Month: January 2018

It’s bitter cold, then it’s amazingly warm; it’s snowing, then it’s raining. There’s ice, and then the streets are bone dry. That’s winter in southern Wisconsin. But there are lots of activities and city meetings to think about and attend. So here we go with our weekly update of the goings-on.

The week ahead

On Monday, both Madison Bikes and Bike Fitchburg will be holding meetings. The Madison Bikes Board of Directors meets at the Madison Central Library at 6:00 pm. Fitchburg Bikes meets at the Fiitchburg Library at 6:30 pm.

Also on Monday, the weekly MEAThead ride leaves at 7:00 pm from Ford’s Gym, 2114 Winnebago St, for a Lake Monona Loop ride, with an optional loop through the Arboretum. This is a weekly ride from November through March, so just put it on your calendar.

Tuesday, the monthly Pedestrian/Bicycle/Motor Vehicle Commission meeting (5:00 pm in Rm 201 of the City-County Bldg, agenda here) will take up a number of seemingly routine, but actually quite important matters. Remember that you can go to all city meetings to watch, and you can also register to testify on any item on the agenda. You can summit comments or your support/opposition via email or in writing in person. Your voice is important! To get more information on the items below, just click the agenda link and follow the attachments for each item.

The PBMVC will discuss the following items:

• Projects within the neighborhood Traffic Management Program (AKA traffic calming).
• Where new traffic signal will be installed.
• A number of general city engineering projects that affect bicycling, including the project at Winnebago and Riverside, a few short path connections, and the repaving of the path that leads to Memorial High School.
• Bicycle-specific projects coming up in this year, mosst of which are small items like flashing lights or curb ramps.
• The city’s policy of bike route maitenance policy.

Also on the agenda is a state law being considered that would add electric bikes to the definiton of “bicycle” in state statutes. You can see a staff review of the proposed state law by Traffic Engineering.

If you’re not I the mood for a city meeting on Tuesday, you can head over to Manna Café on N. Sherman to join up with Down With Bikes for their biweekly winter social ride and games night. Leaving from Manna at 6:30 pm, they will weave through the North Side to arrive at Player’s Bar for ping pong, pool, and board games.

Wednesday

Although the Middleton Pedestrian, Bike, Transit Committee is listed on the Madison Bikes calendar as meeting on Wednesday at 6:30 pm at the Middleton City Hall, no evidence of it can be found on the City of Middleton meetings website. If you are interested in upcoming issues, it might be worth a call to the city to see if a meeting is scheduled.

Finally, on Thursday, the Long Range Transportation Planning Committee will be meeting (5:00 pm in Room 108 of the City-County Bldg, agenda here.) The principal item on the agenda will be continued work on the transportation component of the Imagine Madison planning process, which is the update to the city Comprehensive Plan.

And some reminders:

If you have an event, meeting, or ride that you would like us to list on the Madison Bikes calendar, please drop us a note.

And don’t forget to mark your calendars for Feb 3, when we will be at the Frozen Assets Festival and Fundraiser for the Clean Lakes Alliance. It’s happening on the lake behind (or would that be in front of?) the Edgewater. Drop by and see us and enjoy all the activities, including a fat bike race on the ice on Friday, and on Saturday our popular fat bike sled pull. (Sorry, kids only.)

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! There will be many opportunities to honor and celebrate Dr. King’s life and legacy, for example the Madison-Dane County King Holiday Observance on Monday or the UW’s events on January 22. Otherwise things continue to be rather quiet.

Last week the Madison Bikes Events Committee met to nail down further details of the upcoming Winter Bike Week. Winter Bike Week will take place from February 2nd to 9th. A lot of details are still being finalized — RSVP on the Facebook event page to receive the latest updates, or regularly check back on our website: https://www.madisonbikes.org/winterbikeweek

Some good news for people wanting to bike around Lake Mendota: The county acquired a property that will become part of the planned bike trail around the northwest side of the lake. The massive planned expansion of Highway M, from two to four lanes, in that same area is less good news.

The only two events on the calendar for this week is Madison Bikes Advocacy Committee meeting on Wednesday.

And on Saturday, Madison Bikes board member Baltazar is hosting the Tour de la Familia Latina – Winter Tour of the Latino Family.

It’s a new year for Madison Bikes, and with a new year come new board members. Our organization started in November 2015 around Grant’s dining room table: The group of people assembled around that table felt that there was an opportunity to improve local bike advocacy in Madison. Riding a bike in Madison was pretty good already, but there was no local organization working on making things even better.

As expressed in our vision statement, our goal is to make riding a bike a viable transportation option for people of all backgrounds, ages, and abilities. We aim to have infrastructure that supports comfortable bike riding for a child, as well as her grandparents. We want this low-stress bike network to extend into all parts of the city, not just the downtown area or in affluent neighborhoods.

To make that all happen, we founded Madison Bikes. Our website went live in Spring 2016; we finalized our incorporation as a non-profit that summer; and in the fall we had a kickoff party at the High Noon Saloon.

Since then we have written over 120 blog posts, organized events such as the Winter Bike Fashion Show, Winter Bike Week, and Madison Bike! Bingo, and we have mobilized the community to make their voice heard on street construction projects such as Monroe, West Wilson, and East Johnson Streets. We have also worked behind the scenes with city officials and other advocates to improve winter bike facility maintenance, to improve counting of people on bikes, and to improve the way the city thinks about public outreach. At the end of 2017, we also rolled out a formal membership program.

Much of that board was and continues to be done by our initial board members, and awesome ad-hoc additions. At our 2017 annual meeting, we elected the first cohort of new members to join the board since our founding. Before I introduce the new members, let’s say thanks to Emily Sonnemann and Chuck Strawser, who stepped down from the board. Emily, who chaired our events committee, and Chuck will continue to work with us on our various committees. Thank you for the work you have done. Also thanks to everyone who applied as a board member but wasn’t elected: It was a great problem to have more highly qualified candidates than open board seats!

Now let’s get to our new members. I’m excited to introduce:

Pepe Barros

Pepe grew up in a big city far south of Madison. Santiago, Chile watched him grow and experiment with all kind of adventure sports to end up attracted by the steep mountains and the Downhill Mountain Bike competitions he used to attend with his friends. While being a strong bike commuter in the wild streets of Latin America he traded adrenaline for advocacy and studies. While becoming an industrial engineer he traveled all throughout Chile helping to grow environmental awareness by cycling. He spent the last 5 years developing social-emotional skills in several public schools in different regions of Chile and in 2016 he happily got married in Milwaukee and worked the warm season as a Mobile Bike Repair Coordinator for Wisconsin Bike Fed. In October of 2017, Pepe, his wife and their fat cat moved to Madison and they all hope to be helpful to the city and its growing bicycle community by creating and supporting spaces where everyone can feel safe, confident and gather as a big family, no matter your origins or beliefs.

Baltazar De Anda Santana

Baltazar is an immigrant who grew up in Mexico and came to the United States when he was 23 years old (He is now 41). Because of biking and a healthy life style, Baltazar lost 95 pounds and reversed a pre-diabetic diagnosis. Some years ago, when Baltazar’s drivers license expired (and because of his immigration status he was not able to renew it) he started using biking as his main means of transportation. Baltazar is now able to get a drivers license (he became a Legal Permanent Resident in 2016) but he has chosen not to buy a car and continue using biking as a main means of transportation. In the short time that Baltazar has been biking in Madison, he has found that unfortunately there is a bike racial disparity and bike inequity in the city of Madison. Baltazar does not want to be one of the few Latinos who bike. His goal is to bring more people from the Latino/African American/Hmong communities into biking. As more people bike, there is going to be a yet higher need for better biking infrastructure in Madison. Madison is currently a great place for biking. Unfortunately it is only a great place to bike for just few members of the community. Baltazar believes this can change.

Liz Jesse

Liz grew up in Madison and after college moved to the Washington D.C. suburbs for several years, followed by a ten year stint in Sheboygan, WI. However, it was only after moving home to Madison in 2015 that she truly began to appreciate the city’s vibrant bicycling culture. She is now a year-round bicycle commuter (eight miles round trip), but also enjoys recreational road riding and bicycle camping/touring during the warmer months. Liz works as a science outreach specialist/educator at the UW Biotechnology Center and is an active member of the UW-Madison Science Alliance, a science outreach advocacy group on campus. She lives on Madison’s near-west side with her husband, Ben, and their two adorable rescue dogs.

Becky Jollay

Originally from Columbus, GA, Becky earned her BFA in digital media from the University of Georgia where she first began her love affair with bicycles. At the end of her time in Athens, she heard the rumor that you could bike everywhere in Madison, WI. It was on this rumor alone that she, and Hero the cat, relocated to the Midwest. Becky has been an avid Madison cyclist since 2008. Earning her MS in Urban and Regional Planning from UW-Madison in May 2017, strengthened her love and advocacy of sustainability and accessible mobility. She currently works for The Barbara Hochberg Center for Jewish Student Life as their development associate.

Raj Shukla

Raj is a family dude, Madison-lover and sometimes-radical environmentalist. To him, a bike means less pollution, less stress, more health, more pocket change and more chances to hear the birds sing. He works as Executive Director of River Alliance of Wisconsin and chairs the Sustainable Madison Committee, a city advisory council that works toward environmental goals. Raj and his wife can be found chasing their three young children around their near west side neighborhood, through Madison’s beautiful parks and into the occasional ice cream shop.

On Wednesday, January 10th at 6:00pm, staff from the City of Madison Engineering department will host a public informational meeting on the proposed reconstruction of Winnebago Street from Second Street to Bashford Avenue.

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At the time of writing, there is no information available for this project on Engineering’s projects webpage. Instead, notice of the public meeting seems to be limited to a letter sent to adjacent residents and shared via Alder Rummel’s blog/weekly update.

Current Conditions

Staff describe the current conditions as: “48 ft. wide, with a travel lane, bike lane, and parking lane in both directions, and approximately a 3 ft. terrace on both sides. Due to significant grade differences, a portion of the southeasterly side terrace has walls and railings adjacent to the sidewalk.”

Staff call out the following three alternatives for consideration:

1. Narrowing the travel lanes by 1 ft. each, making the total street width 46 ft., while maintaining all of the existing lanes. Terraces would widen by approximately 1 ft. on each side.
2. Remove parking on one side, but maintain all travel and bike lanes. This option could narrow the street to 40 ft., which would widen the terraces further and improve the grade challenges more.
3. Can also consider an option that combines both of the first options: a portion of the street with all existing lanes, and another portion that has parking removed on one side.

Option #1 reflects a slight change from the proposal that was originally presented to the Ped/Bike/MV Commission in November. At that meeting, project engineer Jim Wolfe described a concept that would reduce the street width from 48′ to 44′ by reducing the unrestricted travel lanes by 1′ each and by reducing the recently painted bike lanes by 1′ in both directions. This would accommodate a widening of the terraces from three to five foot on both sides.

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In addition to the grade challenges that result in the need for a railing on the southeastern sidewalk and that prevent comfortable access for people in wheelchairs, the current 3′ terraces do not accommodate tree plantings. Additionally, nearby neighbors have voiced concern over the difficult pedestrian crossing of Winnebago at Fourth Street (an important walking route for many students to East High School).

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The southwestern end of this project at Second Street also abuts the long-discussed Schenks Corners area. This was one area of focus for the SASY Committee that was organized around improving the Winnebago-Atwood corridor. That work was put on hold when many of the corresponding street reconstruction projects were pushed out, but there was significant public engagement at that time to identify a future vision of this corridor that improved conditions for people outside of cars.

Space

At the heart of this project is the question of space. There’s no suggestion of increasing the public right of way, so any increase of space allocation on the one hand will require a decrease in space allocation on the other.

The key space considerations fall into the following categories:

• Space for people walking and rolling (sidewalk)- 5’ is the standard outside of downtown
• Terrace space – 4’ is required to plant ornamental trees, 5’ for shade trees. This space also accommodates streetlights and signs and street furniture and is where we store snow that’s removed from the roadway and from sidewalks. It also creates a horizontal buffer between cars and people on the sidewalk.
• Space for biking – With over 4000 cars per day, bike and car traffic needs separation. 5’ is the standard width for a bike lane.
• Space for parking cars – Parking lanes are generally 7-8’ wide, not including the ‘door zone’.
• Space for moving cars and buses – The current unrestricted travel lanes are 11’ wide. Reducing the travel lanes to 10’ wide in a section like this has some positive influence on lowering motor vehicle speeds. For larger vehicles like trucks and buses, 10’ can be a little narrow and requires careful consideration of the immediately adjacent space.

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The images above are from NACTO’s Transit Street Design Guide. They show the typical dimensions of different vehicles and the area required to safely operate those vehicles. Buses, for example, are typically 8.5’ wide–10.5’ wide including the side mirrors. (Metro routes 4 and 10 run on this stretch of Winnebago.) The width needed to safely operate a bus in normal conditions is listed as 11.5’. In general terms, this means that a bus operating in a 10’ wide lane requires another 1.5’ of clear space.

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Because the operating envelopes can overlap depending on conditions, the NACTO guide provides additional guidance regarding the needed width for different uses. Taking into consideration both the vehicle’s size and the room needed to operate, it recommends the following:

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In these diagrams, the “minimum” distances cited are based on legal standards that do not provide for good performance in real world situations. The “desired minimum”, on the other hand, provides a good starting point for street design.

You can see that the desired minimum for a bus adjacent to a person on a bike is 17’. Another way of understanding this is: a 10’ unrestricted travel lane plus a 2’ buffer plus a 5’ bike lane. Similarly, the recommended minimum of a parking lane and adjacent bike lane is 14’. This can be understood as a 7’ parking lane plus a 2’ buffer plus a 5’ bike lane. This allows for an actual clear zone of 3’ between the parked car and the cyclist, which is critical to prevent crashes in the ‘door zone’.

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The need for a ‘buffered’ bike lane in this context is also supported by the recently published All Ages and Abilities Bicycle Facility guide. It calls for a buffered or protected lane when motor vehicle volumes exceed 3000/day.

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Engineering’s proposed alternative #1 would reduce the space available for parking, biking, and driving to 23’ on each side. That’s 3’ less than the recommended 26’ described above. It’s not hard to understand that those 3’ come out of the needed buffer between people on bikes and parked cars on the one side, and people on bikes and motor vehicles on the other. It effectively shrinks the safe, usable portion of the bike lane to 2’ wide. It also doesn’t take into account the effective shrinking of available road space that happens as a result of snow and ice accumulations over the course of the winter in Wisconsin. As snow and ice build up, cars are parked further towards the center of the roadway and often into the bike lane itself. Snow and ice removal in the unbuffered bike lane is also problematic as city plows can’t get close enough to parked cars without risking damage to side mirrors. This leaves the unbuffered bike lane in poor conditions and often completely unusable. Providing a 2’ buffer along the parked cars largely resolves this issue.

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Considering all of the above, we have a great opportunity to significantly improve this important public right of way. We can: 1) widen the street terraces to allow for street trees and improved comfort for people walking, 2) eliminate the need for the guardrail on the southeastern sidewalk and provide comfortable access for people in wheelchairs, and 3) provide safe and comfortable conditions for people of all ages and abilities to move through the corridor by bike. The cost of those improvements is a reduction in the available on-street car parking. While it’s likely that this tradeoff could provoke a strong reaction from some neighbors that benefit from the convenience of the existing, free on-street parking, there’s a compelling case that it’s a worthwhile tradeoff that would provide significant community benefit and that is most consistent with the goals outlined in our city’s recently approved Sustainable Master Transportation Plan.

Happy New Year everyone! On behalf of our board of directors, I want to say thank you to everyone who has supported Madison Bikes and biking in Madison in 2017 — be it through donations, doing volunteer work, coming to our events or public meetings, asking a business to install bike parking, encouraging a friend to try riding a bike, submitting a Report-A-Problem, …

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Because of your awesomeness, our end-of-year fundraising drive was a huge success! We were blown away by your generosity! Within little over a week, Madison Bikes supporters gave over $3000 — well beyond our initial target of $1000. Together with the matching pledge from our board members, we raised well over $4500! This puts us on a very stable financial footing for 2018 and also allows us to consider additional activities to further our mission.

We have several new board members starting their term this year (stay tuned for an introduction), and a strategic planning session in February will help us setting our priorities for the year and beyond. I am excited about another year of making biking better in Madison for everyone! Thank you for your continued support.

Harald (VP of Madison Bikes)

PS Our Monday Update posts will return from their holiday break next week.