Something Missing?

Complete Streets Without Micromobility

Who could ask for anything more? 

Back in February 2019, the City of Philadelphia begged off on bringing a scooter-share program to the city, suggesting, among other things, that the topic was very new and required further observation as it developed and evolved in other places. And the City suggested that it might be willing to revisit the subject of a scooter share program in Philadelphia in about a year - that would be February 2020.

Well, guess what? February 2020 is right around the corner. Things have been remarkably quiet. So I wrote an article reviewing what I had learned and seen during the course of the year, and suggesting that it might be time to bring scooters to Philly. (To see the article, click here.)

The responses I've had from the City to that scooter article have been interesting. I'm told that at least a few Council members are cautiously favorable. The City administration, however, remains very concerned that the poor overall quality of Philly's streets creates serious safety risks. And, frankly, I do have sympathy for this position.

My main motivation for scooters, however, is to get more traffic onto our existing protected bike lanes - specifically, the Pine and Spruce lanes, which have recently been repaved and upgraded.

And so, as I was thinking about this, I came up with another of my bizarre ideas. Would it be possible to use Pine and Spruce as the two pieces of a kind of trolley line? The scooters would be geo-fenced so they could only run on these streets (and perhaps a few others). We could have the eastern terminal in Head House Square and the western terminal at 34th and Spruce, next to the University of Pennsylvania, HUP, and CHOP. There would also be intermediate stations with corrals, where people could either pick up or drop off a scooter.

I realize that a closed system like this is just about the opposite of the original Bird-Lime concept of go anywhere, park anywhere. But it might be a way to get scooters going in Philly, and it might relieve some of the congestion out by HUP - which, if you haven't been there recently, is quite horrific.

I don't want anyone to get hurt on a scooter. And I don't want anyone's feelings to get hurt. But if our repaved bike lanes on Pine and Spruce aren't safe enough for scooters, I think I'd like to know why.

What the curb looked like before parked cars drowned everything.

The photographs here were taken by Edwin Locke in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1937, for the Farm Security Administration.

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?

Missing the Point

Biking to School

Outside Greenfield School, on 22nd Street.

In 2012, Professor Peter G. Furth wrote, "It is this writer's opinion that the turning point will be when children begin again riding bikes to school in large numbers. When bicycle infrastructure and children's safety become intertwined, funding for bicycle infrastructure will be secure." (John Pucher and Ralph Buehler, eds., City Cycling, 2012, p. 135.)

I found myself coming back to this quote while reviewing comments on proposed changes to the bike lane on 22nd Street in that bastion of reactionary progressivism, Philadelphia. And I must say I'm feeling a bit better about this go-round. The discussions this time seem much less emotional and adversarial than they were on Pine and Spruce, and on Lombard. I'm thinking it may be because of the proliferation of protected bike lanes in the heart of the city - Chestnut Street in West Philly, Market and JFK near City Hall, and 27th Street and South near the South Street bridge. Look - flex posts right outside my car window, and the world has not come to an end!

I do sense more goodwill this time around, and perhaps an increased comfort level. However, I still find people questioning the bike lanes, or perhaps their placement or configuration, using arguments that would benefit from a deeper understanding of the facts. Let's take a moment to review a few of these arguments.

Flex Post Are Ugly
Opponents of protected bike lanes like to say that flex posts are ugly, and, in certain parts of the city, they like to add that they are not in keeping with the historical character of the neighborhood.

Where to start. Okay, flex posts are ugly. They're also effective. As for violating historical context, I've been hearing this one for years, and I don't think I've ever provided a full rebuttal. Today's the day.

Let's agree that much of your neighborhood dates from the middle or late nineteenth century. Good for you. So how much of it looks the way it did in, say, 1870 or 1890?

When it comes to the houses, the answer is, quite a bit. Some blocks, particularly in the historic district, would make a nice movie set for a Victorian drama. Other blocks offer numerous additions from later periods, which Jane Jacobs tells us is a natural and organic form of neighborhood renewal.

Okay, now let's look at the street - the space between the houses. What do we see? Well, first of all, we see cars parked at the curb - usually an uninterrupted line from corner to corner, sometimes including the crosswalk, and basically preventing a full view of the nice Victorian buildings. Back in the day, there were no cars parked at the curb and, standing across the street, you could see everything, down to the boot scrapers and the mounting blocks.

There were no cars parked at the curb because cars hadn't been invented.

In fact, extended parking at the curb used to be illegal. As the old English common law put it, "The king's highway is not to be used as a stable-yard." I'm personally not surprised that people didn't want to park their horses at the curb overnight, but their wagons were also not welcome.

What did people use the curb for? Dropping people off at their houses, and also picking them up. And of course package deliveries, coal deliveries - it was a lively liminal space, something like a shoreline, and then it got frozen to death by car parking.

The pre-car days are the source of your expectation of being able to get out of a vehicle at the curb in front of your house and walk across the sidewalk and be home. What is robbing you of that expectation is cars parked at the curb, not bike lanes. And you were robbed a long time ago.

More Interlopers
How about some other modern interlopers? Well, for starters, take a look at the street paving. You may notice a lot of asphalt. In fact, that's all you notice, until somebody opens the road and shows you what's underneath. Along with the trolley tracks, you may notice some Belgian block.

Asphalt was available as a paving material in the nineteenth century, but it hardly had the monopoly it holds today. There were dirt streets, and cobble stones, and Belgian block, and wood block, and brick, and something called macadam, which was basically crushed stone kissed by a steam roller. (And the roads were often in a poor state of repair. For an amusing vignette of the state of American roads just before the start of the motor age, see James Longhurst, Bike Battles, 2015, pp. 62-63. There's even a quote from Mark Twain.)

In my opinion, asphalt is a very useful material that is also very boring to look at. I don't think we're going back to Belgian block, but the point here is that it's very unlikely that the street in front of your house was paved with asphalt in the nineteenth century.

And there were no painted lane markers - or any other striping - on the streets in the nineteenth century. (You'll notice, when people try to do this on Belgian block, it doesn't work very well.) Now that Philadelphia has virtually returned to unmarked streets, I think we can agree we would like to have the stripes back. Innovation is not necessarily bad - it's just not historical. (For lane markers see Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011, p. 52.)

Although there have been road signs for a long time, most notably signs carrying street names, the traffic control sign is really a child of the motor age.  The stop sign was invented in 1914, the same year traffic lights were introduced. Signage also governed parking, and parking meters were introduced in 1935. (For the origins of the stop sign see Longhurst, p. 91. For traffic lights see Norton, p. 59. For parking meters see Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking, 2011, pp. 380-382.)

(Bill's going to fall down a rabbit hole for a minute. Clay McShane does report some tile traffic control signs from Barcelona that date to about 1880. The signs depict a man leading a horse and were posted at alleys in the city's medieval quarter. See pp. 395-396 of the linked article.)

So there's quite a lot of visual clutter on our streets that did not exist in the nineteenth century. However, there were other things to watch out for, such as horse droppings, also known as road apples.

So maybe we can put up with a few plastic sticks in the street, and while we're at it maybe repaint the lane dividers.

We Did It to Ourselves
I need to return to what I have discovered is the basic message of this story. There is no biblical or constitutional right to parking at the curb. In fact, as we've seen, English law was very protective of the king's highway, and this same approach was followed in the United States right up to the introduction of the automobile. In 1889, the New York State Court of Appeals opined, "The highway may be a convenient place for the owner of carriages to keep them in, but the law, looking to the convenience of the greater number, prohibits any such use of the public streets. The old cases said that the king's highway is not to be used as a stable yard, and a party cannot eke out the inconvenience of his own premises by taking in the public highway." (See Longhurst, p. 90.)

All this changed when the cars came. They just showed up and took over. Pretty soon there were cars everywhere - parking, moving, and trying to move but unable to do so because of all the congestion. There was a moment in Los Angeles in 1920 that pretty much sums up the whole process. Fed up with the congestion, the city banned curbside parking in the downtown. The ban lasted nineteen days. Under immense pressure from car owners, including quite a number who were wealthy and powerful, the city rescinded the ban. (See Shoup, pp. 491-493.)

This is only one event in a long and complex history, but the basic elements are all there. We did this to ourselves. It didn't have to happen.

Getting Kids Back on Their Bikes
Back to 22nd Street, and the Greenfield School, where the new bike lane is slated to run at the curb next to the school, displacing the drop-off lane there to the other side of the street, where the bike lane is currently located. (There are two other drop-off lanes on Sansom and on 23rd; they will continue to be directly next to the school.)

So far the Greenfield people, and frankly all the 22nd Street people, seem much more reasonable than the people who showed up to the Pine-Spruce and Lombard Street hearings. Good will will carry you a long way in my book.

I think my main concern about Greenfield is that the focus of the discussion seems to be entirely on access by cars, with virtually no attention being given to access by foot and by bike. Even casual observation indicates that a very large proportion of the students here arrive by foot.

So here's my problem. If moving the drop-off zone on 22nd to the east side of the street creates a hazard for the children being dropped off, then the children who are walking to school are already at risk. The question, in my opinion, should not be the location of the drop-off zones, but rather the quality of the intersections.

The school community has already known success with what had been the worst intersection near the school, the one at Sansom and 23rd. The City responded to politely expressed concerns by installing crosswalks and a stop sign on 23rd. (Actually there are two stop signs, one on each side of 23rd. The one on the right-hand side is not in a good state of repair.)

So progress is possible. Perhaps one day people will just habitually do the Complete Streets thing and think about pedestrians and bicyclists as well as motorists when they look at streets and intersections. And maybe, just maybe, one day they will think that having a protected bike lane running directly next to a school is actually a positive rather than a negative.

I know. Call me a cockeyed optimist.

See also Getting Kids Back on Their Bikes, Legacy Street Signs, Cars and Bikes - the Back Story,  The Pavements of Asbury Park, The Supreme Court and Parking, Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?

A New World Being Born

Despite a Breech Presentation, I'm Hopeful of Success

Philly Free Streets 2016, Broad and South.

As I sat in a very comfortable chair in the mayor's reception room in City Hall on Friday, October 19, I found myself filled with conflicting emotions and thoughts. It has taken a while for all of this to settle.

And there's still some sloshing going on, but I do have two salient thoughts: First, I think we are going to get our streets to a better place; second, I'm very concerned about timelines that look like hockey sticks - flat for the first couple of years, then almost vertical in the final year. I saw a lot of those hockey sticks in my corporate life, and I often watched the vice presidents in charge of those programs change jobs - more money at another firm - just before the hockey stick was supposed to go into liftoff.

The meeting in the mayor's reception room was about Vision Zero: the plan to reduce traffic deaths to zero in the relatively near future. And there was some very good news. The bill to allow speed cameras on Roosevelt Boulevard was in the process of being signed by the governor.

The other highlight for me was the introduction of a program of neighborhood slow zones. The two salient points here, again for me, are reaching into the community and asking the locals to grapple with the question of how they can make their streets safer and more enjoyable; and, second, looking at a whole neighborhood and assembling an array of improvements planned to work together to improve the life of the community, instead of the City looking at individual traffic lights and changing things for the worse, without consultation or notice. (I have personal experience of the top-down approach: see Running of the Bulls on Lombard Street.)

I see here the beginnings of a broader approach to reimagining our public spaces. I think the term public space generally causes people to think of parks, but I would definitely add streets, where much of the acreage is. And I would add our rivers and our rail lines. I think some of the most depressing views of Philadelphia are through a train window.

The list doesn't stop there. In New York there's a sewage plant that gives public tours and explains, among other things, the concept of a watershed.

When it comes to our streets, there's an increasingly large and articulate constituency for new thinking (see, for instance, this collection of ideas).  I think one of the big gaps lies in the City's ability to respond.

The City needs to get much more nimble, by which I mean flexible and quick. And it will only get there if the various departments that deal with our public spaces are brought together in ways that facilitate genuine collaboration.

It would be really, really nice if we saw more progress on the ground, more or less right now. A lot of us have been waiting too long. But I think getting the City reorganized around the larger issues is critical to our long-term success.

See also It's the Road Design, Stupid, and Reimagining Our Streets.

It's the Road Design, Stupid

Fiddling While Rome Burns

Emily Fredricks memorial, 11th and Spruce.

Death on our streets. Where does it come from? One school mutters about crazy bicyclists and obtuse pedestrians. Another school mutters about homicidal motorists.

And there's truth in all this muttering. People are human. They make mistakes, they act impulsively, and sometimes they act in anger.

But I fear the foibles of our common humanity are distracting us from the root cause of our problem: Our streets are not designed to kill, but they might as well be.

I've been studying the streets of Philadelphia for a number of years now. At some point it turned into a project - reimagining our streets. If I had my druthers, what would our public spaces look like? How would they function? It started as a personal project, but soon enough I found myself gravitating into the Vision Zero orbit.

Looking back, it seems stunningly obvious - to me, anyway - that safety should come first as a design principle. It turns out that this idea is actually controversial. Not that people come out in favor of death. Rather, they shift the conversation to other priorities - most notably, the need for speed.

This phenomenon of diversion and distraction is very common in our public discourse. There's always another shiny object for someone to toss into the air.

Council Plays Ping-Pong
Here's a recent example of politics as circus. Last year the Philadelphia Parking Authority was criticized for not doing enough to collect on old parking tickets. The PPA responded by dialing up the rate at which it was booting cars for unpaid tickets. The people expressed their unhappiness. City Council passed a parking amnesty, and a Council member got to take a star turn as a hero of the people.

A nice little game of ping-pong. Prod the PPA beast. When it stirs, shackle it. The people applaud. Take a bow. Makes you wonder if the whole thing wasn't a setup from the get-go.

The hot air of politics fills the sails of the ship of state. But if the ship doesn't also have adequate ballast in the form of thoughtful policy, it is likely to capsize in a strong wind.

An appropriate policy solution in this case might be to enact a statute of limitations on old parking tickets. Several people have suggested it, and it sounds like a good idea to me. Will it happen? I doubt it. Politicians are like movie moguls in that they love to recycle old ideas. Indiana Jones, Star Wars. How many sequels and prequels? Look for another parking amnesty in a few years.

Meanwhile, from an operational point of view, this whole kerfuffle never should have happened. The PPA is now even more distracted than usual from its basic mission of managing parking. Think about it: How does hounding people over 30-year-old parking tickets improve access at the curb today?

Zombies on the March
Love of the familiar, compounded by a very human resistance to new ideas, means that old ideas can remain powerful long after they have been thoroughly discredited. Some people call such ideas zombies - the walking dead.

Here's a zombie: parking minimums.

For many years, American zoning codes have commonly required a minimum number of parking spaces in or near new or heavily reworked buildings. Everything was official, and it certainly looked scientific, except that it wasn't.

In 2005, Professor Donald Shoup effectively blew the whistle on what he called "a precise, disciplined folly." The demolition had been going on for years, but with the 2005 publication of Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking, planners and elected officials no longer had an excuse to ignore the new thinking.

Shoup's demolition job is actually quite beautiful. I don't want to get into the weeds here, so I'll just skip a couple of hundred pages of data, statistical analysis, and closely reasoned argument laced with beautiful invective, and give you this: "Like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, minimum parking requirements do more harm than good and should be repealed." (Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking, 2011 ed., p. xxxi. The "precise, disciplined folly" line is on p. 11.)

How It Played in Philly
So how did all of this play out in Philadelphia? Well, actually, we started off pretty well. In 2012, after a great deal of work, Philadelphia adopted a new zoning code that drastically reduced parking minimums. For multi-family dwellings the requirement, which had been one parking stall per dwelling unit (1/1) was reduced to three spots for every ten units (3/10).

In the Rittenhouse area of Philadelphia, where I live, the new law simply reflected the reality on the ground. Half of all households in the area don't own cars. In other parts of Center City the figure is higher - there is one area where 75 percent of households do not own a car.

You'd think this issue would be settled, but it's not. City Council is currently mulling not one but two bills that would push up the parking minimum for multi-family dwellings from three in ten (3/10) to six spaces for every ten dwelling units (6/10).

I honestly have no idea what we would do with all of those parking spaces. Storage closets, maybe.

It's my understanding that Council is reacting to complaints that curbside parking is very tight, which is certainly true in my Rittenhouse neighborhood. The Center City Residents' Association, which covers Rittenhouse, wrote a letter to Council opposing the proposed increase in parking minimums. CCRA noted that "it is not at all clear that mandating more parking space for multi-family housing will in any way reduce the shortage of on-street parking." It went on to suggest that as long as curbside parking is effectively free (a residential parking permit costs $35 per year), the curbs will be jammed. "Therefore," CCRA concluded, "if one purpose of the bill is to increase available street parking, a better way to achieve that goal might be to increase parking permit fees to market rates, thereby encouraging those using street parking to purchase vacant space in neighborhood lots."

To my mind, parking minimums are an intellectually bankrupt concept. I think it would be helpful if Council informed itself on the matter and possibly even came up with a comprehensive parking policy that looked at parking both on the street and off.

In fact, I would go even further. I've been looking at this subject for a number of years, and I'm not at all sure the parking problem is soluble in the context of a monomodal transportation system centered on the private automobile. I think we need to shift some basic assumptions, and start thinking seriously about what a balanced multimodal transportation system would look like, in broad outline and in fine detail.

Speed Kills
Life in the traffic lane suffers from the same dominance of bad old ideas that we have seen in the parking lane.

Since the very beginning of cars, there have been two problems that have defied solution - congestion and crashes. Starting in the 1920s, traffic engineers have used three main strategies to try to alleviate these problems. They have sorted incompatible types of traffic into separate spaces - most notably putting pedestrians on the sidewalk and giving the space between the curbs to motor vehicles. They have made more room for cars, shrinking sidewalks, fattening streets, and building new roads, most notably expressways and, later, interstate highways, that expressly prohibited any traffic other than motor vehicles. And they worked hard to increase the speed at which cars could travel on all these roads, both limited access highways and local streets. (For more on all this, see Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011.)

All three of these initiatives have had disastrous effects on the fabric of the city and on city life, and they have not resolved the issues of congestion and crashes.

So, once again, maybe it's time to accept the idea that the problem is insoluble as stated. Perhaps we should move away from the monomodal model, and get serious about a multimodal transportation system.

Something More
While we're at it, perhaps we can ask yet another question: What if a street can be not just a thoroughfare but also a public space?

Let's look at an individual block - 13th between Walnut and Chestnut. People complain about all the people sitting at tables on the sidewalk, eating and drinking and possibly even having a good time. And it's true they can get in the way of pedestrians, particularly those with strollers or in wheelchairs. The block could definitely be better organized, but the fixes are obvious and readily available.

To my mind, though, eliminating the outdoor restaurant seating should not be a part of the solution. The diners set a nice tone and vibe for the street, and it would be a poorer space without them.

And if you analyze the block as an outdoor room - a place to dwell for a time, rather than just a place to pass through on the way to somewhere else - perhaps you will come to the conclusion, as I have, that the diners are not interlopers. They belong there.

See also At Least It Makes People Laugh, Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Finding Our Way to a Parking Policy, Parking: Storage v. Access, Professor Shoup's Parking Book, Reimagining Our Streets, Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?

Focus on the Short Trips

Bus stop, Rittenhouse Square.

I'm hearing that the commute from Center City out to King of Prussia is becoming increasingly excruciating, and I'm certainly sympathetic to the drivers trapped in that traffic. I used to commute from Center City to Delaware, and most of the time it wasn't terrible, but when it was bad it could be very bad. I remember one day when my half-hour drive to the office took two and a half hours.

I think there's a growing understanding that the problems of congestion and crashes on the Schuylkill Expressway will not be solved by letting people drive on the shoulder, or building an elevated road on top of the existing one. I even think the search for solutions is now bringing at least some people to the conclusion that we need to rely more heavily on rail transit than we have for the last hundred years or so.

I heartily applaud this evolution in the communal consensus. The work will be hard and long and expensive, but in the end I think it will get us to a better place.

Let me now tell you what I'm really interested in. It's not the commute from Center City to King of Prussia. It's the short trips. I think there are big gains to be made here - quickly and inexpensively.

First some numbers. In the United States, half of all trips are shorter than three miles. For this number I rely on an article from the League of American Bicyclists, who in turn are relying on the National Household Travel Survey. (See National Household Travel Survey - Short Trips Analysis.)

The article notes that 72 percent of trips less than three miles are made by privately owned motor vehicles, as are 60 percent of trips less than a mile. (The poster above highlights the 60 percent figure. It was an ad for the Clean Air Council's 2017 Greenfest Philly.)

Increasing the number of these short trips that are made by walking, bicycling, or transit would, to my mind, tend to decrease the number of cars that are wandering around on our streets. This in turn should relieve traffic congestion and also decrease competition for parking spaces. Maybe even make the air outside your front door a little cleaner.

When I mention the short-trip numbers to people, they often express surprise. I think we tend to focus on the long commutes, neglecting the short commutes and the short intraday excursions for shopping, lunch, and so many other things that just pop up.

And it's true that there are a lot of long commutes, and that's where many of our vehicle miles traveled and much of the gasoline burned are to be found. The Bike League article notes that 37 percent of all trips are five miles or longer. When I was commuting to Delaware, my drive was 21 miles each way, and in America that is not a particularly long commute.

As I said above, I think it's very important to deal with these long trips, but I think a lot of our short-term gains could come from focusing on the short trips. I think the way to encourage people to get out of their cars is pretty straightforward - implement Complete Streets and Vision Zero. Improved sidewalks and pedestrian crossings, protected bike lanes, the usual agenda.

I also think that buses and rail transit will play a very important role, and I think the key issue here is how long you need to wait for the next bus.

For the last few months, a friend and I have been commuting from the Rittenhouse area down to 2nd and Chestnut for something called Tuesdays with Toomey. We take a bus down on Chestnut and back on Walnut. Routes 21, 42, and 9 all go down Chestnut and back up Walnut, and we rarely wait more than five minutes for a bus. It's quite lovely. Now if we just had a little electronic sign at the bus stop, telling us when the next bus is coming - the way they do in Paris.

See also Cars & Bikes: The Back Story, Getting Kids Back on Their Bikes, Transportation Should Not Trump Destination.

Getting Kids Back on Their Bikes

In 2012, Professor Peter G. Furth penned the following words: "It is this writer's opinion that the turning point will be when children begin again riding bikes to school in large numbers. When bicycle infrastructure and children's safety become intertwined, funding for bicycle infrastructure will be secure."

This is in an article he contributed to a book called City Cycling, which was edited by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler and published by MIT Press. The quote is on page 135.

I think Furth is right, but I also think there's a chicken-and-egg problem here. How do you get large numbers of kids riding to school without a network of protected bike lanes?

With decent bike lanes, you can get a lot of kids on bikes. We know this. The Europeans have been doing it for years, and even in this country there is the occasional bright spot. In Davis, California, 43.4 percent of high-school boys and 30 percent of high-school girls commute to school by bike. (For more on this, see Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?)

But what about a place like Philadelphia, where we do not have a network of protected bike lanes and where the anti-bike forces in and out of government are mounting a very effective campaign of resistance to bicycling.

It's interesting. Even in Philly kids are getting to school by bike. Parents are riding their small kids to school in cargo bikes, tagalongs, and child seats affixed to bicycles. And older kids are riding their own bikes, either accompanied by a parent or by themselves.

I don't have any numbers for this, but all you really have to do is use your eyes. The numbers are not huge, but despite the utter inadequacy of our cycling infrastructure, children are riding bikes to school.

We'll never see numbers like Davis without a significant upgrade to the built environment, and I think that means we may never cross Professor Furth's threshold.

So we'll plateau, the same way we have in adult bicycling in this town. And people on bikes will get hurt unnecessarily. And some of them will be children.

There's a way out of this impasse. Build the protected bike lanes. They're not terribly expensive.

Message to City Hall. The bicyclists are not going away. Make a space for them on our streets. Life will get better for everybody.

For an overview of the decline in walking and biking to school in the United States, click here.

For a story on how parents in Philadelphia are teaching their children to ride bikes, click here.

See also Intraday Biking, Is It a Curve or Is It a Turn? and Running of the Bulls on Lombard Street.

Looking Three Ways at Chestnut Street

Driving, Walking, Biking

Graffito, Chestnut bike lane.

The new parking-protected bike lane on Chestnut Street in West Philadelphia has been the subject of some controversy, and so I decided to spend a bit of time with it. Let's take driving first.

Driving
The bike lane extends from 45th to 33rd Streets. I've driven this stretch several times since the bike lane was installed, and while this is at best a convenience sample, my impression is that there are fewer abrupt lane changes, and speeds are generally slower. I'm guessing there may be higher speeds at night; I did notice one very wrecked car in the parking lane on one of my trips. Overall, from my point of view as a driver, a distinct improvement over prior conditions.

Walking
I also walked next to the lane on a pretty day, making sure to cross Chestnut Street several times (the various construction sites provided useful prompts).

Before the redesign, this stretch of Chestnut had three bustling lanes of automotive traffic. With the removal of one of those lanes, there are only two main vehicle lanes to cross, and that makes life a lot easier for the pedestrian.

In addition, the placement of the bike lane next to the curb means a pedestrian can walk out from the curb and across the bike lane and stand protected by the cars in the parking lane, which separates the bike lane from the main traffic lanes.

Divide and conquer, if you will. Standing at the island of safety with the bike lane behind me and only two lanes in front of me had an almost intimate feel, like being on Walnut or Chestnut in Center City. Not nirvana certainly, but way better than Market or JFK, where I sometimes feel like I'm being asked to walk across a football field during a kickoff return.

Biking
I rode the lane on an Indego bike (there's a bike-share station at 44th and Walnut and another at 33rd and Market). I think this is a simply lovely bike lane. One of the best things about the lane is that it's not blocked by cars, as other bike lanes in the city so often are. Even Uber drivers seem reluctant to  drive through the parked cars to get to the space by the curb.

The bike lane needs to be extended west of 45th Street, and we need to rebuild the older lane that runs on Chestnut east of of 33rd Street. I have a feeling that both of these things will happen, perhaps sooner rather than later.

Bike Count
On the morning of Wednesday, October 18, I finally got around to doing a bike count. I sat outside of the Starbucks at 34th and Chestnut and counted 97 bicycles in 90 minutes, running from 7:55 a.m. to 9:25 a.m. This is hardly the volume we see on the South Street bridge during the morning rush, but it is more than one bike per minute, and the lane is still less than two months old.

I counted all bicycles at 34th and Chestnut that entered or exited the intersection on Chestnut. (There was a fair amount of traffic that entered from 34th and continued south on 34th. I did not count that.)

I broke the flow down into ten-minute subsets. The peak came at 8:45-8:55, with 18 bikes. The low point was 8:15-8:25, with four bikes.

Of the 97 total bicycles, eight were in the main vehicle lanes rather than the bike lane. Five were on the sidewalk, two heading west and three heading east. There were five Indego bikes, and one scooter in the bike lane.

Only eight bikes turned right from Chestnut onto 34th. I had expected to see more turning traffic, because there's a bike lane on 34th that takes you to the bike lane on Spruce, which takes you over the South Street bridge. If I were commuting to Center City from this area, that is the route I would take.

Performing as Designed
This bike lane is in the district of Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell, who originally favored the new lane but started to backpedal when constituents complained. The Councilwoman has been remarkably non-specific about the nature of the complaints. Is it possible that none of them are from pedestrians or bicyclists, and all of them are coming from irate drivers?

Some drivers, not all. And what makes these unhappy folks unhappy? Are they dissatisfied because the street is performing as designed, and speeds are slower, and there are fewer opportunities for abrupt lane changes?

Let me close with an old bromide from Marketing 101: Complaining behavior is a skewed indicator of customer satisfaction.

Cargo bike, Chestnut Street.

See also Intraday Biking, No Turn on Red.

Running of the Bulls on Lombard Street

Lombard Street in the morning.

A few days ago a stop sign appeared on Lombard Street at Taney, which is a little street sitting between 26th and 27th, not far from the South Street bridge in Philadelphia. Until that point there had only been a stop sign for the drivers on Taney; the drivers coming down Lombard had no traffic controls between the stoplight at 26th and the stoplight at the bridge.

Everyone I've talked to thinks the addition of a stop sign at this intersection is a very good thing. Some would have preferred a stoplight, but they're pleased that at least something was done to calm the traffic here.

Happy ending to the story? Not quite. It turns out that there was a second part to the plan. Shortly after the stop sign went in at Taney, the traffic lights at 24th, 25th, and 26th went to blinking red. People initially assumed, and some still believe, that the lights were simply broken. No, it's all part of the plan. After a period of time on blinking red, the Streets Department intends to remove the traffic lights at these intersections and replace them with stop signs.

There have been several occasions during this year's saga on Lombard that I have had difficulty processing information. Why would you remove those traffic lights? Lombard Street is an access route for the Schuylkill Expressway, and it is well known for its unruly traffic.

Do Streets and Complete Streets Talk?
For months the City's Complete Streets office has been working on a redesign for this stretch of Lombard, for the bit of 27th Street that runs up from Lombard to the South Street bridge, and for South Street where it comes off the bridge and heads east.

The recent initiative adding stop signs and removing traffic lights from Lombard seems completely disconnected from the Complete Streets proposals.

There was a meeting back in July where the Complete Streets concept was presented to the community. I thought the meeting went well, and that there was a vigorous and thoughtful discussion of the issues. However, there was strong opposition from some near neighbors on Lombard to the idea of adding flex posts to protect the bike lane. Shortly after the meeting Councilman Kenyatta Johnson announced that he could not support the proposed changes because of the objections of the near neighbors. This of course does beg the question of the many parts of the plan that the near neighbors did not object to.

The Bicycle Coalition restarted the negotiation with a letter that focused on areas of presumed agreement, including the construction of raised crosswalks (a proven traffic calming device) and also the addition of loading zones to the parking lane. The loading zones in the parking lane are crucial because the bike lane won't work properly without them.

Meanwhile, Back on Lombard Street
There is a school at 25th and Lombard. The Philadelphia School has 478 students, ranging from pre-K to 8th grade, and buildings located both north and south of Lombard. The morning dropoff is a particularly busy time, with children and their parents arriving by foot, by car, by school bus, by SEPTA bus, by bicycle, and by scooter. Quite a few parents bring their children on cargo bikes.

However, children also cross Lombard throughout the day as they move from building to building for various activities and go to the nearby park for recess.

And, at the end of the day, there is dismissal, followed by after-school activities. This is a very active site all day long.

Did the planners take the school into consideration when they decided to remove the traffic lights, or was it all about cars and designing an optimal flow for motor vehicles while excluding consideration of all other users of the space? Perhaps one day we will know the answer to this question, but for now we do not.

Meanwhile, the traffic light at 25th has been replaced by TPS staff, who direct traffic and wave the handheld stop sign. So people who have other things to do are replacing a machine that should not have been removed from service.

Needless to say, the school and its staff consider the safety of the children to be a fundamental goal, and they will do what needs to be done. But shouldn't the City be trying to make their job easier rather than harder?

See also Is It a Curve or Is It a Turn? and Morning on Lombard Street.

A Bike Lane in the Sky

Pulaski Bridge. Photo: Ben West.

A two-way cycle track, actually. My son, Ben, and I were driving around Queens last Saturday, and we decided to have a look at the bike lane the City installed on the Pulaski Bridge, which he tells me is the main bicycle route between Brooklyn and Queens.

The lane went in early last year, and shortly after it opened a car was filmed driving in the bike lane. If you pave it, they will drive a car on it. This issue has been solved by putting a flex post in the middle of the cycle track (between the two bicycle lanes) at the beginning of the bridge.

We got incredibly lucky, and as we were driving across the bridge, which is a drawbridge, it decided to open to let a tug-and-barge pass through. Ben grabbed the shot above with his phone.

Building this cycle track was obviously a bit more complicated than, say, striping a bike lane on 22nd Street in Fairmount, in Philadelphia. Shows you what can happen when a city government actually gets behind the idea that its streets should be safe and convenient for all users, not just cars.

See also Parking Protected Bike Lanes in Baltimore, The Bottleneck on MLK Is Still There.

Parking on a Rainy Day

Yet another kerfuffle over bike lanes. A recent philly.com story focused on the 800 block of Pine - specifically the south side of the street. The north side is occupied by Pennsylvania Hospital, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1751, and the nation's first hospital. My daughter, Alicia, was born there. As far as I know, it is not a participant in this controversy.

In the philly.com story, a resident of the south side expresses concerns about the protected bike lanes proposed for Pine and Spruce. My initial reaction was a trifle acerbic, undermining a promise I've made to Alicia to try to stay positive. So I decided to do something useful yesterday morning. I walked down to 8th and Pine and took pictures.

The proposed upgrade to the existing bike lanes on Pine and Spruce has already provoked a good bit of argument, including discussions at two meetings of the Washington Square West Civic Association. And it seems there will be yet more meetings.

Opponents complain of the hardship of not being able to park at the curb directly in front of their houses. If you listen to this argument in isolation, you may find yourself feeling some sympathy. After all, people need access to their houses. But when you look at the context, I submit that the picture changes.

One of the big things that people tend to overlook is rear access. I've already discussed access issues on Pine and Spruce west of Broad (see Flex Posts on Pine and Spruce and More on the Pine and Spruce Bike Lanes).  Let's have a look at rear access on the 800 block of Pine.

This is a view into the interior of the block from 8th Street. You can see that the buildings facing Pine (on the right) and Addison (on the left) are well provided with off-street parking. The access to this rather rather handsome lot is by a large curb cut on Pine, shown below. Vive la France.

While we're on Pine, here is a look at the existing bike lane.

A basic purpose of protected bike lanes is to keep trucks and cars from parking in the bike lane and blocking it, which of course renders it useless to bicyclists. Some would argue worse than useless, because the bicyclist then needs to leave the bike lane and merge with the moving cars and trucks in the motor-vehicle lane.

Okay, let's go to Addison and look at the kind of rear access available up near 9th Street.

The buildings at this end of the block are bigger, and some of the parking lots aren't as pretty. But some are quite lovely.

Here's another one that's not terrible.

Finally, in the mid-block, actual garages predominate.

There's basically enough off-street parking on this block to sink a battleship. I fail to see the hardship of asking residents to park in their off-street spots, instead of parking at the curb on Pine, where their presence does create a substantial hardship for bicyclists.

Well, you say, the people don't want to park at the curb very long, maybe 15 minutes. Surely not that many bicyclists would be inconvenienced.

The bike traffic numbers indicate otherwise. Even in the middle of the day, there are a lot of bikes whizzing around the streets of Center City. Last June 20, between 2:30 and 3:30 in the afternoon, I counted bikes at 16th and Spruce. On average there was one every 30 seconds. (See Intraday Biking.)

So if you parked in the bike lane there for 15 minutes, you'd have 30 bicyclists scrambling around you. An inconvenience ratio of 30 to 1. And in rush hour the number of bicyclists would be much higher.

To come back to the 800 block of Pine, here's what I think. If we can't put a protected bike lane on this block, we're not going to be able to put one anywhere in Center City. And I greatly fear that is going to be the outcome of the process we are currently enduring.

Mayor Kenney may indeed deliver his promised 30 miles of protected bike lanes. But will they be where the bicyclists need them, and where current and potential bike traffic demand them?

See also Vision Zero in Philadelphia.

A Sense of Perspective

Boardwalk, Asbury Park.

At the end of September, a New Jersey Transit train crashed in the Hoboken Terminal, killing one person and injuring more than a hundred.

This was a terrible thing. The governors of New York and New Jersey held a joint press conference, and soon thereafter Governor Christie of New Jersey finally agreed to raise the gasoline tax. (Revenue from this tax in New Jersey supports mass transit as well as roads and bridges.) The institutions of government actually responded to the event and changed their behavior.

But guess what? The streets of New York City kill and maim the same numbers, on average, every two days. Government officials occasionally express measured concern over the violence on our roads, but there is hardly a sense of urgency.

I have some ideas about why the responses to train wrecks and car wrecks are so different, but first let's look at some numbers. Actually, let's take a little detour first.

Oh, That Can't Be Trew!
South Philadelphia housewives - at least some, of a certain generation - love to say this: Oh, that can't be trew! For full effect it should be accompanied by a sideways movement of one hand, something like half of the safe signal that an umpire would use in baseball, but meaning the opposite. If you're ever on the receiving end of this expostulation, as I have been, it's important to bear in mind that your interlocutor has no facts; she just doesn't like yours.

This is a basic flaw in the political discourse of Philadelphia, and perhaps many other jurisdictions. I suspect that it is related to Alberto Brandolini's Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, which states that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. In the present case, it's easy to deny someone else's proposition, especially if you don't feel the need to bring any facts with you.

Still, as a believer in the rational development of policy based on data, I feel the need to engage in this asymmetric warfare, even though I know that it may well be futile.

A Festival of Automotive Carnage
The five boroughs of New York City play host to a year-long festival of automotive carnage that, in 2015, killed 232 and injured 54,821. That works out to 1.27 deaths every two days, and 291 injuries every two days. In contrast, as the New York Times reports, "The accident in Hoboken was New Jersey Transit's first fatal crash involving a commuter in 20 years."

The national numbers are similarly lopsided. In 2014, the latest year for which comprehensive figures are available, 32,675 people died in crashes on the nation's roads. The death toll for passenger trains was 3; for rail transit it was 135.

In the passenger train data, if you include people killed in rail crossing crashes and also trespassers - people who wander onto the tracks - and 8 people categorized as "other," you get to 217 dead. Versus 232 dead on the streets of New York alone.

The national data here are from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The New York City data are from something called the Bicycle Crash Data Reports, put out by the New York City DOT.

The bike crash reports got their start in 2011, with something called Local Law 13. Every year a new report pulls together data on crashes involving motor vehicles, and also on bike crashes that do not involve motor vehicles. Both kinds of data are aggregated from police department crash reports, which are written on a form called MV-104. The numbers are broken down by borough and police precinct.

So Many Dead Pedestrians in the City
I'd like to point out an interesting difference between the national data and the NYC data (at least I find it interesting). Pedestrians are the largest category among the dead in New York; nationally, the overwhelming majority of deaths are among the occupants of motor vehicles. People who pay attention only to the national data are missing a big story in New York and, I expect, other cities.

Nationally, pedestrians were 14.9 percent of total motor vehicle crash fatalities in 2014. In New York City pedestrians were 59 percent of total motor vehicle crash fatalities in 2015.

Bicyclists and pedestrians together were 65 percent of deaths in New York and 17.1 percent in the United States.

Meanwhile, in Bucolic Central Park
I'm afraid we've gotten to the point where these statistics are more mind-numbing than useful. So let's take a break and talk about Central Park for a while.

Something bad happened in Central Park in 2014. Two pedestrians were struck and killed by bicyclists.

On Sunday, August 3, 75-year-old Irving Schachter, jogging on the east park loop near 72nd Street, was hit by a 17-year-old cyclist around 4:52 p.m. Schachter died of head trauma on August 5. He had been an active cyclist as well as runner. He was a long-time member of the New York Cycle Club, and he had been training for the 2014 New York City Marathon.

On Thursday, September 17, 58-year-old Jill Tarlov of Fairfield, Conn., was struck by a 31-year-old cyclist while walking across West Drive near West 63rd Street, about 4:30 p.m. Tarlov died on September 20. She was married to Mike Wittman, an executive for CBS Television Stations, and was reportedly in town shopping for a present for her daughter.

"My wife was beautiful in every way imaginable," said Mr. Wittman in a statement. "Jill was the most amazing mother to Matthew and Anna, who taught them above all that kindness, compassion, and a spirit for life were the right morals to live by."

You may have noticed yourself paying more attention to these two very sad stories than you did to the previous eight paragraphs of statistics. There's an old line in newspapering: If it bleeds, it leads. Statistics don't bleed. People do.

Oops. Here Come Those Pesky Numbers Again
The unhappiness over these deaths was intense, so much so that the New York Times published an editorial about "the bicycle menace," urging that "A little perspective would help here." The editorial continued: "The real threat, as ever, is cars. Bicyclists have killed three pedestrians since 2009. Drivers killed 178 pedestrians and cyclists in 2013 alone."

This data set can be extended. In fact, the NYC DOT has already done so. From 2000 through 2014, bicyclists killed 11 pedestrians. In more than half of those years, bicyclists didn't kill any pedestrians. Meanwhile, from 2000 through 2014, drivers killed 2,434 pedestrians. The smallest number that drivers killed in one year was 136, in 2014.

Still, people were right to be upset about those two deaths in Central Park. Something was going on in the park in 2014 - a real surge, not just in deaths, but in crashes. Bicycle-pedestrian crashes went from 20 in 2013 to 34 in 2014 (there were no fatalities in 2013). Bike-on-bike crashes held pretty steady, increasing from 26 to 29. And single-bike crashes leapt from 78 to 114.

These numbers are in the Bicycle Crash Data Reports that I mentioned a while ago. Central Park and the 22nd Precinct in Manhattan are coterminous.

I'm a bit intrigued by the solo bike crashes. I was surprised that there were so many of them. After all, the pavement on the Central Park loop is quite good - not a lot of potholes to fall into. I toyed with the idea that solo bike crashes might be a marker for excessive speed, while bike-bike and bike-ped crashes might be a marker for excessive congestion. But then it's possible that solo crashes come from successfully avoiding a crash with someone else. So, I don't know how to explain solo bike crashes.

A Place Where Death Is Rare
Here's my main takeaway from these Bike Crash Data Reports: Death in the absence of motor vehicles is extremely rare. Citywide, if you take the years 2012-2015, bike-ped crashes killed four pedestrians and two bicyclists. Bike-on-bike and solo bike crashes killed four cyclists.

This is a far cry from the profligate slaughter that we see with cars. And I would argue that it is a cause for hope. If we can establish some oases without cars, perhaps we can figure out how to get deaths all the way down to zero. And perhaps we can use these lessons profitably with cars. Or perhaps not.

Making Central Park an Oasis
After the 2014 crashes, the City moved pretty quickly to improve conditions in Central Park. In November it announced major upgrades to four important crosswalks in the park; it also lowered the speed limit from 25 mph to 20 mph - for both cars and bicycles. And then, effective June 29, 2015, it banned cars from the parts of the loop road system north of 72nd Street.

So here we may have one of the first of our oases. How's it going?

We can call 2015 a transition year, with some changes in effect on January 1 and the major road closing coming halfway through the year. Ped-bike crashes declined from 34 in 2014 to 14 in 2015; bike-on-bike crashes declined from 29 to 17; and solo bike crashes declined from 114 to 100. Nobody died in any of the 2015 crashes.

And so far in 2016, things are also looking pretty good in Central Park. The Bicycle Crash Data Reports are only issued annually, but New York City's Vision Zero program has a nifty map that shows the number and location of both fatalities and injuries, with 2016 data currently available through September.

(The history of closing Central Park to cars dates back to 1966. The advocacy group Transportation Alternatives has a timeline and a story on the struggles of the last half century.)

(Why are the park drives from 72nd south still available to cars? This report from NYC DOT offers a detailed rationale with supporting data. It is an elegant version of the basic argument that was used to keep all the park drives open to cars for so many years.)

I Paid a Visit
I visited Central Park recently, along with my wife and son. It was a beautiful fall Sunday. We got sandwiches at the Whole Foods on Columbus Circle and then walked into the park. Things were quite busy, but, unlike Columbus Circle, there were no cars in the park. I managed to walk on a part of the roadway where I wasn't supposed to walk, but with some gentle guidance from my son I soon learned the ropes. We walked and talked and sat on a bench and ate lunch and talked some more, and all the time I was watching the battalions of runners, the squadrons of bicyclists, the many, many people just strolling along enjoying the afternoon. And the pedicabs and the occasional horse-drawn carriage.

It struck me that I was looking at a modern version of the old, pre-car park. Back in the 1890's there was no asphalt; there was gravel. And I doubt there were many runners. Of bicycles there were plenty, back in the 1890s.

And one more thing, as we sat together on our bench in the sun. We talked and occasionally just sat together quietly, and I almost fell asleep once or twice. And here is the one more thing. There was no roar of traffic. You could easily hear people's voices; they didn't need to shout to be heard.

The park was crowded with people - tourists, locals, just about everybody having a good time. And it was quiet. Quiet, and peaceful.

See also Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Death as an Acceptable Outcome, and Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?