BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

check out this event on Monday. You'll meet lots of qualified resources:

http://bike-pgh.org/bbpress/topic/creator-of-the-ciclovia-speaking-in-pittsburgh-june-13

Hell, get a jump on the story and come out to the Flock Ride tonight. You'll get horror stories, if you want them, as well as suggestions on where infrastructure improvements might help. Bring a bike for a hands on learning experience.

I would expect that you would get a wealth of sources from here. The only hitch is that many folks will from here are participating in the MS 150 ride to Erie this weekend and that will cut into your responses.

I personally don't have any especially interesting stories. I ride in from the 'burbs in the comlete absence of infrastructure, and have no titillating stories.

++ on the Monday event. You struck gold there.

Why not hook the reader with some positive stories? I can buy A LOT OF BEER with the money I save on parking.

I rode in this morning, and after parking my bike at the Forbes garage, walked to my office building, up the elevator, and to my office, then discovered that the blinkie on my belt was still going. That probably looked extreemely dorky. But that's the worst thing that's happened yet today.

That's probably not going to hook people.

Positive stories?

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/press99/cyclists.html

I'm not riding the MS150, I've been commuting almost entirely within the city limits for twenty years, and I'd be happy to talk to you, but I doubt my experiences will substantiate your preconceived conclusion.

Sure, I've had a few unpleasant experiences, but most of my trips are completely uneventful.

You don't need to write a horror story to hook readers, you just need to pique their interest.

"Today, Bill Edmonds got on his bike and rode ten completely uneventful miles to work. In that regard, it was much like yesterday, and every yesterday before.

Hey, what about the other 3 1/2 miles, you trying to hide something, huh?

I once came to a full and complete stop at a glowing pumpkin due to fog. It was halloween-ish, and I was horrified when I realized it.

Ugh! That citylive event is exactly the sort of thing that I need to see. Unfortunately, I work Monday evening and short of a hospital stay, there is no way I can get out of it. I'll have to dig through the 8-80 site or something and see if I can find anything that Mr. Penalosa has written on the subject as one of my sources.

I also appreciate the aspect of positivity to hook the reader, but I do intend for the paper to progress from a potentially horrible past to our (mostly) uneventful present and then conclude with a vision of what could be. I'm not in the city or I'd hit up the flock. I'm in Westmoreland County and my daily commute is 11.5 miles one way with 7.5 of those miles snaking through car dealership parking lots and along a highway, down into city streets, across a quiet neighborhood and then along 4 miles of rail trail. Actually, I'm most nervous when I'm on the half mile stretch that is the road I live on. People drive like maniacs on a rural two lane with no shoulder. Thankfully, my house is set back about a hundred yards.

@ejwme, if this were facebook, I'd "like" your comment. @Lyle, if you could drop me a line at my email with a brief introduction, I could email you a short list of questions tomorrow. I do have preconceived notions. Mostly, I'm looking for some stories about things like drivers not sharing the road or near misses with vehicles due to a lack of sharrows or bike lanes (particularly if it was on a road that didn't have lanes but now does).

JBF - sounds like you're looking for the story of ELB. WAS: inner city highway through residential area, scary to DRIVE on let alone bike on. *road diet improvements happened* NOW: eastern city bike thoroughfare with calm motor vehicle traffic along side - bad events are not eliminated but are now anomalous.

This could happen to any number of roads in the city (Washington Blvd, Negly Run, Forbes through Frick, though yes it's got sharrows, Bellefield, Blvd of Allies through Schenley), but hasn't yet.

I'd be interested to read what you come up with

This will probably get you the gist of the message:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQWWhnjNUtc

Do you go to Pitt? He'll also be speaking there next week, but I don't know if it's open to the public or what.

Tabby, I'm at Pitt. Can't make it Monday evening, but on campus would be very do-able. Which department is hosting?

Oh, well if you want stories about the potentially horrible past, I guess you'd have to ask somebody who was riding then.

@ejwmw: I need to preface this by saying that I really do like removing a lane and dedicating it to bikes (and parking, yah). Most striping projects don't actually add any pavement for the cyclists, they just try to control how the existing pavement should be used. But. In point of fact, there have been plenty of violent bike incidents on ELB since the restriping. They've just been bike/bike or bike/ped and not so much bike/car. Does anyone have any statistics on the number or rate of cyclist injuries on ELB before vs after?

I'll grant you that ELB could be scary to bike on, but I never heard anyone say it was scary to drive a car -- unless it was from fear of the same pedestrians.

School of Public Health, still hosted by CityLIVE, so maybe check with them for details

Lyle - I used to be scared to drive on ELB. Now I like it because I see bikes. I don't mind driving if I can see people riding.

"Oh, well if you want stories about the potentially horrible past, I guess you'd have to ask somebody who was riding then."

I only go back to like 1969. Still no horror stories.

I consider the horrible past to be sometime prior to 1869

wait, so edmonds, lyle, you are both maintaining that the increased cycling infrastructure has not contributed positively in any way to either of your riding experiences in this city? Just wanting to be sure I'm not reading too much into things...

Hmm, that is a bit of a different question, which is going to require me to think more analytically. I don't think I am necesarily saying that. I'm just saying, I don't have any real horror stories from years of riding, no one has tried to run me down and kill me or anything like that. The worst things I can recall are people yelling out car windows, fingers flying here and there. And from the sound of things infrastructure doesn't seem to have solved that yet.

There are more people riding, which makes me happier and less curmudgeonly, which is possibly attributable to infrastructure. But it's possible that relationship is the reverse.

I must say, I can take the kids for rides around the city more confidently, but in my mind, the trails I use for that are in place for recreation, and just happen to help somewhat with actual transportation.

Will continue to consider your question.

Please don't misinterpret me as saying that none of the fine work that Bike-PGH does has been of value! Or that none of the infrastructure is personally positive. Just that I don't like to see people trying to rewrite the past in order to grind an ax. I can't say that the past was "horrible."

I have maybe a few horror stories from twenty years. One was bad weather (1999) one was my own aggressive riding (1998 - motivated by my mistaken concern about getting out of the way of impatient motorists), two were road rage incidents (2000,2011). Maybe I can think of some more.

Could better infrastructure have helped? Well, in case 1, an entirely separate enclosed bikeway network from my office to my home would do. In case 2, yeah, that would have helped there too. In case 4, maybe, or that rager guy would have been in my bike tunnel with me, hard to say. In case 3, tough call, since the rager was screaming at me about my failure to use the bike lane that was full of downed tree limbs. So if we want to imagine a future world in which the public works crews are out to instantly clear debris, and potholes are filled and road surface well maintained... okay, hypothetically things could be better.

But would any of the infrastructure projects now in place have prevented those things had they been done earlier? No.

So in a nutshell: Have I seen positive improvements? Yes, in ways I'd be happy to list in a longer post. Has it been a night-and-day difference? No, can't say it's been that dramatic. What's the one thing that has made the biggest difference? Changing the way I ride.

I suppose JBF could talk to me. I'm a bit of an odd duck, primarily a transit user but with a lot of cycling into the city from the northern suburbs. Mainly I'm about not using the car if it can possibly be helped.

JBF, I can point you to dozens of posts on this message board that document horrible interactions cyclists have had with cars. They've already written your paper for you, and the rest of us have discussed the situations in detail.

In particular, this thread, from about a year ago, had a running conversation going for several weeks, late May into July, about what to do about aggressive drivers, mowing down cyclists, driver impunity, and what we should do to make the roads safer. The 617 posts on this one thread alone will keep you up all night.

On a lighter note, this thread will have you in stitches (of the good kind).

@Lyle, that's the sort of thing I'm looking for, incidents and whether or not cycling infrastructure can remedy or has remedied the situation. Public works crews clearing debris from bike lanes would be great, but the fact of life is that they service the roads for cars and buses first. Also, my word choice isn't exactly great when I'm trying to express what I'm looking for. Horrible might be too strong of a word... wait a minute... no, the thread in Stu's post is pretty horrible. At any rate, I would like to use some of the information in that thread anecdotally. Does anyone completely object to that? If I find a quote that I'd like to use, I will PM the user and ask if I may use it and I will ask for a name so that I can say something other than "according to public transit advocate and avid cyclist StuInMcCanless, 'blah, blah, blah has had an effect on blah, blah.'" Stu, I don't know if that's how you'd describe yourself, but you know what I mean. How would you identify yourself in that scenario. "Public transit advocate" was just based on what I can glean from the board here.

This paper isn't going to be published and like I said, I'll PM the user if I find a quote from a thread that I'd like to use.

Now that I think about it, I need to find out how to MLA cite a message board.

"...how to MLA cite a message board..."

not really my area of expertise, but maybe rfc3986 is current, not sure.

http://citationmachine.net/index2.php?reqstyleid=1&mode=form&reqsrcid=MLACorrespondenceDiscussion&more=yes&nameCnt=1

CitationMachine.net is probably the only reason I graduated.

Factory, Rubber. "Commuter Research." 12 Jun 2011. Online Posting to Bike Pittsburgh Message Board. Web. 12 Jun 2011.

I checked it against the MLA and it's legit. Thank you, Factory, Rubber.

that site is quality.

MLA aside, I do think it would be helpful to preserve a link to the actual post in question. RF's post would be http://bike-pgh.org/bbpress/topic/commuter-research#post-75086 which isn't real obvious as you have to view the source code for the page to obtain it. (Does anyone know a better way to obtain it?) Deriving the date of the post isn't easy, either, but doable.

Stu, I agree that the post number would be nice to have. I think I'll use it in the annotated bibliography and stick with MLA for the Works Cited. Older MLA citations kept the entire url, but for some reason, the new style doesn't. The world wide web is now too ubiquitous, maybe?

wait, so you'd be Face, Johnny Beer? and Stu would be Candless, Stu In Mc?

For some reason that has me laughing so hard I'm in tears. Thank you Factory, Rubber. You've made my week and it's only Monday.

MLA is a funny thing.

Also, I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't mind giving their first/last for this.

Okay, so I'm throwing together a rough draft. Would anybody like to say anything about the infrastructure in the city? Do you feel safe using the bike lanes, are there enough of them? What could be done to make you, as a cyclist in the city, feel safer? I only need one or two (or three) quotes to flesh out my point that improved infrastructure equals improved safety, higher visibility (by that I mean awareness of cyclists by drivers) and thus helps to increase the numbers of bicycle commuters. A PM with a first and last name and a way you would like to be identified (cycling advocate, etc.) would be much appreciated. Four or five quotable sentences would garner undying gratitude.

I'm not reinventing the wheel here, I'm just writing a crappy research writing paper for a 100 level English course.

I think bike lanes visually show drivers that bikes are allowed on streets and encourage shy cyclists to give it a go off the trail, so to speak. Properly painted bike lanes can calm traffic and provide a physically and psychologically safe place for cyclists to travel on otherwise busy and intimidating but convenient roads.

But paint can be a dangerous weapon - many bike lanes in our city are located directly in the door zone, unaware drivers may incorrectly conclude that cyclists are ONLY allowed in bike lanes, and bike lanes often suddenly end at intersections, creating dangerous chaos.

i would add that the 4-inches-wide painted line often comes across as an impenetrable barrier of safety glass to drivers, so they feel that they can get as close to the line as they like, since the border between our territories is so clearly demarcated. cyclists in the bike lane may have to swerve to avoid obstacles, such as tree limbs or opening car doors, and can't treat that line as the same wall. this can (and, from experience, does) lead to brushes with automobiles that are too close to allow that psychological comfort to which ejwme eluded.

i think the biggest benefit of biking infrastructure comes from encouraging others who might not normally be cyclists to hop on two wheels and have a go. we have seen an at least tenuous correlation between increased ridership and increased safety among riders. it seems to me intuitive that the more people there are on bikes, the more other road users will expect bikes to be on the road, and thus the more attention and (hopefully) deference they will pay to cyclists.

what could be done to make me feel safer? Add a physical barrier between the bike lane and motor vehicle lane. That line line of paint, as HV said, is not the safety glass that car drivers seem to think it is. I'll ride on most streets now, but towing a child or pet, I just couldn't do it. Also for an older or less athletic cyclist the physical separation really inspires more confidence.