Home again

Returning to my regular Louisville commute for the past couple of days has given me a chance to check some of the things I wrote last week about the contrasts between Seattle and Louisville. I have not had any feeling of returning to earth after a visit to paradise. Indeed, the bicycling conditions are remarkably similar along the commuting routes that I took in the two cities: few places with space set aside for cyclists; stretches with lots of car traffic; a downtown street grid over-reliant on one-way streets; fair pavement conditions; numerous obstructions and hazards due to construction activities.

I have not noticed a big difference in behavior between Louisville and Seattle urban drivers, either, with the exception of much greater respect in Seattle for pedestrians in crosswalks. The big difference lies in bicyclist behavior. In Seattle, the great majority of bicycle commuters appeared adept at commuting by bicycle. Regardless of their riding speed, they predominantly rode bicycles that fit them properly, wore helmets, and carried their belongings in sophisticated waterproof panniers. Most rode in work clothes rather than bicycling clothes, and few rode on fancy road bikes, though I saw plenty of high-quality commuting bikes. 

Yesterday, I saw a downtown Louisville bicyclist riding with his seat much too low, crossing the street at a walking pace in the crosswalk, riding from one sidewalk to another, without a helmet. He would have stuck out like a sore thumb in downtown Seattle. In a 5-minute span well after dark last night, I saw two riders without lights, both on major streets (Brownsboro Road and Frankfort Avenue). Even with vastly more bicycle traffic, I never saw bicyclists in Seattle riding after dark without lights.

Somehow, the bicycling community in Seattle has learned from experience or taught one another how to ride safely and efficiently. I believe that this happens much more quickly as the proportion of serious cyclists in a community grows. As a city develops a discernible bicycling community, that bicycling community establishes social norms for its members. Social norms affect behavior more powerfully than any formal education or law enforcement programs.

Seattle wrap-up

On Friday morning, I had another unique bicycling experience. I had arrived in Seattle with my Bike Friday folding bike in its travel case and the rest of my traveling possessions in a large backpack. (I don't have the accessories to convert the travel case into a trailer.) If I rode my bicycle back downtown from Nancy's house, I could probably manage to carry the backpack but not the travel case. Repacking the Bike Friday into the travel case would require taking the bus downtown with two large pieces of luggage, during the peak of morning rush hour.

Nancy offered me another option: she could haul my luggage behind her commuting bike in her Burley trailer with me riding behind her. I packed my backpack into the Bike Friday travel case and loaded it into her trailer, and we rode together the five miles downtown. It was the first time I have ever bicycled with a baggage porter! Our route included one climb, perhaps 4% grade for about a half mile. We geared down and rode up at about 8 mph. Nancy was pulling probably 65 pounds of luggage and trailer up that grade!

Downtown Seattle has numerous hills much steeper than that. The steepest that I rode during my stay must have been 12% for a block. Anyone riding much around Seattle needs to learn to handle hills, unless they stay on the Burke-Gilman trail. As a result of building strength by riding the hills, many of the commuters I encountered kept a fast pace.

On the way to the conference on Friday, I counted 33 bicyclists - the highest of any of my 5-mile commuting rides. We had glorious weather all week, with low temperatures in the 50s and high temperatures in the 70s, with sunshine and no rain. I rode in business clothes all week without getting sweaty on the way to work.

What do bicycle advocates in Seattle think of the state of affairs there? After all, they have Cascade Bicycle Club with 10,000 members and 16 full-time paid employees, the famous and fantastically well-used Burke-Gilman Trail, and between 20 and 100 times Louisville's bicycle commuting "mode share" (the fraction of commuters who commute by bicycle). They have a downtown BikeStation and get priority treatment on ferries and other transit vehicles. Short answer: They are not resting on their laurels. With strong participation from Cascade Bicycle Club, the city in 2007 adopted an ambitious new bicycling master plan calling for major expansion and improvement of on- and off-street bicycling facilities. They have started a program based on the SmartTrips program used successfully in Portland, OR to encourage people to switch from single-occupancy motor vehicle trips to transit, bicycling, and walking. They have active bicycle safety education and traffic enforcement programs. Cascade has increased its membership by over 10% in the past year.

Bicycle advocates in Seattle have long since reached the goal of making bicycling a respected mode of transportation that handles a small but significant proportion of trips. Now, they work to make bicycling a mainstream mode, equal in importance and public consideration to driving and public transit. It looks as though they will get there within the next 10 years.

The ProWalk/ProBike Conference aims to make insight and experience from successful programs and policies available for widespread application. The people from Seattle gleefully acknowledged the ideas that they had "stolen" from Portland and other cities. The leaders in our field repeatedly invited the rest of us to use their materials and methods. We in Louisville will not need 30 years to catch up with Seattle and Portland if we accept this invitation.

It all counts

Today was a big day for counts. On the 5-mile bicycle commute to the ProWalk/ProBike conference, I counted 21 bicyclists, all apparently fellow commuters. This roughly equals the number of bicycle commuters that I see during a typical week of morning commutes in Louisville. At the conference, I attended a morning session that included three presentations involving bicycle traffic counts and counting methods. It gave me ideas for where, when, and how to do more bicycle traffic counts in Louisville. (Bicycling for Louisville conducted morning and afternoon peak hour bicycle counts of 20 intersections in the spring of 2007.)

I joined an afternoon "mobile workshop" to see the ways in which University of Washington is encouraging its students, faculty, and staff to avoid driving alone to the campus. We stood on University Way one block off campus learning about measures taken to make the street safer and more inviting to pedestrian and bicyclists. During a 10-minute stretch at that intersection at about 4:30 PM, I counted 15 bicyclists - a pace of 90 bicyclists per hour, more than we counted at any of the intersections in Louisville. Remarkably, this happened during a "slow" time when the University is not in session. An hour later, we stood at the south edge of the campus alongside the Burke-Gilman Trail, a paved multi-use path over 30 years old. In six minutes, I counted 54 bicycles passing on the trail - a rate of 540 bicycles per hour! Although this was during rush hour peak (about 5:45 PM), it was again during a slow time of year for traffic in the University.

With or without bike lanes or paths, with or without school in session, Seattle has enormously higher bicycle traffic than Louisville does. During my glimpse of it, the Burke-Gilman Trail carried even more bicycle traffic than any of the Seattle streets I've seen. Over the past few years, Seattle has averaged about half of our number of bicycle fatalities (about 1 per year rather than about 2/year in Louisville). Even so, riding around Seattle has not given this Louisvillian a sense that the bicycling facilities here are all that much better than those in Louisville. Cascade Bicycle Club (with 10,000 dues-paying members and 20 paid staffers!) and the City of Seattle appear to agree. Last year, the City approved a new bicycling master plan with commitments to invest roughly $3 million per year for 9 years ($27 million total) on new and improved bicycle facilities. The plan calls for much more, as funds become available. The $27 million will go to carefully selected, high-benefit projects, not just some vague concepts or one or two glamorous big-ticket trails or bridges. The plan also has specific goals for these new facilities and programs: tripling the number of bicycle commuters from 4% of Seattle commuters to 12%. (I believe that fewer than 0.2% of non-home-based workers in Louisville commute by bicycle.)

Seattle appreciates what bicycling already does for the city and its people, and wants more of the same. Its tremendous bicycling advantage over Louisville has relatively little to do with more or better bicycling facilities (notwithstanding the phenomenal difference between bicycling conditions on University Bridge in Seattle compared with Clark Memorial (a.k.a. 2nd Street) Bridge in Louisville). Over the next ten years, we'll get to see how much bicycling increases and bicycle crashes decrease in Seattle as they build more and better bicycle lanes, multi-use paths, and bicycle boulevards.

My first day as a Seattle bike commuter

During the ProWalk/ProBike Conference in Seattle, I am staying with friends 5 miles north of the conference site. My friend Nancy, a long-time bicycle commuter, led me on the bicycle ride into downtown this morning during rush hour. The experience contrasted in some interesting ways with my commuting experience in Louisville.

Seattle has the fastest growth rate of any major US city and suffers from severe automotive traffic congestion. As you picture my bicycle commute here, keep in mind that I passed and was passed by many more cars this morning than I encounter on my commute in Louisville. No part of our trip was on the famous Burke-Gilman Trail or any other off-road path; we rode on streets with lots of cars, trucks, and buses. We had the use of bike lanes for perhaps a quarter of our route, and it was generally clean. The streets were in about the same state of maintenance as Louisville city streets, with occasional holes or cracks requiring dodging but no really bad stretches.

Immediately, I noticed the omnipresence of other bicyclists. During a 5-mile commute at about 7:30 AM, we were never out of sight of other bicyclists. For about a mile and a half, we rode amidst an accidental assembly of 7 bicycle commuters. I don't think I've ever seen 6 other bicyclists during an entire 5-mile commute in Louisville, let alone 6 others at one time. On the return trip at about 6 PM, I only briefly rode without another bicyclist nearby. During the round trip, I saw at least 20 other bicyclists. They all appeared to be riding to or from work or on another trip for transportation - no racing bikes or team jerseys or groups of riders socializing or riding in a pace line.

I don't recall seeing even one bicyclist blow through a red light. For about three miles, I stayed within a block of another rider who did a track stand at every red light, sometimes for nearly a minute. I saw no wrong-way riders and very little sidewalk riding. The Seattle bicyclists, like Seattle motorists, universally yielded to pedestrians in crosswalks. I see this only rarely in Louisville. Most of the pedestrians crossed in crosswalks after waiting for the "walk" signal, another rarity in Louisville. On streets with two or three lanes in my direction, motorists accepted my staying in the middle of the narrow right lane. In general, I found the motorists patient and accepting of my presence.

Some bicyclists made some iffy choices, swerving around buses or cutting around slow-moving cars. For the first and second times in my many years of urban riding, I had bicyclists pass on my right - bizarre and dangerous behavior. On the whole, though, I found the behavior of Seattle's rush-hour on-street bicyclists better by far than run-of-the-mill bicycling practice in Louisville.

The high number of bicyclists on Seattle streets appears to have had an unfortunate side effect: none of the other bicyclists waved, nodded, or acknowledged me at all, even when I greeted them. The relative rarity of bicycle commuting in Louisville seems to support a camaraderie that I enjoy. I hope that we keep that friendliness even as numbers of bicycle commuters increase.

At the ProWalk/ProBike Conference, I continue to learn about ways to make bicycling safer and more enjoyable and convenient. Still, it's fascinating and heartening to see how much better bicycling can be even in the absence of visibly improved streets and intersections. Better attitudes and practices by motorists and bicyclists make an enormous difference.