Density Bonus

With the newly onerous gas prices afoot, people are actually switching modes away from VMT (vehicle miles traveled) and towards transit trips. Another mode that often gets neglected in the discussions of “alternative transportation” is the bicycle.

There is a big distinction that often goes unheeded in designing for bicycle pathways: the recreational and the destination ride. From a traffic management perspective, the recreational rider is pretty much meaningless. They may be healthier, but they aren’t driving any less. Many bicycle trails are built with the recreational rider in mind. Many of the rails-trails paths are built on this principle.

A directional rider is different; they have an origin, and a destination, just like a motorist commuter or shopper. As a result, they want to ride where the action is. They want to use the same highways that connect many other parts of our cities. If only it weren’t for that pesky traffic and complete lack of design of anything but a car at high (and lethal) speed.

The push to provide trails that serve the destination biker has involved many methods, which can be classed into paint and pavement.

Paint methods, like bike lane markings and sharrows, face the problem of being ignored by motorists. While paint is better than nothing, it can also be as good as nothing where the traffic is busy enough. If the paint is placed in the treadpath of vehicles (as with sharrows), it can be worn away much more quickly than expected.

Pavement methods involve the establishment of separate bike lanes within the right o major highways. This is safer for bicyclists, but is often poorly executed. While the road surface is regraded to provide a certain maximum grade, bicycle paths often dip up and down with the land surface. The 4-foot pavement is a distant stepcousin to the better used roadway nearby. While the road is designed to resist frost and weathering, and is resurfaced on a schedule in sync with the complaints of motorists, the bicycle trail is often laid down as a single smear of asphalt and forgotten.

The notion that destination bikers want to be where the action is, yet safe from vehicular traffic, suggests a third kind of bicycle trail, the shared-use road one block away form the major highway. This would be a road designed to carry motorized traffic and occupied by residential or lower-rent commercial land uses. With traffic calmed by bulbouts or narrow lanes, the motor traffic could be kept at a safe speed for cyclists. Cyclists on these “trail/roads” could get everywhere the arterials go, and turn towards to the highway to reach their destinations.

The problem with this, right now, is subdivisions. Subdivisions are designed to fed arterials via one main roadway, not providing for parallel roadways in coordination with one another.

If we are going to wean ourselves of our dependency on cars and expensive fuel, we had better think clearly about the paths to the alternatives.

The Economist had an interesting piece both in print and online (link) on contemporary suburbs growing to hold the bulk of the nation’s population and jobs (breaking news), and having evolved to become more diverse.

The interesting thing about this article from my perspective is how it feels as if it were written maybe 4-6 years ago - it pays attention to gas prices only glancingly, and cites insufficient road expansion funding as the suburbs’ chief problem (no, it was not written by Joel Kotkin, but does cite him):

Although much of this is nonsense, it cannot be denied that a little sheen has come off America’s suburbs in the past year. Especially in the West, many have been hammered by foreclosures and falling house prices. As a result, their budgets are a mess. The fact that this is largely a consequence of success—the suburbs and exurbs grew rapidly at a time when lending standards were lax, and are now suffering the consequences—is little consolation. Nor is the fact that, as Joel Kotkin of Chapman University points out, the bottom has also dropped out of the city-centre apartment market.

I’m fairly sure that city condo values are holding up better than suburban/exurban values in most regions outside sunbelt bubble-towns. NPR had an interesting piece on this recently (link).

Other problems are creeping into suburbia. The one that its inhabitants complain most bitterly about is traffic. America has failed to build enough roads to accommodate the suburbs’ growing population—a big problem for places where public transport is generally weak or non-existent. Interstate 5, which is the only practical route between Valencia and the city of Los Angeles, is often clogged. Those who make the journey in either direction pay twice as much for petrol as they did in the spring of 2004.

So there aren’t enough roads, and that’s the article’s only reference to gas prices as a challenge to suburbia as usual. Hmmm…

Data from the US Department of Transportation (CNN-link) indicates that Americans reduced their total driving by 4.3% between March 2007 and March 2008 in response to higher fuel prices. Since much of the yearly run-up in gas prices has occurred very recently, we can expect that year-on-year declines might get even larger in April, May, June, and beyond.

Compared with March a year earlier, Americans drove an estimated 4.3 percent less — that’s 11 billion fewer miles, the DOT’s Federal Highway Administration said Monday, calling it “the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history.” Records have been kept since 1942.

According to AAA, for the first time since 2002, Americans said they were planning to drive less over the Memorial Day weekend than they did the year before.

Tracy and Adam Crews posted on iReport that their annual Memorial Day weekend has traditionally involved camping and fishing.

“Well, due to the continual rise in gas, we felt our only recourse was to nix the idea this year and stay home” in Jacksonville, Florida, they wrote.

Instead, the couple said they “decided to camp out in the backyard. We set the tent up, just finished installing our above ground pool, and cleaned up the grill. … We have ourselves a campsite! It’s been a blast!”

It would be interesting to get a breakdown of the specific trips that have been cut back or combined. Clearly transit use is up dramatically nationwide, but there are so many trips that aren’t served by existing transit lines. If both ends of the trip have auto-oriented development configurations with low densities and no or poorly connected sidewalks (aka 95% of suburban America), it’s likely that they can’t be effectively served by transit at all.