"Too much pressure": Fixing bicycling in the suburbs

In the last blog entry, Casey comments about my interim position in Baltimore County, managing the creation of a pedestrian and bicycle plan for the urban section of the county west and north of Towson, and suggests that I may come up with some important insights for improving bicycling in suburban areas, applying to the problem my urban sensibility...

Hmm, that might be too much pressure.

It's interesting because in email, I've written this in the context of a question about the Baltimore City bicycle plan and what has it produced since being produced in 2006:

my advocate side understands your "pain." The practical planner side of me would respond thusly: if a transportation project is placed at the head of the line for implementation, from planning through design and engineering to construction, it takes 8-10 years--and that is for a project that has been "fast tracked."

Of course, that's for serious construction. But even lane restriping tends to be done only when a road is getting rehabbed, etc. So transportation plans tend to take 10-20 years to come to fruition. (OTOH, it has taken 50 years to build out the road network...)

Another way to put it is this: advocates point to places like Portland as an example and say "why aren't we like that, right now?" while failing to recognize that Portland is where it is today because it has been focused on sustainable transportation planning and implementation since about 1970 (when they tore down the Waterfront freeway, and created the Downtown Plan in 1972 which staked the future of downtown on transit and restricting parking), with successive physical and planning improvements every year (including the development of a light rail and streetcar transit system). Plus other changes, like the Urban Growth Boundary, creation of a Metropolitan government, amazing staff people, the development of and support from a sustainability oriented urban planning program at Portland State University, etc.

So knowing the "back story," and faced with the "why can't we be like Portland [now]?" question practically paralyzes me. Because the last thing the person wants to hear is an explanation of how you build the setting for change, about organizational change, social movements, radical planning practice, and best practices in what we might call sustainable transportation.

You know though, some things aren't fully correctable. The advantage that cities and towns have over traditional suburban land form is the grid network of streets, which provides parallel routes and lower traffic alternatives--even if secondary local streets aren't deliberately remade into the equivalent of "bicycle boulevards" they function that way.

And in DC proper, the radial avenues provide cut throughs that help you get to other places relatively quickly e.g., from where I live riding down Kansas Ave. gets me to Columbia Heights or Adams Morgan or Georgetown much faster than if I had to be reliant on a straight grid.

So I get a kick (but also frustrated) when citizens, figuring I am a government worker just like any other government worker, start to lecture me about why it is good policy to promote sustainable transportation, more specifically biking and walking.

I know already.

The problem isn't me in my guise as a government worker (albeit temporary). It's about whether or not elected officials and the appointed officials who deal with the budget and capital improvement program and street projects and transportation planning create and support the right policies.

For example, did you notice in the Washington Times (I almost never read it anymore now that it has almost nothing local) that in one day it had two anti-"livable streets" pieces, a letter I can't find at the moment, and this op-ed, "Federal dollars for federal roads."

The article is hilarious because the subtitle is "local money should fund local transit" and yet the answer to the point made in the first two sentences of the article:

America's highway system is not delivering the high-quality transportation a competitive economy needs. Congestion gridlocks our urban expressways, costing Americans $76 billion per year in wasted time and fuel.

is in fact "transit" or more properly optimizing mobility resources.

The reality is that it is suboptimal to focus a transportation system on one mode, especially one mode that takes up an inordinate amount of space (it takes as much as 200 square feet to accommodate an automobile usually carrying only one person, while a bus using twice this amount of space can move 50 people or more), not to mention a sprawl land use paradigm. Even unlimited federal dollars can't "fix" the structural flaw--basic physics--that make it impossible to provide all the roads (and parking lots) that would be necessary to ensure unlimited uncongested driving. Let alone trying to do this in a financially constrained environment.

Because walking, bicycling, and transit are optimal mobility modes, requiring the least amount of space (let alone energy), that's the justification for funding more than automobile-mobility infrastructure from the federal and local road tax revenue stream....

but I digress. Getting back to bicycling in the suburbs, the biggest issue with bicycle planning is dealing with the 57-60% of people willing to bicycle transportationally, but not in the mixed traffic, high speed situations that they are forced to do so in today.

(I swiped this graphic from this blog entry, "The Bikeway Network" from the Reconnecting America blog but I have mentioned the work by Roger Geller, of the Portland Office of Transportation, many times.)

The advantage that center cities have that suburbs don't is a grid street network, which provides for parallel roads and therefore parallel routes. Some of these roads can be prioritized for automobile accommodation, leaving alternatives with less traffic, only local automobile traffic, etc., so that bicyclists can be placed in low traffic, low speed, limited heavy vehicle traffic situations (called "bicycle boulevards").

In the suburbs, without the parallel streets, it becomes very difficult to incorporate bikeways unless right of way has already been acquired. Otherwise it takes time and costs a lot of money.

Baltimore County doesn't have a lot of main roads and the road network other than the Beltway emanates from Baltimore City. There isn't much in the way of right of way, and unlike Montgomery County, many of these roads don't have continuous shoulders or perhaps one side of the road is significantly lower than the other, meaning that you would have to construct embankments, etc.

But there are other issues too.

I guess we could sort the issues into seven main categories:

1. Institutional commitment -- whether or not there is a commitment to construct and maintain facilities that promote walking and bicycling (this has to come from the top, from elected officials);

2. Agency commitment -- aligning the policies, regulatory framework, and practices of the government agencies to bring about the implementation and maintenance of facilities for pedestrians and bicyclists;

3. Financial commitment to funding pedestrian and bicycle facilities as part of normal capital improvement programs and street design, engineering, construction, and/or rehabilitation practices;

4. Having an extant "inventory" of space that can be made over into sidewalks and/or bicycle facilities -- availability of land, topographical constraints, existence of road alternatives, etc. (if you look at bike plans where they have the leeway to provide cost estimates, which can also include creating parks, well, the cost can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars);

5. Overall land use practices and spatial organization of the county to this point, which either support or do not support sustainable transportation -- mostly this means whether or not it is possible to bike or walk to places within 0-3 miles of where you live, and accomplish errands, get to school, events, etc. If cities are about "short distances", well counties are about "driving" and having to drive "long distances" to get to most places to accomplish just about anything.

6. Developing and providing encouragement systems to assist people in their adoption of walking and bicycling as a means of transportation.

+ 7. Support, interest, and willingness not to mention advocacy for walking and bicycling improvements on the part of citizens.

So while I am dealing, as best as I can with how to incorporate bicycle (and pedestrian) facilities into a suburban county road network (and note that a big piece of the puzzle is creating a master network of multi-user trails in locations that can support longer distance community as well as between town centers, and by definition multi-user trails are separated bicycle facilities able to accommodate the 60% of interested bicyclists unwilling to ride in high speed, high traffic situations), I am focused on all of those issues into trying to craft not just a plan, but a practical way forward, an implementation strategy that is multi-pronged, designed to bring about a structured system and process that can initiate, build, extend, and maintain pedestrian and bicycle facilities in a community that has for decades, prioritized automobile travel.

Part of this involves working on getting certain language into the transportation element of the master plan, with concomitant changes in budget policies. Part of it has to do with getting road design standards that require the simultaneous creation or retrofitting of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure into road projects.

The bikeway network diagram from the Reconnecting America blog entry showing different types of bikeways based on land use context is a good example, it illustrates the kind of design standards that are outlined on pages 37-39 of the Smart Transportation Guidebook. With standard design guidelines it's easier to reshape the environment going forward. Just make it "SOP" or standard operating practice.

Part of it involves trying to get the State of Maryland to change a bunch of state laws:

- the State Highway Administration is required to follow complete streets guidelines (but even they have a couple policies, such as walkways and bikeways and bridges, that can be tweaked to better support walking and biking)
- but other state agencies are not
- and neither are local jurisdictions (Montgomery County has its own law, and the capital budget process does require inclusion of pedestrian and bicycle facilities in streets, parks, schools, and building projects)
- plus the school districts aren't required to support walk to school programs
- and university campuses are not required to engage in significant sustainable transportation programs (some do, some don't) and they are not required to engage much with the local jurisdiction in their campus planning processes.

By getting these changes at the state level, counties would be mandated to have complete streets policies, etc. This would then apply to all 24 counties in the State of Maryland, rather than forcing people in each county having to work to change the laws separately, or parents at every school to create their own walk to school program, etc.

Of course, I could just produce a stock plan with a bunch of facilities recommendations and leave it at that...