An occasional update on items from the Velo-city.
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SCORED!
Bike Score, an offshoot of Walk Score, rolled out more city ratings for bikeability. It turns out even many of the towns we consider cycle-friendly — like New York and Portland, Ore. — are barely getting a passing grade.
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A DECADE OF DATA
Long Beach, CA, has been keeping track of cycling accident data:
The number of bike related accidents is increasing – at a rate about equal to the rate of growth in bicycling.
As you can see from the chart below…the number of bike related accidents has increased over past 5 years. This is increase is coincident with the growth rate of cycling in Long Beach…which based on our bike counts doubled between 2008 and 2010.
Why?
Five leading causes that make up more than 80 percent of all automobile-bicycle incidents:
- Bicyclist riding on the wrong side of the road against oncoming traffic;
- Bicyclist making an unpredictable and hazardous move (e.g., darts in front of a moving vehicle);
- Bicyclist running a stop light or stop sign;
- Motorist running a stop light or stop sign; or
- Motorist making a right or left turn in front of a moving bicycle.
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DOUBLE DIGIT DATA
The City of Portland has just compiled the numbers from their fall 2012 Safe Routes to School parent survey. The results show an encouraging upward trend of biking and walking rates. In fact, 10.3 percent of the fall 2012 survey respondents said they biked to school. That’s a 36 percent increase from fall 2011 and it’s the highest bike mode share recorded they’ve ever recorded.
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HORN TOOT: BIKE-FRIENDLY SFU
Marketwire carried a story about the winners of HUB Your Cycling Connection’s 2012 Bike Friendly Business Award Winners, and included the runner up, SFU Vancouver, in the Most Bike Friendly Building Category. The article read: “The iconic Harbour Centre Complex that houses the Top of Vancouver restaurant, Vancouver Lookout Observatory as well as Simon Fraser University claimed an honourable mention for its accessibility to cyclists and for providing secure fob-accessible bike storage; changing & shower facilities and on-site repair space to tenants.”
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This bikescore needs some work. Stanley Park and Spanish banks are apparently bike nightmares but that is because the destinations criteria is based on route connectivity by which they mean roads, not bike paths. The hills section also is overly harsh when not counting considering that transverse traffic is not bother by hills. Thus False Creek and Fairview is apparently a bike wasteland because of the hill, but really it is only a bike wasteland in the north-south direction. (Not that creating a comprehensive bike score is easy, it isn’t.)
Echoing yvrlutyens comments, BikeScore is currently a great place to start a conversation, but their model is overly simplistic due to lack of (good) data and some bad assumptions on their part.
Surely Calgary, would not rank higher than other listed cities like Vancouver and Toronto.
Now, that I’ve lived in all 3 of these cities as a cyclist and commuter (I’m car-free for all these cities too), Calgary has a long way to go compared to the other 2 cities in terms of great cycling infrastructure. Sure, it has a green parkway system and not alot more bike routes feeding into its backbone.
Only 1-2 buses have bus bike racks..in Calgary with geographic coverage equivalent to Metro Vancouver (which has over 20 municipalities) and with weather that is three times colder than Vancouver in winter.
The biggest difference is Toronto offers far more feeder bike routes into its backbone and vibrant pedestrian, bike friendly and residential areas through a huge chunk of its downtown and midtown. Calgary is not like that. In fact, this year a recent bike lane was removed in the north end after only there for a few months and due to local protest.
And I am describing Toronto of what it was like…..15 years ago (!) and still is like this for cyclist. The opposite is happening…more and more of its downtown, midtown areas are becoming gentrified and attracting even more pedestrians, cyclists..Ossington area, Little India in east Toronto, etc. Life goes on in Toronto even with Ford as a mayor.
I don’t see it… where is Calgary ranked higher than Vancouver and Toronto?
That’s pretty much a list of Canada’s larger cities, which might be as useful as an unordered list of the ten best commandments in the bible.
As for SFU: maybe things have improved since I last took a class in 2010, but I was told, when I specifically inquired, that there were no student showers, no bicycle storage facilities, and no recreation services downtown, except for the two bike racks that sit – unsheltered and accessible by anyone – next to the Hastings Street doors (and from which one classmate’s bike was stolen). Nevertheless, I was still forced to pay the same recreation and student service fees (along with an unneeded UPASS fee) as a Burnaby Mountain student.