When Will Philly Get Scooters?

Driving Your Car to the Corner Store Is Not Okay

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?

Zombie Arguments in Bike Safety

Zombie says overtaking crashes are very rare, 
so why build bike lanes? Turns out 40% of fatal 
car-bike crashes are rear-enders. 

Recently I posted a story about Tom Palermo, his death, and the subsequent construction of parking protected bike lanes on Roland Avenue in Baltimore, where Tom died.

Shortly before the new bike lanes went in, there was a contentious community meeting attended by City officials. After the meeting, the officials confirmed that they would proceed with construction of the bike lanes, and they responded to a number of issues that had been raised.

Among the FAQs from the Baltimore DOT (on page 9) was this: "Since rear end crashes are rare for bicyclists, how is the change to cycle track protected by parked cars justified? Please provide statistics and references."

This argument has been around for a while, and it refuses to die. I'm not quite sure how you kill a zombie argument. I'm pretty sure you don't drive a stake through its heart - that's for vampires.

At first, I was going to let this go. After all, the Baltimore officials did a reasonably good job of rebutting it, and it would have been easy enough to let things lie. However, one of the lessons I took away from the story of Tom Palermo's death and the subsequent bike lane controversy was that "specious arguments must be rebutted in detail."

So maybe you can kill a zombie argument by talking it to death. Or burying it in facts.

The FAQs from the Baltimore DOT referred to a data sheet from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which focused on fatal bicycle accidents and found that in 2013 "non-intersection" crashes accounted for 57 percent of fatal bicycle crashes.

It's possible to take this further. In 2014 the League of American Bicyclists put out a report on a study it had conducted, independent of the federal statistics. For a period of 12 months, it researched in detail every fatal traffic crash involving a bicyclist that it could find on the internet, documenting 628 crashes. The results were, as the report put it, "eye-opening":

"We learned, for example, that a much higher percentage of fatal crashes than expected were 'hit from behind' incidents." Of crashes with reported collision types, 40 percent were rear-end collisions.

Rarity Is a Matter of Perspective
So why do people think 40 percent of deaths is rare? Because rarity depends on perspective. In absolute terms, death on a bicycle is rare.

Currently this particular way of meeting your maker is running around 700 a year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that 726 bicyclists died in car-bike crashes in 2014.

Meanwhile, total deaths from traffic accidents involving motor vehicles were 32,675. Even pedestrians died more than bicyclists - 4,884.

And then you can add in all the non-fatal crashes. Good numbers here are hard to find because the reporting criteria vary widely among reporting agencies, but here is one indication of the non-fatal mayhem on our highways: 39.2 percent of spinal cord injuries in the United States result from motor vehicle crashes.

And of course we could add crashes that don't involve cars. Bikes crash into other bikes, pedestrians, immovable objects, the ground. Such crashes are rarely fatal, but they can result in serious injury.

Small Compared to What?
So, yes, in absolute terms, not a lot of people die in bicycle accidents. But the rate at which they die is another issue entirely.

John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra published an article in Transportation Quarterly in 2000 on this subject. They found that, per kilometer traveled, bicyclists in the United States are 11 times more likely to die than motorists. Pedestrians are 36 times more likely to die than motorists, on a per kilometer basis. On a per trip basis, pedestrians and bicyclists are about three times more likely to die than motorists. Think about this the next time you venture out to the grocery store. (See my previous post Death as an Acceptable Outcome.)

A car is the safest place to be on the street. There's a lot of vehicular mayhem, but the vast majority of miles that Americans travel, and trips that they take, are by car, so the shockingly high mortality rates for walkers and bikers get masked. As Pucher and Dijkstra put it, "the dangers of walking and cycling in America are not just perceived, they are real."

The Terror Factor
The idea of being rear-ended by a car while you're riding your bike down the street holds a very special kind of terror. Such an event is very likely to kill you, and you can't in most cases prepare or react, because you don't know it's going to happen. You're utterly powerless. You have no control or even influence in this situation. (Here's a story on a crash in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in June. Five bicyclists died, and four were injured. It was a group ride. The driver has been charged with second degree murder and operating while intoxicated causing death, among other things.)

There are bicyclists who live with this icy thought every time they get in the saddle. What's more, I think it's why many moms won't let their kids ride bikes in the street anymore. They don't care so much that Johnny may fall and skin his knee. It's death from out of the blue that keeps kids inside, playing video games and getting fat.

And if the driver isn't drunk and doesn't leave the scene, he or she is unlikely to get more than a slap on the wrist. It's basically a free kill. Homicide without consequences. At least for the perpetrator.

We need to rethink this. We need to think of protected bike lanes as anti-terror devices.

Drunken Episcopal Bishop Kills Bicyclist

Baltimore Then Moves to Build The City's 
First Parking Protected Bike Lanes
And That's When Things Got Complicated

Two days after Christmas in 2014 the weather was fine, and Tom Palermo decided to go for an afternoon bike ride. He never made it home. As he was riding in a bike lane on Roland Avenue in Baltimore, he was struck from behind by Heather Cook, an Episcopal suffragan bishop who had been drinking and was texting.

This story received coverage in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Cook pled guilty to automobile manslaughter, leaving the scene of a fatal crash, and driving under the influence and texting while driving. In October 2015 she was sentenced to seven years in prison and immediately taken into custody. She is currently being held at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup.

And then, earlier this year, Roland Avenue got two protected bike lanes, one on each side of the street, heading in opposite directions. Essentially, the existing bike lanes were moved to the curb, and the lanes of parked cars were moved away from the curb, so they would protect bicyclists from moving cars in the traffic lanes, including people like Heather Cook.

I hope that's clear. The parking lanes were on the right, by the curb. They moved to the left. The bike lanes had been on the left. They moved to the right, by the curb.

So, a fitting memorial. Community and government working together to improve the safety of the built environment. Right? Well, not quite.

Everyone is quick to point out that the new bike lanes had been in the works before Tom Palermo died. They were part of a larger repaving project for Roland Avenue. The bike lanes had been included in the city's bicycle master plan, the local civic organization supported them, and the principal of the 1,200-student Roland Park Elementary/Middle School supported them, along with many teachers and parents.

There are quite a few schools in this area, including the Gilman School, Roland Park Country School, and the nearby Bryn Mawr School. I'm thinking protected bike lanes might increase the number of children riding their bikes to school. And that might actually put a small dent in the car traffic. Call me a dreamer.

However, this being about bicycle lanes, you will not be surprised that opposition arose. You will also not be surprised that it arose very late in the process. And so the city and the local civic organization held yet another meeting. It was standing-room-only at the Roland Park Presbyterian Church, with the Baltimore Sun reporting that the audience of 200 seemed about evenly split between the pros and the cons.

It was a contentious meeting, so much so that a few days later a local bicycle advocacy group called Bikemore issued a white paper entitled "Mythbusting: Roland Avenue Cycletrack."

A basic claim from the opposition was that there had been inadequate communication about the project. It just wasn't true in the case of the Roland Avenue bike lanes, and the white paper runs through a litany of the communications efforts, which I won't bore you with. Bottom line: "Whether or not one chooses to attend neighborhood meetings or read neighborhood communications is ultimately a choice." However, "one's choice to remain ignorant to the details of a road project shouldn't be used as the basis to call the communication inadequate."

The opposition also claimed that the new bike lanes were making the road less safe. My favorite objection comes from the lady who said she had been using the old bike lane as a buffer when she pulled her child out of the driver's side of the car, and therefore moving the bike lane removed that buffer and made her less safe. It was suggested in response that the typical street in Baltimore does not have a bike lane that motorists can use as a buffer, and that perhaps it would be a better idea to remove the child from the other side of the car. As the white paper says, "We believe it is always best to load and unload your children and elderly passengers on the side of the vehicle away from traffic."

The white paper also addressed the concept that the objecting neighbors had a right to veto the project: "But in the end, while community input should be carefully considered, transportation projects that have the direct aim of improving safety of all road users on a public roadway should not be allowed to be derailed simply by public opposition of residents."

The City of Baltimore stuck to its guns and built the bike lanes. More than that, there are other bike lanes that are in the pipeline and on track.

I take away several lessons from the story of this battle. First, Tom Palermo's death clearly had no effect on the neighbors who objected to the bike lanes. Second, bike lane proponents should always be prepared for late-arriving opposition. Third, specious arguments must be rebutted in detail. Fourth, near neighbors have no right to veto transportation projects affecting much larger areas; it's important to make that argument clearly, forcefully, and repeatedly. And finally, people in favor of a bike lane need to attend the public meetings in force.

I've been wondering about the effect of Tom Palermo's death on the various city officials who were involved in the Roland Avenue bike lanes. After all, I'm from Philadelphia, and I've watched shovel-ready bike projects languish for years. Did Tom Palermo's death stiffen the administration's spine enough to overcome bureaucratic inertia and near-neighbor tantrums?

I spoke about this with Liz Cornish. She's the executive director of Bikemore, the Baltimore bike advocacy group that produced the white paper I've been quoting from. She didn't want to speak for the city administration, but for Bikemore, she said, "It certainly stiffened our spines."