PRINTI want to ride my bicycle
Biking is gaining popularity, but can Columbia streets handle the traffic?
Missourian file photo
September 25, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Andy Davis used to have a car. It was a 1993 Toyota 4Runner. But the engine blew up while he was living in Colorado, and a family member had to drive out to bring him back to Missouri. Davis’ relationship with biking didn’t start when his car died. He has been around the block on a bike.
Ten years ago, Davis got into BMX biking. Now, he rides for fun, transportation and competition. For the past three years, he has been attending MU and getting a firsthand look at the biking climate in Columbia. So far he thinks some of the local programs are great, but as bike traffic increases, knowing what you’re dealing with is still the driver of safety.
Three other communities were chosen to participate in the Federal Highway Administration’s Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program along with Columbia. Here’s a look at what they’re doing.
Where: Minneapolis-St.Paul, Minn.
Program Name: Bike Walk Twin Cities
Big Project: Bike Walk Ambassadors educate the community
Response: Some resistance but mostly positive
Where: Sheboygan County, Wis.
Program Name: Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program (the slogan is “Get Connected!”)
Big Project: Multi-use pathway that stretches for nearly three miles through residential, commercial and industrial areas
Challenge: Applying the grant on a countywide scale
Where: Marin County, Calif.
Program Name: WalkBikeMarin
Big Project: Turning an old two-way railroad tunnel into a single rail track and a space for multi-use pathways
Location: Most of the project focuses on the eastern part of the county; the western side is mainly recreational areas such as parks
--Thomas Cullen
“You can’t ever assume a car will do something,” he says.
Just as Davis remains vigilant, Columbians can’t assume that changing the city into a biking utopia will happen without similar attention. Columbia is in the middle of a biking evolution. GetAbout Columbia has provided money to work with and some noticeable changes. The city is taking measures to grow the biking culture and make the streets safer for new and experienced bicyclists. But there’s still some uphill riding to do.
INFLUENCING COLUMBIA
Davis lived in Boulder, Colo., for about a year before moving to Columbia. He says Boulder is an excellent place for biking because it has miles of bike lanes and racks throughout the city. His new home is catching up to the old one. “Columbia’s getting there,” Davis says. “They need a lot more bike lanes and bike parking though.”
Boulder seems like an obscure place for Columbians to learn from, but the model for our city’s shift comes from even farther away.
MapQuest has Portland at 1,925 miles from Columbia. Despite the distance, Portland is the city on which many of GetAbout Columbia’s moves are based, says Ted Curtis, the program’s manager.
GetAbout Columbia sprang out of a $22 million grant given to the city in 2006 as part of the Federal Highway Administration’s Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program. The money should enable Columbia to make moves that encourage citizens to travel in more active ways. Ideally, what Columbia and the other three pilot communities across the country do will help create national prototypes.
Portland built its biking system over time. They measured bike usage over 15 years and experienced a 10 to 15 percent mode shift in some areas, Curtis says. If a GetAbout Columbia dictionary existed, the first term in it would be mode shift, or the process of getting people out of their Buick Regals and onto their Roadmaster bikes or into other forms of active transportation such as walking.
On the surface, Portland and Columbia look awfully different, but the divergence between the two is shrinking in at least one way. Enter shared lane markings, or sharrows. These are symbols on roads that can’t support bike lanes but still allow for bikes and cars to coexist. Cyclists don’t have to ride on the physical sharrow markings, but some do, Curtis says.
Sharrow is a funny word, and the placement of the symbols seems a little funny, too. There’s a set of them on Fifth Street. But Fourth and Sixth streets seem equally deserving. “It’s still a little bit of an art,” Curtis says.
Portland has been putting its sharrows toward the center of the road to make it easier for bicyclists to avoid car doors. A section of Old Highway 63 has sharrows that are similar, and the city is experimenting with sharrow location and placement, Curtis says.
Three factors that influence where sharrows are placed in Columbia are input from the biking community, parking options and the volume of traffic on city streets. Another batch of striping and marking is scheduled to begin in October. Curtis says the city is expected to have 60 miles of streets with sharrows and 50 miles of streets with bike lanes once finished.
Surely, this whole process requires finesse, but artistic flourish isn’t something that new bicyclists have. Moreover, they might not even know where they belong on city streets. The sharrows and bike lanes are there to calm newcomers.
“All those bike lanes don’t really make me feel any safer than before,” says Robert Johnson, who bikes 100 miles per week and is the bike education coordinator for the PedNet Coalition. PedNet is an advocacy group that wants citizens to engage in active modes of transportation and encourages the city to provide the means for them to do so.
Johnson says he feels safe biking in town, but his feelings can be at least partially attributed to experience. What makes those inexperienced bicyclists feel safer is being informed. Andy Davis is informed. He has to be.
MINDING THE MARKS
Davis has been in two bike accidents, both in Boulder. The first time, a van was pulling out of an alley and knocked him off his bike. The messenger bag he was carrying broke his fall, and he escaped with bruises. The second accident involved a driver pulling out of a grocery store parking lot and colliding with Davis and his bike. Again, Davis received minor injuries.
Although Davis hasn’t had any accidents in Columbia, others haven’t fared as well. In July, Columbia resident Debbie Bellmer was riding her bike on Nifong Boulevard with her group, the Easy Riders. As she looked over her shoulder to check for traffic, her front tire slipped into a groove in the road. Her bike spun to the left and sent Bellmer to the ground.
She came away with cuts on her leg, scrapes on her elbow and pain in her shoulder. As she sat there after the accident, people came to her aid. Members of her group stopped, and two cars pulled over. “They were very helpful,” she says of the drivers. “They asked if they could take me to the hospital.”
Bellmer declined the offer but ended up getting her shoulder checked out at the hospital later that night. Nothing was broken, and after a week, her arm was out of the sling. Over time, she slowly regained her confidence. “It still hurts just a little bit, but I’m back riding,” she says. She credits her fellow Easy Riders for allaying her concerns about hitting the streets again.
The streets she returned to are not overly dangerous, but naturally, accidents happen. From January 2000 to July of this year, there were 154 reported accidents (Bellmer not included) involving bikes in Columbia with a total of 103 injuries and two deaths. In fairness, that’s not a lot of accidents, but the police aren’t called every time a car and bike unintentionally meet at the same spot.
If more people start biking, more accidents would be a reasonable expectation. However, the numbers in Portland show otherwise. “What they found in measuring the reported crashes over that 15 years is that [the number] stayed constant at about 180, even though the usage had tripled,” Curtis says.
Why? According to Curtis, people got smarter. Biking became more accepted. Cars became more aware, and everyone started to adapt.
All of those changes revolve around education, and the city is trying to inform Columbians who want to ride safely. Confident City Cycling is a class funded by GetAbout Columbia, which PedNet’s Johnson says can benefit everyone. “The course covers basically everything from A to Z,” he says.
Instructors certified through the League of American Bicyclists handle teaching the classes. Some people who have taken the class told Johnson that it has helped them lose weight, save money and turn their daily commute from a hassle to a joy.
As pleasant as a commute might become, there are still hazards. Curtis recognizes the presence of accidents but emphasizes the focus of his program. “When you look at the accident sites, they don’t tell you a lot of information,” Curtis says. “You know, there’s not a huge amount. It’s not like all of a sudden this one place has got a huge number of accidents. It’s just, they’re sort of all over.”
That’s true. But the records do show something. They show that the intersections of Providence Road and Park Avenue and Providence Road and Ash Street are relatively dangerous. Four accidents at each intersection showed up between January 2000 and July 2008.
Curtis says safety is an objective of the GetAbout Columbia program, but it is not a measurable goal. First and foremost, the program is aimed at getting people out of their cars and involved in more active modes of transportation.
Once people get out of vehicles, they need to know what to do, but knowledge is worthless if it’s not put into practice. If Columbians want to reduce biking accidents, everyone’s behavior must reflect that commitment.
BEHAVING ON BIKES
Biking is a part of Andy Davis’ behavior. On a normal day, he rides from home to school to work and anywhere else he needs to go. For Davis’ fellow Missourians, walking and, more importantly, biking are not as fundamental. One explanation could be that they don’t have the resources.
In its 2008 report card, the Missouri Bicycle Federation gave the state a D when it came to supporting walking and biking. Overall progress this year was given a slightly more respectable C+.
As a city, Columbia fares better. “There is no question that Columbia, of all the cities in Missouri, has got to be the best city for biking and walking,” says Brent Hugh, the federation’s executive director. Although Missourians bike and walk about half as much as national averages, Columbia is closer to the middle ground. Still, Hugh is quick to contextualize the praise. “Columbia is the best in Missouri without a doubt,” he says. “On the other hand, that’s not a very high comparison.”
Missouri could stand to fast-forward the progress, but the slow pace of change isn’t surprising. Drastic change is sure to take a few calendar pages with it. The GetAbout Columbia project timeline does. “You can kind of see why it takes so many months to get a project from beginning to the end just because of the process we go through,” says Jill Stedem, public information specialist for the Department of Public Works.
A flowchart provided by Public Works outlines the timeline from when the clock starts on a project until approval or shutdown. Starting at meetings with citizens who live in affected areas and ending with City Council voting, there are nine steps in the dance. The time continuum runs from as little as six months to as many as 19. Once that process ends, the acquisition and construction bidding timeline starts.
The length of the discussions and implementation isn’t shocking though. GetAbout Columbia is like anything else that involves humans: exhilarating in its potential and guaranteed to include some bickering. Along with delays, changes like the ones the program promotes can expect resistance.
Behavior change is at the center of the GetAbout Columbia program.
“Some people out there are going to say: ‘Well, I don’t believe you’re going to ever make a difference. I’m not going to change,’” Curtis says. “Those people will never bike. That’s fine.”
Obviously, not every Columbian will bike, but the people who are biking should try to enhance the climate rather than hinder it. However, that’s not always the case. Karl Kimbel, owner of Columbia’s Klunk Bicycles and Repair, notices one bicyclist behavior that’s a problem. Sometimes, when riding downtown, he’ll see a bicyclist blow through a stoplight. Not only is that dangerous, but the action also gives drivers the impression that bicycles and cars are different vehicles with different rules.
Apparently, not everyone is buying in to respect on the roadways. For biking in Columbia to get where it wants to be, that kind of behavior will have to ride itself out.
GROWING UP IS HARD TO DO
Andy Davis has to change his behavior when he needs to look nice for the person he’s meeting. Pedaling slower is one way to work around that problem, he says.
Columbia’s biking evolution is about new behaviors, too. GetAbout Columbia has provided a big shiny budget, education and some real changes. But there’s no way to know how biking in town will look in the future.
Optimism is appropriate, but a future isn’t guaranteed. Big changes need considerable action. In this case, that action is people choosing bikes over cars and everyone respecting bicyclists who make that decision.
Davis doesn’t have a car, so he doesn’t have a choice. If Columbians want the city to become a biking utopia, they could benefit from thinking about their travel the same way.
