is this kind of nitwittery that makes it so difficult to vote for them. They are saved at the ballot box only by the foolishness of Democrats. God save us all.

– JAB

Here’s another bill I like: HB 1950. Introduced by Alfonso Lopez, D-Arlington, this bill brings bikes under the protection of the no-tailgating law by deleting one word from existing legislation: “The driver of a motor vehicle shall not follow another motor vehicle, trailer, or semitrailer more closely than is reasonable and prudent…”

In this case, shorter clearly is better.

– JAB

The Virginia Creeper Trail is arguably the most beloved bicycle trail in Virginia. But it wasn’t always so. As Bill Lohmann reminds us in the Times-Dispatch, many landowners along the trail, which was built upon an abandoned railroad bed, opposed its development in the 1980s. Writes Lohmann:

One group filed a lawsuit. Others placed logs and hay bales across the trail and locked public gates. One farmer put a bull in a field next to the trail and posted a sign warning, “Cross at your own risk.”

By the mid-1990s, when the trail had opened and the world hadn’t come to an end, Lohmann says, a survey of property owners showed that 75% approved of it. That number might well be higher today. Many who live on the trail enjoy it as a recreational amenity. The community as a whole in Abingdon and Washington County certainly loves the trail, which has become a significant visitor attraction and revenue generator.

Tastes are changing. People place a higher value on cycling amenities than they did in the past. Bicycle access increases property values. Higher property values makes people happy.

– JAB