Month: September 2016

Madison Bikes Kickoff Party

Last Week

Wow, our Kickoff Party was such a great event. We counted somewhere north of 80 attendees, which was great considering the dicey weather. Big shoutout to all those that helped put the event on, including support from High Noon Saloon, DJ The Real Jaguar, Saris Cycling, and especially Jonny Hunter with Underground Food Collective. If you missed the partyyou can still donate online. All the money raised will be put into improving biking in and around Madison.

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There was also a good turnout at the Sustainable Madison Transportation Master Plan Open House the following night. Mayor Soglin shared some words and then we got a brief overview of some of the key highlights by David Trowbridge and the consultant firm. I think a lot of the groundwork for this plan is very solid, and I appreciate the attention to land use and the impact that has on our current and future transportation network. The biggest gap in the current draft is the absence of any clear goals/objectives, particularly around biking. There is a long list of recommendations, but most of them encourage the city to keep doing what it’s already doing and there’s nothing put in front of us that requires any new action. Take a look for yourself and share your thoughts on what you like and what you think is missing. The website now includes links to several of the draft documents including the primary summary document.

This Week

The 4th week of the month is always busy with the City’s primary transportation committees. Add in the final Mondays Around Monona ride and the big Monroe Street Reconstruction meeting on Thursday and it’ll be a busy week. If you haven’t made it out to any meetings, give it some consideration; things on the ground change when people speak up. PBMVC meetings are also streamed live over the web and can be watched from the comfort of your home.

Monday: It’s the final Mondays Around Monona ride of the season, and if you keep a steady pace you can get to the Wil-Mar center by 7:00 to participate in the discussion about moving bus routes from Jenifer to Williamson Street. There are a lot of considerations with the move and bike comfort/access is one that hasn’t received as much attention as it should. Come learn more and share your thoughts.

Tuesday: Key topics on this month’s Pedestrian/Bicycle/Motor Vehicle Commission meeting will be a discussion of a proposed ordinance change related to panhandling from medians and a first view of the comments received this spring on potential pedestrian/bicycle improvement projects. Also on the agenda is a new proposed segment of the Goodman path.

Wednesday: After a month off, the Transportation Ordinance Review Ad Hoc Committee will meet on Wednesday and review draft ordinances proposing the creation of a Transportation Policy and Planning Board, and the recreation of Transit and Parking Commission and Pedestrian, Bicycle, and Motor Vehicle Commission. This is really fundamental and important work for our city and is worth paying attention to.

Thursday: The Long Range Transportation Planning Committee will receive a presentation from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation on “various major WisDOT roadway projects in the Madison urban area” followed by a review of “Madison in Motion draft transportation system performance monitoring program”. But for anyone that bikes or that would like to bike through and around the Monroe Street neighborhoods, the Monroe Street Reconstruction: Cross Section Workshop may be the more important meeting to attend. This meeting will bring together a lot of the input received to date and will give the public a hands-on opportunity to recommend possible cross sections for further evaluation and design by Engineering. If you care about getting bike lanes on Monroe Street, you should find a way to get to this meeting.

Saturday: For a break from all the advocacy and city meetings, you can go see a talk about touring the Silk Road on a folding bike at Sequoya Library

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Last Week

I wasn’t able to attend the final UW-Madison Draft Campus Master Plan Public Input Meeting, but from the reports of others on our Facebook page, it sounds like the plan calls for increasing motor vehicle access with a not-quite-fully-baked plan for accommodating bikes on University Ave. The final plan should go through the city before it’s adopted and it would be good to consider sharing your thoughts on how this important downtown corridor should function.

This Week

Monday: I’m super excited to see all your faces at our Madison Bikes Kickoff Party at the High Noon Saloon. We’ll have great food and tunes and you’ll have an opportunity to give your thoughts on where we should focus our energies in 2017. Also, door prizes from Saris including a SUPERBONES rack! Party starts at 6:00 pm and we’ll be there until 8:30 or 9:00 pm. There will be a special Mondays Around Monona ride leaving at 4:00 pm and ending at the party. Or for the night owls, join us for a post-party ride (details will be announced at the event). Whether you can join us or not, consider donating online. Every little bit makes a big difference.

Tuesday: The Sustainable Madison Transportation Master Plan Open House is your chance to see the city’s current transportation vision. Come see for yourself what big ideas the city has in mind to improve biking. Do you think the plan will have what it takes to move us out of our stalled mode share numbers?

And make sure that the Monroe Street Reconstruction: Cross Section Workshop is on your calendar for the following week. This will be the most important meeting to date to advocate for better bike access on a reconstructed Monroe.

September is the time of the year when the US Census publishes data from the American Community Survey, one of the few large-scale data sources that can tell us something about long-term trends in biking in the US. How is Madison doing? We had a first look at the data.

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So what are the numbers for bike commuting in Madison? They’re pretty much exactly the same as in the previous year. Whereas between 2013 and 2014 there was a minor increase in bike commuting from 4.8 to 5.3% (well within the margins of error of the data), in 2015 it is still 5.3% of people who report that biking was their main means of getting to work. So for the seventh year in a row bike commuting in Madison has stagnated.

In some ways this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Nationwide bike commuting has also stagnated for several years. So at a time when spending on road expansions continues while gas price hover barely above $2 per gallon, maybe we should be happy that commuting by bike hasn’t decreased. Some advocates in other cities have taken this position. For us at Madison Bikes that’s not an acceptable stance to take. The Bicycle Transportation Plan for the Madison metro area has an increase in the number of people cycling as one of its stated goal, and the city takes great pride in having received “Platinum” status as a bicycle-friendly community. Stagnating bike commuting rates for multiple years in a row therefore should be cause for alarm: What has been done and is being done to improve biking either isn’t working or isn’t enough.

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Getting to a mode share of five percent is relatively easy, especially in a college town. Research originally done in Portland divides the population into four categories: “Strong and fearless” riders are those who will ride under almost any circumstances. This is a very small segment of the population. A slightly larger percentage can be characterized as “enthused and confident,” people who are willing to ride on unprotected on-street bike lanes, in mixed traffic on side streets with few cars, or Madison’s disjointed network of off-street bike paths. Taken together, these two groups make up about five to eight percent of the population. To get a bike mode share that goes beyond that, we need to tap in the group of “interested but concerned”–people who may ride a bike for recreation on a trail or during Ride the Drive, or someone who currently is not biking at all but is in principle interested.

To tap into this group real investments in infrastructure, along with incentives to active transportation and disincentives to driving need to happen. In Madison we do not see those major steps. Changes to biking infrastructure are incremental and piecemeal. Green paint on an intersection here, a widened but still unprotected bike lane there. But no protected bike lanes, no rebuild of horrible intersections such as the one at Machinery Row, and major street reconstruction projects, such as the one on Monroe Street, still prioritize on-street parking and car traffic throughput over safer and more convenient bike and pedestrian infrastructure. At the same time, driving and parking continue to be cheap and convenient. Let’s work together to make this change!

Stay tuned for a more in-depth look at the data. And please stop by our Kickoff Party this Monday and tell us what you think needs to happen to make cycling grow again in Madison.

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Last Week

There were a couple transportation related items discussed at last week’s City Council Meeting. It was a six-hour-long meeting with many important discussions. You can watch all or parts of it here.

• Item 19: Update to panhandling ordinance – Some have suggested that this ordinance rewrite is about trying to stop panhandling in our roadways, but Mayor Soglin tries to make the case that this is really about public safety. Perhaps this new focus on roadway safety will carry over to initiatives to reduce accidents involving pedestrians and bicyclists on our city streets. 3:40:15 is the start of the item and 3:51:00 is the mayor’s speech.
• Item 27: Comprehensive Plan update – This will be gearing up later this year and into next. It will be a good opportunity to try and get some real transportation vision in a City of Madison plan. The Planning Department says this version will have greater emphasis on equity, health, sustainability, and resilience. (4:20:15)
• Item 125: Capitol East District Parking Structure – Parking and parking policy have a lot to do with how our city develops and a lot to do with where we allocate roadway space and transportation dollars. Interesting discussion about the subsidies involved in order to encourage development in our downtown. (5:20:00)

On Wednesday, the Bicycle Facility Maintenance Workgroup met and reviewed a first draft of a Bicycle Maintenance policy. We’ve been making good progress and hope to have something pulled together by the end of the year.

This Week

Monday: Madison Bikes Board Meeting – if you are interested in participating in any of our committees, send a message of interest via this online form. And India, one of our directors, leads another Mondays Around Monona ride.

Tuesday: UW Madison Draft Campus Master Plan Public Input Meeting – There was some good discussion about one element of the plan, the redesign of University Avenue and its bike facilities, on our Facebook page recently.

Friday: Join Bike Fitchburg as they sponsor this year’s Pick Me Up at the Border, a nighttime ride to the Illinois border on the Badger State Trail.

Saturday: Ride over to Revolution Cycles for Ladies Night with Molly Hurford, “where all your questions will be answered—from women-specific ‘issues’ to cyclocross training to nutrition.”

Sunday: Bike the Barns, “a delicious charity bicycle tour raising funds for Partner Shares, featuring local food and CSA farms!”

Also, the 2nd annual Love to Ride program, a month-long local bike challenge developed to help more people rediscover the joys and benefits of riding a bike, runs from September 12 –⁠ October 7, 2016. Businesses can compete for team prizes and bragging rights based on their employees’ participation. Individuals get points for their own rides and, even more importantly, for encouraging others to ride. Visit the Love to Ride Madison website to find out more and to register. Sign up to be the Challenge Champion at your business and help spread the word!

And of course, Madison Bikes Kickoff Party at the High Noon Saloon is on 9/19. Donate online now and we’ll see you on the 19th!

As always, you can also find all these dates on our Community Bike Calendar.

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Last Week

Other than the Mondays Around Monona ride, I wasn’t able to attend any of last week’s events. Sounds like the Sun Prairie Transportation Summit was well attended: video of the event (see screenshot above) is available to watch here. If you’re following the Monroe Street reconstruction process (you should be) here’s a link to last week’s Green Infrastructure World Café presentation. September 29th will be the Summer Input Review and Cross Section Workshop at Wingra School followed by the Cross Section Open House on October 27th. If you have any interest in seeing bike lanes on Monroe Street, you should plan on attending both of these meetings.

This Week

On Wednesday, the Bicycle Facility Maintenance Workgroup will meet to review a first draft of a bikeway maintenance policy. On Saturday, consider joining the Bike the Art Kickoff Tour! organized by the Arts & Literature Laboratory.

Also, just announced last week, is a public comment open house for the Madison in Motion, Sustainable Master Transportation Plan on 9/20. I’ll go into more detail about this plan and what to expect at the open house next week, but for now just plan on two big bike events that week. The other event, of course, is the Madison Bikes Kickoff Party at the High Noon Saloon on 9/19. Donate online now and we’ll see you on the 19th!