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Congestion Cycle of Doom

By | Health, Silo-Breakers, The Global Is Local | No Comments

…..But first, a look back at Silos in the ChangeEngine world:

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback, either in the comments section of Silos or Silos II, The Power of the Triple-S, in person, or as Michelle and Rodney did, in full fledged posts on ChangeEngine. Excellent discussions have been taking place, and I want to encourage that to continue. Challenge yourself and your colleagues:

What is the box you are in, for better or worse, and how can seeking partnerships or experience outside those parameters benefit your organization AND the community you live in?

Good luck, and keep us all posted! Link back to Silo Breakers as you post about your efforts, use a hashtag (I’ll defer to Hasdai on how to do that), and talk to friends and strangers… (Ed: Thanks Adam. It’s @ChangEngine #breakoutchallenge on Twitter, facebook.com/ChangingMedia, or email hasdai@changingmediagroup.com).

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Okay, this week, we touch upon the issues raised in posts about bicycling this past Spring (B’More Bike Friendly, Bikemore in Baltimore, and I Bike, You Bike, We Bike!) but with a wider lens. Although the previous posts brought up the local ramifications of taking cars off the roads, getting more of our community off the couch and out of the drivers seat, and so forth, today we will take a further step back to look at the transportation trends across the country and the world.

As was noted in the recent post by Stu Sirota, Our Trillion Dollar Dirty Little Secret, transportation funding in the United States is hyper-focused on roads and bridges. It’s not an unreasonable priority. The road infrastructure throughout the nation is vast, adding up to just over 2.5 million miles of pavement (not including the quadrillions of acres that make up parking lots and such things). We rely on roads and bridges for transport and economic vitality.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

The trouble is that those pesky roads share some unfortunate traits with us — they get stiff in the winter, squishy in the summer, and show the effects of age sooner than they feel like they should (“I swear it was only yesterday that 695 and I were at the prom together, young and fresh, and now look at us, full of potholes and cracks!”). The context in which this massive infrastructure was built was far different, and the maintenance costs increase over time. The current political climate has not been productive for passing thoughtful, long-term legislation of any sort, and future transportation bills may face the same problems.

As Sirota points out in his piece, the network of roads and associated development that have grown out of the national highway building efforts of previous decades have initially eased and then subsequently caused congestion and a need for expansion and development.

Shifts in our expectations about transportation, urbanization, work and play are undergoing a generational shift, however, which may reverse or at least force a reassessment of earlier priorities. New industries and young workers have a greater interest in working and living in urban areas, rather than suburban software parks for instance.

OK, so great, good for U.S.; we’re progressive as hell and living the green dream, right? Well, no, of course not. America will continue to rack up miles on our cars, build roads while others crumble, and generally remain a servant of the internal combustion engine. But things will improve, of course — better gas mileage, improved bike/car education, and pro-environmental youth will vote with their dollars more and more as they join the labor force.

Other places in the world however, are on a different trajectory:

Image credit: European Environment Agency

The developing world has long epitomized a biking culture for decades, and although many people now own Motos (mopeds, scooters, or other low-powered motorbikes) and aspire to own their own car, bikes still fill the streets. India and China in particular are projected to experience a massive increase in car ownership in the coming decades, fueled (ha) in part by their own domestic auto industries.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

This trend is going to have a massive impact on vehicle emissions in coming years, but with any luck, the exploding population of car owners will be the proud owners of smaller, more fuel-efficient cars than were typical in the United States — imagine millions upon millions of Cadillac Eldorados cruising the Chinese landscape. At the same time, heavy industry in these countries will likely benefit from a greening culture as well as more efficient technologies, decreasing environmental impact.

This ebb and flow of transportation and urban fashions both here and around the world will have profound and lasting effects on our lives, our economy, our health, and our city. Baltimoreans have a particular responsibility to share innovations, be good ambassadors when traveling or hosting international guests, and break out of our regional and national silos when we engage in the online community.

Baltimore shares many characteristics with cities in the developing world — substantial industry presence, high poverty and disease burden, and vibrant pockets of entrepreneurship and innovation. We must share our lessons learned, reach out to inspire others, learn from disparate cultures with similar characteristics, and change the world.

Sunscreen and Spending Power

By | The Good Plan | No Comments

On more than one occasion, I’ve heard visitors remark on Baltimore having a beach-town mentality, perhaps supported by much of the waterfront population wearing flip flops on the promenade and those few precious days when the bay smells like a bay should smell.

The constant presence of the water conjures up that willingness to be carefree, and do whatever we can to seek out the refuge of saltwater and sand. The Department of Transportation predicted over 350,000 vehicles would cross the Bay Bridge between Friday and Monday this Memorial Day Weekend, with an additional half a million using other ways to get into the beach areas of Maryland. The Bay Bridge boasted an 18-mile backup at the beginning of the weekend, and as Baltimoreans descend onto the boardwalks the beach towns stood hopeful and ready for their previously quiet landscape to be transformed by the seasonal crowds, providing economic respite from the quiet winter months.

The economy is possibly the most challenging realm for a beach town. Retail and food service industries are difficult to sustain, as significant fluctuation of population challenges these industries to reach economic stability in the off-season. Decreased visitation influences many beach town businesses to board themselves up for the winter, minimizing operational cost, and marooning wage workers for many months. While Baltimore isn’t quite a beach town, we need to plan for seasonal attraction too. The decline of blue-collar industries has made the low-income population of our city more dependent on tourism and related service industries for employment. If we don’t find ways to make those attractions more sustainable, low-income workers suffer and Baltimore as a whole becomes less vital, and less sustainable.

Beach towns are constantly brainstorming and investing in the ability to become year-round attraction for both businesses and tourists. This investment is increasingly more important as tourist season is dependent on external factors like weather, gas prices, and unemployment. If people don’t have money, fewer can head to the beach in the first place. A common approach to creating year-round attraction is through an office of promotion or events. Rehoboth Beach has supported The Rehoboth Beach Main Street organization as the ringleader for community promotion and year-round event planning. The organization doesn’t just seek to lengthen the season by one or two months on either end, but to plan events in February and March, where non-residents would need to make special trips to the beach for reasons other than sun worship.

By organizing events in the off-season, Rehoboth Main Street hopes to draw residents out of their homes in addition to expanding tourism opportunity. Rehoboth attracts approximately 3.5 million tourists each year, translating to $630 million in annual economic impact. Main Street has helped some of these tourists become residents while sustaining their residential population: from 1996-2008, the town vacancy rate decreased from 10 percent to 3 percent, 95 jobs were gained, 16 new businesses were created, and eight new buildings were constructed. In addition to off-season event revenue, off-season advertising opportunities support operating revenues, as greater visibility commands higher advertising prices from area businesses.

The collective push of local businesses has inspired other towns like Hampton Beach, New Hampshire to strive for widespread support, believing that if all restaurants stay open longer, and services keep themselves fully functioning in the off season, tourists will see the town as a destination for reasons other than the beach. Other towns like Portsmouth, Maine remain sustainable through Citywide incentive projects like the Green Card — offering discounts for nearly 100 local businesses. Petoskey, Michigan capitalizes on its historic architecture and miles of waterfront to retain year-round visitors.

Seasonal planning is extremely important in city sustainability. Maybe the creation of an urban beach in Baltimore wouldn’t be enough to discourage the Memorial Day exodus and spending power into local beach towns, but perhaps thinking creatively, and learning a few lessons from true beach towns would make staying local a bit more palatable, keeping some of that $630 million here, instead of invested elsewhere.

IMAGE CREDIT. Wikimedia Commons

Bikemore in Baltimore!

By | Health, The Global Is Local | No Comments

(The second in a Spring series about cycling in Baltimore: Why planning for strictly vehicular travel makes pedestrians and bicycles an unwelcome nuisance rather than a welcome expectation.)

In my last column, we began discussing the bicycle culture of Baltimore. Recently, I had the chance to continue that discussion with Bikemore Executive Director Chris Merriam and Board Member Dave Love. I asked Chris to frame the relationship that bicycling has with public health, how one impacts the other, and how Bikemore’s efforts are designed to improve both the health of the community and the acceptance of bicycles on Baltimore streets.

“There’s a huge public health aspect to what we do,” says Chris, who was recently award an Open Society Institute Fellowship to further Bikemore’s mission of advocating for cycling and cyclists’ rights in Baltimore. “Cycling is a means of addressing the obesity problem in Baltimore — and all over the country of course. This is a working class city, though. It’s not like Washington D.C. or San Francisco. Not everyone belongs to a gym or eats healthy food all the time. The corner store diet of chips and soda is such a pervasive issue here.”

Chris has a background in urban planning, which informs his perspective. He agrees that our transportation system is a major component of public health, and a major obstacle to improving it. “We have a substandard [public] transportation system. For instance,  I’ll see people waiting for hours at a time for buses that will take them to work. A lot of the job sprawl in the area is such that many jobs for lower income people are in suburban malls, in Towson or Whitemarsh. Using public transit, depending on where people live, can take a long time: take one bus, take another bus, take the light rail, and there’s a lot of waiting around in between.”

And yet, despite the obvious advantages of a more bike-friendly city, Bikemore and other bicycling advocacy groups are trying to counteract 80 years of car-based engineering on our cities. Designing both vehicles and cities for strictly vehicular travel makes pedestrians and bicycles a nuisance rather than an expectation, and that is reflected in driver attitudes. Often the relationship between bikers and drivers is fraught with animosity.

Dave thinks that this may change due to sheer volume of bikes on the road, remembering his time in Berkeley, California: “Regardless of where I’m going, there would be three or four people on the same path, at a stop light five or six bikes back up. We wait just like traffic…If we got enough people on the roads, we could be looking at a sea change.”

But getting Baltimore drivers not to see red when they see a skinny person in spandex “in the way” is more than just a matter of numbers. Culture has to change too, and Bikemore realizes that Baltimore is a city with its own needs, and certainly its own culture.

People cite Portland as the ultimate case study. But remember, Portland is largely homogeneous, doesn’t have a lot of conflict, has a lot of taxpayers, is relatively young, etc. We can learn lessons from other cities, but we need to be wary of the ‘if they can do it, why can’t we?’ game.

Chris and Dave believe that these problems can be solved, but it will take effort on three fronts: education, infrastructure, and policy. They are leading in all three of these areas, but if you see the Bikemore sign around town, you are seeing education in action. Whether it’s a Bike Valet stand at the Food Truck Gathering or a presentation to a group of innovators at a conference like Reinvent Transit, Bikemore is constantly encouraging awareness and mutual respect between bikers and drivers.

Housekeeping: I wanted to address a couple of questions that came up in comments last time. First, the marked gender gap in bike commuters. I have two thoughts on factors that might be contributing to the disparity:

  1. It seems likely that there are safety-related differences in male and female biking behavior, as there are in many other activities. These safety concerns are related to both the perceived and actual intrinsic dangers of the activity itself and the external threats associated with being a single woman without a protective (vehicular) barrier. This study here comes to some similar conclusions, but I welcome any comments.
  2. There is reporting bias of some sort. This study from Stanford refers to a bias on survey forms that minimize or aggregate the kinds of trips that women tend to make (leaving aside the 50’s housewife stereotype slathered on the surface of the whole premise).

Second, how to get involved:

There are a number of groups that are active in the City, Bikemore being today’s obvious example. Velocipede and other bike shops and coops are all educators and advocates worth knowing, and of course join the Bike Party on the last Friday of each month.

Next Time: Who should bike in Baltimore, how, and why?

IMAGE CREDIT. Benson Kua