I don't know whether my managers would agree with this or not, and I haven't asked. So these are my personal opinions, not those of my employer. But these opinions are informed by my professional knowledge and experience.
This may come as a shock to some of you, but I'm going to defend some of the city's decisions here (though not all). I was in the room five short weeks ago when the assistant city traffic engineer was clearly shocked to learn from the representative of Wisconsin Bike Fed that BTWW was going to be scheduled for June instead of May this year. I understand why Wis Bike Fed decided to reschedule (and in full disclosure, Bike Fed did the same thing a decade ago when I was the person in charge of organizing Madison's BTWW, so I am just as guilty). But radically changing the date of an annual event does play havoc with construction projects that are scheduled months, if not a year, in advance. I give the city full credit for scrambling to get this project done BEFORE BTWW when they were really thrown a curve ball. If they manage to complete this project, it clearly won't be a home run. But I don't think you could call it a strike out either. The easiest route (no pun intended) for the city probably would have been simply to decide to delay the whole thing for a year. But I disagree with the city's decision not to reallocate a lane of John Nolen to bike traffic. I'm not blaming Tony for that. I think Madison would be far more unfriendly to bicyclists and pedestrians if not for him and his work. I personally benefit from his designs every day. As others have noted, he is working with a paradigm that is not really sustainable (if it was, we wouldn't be constantly arguing at the federal, state, and local levels how to pay for the maintenance of roads we can no longer afford). Certainly reallocation space on John Nolen would inconvenience motorists, and there are many more of them than there are bicyclists. But choosing not to inconvenience motorists for nearly the last century is one reason why there are so many more motorists. Consider that when University Ave through campus was rebuilt, there were months when half the capacity of the street for pedestrians (sidewalk on one side) was eliminated, and ALL the capacity for bicycles (both EB and WB bike lanes) was eliminated. Yet there were still three lanes of WB traffic for cars, just as there has been for decades (whether capacity for transit riders was reduced because buses had to share one of three lanes of traffic filled with 50,000 cars per day is debatable). 50,000 cars per day on University Ave is a lot. But there are easily 50,000 pedestrians per day trying to use University Ave as well. And 15,000 bicyclists. So let's see.. in very rough numbers, University Ave carries 50,000 people in cars, 50,000 people on foot, 15,000 people on bikes, and an unknown (to me) number of people in buses. So in very round figures, 43% of Univ Ave users are in cars, 43% are on foot, and 13% are on bikes (again disregarding transit, cause, you know, that's not really transportation anyway). Yet when we had to decide how to allocate scarce space on the street, we decided to reduce the capacity of the road for people on foot by 50%,reduce the capacity of the road for people on bikes by 100%, and reduce the capacity of the road for people in cars by, er, well actually we decided not to reduce the capacity of the road for people in cars at all, even though they represent less than half of the road's users. Don't even get me started on so many RailRoads unwillingness to share so many of the corridors they were given for free by the federal government 150 years ago with anyone else. Chuck Strawser Pedestrian & Bicycle Transportation Planner Commuter Solutions UW-Madison Transportation Services Visit our University Bicycle Resource Center at Helen C White: http://transportation.wisc.edu/transportation/bike_annex.aspx How are we doing? Take our customer satisfaction survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CommSol_CSSurvey From: Bikies [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brian Mink Sent: Friday, May 08, 2015 7:17 AM To: GOLDSTEIN, STEVEN Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Bikies] Notice of closure of John Nolen Path in Law Park I agree Steve and Melanie. I think Tony's response if frankly a cop out. Basically says there was not a perfect solution so we opted to do nothing. I think that is frankly a lame approach to a significant problem. We live in a world where there is seldom an ideal solution. Heaven help us if we can implement solutions that are less than perfect. This is precisely why folks get so frustrated with government, analysts, and policy makers. Most of us are just fine with a less than ideal solution. We want some attempt made to solve the problem. One could use Tony's rationalization at every level of government as an excuse to do nothing. Which is exactly what has been done. The excuse that the city often closes streets and os not implement detours is fine for cars because it is no big deal to use you 2-5 liter engine to go out of your way a few blocks. The attitude in my mind is very cavalier and I don't think we're comparing apples to apples. Brian Mink Monona, WI Steve Goldstein wrote: On 5/8/15 12:13 AM, Melanie Foxcroft wrote: I think this is another demonstration of why Madison doesn't receive a "platinum" award for bicycling. This disaster is simply not acceptable. The double standard of cars vs. bikes is too much. Hopefully city transportation people will learn from this disaster and do better next time. The "city transportation people" are the traffic engineers who, after considering the alternatives, have been forced into this decision because nothing else meets minimum engineering standards. We all see the logic of Tony's deliberations and conclusions. The problem is that an engineering-only approach doesn't solve this problem and that was the end of the discussion. If there were enough political pressure, the discussion could have started out with the requirement that the most heavily traveled bike route in the city remain passable during one of the peak months of biking. If that were the case, other alternatives might have been on the table --- for example, staging the project to enable access or closing lanes on John Nolen. Many on this list will recall the activism opposing of the closing of the Law Park path during construction of the convention center achieved partial success. Tony's sensitivity to the issues shows some things have improved over the past twenty years, but this disaster shows we need more effective activism. _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.danenet.org/listinfo.cgi/bikies-danenet.org
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