Driving Your Car to the Corner Store Is Not Okay
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| Bangs Avenue, Asbury Park. |
Well, the new bike lanes are in on Pine and Spruce, and I think they're quite beautiful. The pavement is marvelously smooth, the painted lines vivid, and there are flex posts at strategic locations that will substantially reduce crash risks. And the bike lanes have been moved from the right side of the street to the left, making bicyclists more visible to drivers and again reducing crash risk.
Some pieces are missing. We don't have full-block coverage with flex posts, similar to the design of the bike lane on Chestnut Street in West Philly. And we don't have adequate numbers of loading zones in the parking lane. This means that drivers will continue to use the bike lane as a loading zone and very reasonably claim that they don't have an option.
But here's what's wrong with using the bike lane as a loading zone. It limits the people using these lanes to two groups of bicyclists. The first group is called the strong and fearless - think bicycle messengers. The second is called the enthused and confident. Together they compose about 10 to 15 percent of the population. A much larger group - studies generally size it at half of all people - is called the interested but concerned.
The interested but concerned are interested in biking but concerned about getting into a life-altering crash with a car, or possibly a trash truck. Dodging cars and trucks parked in the bike lane is a deal-breaker.
2018 Bike PHL Facts, from the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, says that Center City had a 2017 bike mode share of 7.3 percent. South Philly was higher, with an 8.1 percent mode share, and a few
census tracts actually score over 20 percent. (See also the Center City District's 2018
report on bicycle commuting.)
In an American context, these numbers are not at all shabby, but they also indicate that the present market for bicycling in Philadelphia is almost entirely strong and fearless or enthused and confident.
More disturbing, in 2018 the Bicycle Coalition's bike counts on the Schuylkill River bridges and in Center City were actually down. The South Street bridge, for instance, declined from 455 bikes per hour in 2017 to 380 per hour in 2018. Fortunately, preliminary data from the Bike Coalition's
2019 bike count indicate that bike counts have rebounded strongly.
Still, we haven't yet made any significant gains with the interested but concerned group. Since this group has about half the population, I've been saying for years that bike mode share in Center City could get to 50 percent. But that will require building a complete network of fully protected bike lanes. Pine and Spruce can be the east-west spine of this network in Center City, but these by themselves will not be enough.
So we have a few years of building ahead of us before we can expect the interested but concerned to come off the bench in any numbers.
What to do? Call in reinforcements - in this case, e-scooter share.
Learning About Scooters
Back on February 27 of this year, the committees on transportation and public utilities and the environment of Philadelphia's City Council held a very interesting hearing on e-scooter share. Several of the major firms were there - Lime, Bird, Spin - along with City administrators from various departments and outside experts.
I attended the meeting, and I found it a very good tutorial on a very new topic - e-scooter share was
less than two years old at the time. A lot has happened in the intervening nine months, and so I found myself going back and reading the transcript on the City Council website (to see it, click
here).
In February, the scooters were quite controversial, mainly for two reasons. First, they were thought to be very unsafe. Second, the industry was pushing dockless scooters, which created many, many complaints about scooters being left in inconvenient spots.
I'll get to the criticisms later, but first let's have a look at some of the positives that scooters can bring.
For starters, it turns out that lots of people who won't bike are quite willing to get on a scooter. Sarah Clark Stuart, executive director of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, noted a study in Portland, Oregon, in which 74 percent of scooter riders reported that they had never used the local bike share, and 42 percent reported that they had never biked. (See transcript, p. 75. For the Portland study, click
here.)
Liz Cornish is executive director of Baltimore's Bikemore, an organization that advocates for bicycling and Complete Streets. Baltimore was just wrapping up a pilot scooter share project with Bird and Lime, and she said, "Scooters have also proven appealing to a broader range of users than those who bike." (P. 89.)
In other words, we can use scooters to fill the bike lanes. Many scooter riders will be new recruits, and not bicyclists switching over to scooters.
Professor Megan Ryerson is UPS Chair of Transportation at the University of Pennsylvania. She put it this way: "Demand for separated, protected, multi-purpose bike/scooter lane infrastructure will become impossible to ignore." (P. 93.)
So where are all these new scooter riders coming from? Well, a lot of them are coming from cars. Paul Steely White used to be executive director of Transportation Alternatives in New York City. Now he works for scooter company Bird. He noted, "Thirty-four percent of e-scooter trips in Portland were trips that would have otherwise been taken by a private car, an Uber or a Lyft." (P. 62.) And in other cities Bird keeps seeing a figure around 30 percent (p. 64).
The experience at Lime is the same: "30 percent of our riders in major markets took a scooter instead of using a personal car," reported Shari Shapiro of Lime. (P. 53.)
Getting this many people out of cars is a big deal. It leads directly to reduced traffic congestion and reduced air pollution. Call it a win for scooters. Call it a win for all of us.
At the hearing, representatives from the City urged caution, arguing primarily that the safety issues were inadequately explored, and suggesting it would be best to wait awhile before letting the scooters in.
I was okay with putting scooters on hold, mainly because of the lousy condition of our streets. There was actually a speaker who spent most of his time talking about all the potholes and unfilled utility trenches.
Now I'm ready to go, for two reasons. First, we have the Pine and Spruce bike lanes, along with 11th Street and others, and rumor has it that we'll be getting a few more in the spring (I've been disappointed before). Second, e-scooter share came to my second home town, Asbury Park, last summer, and I've seen a successful program in action.
The e-scooter share in Asbury Park
debuted on August 2, and it was an immediate hit, garnering 15,169 trips in the first month with 5,806 unique riders (this in a city with a permanent population of about 16,000). Each scooter had an average of 4.7 trips per day.
And they weren't all visitors headed for the beach. Local residents are using them to get to work and also just to get around during the day. In the first month of the program - August - 46 percent of users were residents. And they're still doing it, even as the
weather gets colder.
And, yes, scooters are getting people out of their cars. A
survey of scooter riders indicated that 33 percent would have otherwise been driving.
Parking in Corrals
One of the main objections to the scooters, back in February, was the way the dockless bikes tended to get left in inconvenient locations, blocking sidewalks and generally making a mess. Asbury Park solves this problem by requiring that scooters be parked in corrals, which are simply painted squares, either on the sidewalk or in the street next to the curb (see the photo at the beginning of this story). I am reliably informed that GPS technology requires the rider to park in a corral before the rental session can be ended.
Asbury Park did not invent the scooter corral - it appears that
Seattle may have been the first, and
Santa Monica may have been the first to put corrals in the street, as opposed to the sidewalk. But I can tell you the Asbury Park experience has convinced me that the clutter problem is over. (Phoenix did experience a bump in the road when it first implemented mandatory corrals. For a story, click
here.)
Crashes
As to the safety issue, I need to detour back to the Portland
study, which says on page 22, "Eighty-four percent of emergency room visits were the result of an individual falling off a scooter." In other words, they were solo crashes that did not involve a car, a truck, or a pedestrian.
I believe it. We're talking about newbie riders - people who may not have ridden a scooter, or a bicycle, since they were children. Riding a scooter does have a learning curve, and mistakes can lead to contact with the ground. For one thing, it's easy enough to oversteer a scooter and have it buck you off like an ornery mustang.
I'm not eager to blame the victim in any crash. There are always other factors involved, including the design of the scooter and the quality of the road. (For a few news stories click
here and
here and
here.)
More serious crashes do occur. Recently, in Elizabeth, N.J, a scooter
collided with a truck making a right turn, and the scooter rider was killed. This is unacceptable. We must find out what happened and make the necessary changes - to scooters, to the built environment, and to program management - to make sure this does not happen again.
Shortly after the debut of the Asbury Park scooter program, the maximum speed for the scooters was reduced from 15 mph to 12 mph. (For a story from the Asbury Park
Press, click
here.) Even before the launch it was decided to turn all the scooters off at 9 p.m.
In Asbury Park, scooter crashes do tend to be minor, as we have seen in Portland. Here's one.
A few days before Labor Day, my wife and I were walking down Ocean Avenue in Asbury Park, next to the boardwalk, and we actually watched a young woman take a pratfall more or less in front of us. I walked over and spoke with her to see if she was okay - it was a pretty dramatic dismount. She seemed alert and oriented, even cheerful. No sign of road rash on her knees. After a minute she got herself up unaided, grabbed her scooter off the pavement, and scooted away.
I wouldn't want to do this in the middle of Market Street in Philadelphia during rush hour, but I do think the safety issues are manageable and will decrease as we all get more experience with scooters on our streets, identify issues and their solutions, and make adjustments.
We just need to get started. Learning curves don't function until you climb onto them.
See also Focus on the Short Trips,
Intraday Biking,
Looking Three Ways at Chestnut Street,
Scooter Share Coming to Asbury Park,
They Threw Rocks at Mayor Dilworth,
Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?
