People for Bikes says:

We’re all united by a shared passion: bikes. Bikes keep us healthy, carry us from point A to point B, save us from high gas prices, and make our air cleaner and our roads less congested. Bikes fill our lives with adventure and excitement, relaxing our minds and energizing our souls.

Peopleforbikes.org is dedicated to channeling that passion to improve the future of bicycling. Our goal is to gather a million names of support, to speak with one, powerful voice—to make bicycling safer, more convenient and appealing for everyone.

Simply put, we believe that life is far more enjoyable when it’s experienced on two wheels. We believe that by coming together, we can make our world a better place to ride.

Have you signed the pledge?

In related news, I’ve been taking a point-and-click camera with me on recent rides and been posting some of the pictures at Bike Tucson. (As if I needed yet another blog.)

mt has responded to my last post basically saying if he took my route he’d die. That’s only half tongue-in-cheek. The other option was to get mugged. Since I’ve never been able to figure out how to comment on mt’s blog, and it gets me another post for the month.

But I was browsing upon The Wikipedia (side note: I think we should start calling it The Wikipedia like Ohio State refers to itself as The Ohio State University or how it’s called Le Tour de France not simply Tour de France) and happened upon a solution. When I was pontificating in the last post, I noticed, but ignored, the rail tracks that lead almost directly from mt’s house to his destination. No, I’m not suggesting he use the train or hitch a ride like a hobo (although he’s welcome to if he wants, I doubt his employer would approve). The solution is what The Wikipedia terms rails with trails.

The Wikipedia doesn’t have any good pictures of rails with trails, so I’m going to borrow one from railswithtrails.com and claim fair use. Anyway, when they design and build these railways, they have extensive right-of-ways that are more often than not pointless. There’s probably some good reason, but I’m not interested in it. That space can be put to a useful purpose… a bike or multi-use path!

I have no idea where that image was taken, but judging from filename, somewhere in Santa Cruz. But look at how the formerly wasted space next to the railway has been converted into a useful multi-use path. I’ll insert additional commentary by saying it could be more useful if it was paved, but it looks well-kept and could be used by road cyclists. Spot checking a few areas along the Austin rail route, it appears that there is more than adequate room to install a path. So why isn’t there one?

I don’t know, but because this is a blog I can offer some uninformed speculation:

• when they were designing the rail route, they didn’t plan on a path
• NIMBY
• no one uses the rail, so why spend money on yet another public transportation project
• worry about kids playing on the tracks
• other residencial blubbering

…probably lots of others, but they’re all silly just like those above because these paths have been shown to work. I’m assuming they are relatively cheap to install because the city of Tucson has been going overboard on multi-use paths along our “rivers” instead of other projects that would probably be more beneficial.

mt also comments that a lot of the bike infrastructure in Austin is more about recreational cycing than for commuting. Unfortunately, that also applies to Tucson too. The multi-use river paths are no designed for commuting. They are really just simply wide walking paths that they allow cyclists and equestrians to use. The result is not always the safest, especially on weekends. Fortunately for me, the paths are usually unused when I’m on them. Although, as I write that, I realize that this morning there were quite a lot of walkers, joggers, and runners, which was especially odd considering I started my commute this morning at 4:45.

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This post was supposed to go live several days ago, but Wordpress decided to crap on me. This morning I realized it had saved a draft.

…. or maybe he does. I don’t know.

He states that “You will note that there is NO safe bike route, no matter how circuitous, shown. This is not a cartographic error. In my opinion it is correct.” Having never been to Austin, I am in no position to disagree with that statement. But disagree I must.

Don’t get me wrong, Google does some amazing things. But their bike routes, in my opinion, are horrible. I’ve only used them in two cities, Tucson and San Diego, and mostly the former, but they will almost certainly route you though the worst intersections and down the worst streets. I don’t know why this is, but if I am looking for a new route I generally only use Google as a first step (if even that). But what does Google say? After messing around for a short while altering the route to avoid what appeared to be major streets and intersections, I came up with this route.

Having no local knowledge of the city, it looks pretty good to me. There is about a half mile section on what appears to be a major road out of a total of nine miles. It’d be nice to have the entire route on dedicated bike paths or on 3+ foot-wide striped shoulders, but unless you’re a billionaire willing to finance it yourself, you’re out of luck.

But in my experience, the local bike map is a much better guide to bikers than Google. The Austin map is available on the city’s bicycle resources page or available for purchase at a local bike store. (They’re free in Tucson at LBSs, not sure why they aren’t in Austin.)

This map shows that Google wasn’t all that wrong in it’s directions, but if the Austin map is anything like the Tucson map, it’s wildly out of date. There are streets in Tucson that (using the horrible green-blue-red-grey color scheme above) marked green (good) that I would never knowingly bike, and there are streets that are marked as grey (worst-don’t ride) that are perfectly fine to ride. In many cases, you can’t actually know how a road is to ride until you’ve actually ridden it. Your impressions from driving in a car may or may not be accurate.

Both of these maps show routes that start off going the wrong way, but not that far. It’s only a total 9 miles each way, which would take me about 30 minutes. It might take the novice more like an hour. So this could be up to an extra 50 minutes of commute time each way. Whether it is worth that extra time to not emit X pounds of pollution for every Y miles you drive is up to you. (If anyone knows what X and Y are, please add to comments!) For me, I like biking. I like biking to work. I like biking for fun. The extra 15-30 minutes commuting by bike is well worth it for me over sitting in traffic.

He ends by saying: “So I ‘want’ a car. I ‘demand’ continued road maintenance and gasoline. I ’show no interest’ in bicycle or bus options. This is my revealed marketplace preference.”

I don’t know why he put some of those words in quotes, but presumably because he doesn’t actually want those things. To which I say: pfffffft. Complaining about the lack of bike infrastructure while sitting in your air conditioned car is about as useless as a poopy flavored lollipop (or pick your favorite). If you want to effect change, get out on your bike, find a problem that is easy to fix (usually cheaply or freely), and get it done. Look at ways that other cities have improved bike infrastructure and see if they can be applied to your city. Then ride some more and repeat. If biking isn’t for you and you’d rather take the bus or other forms of mass transit. Do the same thing, but with the buses / subways / light rail / whatever your city has. There is probably a local bike advocacy group that you could join.

If all you do is sit on your arse and say you want change, you really are showing no interest. And more importantly, nothing will change.

A post over at the Stoat (which in turn was inspired by Idiocy on carbon permits) has prompted an actual post semi-related to the topic of this blog! (Or what the topic of this blog used to be.) Although first I’ll point out that the image is supposedly copyright, I say {{PD-textlogo}}.

I will note that any sane person has long ago realized that a carbon tax is better than cap-and-trade, carbon permits, or whatever new-fangled lingo the politicos have made up this week. I’d link to an old post of mine saying this, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually said this on this blog. Oh well. You’ll have to take my word for it. It was around when I was regularly posting and cap-and-trade was in the US media semi-regularly that I came to this conclusion. It was shortly after that I realized that there was no f*ing way there would ever be a serious carbon tax.

But apparently that’s not really true. This year I am getting a tax break for commuting by bicycle.^[1] This was actually a permanent tax break written into the bailout bill and not an actual tax. But I think the intention was that it would encourage bike commuting and get people to emit less CO2 from their cars. In effect, by not biking to work, you’re getting taxed a very litte more. I’m guessing it was inserted at the last minute by some sleezy, pinko-commie from California or something. According to some blog on Forbes website,^{[unreliable source?]} it amounts to $20 per month for every month during the tax year that you regularly commute to work. I haven’t looked at the legaleze, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be claiming all $240 (subject to review by a tax professional, of course).

Which leads me to this quote from the wise Stoat: “carbon costs can in principle be largely revenue neutral, in that you can (and should) offset them by reducing other taxes”. A good carbon tax needs to be at least revenue neutral. A successful “tax” would have the following properties:

• the amount of taxes that corporations pay must not increase
• the amount of taxes that individuals pay must not increase
• the amount of services (in $$$) provided by the government decreases
• the quality of services increases
• the net revenue collected by the government actually increases

If a carbon tax does not satisfy these requirements, I don’t think there is a way it will ever get through our f*ed up Congress coupled with the volume of money that lobbyists have to throw around. But, as far as I can tell, there is no reason that a carbon tax could not actually create revenue for the Federal Government without an overall increase in income. As an example, and I know that transportation is not the highest source of CO2, but by incentivizing bicycling or walking to work, school, grocery store, etc. instead of driving, and doing so at a price that actually encourages enough people to ditch the car. If enough people can be convinced that they don’t actually need a car, then our current transportation infrastructure can be repurposed.

In Tucson, AZ, USA, where I’m located, there are a lot of roads. Lots of roads. Surprisingly, many of them are actually nice to ride on. Some I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. But, there has been some recent changes where roads that were previously car-oriented have become bicycle byways. (I’m not sure of the official term the city uses.) I regularly commute by one of these. It has extremely wide bike lanes, and speed limits that are slow enough that even on a bike I have to be careful not to go over. The slow speed limits encourage drivers to use other roads, which is nice too. But the number of these bicycle byways is few and far between, and even though Tucson regularly rates in the top 10 U.S. cities for bicycle friendly cities, there is a long way to go before we hit a tipping point and bicycles are considered a normal mode of transportation.

I’m not sure if we will ever see a U.S. city where the primary form of transportation is biking and walking, but I would like to see it.

For those unfamiliar with the Wikipedia lingo, grab an account (they’re free), and join the MMORPG