Lessons from Salt Lake City

I had reason to visit Salt Lake City, Utah and the city has a west coast kind of Denver like vibe to it, and is a wholly more likeable place than, say, Las Vegas, Nevada. And whilst Las Vegas is not the kind of place you’d want to ride a bicycle, the centre of Salt Lake City is.

They’ve just installed a small network of hire bike stations, called Greenbike. There are only 9 stations so it geographically pretty limited. It does however have a station for commuters arriving on the Frontrunner train which connects cities from Ogden in the north to Provo in the South, as well as stations for the various Trax light rail lines that serve Salt Lake suburbs and closer in cities.

As a tourist it was pretty easy to hire bikes for $5 for the day giving an unlimited number of 30 minute rides.

There are 3 gears and it was easy enough to ride up the hill towards Temple Square. It was a sturdy, safe ride on the step through frame bike. No helmets are necessary (they’re not compulsory even for motorbike riders in Utah). There’s 2 lessons here for Wellington: hire bike schemes complement the public transport network, especially when the train station is just that little bit outside of the centre of town, and compulsory helmets are a stupid law that treats adult cyclists like little children. I didn’t know Salt Lake had hire bikes until I got there, so on a whim I hired one. Try doing that in Brisbane or Melbourne without the required plastic lid.

And it was a nice quiet Sunday for riding around. There are bike lanes on a few streets, and on some streets there are sharrows and signs telling cyclists to take the whole lane:

There are routes marked around the city by signs:

and signs to remind cars to be courteous:

The Trax is a system of modern light rail and bikes can be taken on them. Service seemed pretty frequent especially for a Sunday:

And good manners are enforced (a lesson for Wellington train stations if there ever was one):

There’s also a lot of bike racks dotted around the city:

And a healthy contingent of bike riders were out riding the day I visited. This guy was having a break from riding his fixie. He told me he was waiting for a friend of his that was due through on a ride from northern Idaho to southern Texas to protest the Boy Scouts of America’s ongoing homophobic policies.

And last, but not least, and perhaps not a lesson for Wellington, is the red flag scheme. Pedestrians on zebra crossings can take a red flag on one side of the road, wave it on the way across, and leave it on the other side.

I did see one lady use it, and it was most effective. It definitely made her visible to every other road user. I didn’t hear her singing the Internationale on the way across, but it is obviously a communist plot to get good decent Americans to wave the red flag.

All up Salt Lake City is a pleasant city where all of the American West Coast bike ideas come together. Slow down the cars, give some riding space to cyclists, either in dedicated lanes outside of door zones, or by using sharrows. Map some coherent routes, have a hire bike scheme, integrate it with public transport, abandon discriminatory helmet policy (yes, the law is discriminatory – they discriminate against cyclists and are a sop to, and a reflection of, the political power of motorists), tell the cyclists to take the whole lane where appropriate, make the weather pleasant, throw in some snow covered mountains, and “This is the Place”.

The Cycling Visionaries Awards at Velo-City 2013 in Vienna

Wellington’s own Jack Jiang, a recent Victoria University architecture graduate has been asked to lecture at the Velo-City 2013 conference in Vienna, Austria in June about his unified designs for Wellington cycling infrastructure.

He is also up for a Cycling Visionaries Award. See more of Jack’s work and vote for Jack’s Unified Cycling Infrastructure Design ideas by clicking here or on the graphic:

 

 

The voting closes 15th of April so vote now. Good luck Jack.

Is the Conservation Minister smarter than the average bear?

Is the recently rehabilitated, formerly disgraced, Conservation Minister, Nick Smith,  smarter than the average bear when it comes to making the right decisions about not messing up Fiordland with crazy Disneyfication get rich quick schemes?

We think the best way to help him come to the right decision is set him in down in front on a kids’ film, the filmed in New Zealand, Yogi Bear. (It got hammered by critics, but my better half and I, close to our 40ths, loved it.)

It comes with a great message, made so simple, even a National Party MP could understand it (we hope).

The story goes like this:

Mayor Brown, who has wasted too much of the city’s money on trivial things (being analogous to National’s spending on the Roads of National Significance boondoggle no doubt) needs to turn his deficit into a surplus and decides to monetise Jellystone Park by selling it to logging companies. Yogi, Boo Boo and all their fellow forest creatures are going to be out of a home, and instead of perpetually stealing pic-a-nic baskets, they have to cooperate with Ranger Smith and love interest/biology researcher Rachel to save the park. There are the predictable scenes of rafting over a waterfall, and waterskiing bears and Mayor Brown is shown as the on-the-take, shallow, nature hater that he really is, when he gets his comeuppance and Jellystone Park is saved.

This year the Minister is going to make a decision on whether either or both of the schemes to violate Fiordland are going to be given concessions. There is understandably a bit of a local backlash about the proposals, ie see Save Fiordland’s website.

Firstly there is the Milford Dart Tunnel which proposes to build a tunnel for buses with an eastern portal near the Routeburn Shelter and a western portal just north of Gunn’s Camp on the Hollyford Road. Tourists can then rush from Queenstown via the road to Glenorchy, over the little bridges over the Rees and Dart rivers, through the tunnel, to the Hollyford and then on the existing Hollyford Road, through the Homer Tunnel, and into Milford Sound, instead of going the long way round through Mossburn and Te Anau.

Secondly there is the plan to build a monorail from the Kiwi Burn through the Snowdon Forest to Te Anau Downs. With this tourists would be able to rush from Queenstown to Milford via a boat across Lake Wakatipu, then an “all terrain vehicle” (oh gosh) on the Mt Nicholas Road to KiwiBurn and then catch a monorail to Te Anau Downs where presumably they can get on pogo sticks to go through the Eglington Valley to the Homer Tunnel and down to the Sound.

Both of these would mean granting significant commercial concessions to build intrusive infrastructure in Te Wahipounamu/Fiordland World Heritage Area that would have big effects on scenery and recreational users to save tourists a few hours on an exhausting day trip bus ride. They would both significantly reduce the mana of the parks.

Here’s a suggestion for any tourists coming to Fiordland and are in Queenstown and want to visit Milford Sound. Don’t do it as a day trip. It is a long way to go, and there are many beautiful things to see on the way. There are world class walking tracks and the scenery is fantastic. Fiordland is worth more than one day of your life.

On paper the Milford Dart Tunnel would appear to not have much impact you might think, but the roads and bridges between Glenorchy and the eastern portal will all need to be upgraded for the large number of buses using the tunnel. (There would also be political pressure to open up the tunnel to trucks and cars once it was built).

The Lower Dart. What this valley needs is lots of diesel pollution.

Most of the Routeburn track walkers won’t notice the buses in the tunnels underneath (and the people in the buses would be looking into blackness when above they could be hiking in a lovely beech forest up to the Harris Saddle). A hundred diesel belchers going past the start of the walk to Lake Sylvan are going to mess with the ambience of what would have to be one of the nicest short walks in the world.

The beech forest en route to Lake Sylvan.

A short walk to a peaceful oasis of serenity, Lake Sylvan.

Peaceful Lake Sylvan.

At the western end of the tunnel the Hollyford Road will have to be widened and upgraded to take the extra bus traffic. The Hollyford Road near the start of the Lake Marian track is narrow and steep and in pristine forest. They’ll have to cut down a lot of trees to accomplish this. On the Hollyford Road past the turnoff  the traffic will thin, and only be there to provide access to the Hollyford Track. It’s a good thing the tourist buses will rush past giving no-one the opportunity to see such a magnificent river as the Hollyford.

The Hollyford River.

I had a hike once in the Snowdon Forest.  I walked in from the Mavora Lakes and in from the KiwiBurn. I’m pretty much of the opinion that this part of the World Heritage Area should be incorporated into a National Park and better protected.

Walking around the South Mavora I was pretty much of the opinion that the 4WD access should be shutdown, because they had churned up the fragile soils in the beech forest into mudpools. DOC, if you’ve got any staff left, you should look into that.

Potholed and hillocked – 4WDs have fucked up the South Mavora Lake.

The Kiwi Burn area itself is beautiful with flat walking following the Mararoa River through the forest.

Bridge over the Mararoa River, near Kiwi Burn.

Would this look better with a monorail?

En route to the Whitestone Valley.

If tourists want Disneyland then I suggest going to Anaheim, Lille, Orlando or Hong Kong. If they want to see a beautiful corner of the world (except for the bloody sandflies) then I suggest they do it on foot, or take more than a day to do it by the existing road. These projects are unnecessary. They will despoil a beautiful and unique part of the world. They will commoditise, monetise and Disney-afy a part of the natural world. They will allow a couple of companies to generate wealth for themselves, whilst detracting from the common good that is owned not only by every New Zealander, but by everyone on planet Earth.

Can Nick Smith make the right decision? Is he smarter than the average bear?

Save Jellystone. Save Fiordland.

Macau Chic

Just back from presumably sunny Macau (presumably sunny because the sun, if it was there, was hidden behind the pollution haze for my whole trip). Macau is a mecca for Chinese gamblers and it’s glitzy (and a bit gungy) “glamour” has not entirely eclipsed the faded Portuguese colonial air.

It’s not a cycling city, and only a very few do. It is also a city not too kind to its pedestrians with numerous street level pedestrian crossings where the buses, cars and scooters don’t stop, and on the busier roads, underground passages or pedestrian overpasses which curiously seem to cause rather than reduce any inconvenience. Mostly it is a cacophony of 2-stroke scooters (a very big reason why the sky is grey and rarely blue). With all the buses waiting to ferry casino customers to and from the ferry terminals and the border posts spend their whole time idling belching diesel, the ever present stench of Chinese cigarettes and the aforementioned 2-strokes it doesn’t really add up to a place I’m going to think is very enjoyable, but Macau does have its charms. Mostly they are the variety of good restaurants, and there are a couple of pleasant neighbourhoods to hang out in, where there is a lot less vehicle traffic, Taipa Village being one of them. So the guests of the world’s biggest casino, the Venetian in Cotai, can get to the village without breaking a sweat there is a moving pedestrian walkway between the fantastically named street, Estrada Baia de Nossa Senhora de Esperanca, and the lake. If you always thought these would be  a good idea since you saw them in the Jetsons as a kid, you’ll be disappointed. You can walk faster than they go.

My favourite picture that I took in Macau was this one, where I asked a man if I could take a picture with him and his bike, a classic Chinese single gear situp with some of the tools of his cleaning trade:

Tranzmetro, this is what could be achieved

Tranzmetro‘s new Matangi trains have an internal width of about 2.4 metres, and a bike on average is 1.8m long, so parking on a slight angle will give plenty of room for a bike to be stored on a train.

Copenhagen’s S-tog trains have a carriage in the middle of each train, with a one way system, where you enter with your bike at one end of the carriage, and get off at the other.

The inside of  the carriage looks like this:

Bikes on trains are an important part of integrated transport, and should be encouraged by making it easier than it now is, be for way more than 3 bikes per train, and should be available for all services and not just off-peak. If crowding is an issue increase the frequency of service. It is more cost effective to increase the cycling options between Kapiti and Wellington than to build a billion dollar motorway for 3.25 billion dollars.

Info from the Cycling Embassy of Denmark.

Cyclists advised to wear clown suits and flashing neon glitter hotpants

With a recent coroner’s report into the 2008 death of a cyclist at the Petone roundabout there have been his and others’ calls for cyclists to wear hi-viz clothing. It’s a very strange call considering he could have advised to invest in safe separated cycle infrastructure instead, and especially strange when considering the victim, Stephen Fitzgerald, was already wearing hi-viz clothing when he was struck and killed by the truck.

The coroner has also called on motorists to give cyclists a metre of space when they pass. Someone should tell the coroner we ask for at least 1.5 metres, so he is calling on motorists to come closer and scare us even more.

Now the NZ Association of Optometrists has chimed in with their advice for cyclists to put biomotion reflector markings on their knees and elbows, presuamably so we can look more like crash test dummies, so it helps the ambulance officers to find us in the dark or something.

My first reaction to all this is to think that like the mandatory helmet laws this is really a reflection of the relative political power of motorists versus cyclists. Motorists hate cyclists because we’re not caught in traffic as much as them, and we glide past on the inside, and sometimes they even have to slow down and give way to cyclists. If it really was all about road safety then speed limits for cars would be cut, and motorists would have to wear helmets too. But why address the real problem of too many cars going too fast with poorly trained and inattentive drivers on poorly designed roads, when you can just score an easy political point against cyclists and mandate another condition pretending it is for their own good? Mandatory hi-viz clothing in the middle of a sunny day on a cycle path, the Waterfront, or even the Hutt Rd shamozzle does absolutely nothing to increase the real safety of cyclists. It just tells the general public that cycling is more dangerous than it really is, and participation rates are going to fall, as cycling becomes even more denormalised in New Zealand. The rest of the world is going the other way and is promoting cycling and building safe infrastructure. New Zealand is once again cack-handed and backwards, behind the times and a bit of a laughing stock.

So if hi-viz,  helmets and biomotion reflector markings are a sop to motorist’s guilty conscience or more a way to try to put us in our place, then what other suggestions could we make for them to drive us further into a fringe activity?

How about some colourful clown clothes and a big red nose:

Or perhaps we should all wear hot pink sequined hotpants (I believe they sell them and neck ties to match  in Men’s sizes at Munns on Willis Street:

Feather boas could also be worn, but be warned; they’re scratchy.

Maybe what is really needed is some kiwi ingenuity and Wellington cyclists should team up with the Wearable Arts people and they can all make us great costumes that will make us standout so that we don’t get run over by trucks anymore:

Really I think we need to dress the streets up, rather than ourselves. Something like this on Hornby St, Vancouver will do:

Here are three suggestions:

- when making cycling policy ask cyclists what they want.

- when planning for transportation infrastructure ask cyclists what they need.

- really, really, really don’t go the hotpants.

Government needs to step up to the plate on cycle infrastructure funding

Recent news stories, these last few days, in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch all show that there is a significant push in each city to improve cycle infrastructure.

In Wellington and Christchurch this will be from rates and in Auckland, embarassingly, but fitting the sad ideological zeitgeist, it will be a private public partnership funded by tolls. Cars will be able to drive over the Harbour Bridge for nothing, but cyclists and pedestrians will be paying tolls. Imagine stinging tourists $5.00 for the pleasure of walking over the bridge and back. They’ll be telling their friends when they get home that New Zealand ripped them off.

The reality is that at the moment government funding for cycle infrastructure is miniscule. The summary of the NZTA’s National Land Transport Planning for 2012-2015 doesn’t even mention bicycles. It is budgeted to have $53m of funding for the years from 2012-2015 for all footpaths and cycle funding. That is less than $18m a year, or about $4 per person per year. That $53m out of a total budgeted $4,449m budgeted on roads. That is 1% of funding going to active transport, ie walking and cycling. Currently more than 1% or people get around on foot and by bicycle

There are about 1.27 million cyclists in NZ – about 31% of the population (by comparison, there are about 3 million people with car licences). There are about 750,000 regular cyclists (cycling at least once a month) in NZ – about 18% of the population. About 144,000 or 3.5% cycle nearly every day. Yet these people get less than 1.2% of the road transport funding.

There’s no other way to interpret it, but presently cyclists and pedestrians are being ripped off by the government.

Government needs to step up to the plate on cycle infrastructure funding. Cities all over the country are crying out for more funding. They are resorting to raising rates, or unbelievably, tolls.  Extra funding needs to be forthcoming.

Investments in cycle infrastructure typically have benefit to cost ratios much greater than road projects. Improving urban transport infrastructure improves cities. It reduces congestion on the roads, and enables people to get around by public transport. Cycling and walking improve air quality by taking cars off the road. It fights the obesity epidemic. This should be a no-brainer. Cycle infrastructure is a common good, benefiting everyone, even the people who don’t use it.

The amount of money available from the NLTF for local councils to implement cycle projects should be increased, even up to an amount of $50m or $100m a year. Cities and towns should still match the funding, maybe not at 50%, but at 20%. Each city should be able to plan and build their networks without fear that it won’t be funded.

Of course the projects should still stack up, but not to the NZTA’s extremely narrow conditions that seem to only want cycle infrastructure if it decongests a highway. Cycle infrastucture projects should be done for their own sake, e.g. for extending the network of safe cycle ways into a useful grid, or for adding extra cycle parking in strategic spots or for other valid reasons.

The demand is there, the pent up demand, waiting for safe cycle infrastructure, is there and the induced demand from people who don’t yet know that they will want to cycle is there too.

A thousand people cycled into Wellington City for a free breakfast this morning for Bike to Work day. They got free bananas and bagels. They didn’t get their fare share of road transport funding.