Cycling in Wichita

Some comments on the WAMPO MTP 2035 list

2010-06-24T03:45:00.001-05:00

As I posted last week, WAMPO has arrived at a final list of transportation projects eligible for federal funds from 2010-2035. Here is that list (bike/pedestrian projects lead it off); and here is a map showing the locations of the projects.

First, a quick reminder of what WAMPO does, because that will have a bearing on some of the comments that follow. The Wichita Area Metropolitan Planning Organization is comprised of municipality and county officials, as well as other groups of various sorts who are interested in/affected by transportation and its infrastructure. WAMPO looks at proposals for transportation projects from Sedgwick County and the municipalities therein, plus Andover, and through a combination of consultations of federal funding priorities and guidelines, public meetings in the area and surveys of citizens, it determines which of those projects a) are eligible for federal funds and b) have broad-based support for their funding. (If you're truly obsessed about this sort of thing, you won't want to miss these long posts on WAMPO meetings back in January, here and here.)

NB: Just because projects made the final list does not guarantee that they will be built. Municipalities and the county will build these, or not, based on interest the public shows in them. The NW By-pass, for example, has appeared in several of these project lists but has yet to be built. WAMPO's next public meeting will be Monday, June 28 (here is the agenda); the official acceptance of the project list will be in July; what lies ahead now will be WAMPO's functioning in an advisory capacity from here until 2035 and, in a few years, beginning work on the new master plan for the area.

So. What do we have in the MTP 2035? Well: from the standpoint of cycling/walking infrastructure a mixed bag to be sure, but one that is beginning to reflect a positive shift in prioritizing bike/ped facilities. Some of that shift is due to the change of administration in Washington, but some is due to local attitudinal shifts among the public and in several municipalities in the area. Also, as I've noted in a couple of older posts on WAMPO, it officially is a neutral arbitrator regarding a project's eligibility for funds, but because it also compiles the various lists of projects from which the final one is drawn up, it too can determine, in a passive-aggressive way, those projects that would have greater value in reducing traffic (and thus pollution). As just one example, in the middle stage of the selection process for these projects, there were four lists prioritizing a different traffic consideration, such as bridge repair, reducing congestion, etc. Each of those four lists contained all the eligible bike/ped projects and funding to allow Wichita Transit to expand bus service in the area. Also, a little reading between the lines of this overview document--in particular p. 4, which addresses land use and environmental issues--suggests (to me, anyway), that WAMPO would like to see municipalities address the issue of sprawl. Thoughtful land use, such as high-density, mixed-use development, makes for easier decision-making when it comes to transportation infrastructure. In short, in this MTP are some quiet but clear suggestions to the Powers That Be regarding future planning.

All that said, one could still wish that more (and/or other) bike/ped projects had been proposed besides the ones here. The primary objective with the bike/ped projects is to create some connectivity among already-existing paths to make them more useful as genuine travel routes for cyclists. Thus, on the list there's the path that will connect the southern terminus of the Arkansas River path with the Gypsum Creek path's Planeview Park terminus, and the path that will run from McAdams Park (the north end of the Canal path) to Grove Park (the north end of the K-96 path). Both these paths should encourage bike-commuting from outlying areas on the east side of town into the downtown area. There's also the conversion of the abandoned railroad right-of-way from the 8th/9th street and I-135 exit to 17th and Oliver, a much-needed in-town east-west route which should also encourage bike-commuting into the urban core. These are all important projects, and we should be glad that they are there. But, once again, the west side of Wichita (by which I mean everything west of downtown) will see no bike/ped projects; nor is there one east-west route that is anything like the length of the Canal path and the Ark River path. The first omission remains a mystery to me; the second would easily (and cheaply) be remedied by a simple re-striping of a street like Douglas. Re-striping, though, is not yet eligible for federal funding, as I found out at a WAMPO meeting back in January. That sort of thing is for the city to decide--and for us to encourage the city to decide it. Something else to keep an eye on: a total of almost $10.4 million not earmarked for any one project but to be used for bike/ped projects over the course of the 25 years covered by this MTP. That kind of money can build lots of bike paths . . . or, if Complete Streets legislation passes Congress, re-design and/or re-stripe a lot of streets.

I should note that in addition to the stand-alone bike/ped projects, several of the road and bridge projects also incorporate bike/ped-friendly improvements. These will be mostly unsexy things like new sidewalks and pedestrian crossings at intersections. Still, anything that can contribute to lowering our disproportionate share of Kansas' bike/ped fatalities is more than welcome. It's also very gratifying to see funds for expansion of Wichita Transit into a grid-route system with commuter routes to outlying towns.

So, in short, MTP 2035 doesn't do everything we should want to see a diversified transportation plan do; on the other hand, though, if we squint at it in the right way, it serves as a template for where we should want to go. But infrastructure is in its essence reactive rather than proactive: it goes where the people are and reflects their priorities regarding land use and their preferred means of getting around. The government entities WAMPO serves are the ones who can be--who should be--proactive.

Alternate transportation makes good financial sense, too

2010-06-23T10:58:00.000-05:00

Bundle's map showing the gasoline and maintenance expenditures for the largest U.S. metro areas. Click to enlarge.

Via Andrew Sullivan this morning comes an article in Bundle titled "Our car addiction," which notes and tries to account for state-to-state variations in household spending on gasoline and maintenance. The specifics of the data are new, but the larger conclusions we can draw from them will be familiar to anyone likely to be visiting a cycling blog. Still, there's nothing wrong with a little reinforcement.

Some excerpts:

The average American spends 72 minutes per day in transit. Most of that time, we're driving: to and from work, school, the grocery store, the movie theater. Every year, that's more than 290 hours of drive-time radio, talking back to the GPS and wondering why, for the millionth time, people think it's okay to drive 60 in the left lane. It's a lot of time.

It's also a lot of money. The average household spent $5,477 on gas and auto expenses last year, according to Bundle data, an amount which accounts for about 14.5 percent of daily spending. [This data does not include spending on food and rent/mortgage.] That's more than we spend on groceries or utilities, and more than we spend on travel, entertainment, clothes and shoes, and hobbies — combined.

[snip]

The good news is, how you get to work — and with whom — is something we can control, much more than we can control the price of gas, the traffic, the weather, or even the length of our commute. For most people, there's very little that's truly "discretionary" about gas and car maintenance. But this — adding a passenger to your commute or hitting the park-and-ride — is a much easier, cheaper change than, say, buying a more fuel efficient car, or moving closer to work.

This isn't an environmental argument. (That's for a different site.) It's a financial one — and one that makes intuitive sense. Most people use their cars primarily for commuting; if you can split those costs with another person, you can spend half as much. That could add up to several hundred dollars of savings a year. To which I say, "Going my way?"

What else to say? As the penultimate paragraph makes clear, the stereotypical single-driver commute all the way from home to work and back again is a financial luxury that, with a little thought, we can cut back on here and there and, in so doing, save some money and, maybe, improve our quality of life in the bargain. The elegance of such an argument is that it cuts across obvious political and philosophical divides and appeals to our financial self-interests. It just so happens that acting on one's self-interest, in this fairly rare instance, also indirectly benefits one's fellow citizens--even those who don't change their driving habits.

Here in Wichita, home of one of the shortest average commute times in the country, it's historically been hard to encourage people to consider these arguments. However, as gas prices slowly increase, as bus service is expanded to serve the nearby outlying communities and bike paths are built that makes the current system more practical for bike-commuters, driving less becomes an easier choice to make for more of us.

Not-so-fun fact from the WAMPO MTP 2035 project list report

2010-06-19T06:34:00.000-05:00

I'm out of town this weekend and will have more on the WAMPO report next week, but here's something to contemplate in the meantime:

According to the section in the draft on bicycles and pedestrians, the area under WAMPO's administration has 15% of Kansas' population but accounts for 25% of bike and pedestrian fatalities in the state.

Family Bike Day!

2010-06-16T21:24:00.003-05:00

[Now corrected to reflect the correct date.]

Here's an indication of just how "away" I have been from this blog:

I found out only today via the Wichita Bicycle Collective about last week's first annual Mayor's Family Bike Day. I hope it went well.

I am very very happy to learn that events like this are being scheduled. This gathering, along with such events as I Bike Douglas and other organized rides last month in recognition of National Bike Month, an emerging group of people interested in promoting riding, support on the City Council for cycling and pedestrians, and policy decisions in Washington that will give higher priority in funding to alternate and public transportation, cannot but help Wichita become a little more bike-friendly . . . and healthier, and greener, and safer.

A couple of links

2010-06-16T07:13:00.003-05:00

Let's just ease back into this, shall we?

WAMPO is seeking public comment on its draft of the the Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP) 2035 through June 18. Go here to have a look and offer your opinions; I'll have a post here soon that will comment on what's there.

The Kansas Online Transportation Community (KTOC) now has a blog dedicated to bike/ped issues in Kansas called Active transportation. Becky Pepper, KDOT's Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator, is its author. It's brand-new; its first post is a reminder about the importance of wearing a helmet when cycling. In the accompanying e-mail, it's billed as being devoted to "all things related to bicycle and pedestrian transportation in Kansas and beyond." "All things" is a lot of territory; my hope is that it really will include discussions of infrastructure and long-term planning at the state level for cyclists and pedestrians. Even if this is a token gesture on the part of the state, well, I can't think of any truly transformative movement that didn't include token gestures at the governmental level.

My colleague Paula has started a blog called Love Local Food in Wichita, Kansas, whose title kinda gives away its subject. Paula provides tips and leads not just on sources for food grown locally (to those who write her, she'll e-mail a list of local-food folks) but, even, advice on potential, unexpected wild foods (her current post is a brief reminder about the potential pleasures and real risks of wild mushrooms). Even better: Paula is a formally-trained dietitian, and her husband Chris is a trained chef.

Both her knowledge and enthusiasm for her subject are palpable in her posts. If your interests lie in her direction, I hope you'll head on over there.

EDIT: I've just learned that we now have a cycle-chic blog, ICT Cycle Chic, written by Matthew. As those of you who have followed this blog know--those of you still around, that is--the Cycle Chic movement is something I've enthusiastically promoted for some time now, up to and including some wondering-out-loud posts about a Cycle Chic movement here. Well. It's here--or its blog is, at least.
_____

Yes--it's my intention to get this thing going again. I have some catching up to do re this blog's subject, so a more substantive post is still forthcoming. But I'm happy to be able to say that here for the first time in a long time and not have it feel like a false promise.

See you soon.

Checking in; Bike Fort Worth

2010-02-13T12:34:00.005-06:00

Apologies for not having posted in a while. School has gotten busy for me and will be for a few days more yet.

In the meantime, though, have a look, if you haven't already, at Bike Fort Worth, the (truly) comprehensive bike plan the city passed this past week. As you'll see, the city is not investing only in infrastructure but also in cyclist and motorist education, too. Here's an excerpt from Fort Worthology's overview of it:

Bike Fort Worth is a radical shift in transportation planning here in Fort Worth. Our current bike transportation network is a paltry 100 miles, most of which is off-street recreational trails and the rest being a handful of sharrow routes and a scant 6.4 miles of dedicated bike lanes. Bike Fort Worth will massively increase our bike network to nearly 1,000 miles - 224.7 miles of off-street trails, with the majority of the network shifting to on-street: 1.4 miles of bus & bike-only lanes in downtown, 218.3 miles of sharrow routes, and a huge 480.3 miles of dedicated bike lanes. The plan also calls for radical increases in the amount and quality of bike parking, minimum bike parking requirements in zoning, establishment of bike commuter facilities at transit hubs to tie into our bus, commuter rail, and planned modern streetcar systems, education programs for cyclists and drivers, new traffic ordinances to (among other things) require drivers to yield to bikes and to give at least 3 feet of clearance when passing, establishment of a city bike fleet for city staff use instead of cars in the urban core, establishment of bike counts, and much more. The plan calls for innovative solutions like Bicycle Boulevards, bike boxes, contra-flow lanes, physically separated cycle tracks, colored bike lanes, bike-only traffic signals, and more. The plan aims to triple or more bike commuting in Fort Worth by 2020, double or more the amount of all bike trips, reduce crashes by at least ten percent, and attain a Bicycle Friendly rating from the League of American Bicyclists (Austin is currently the only city in Texas with such a designation).

All this is estimated to cost around $158 million over the next ten years. It's clear to me, though, that Fort Worth has gone all in on this bike-friendly thing; it'll be more than a little interesting to see how other cities in the region respond to this.

Northern Flyer Alliance in the news

2010-02-09T07:15:00.004-06:00

This morning on KMUW, there's a nice interview with Deborah Fischer Stout and Evan Stair of the Northern Flyer Alliance about recent developments in the Alliance's efforts to bring passenger rail service to Wichita and south central Kansas. Each speaks in particular about pending legislation in the Kansas legislature that will put up funding for upgrading already-existing rail lines that, once approved, could lead to passenger service here as soon as three years from now.

Go and listen.

Wichita's not-so-visible cyclists--beginning the conversation

2010-02-09T05:30:00.006-06:00

[UPDATE: Welcome to folks visiting here from Biking in L.A. I hope you'll not be too disappointed that you found your way here.]

This picture is from a neighborhood in Queens, New York, but such a scene is not at all uncommon north of downtown in Wichita, either. Image found here.

One of the hardest jobs cycle-advocacy people have ahead of them in most places, but especially in a city like Wichita, is to re-frame the case for on-street, in-town cycling infrastructure so that can be seen as filling a genuine need. That need, moreover, is best described as "economic," and in exactly the same sense that many road projects are described as filling economic needs: shorter/safer travel times. That re-framing needs to happen not just for non-cyclists, who tend to think of cycling primarily in recreational terms, but also for themselves, for whom cycling is a choice and not a necessity that circumstance has forced on them.

Streetsblog recently had an article that serves as a good place to begin that re-framing. The writer, Sarah Goodyear, uses a post from the North Carolina blog Honking in Traffic as its starting point; the following passage comes from that blog:

The Latino immigrant bike commuting out of necessity is a rare sight out on the country roads. But it’s not so rare in cities and towns across this country. According to the Alliance for Biking & Walking report [which I made reference to yesterday], while Hispanics now make up 15 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 22 percent of total bike trips. If this data is accurate, then that population is overrepresented among bicyclists, while perhaps underrepresented in the popular media image of who bicyclists are[.]

I don't claim any special righteousness on this matter; it is true, though, that the daily sight of working-class and street people on bicycles in the neighborhoods immediately north of downtown was what initially moved me to consider cycling as a regular mode of transportation. It's for these folks' reasons as well that I've applauded the Midtown Bike Path as providing the very practical services of a safe route to school for kids in the neighborhood and a safe, off-street commute route into the urban core.

But more can and should be done along these lines. With regard to NOMAR and the revitalization of 21st Street, for example, unless I've just not seen it, I've seen nothing in those plans that accommodates cyclists, and nothing that serves further to link that part of town with the urban core (the midtown path, after all, is over on the northwest side of downtown). Yet, doing so, via a couple of well-chosen re-striping projects running north-south, would be a practical--and inexpensive--no-brainer. The current bike projects emphasize connectivity between already-existing bike infrastructure, and those are of course important. But equally--more, I would claim--important is the providing of space for safe, on-street cycling in those parts of town where people ride not for fun but out of need and where riding on poorly-maintained sidewalks is hazardous. I hope to encourage a dialogue among those who may be reading this who live north of downtown and those of us not part of this underserved neighborhood, that together we can re-frame cycling's image to include its serving a practical economic need for a large number of fellow citizens.

A couple of weeks ago, I noted Councilman Paul Gray's dismissive attitude toward the needs of cyclists--in particular, his statement that he didn't know anyone who biked to work. I said by way of response that "there are lots of people you don't know--and many of them would ride bikes to work if the city would spend a few tens of thousands of dollars and re-stripe a few streets." I'd like to amend that statement a bit: There are lots of people who already do bike to work--and, if you'd literally just look out your office window or the doors of City Hall, you'd see them. Every. Single. Day.

Maybe you should meet some of them.

Should we negotiate with the automobile? Or would that be appeasement?

2010-02-08T16:33:00.004-06:00

Via the weekly WAMPO update comes a link to a recent study that I had seen a couple of weeks ago and had wanted to link to and then, as I am wont to do, forgot about it. Now that it's appeared again, I'd like to link to it and make a connection between it and the recent story in the Eagle that I mentioned in Sunday's post.

The Alliance for Biking and Walking has just completed a benchmarking report (the Quick Facts Sheet is here) that shows that, nationwide, 9.6% of all trips in this country are made either on foot or by bike (those numbers are of course higher in urban areas), yet transportation funding for bike/ped infrastructure accounts for only 1.2% of federal funding--and it may just be that that funding disparity partly explains why cyclists and pedestrians account for 13.1% of all traffic fatalities in the U.S. The fact that WAMPO sees fit to forward this along is, I think, further confirmation that it sees such things as important and seeks to encourage the area's municipalities to give some thought to these issues.

Randal O'Toole's recent visit to town and critique of Wichita's apparent direction in favor of making downtown more walkable is worth taking another look at, especially his comment that (quoting from the article here) "'pedestrian-friendly' development — a cornerstone of Wichita's downtown effort, usually means car-hostile." This of course begs a question: That there is something to be gained in keeping downtown "pedestrian-hostile," some greater good that is worth continued occasional-yet-increasing cyclist and pedestrian deaths, seeing as the numbers of cyclists and pedestrians increased by 42% between 2000 and 2007 and will only continue to increase--whether or not cities and states plan accordingly for those increases.

O'Toole frames the issue in adversarial terms: cars vs. pedestrians and cyclists; the latter two, being the weaker entities, must perforce surrender space to the stronger. It's as though, in fact, that in such a framing autos are assumed to be feral creatures to be accommodated at all costs by us weaker mortals and so, if we appease them by providing them (and then stay out of) nice, wide lanes and plenty of (preferably free or at least cheap) Sudetenland-like parking lots, we will have peace in our time with them.

My analogy is, of course, absurd (I hope no one takes offense at it); but too often it is indeed true that it is the existence of cars, over and above what is better or at least preferable for making a place more livable, that has shaped the cities we live in--and, of course, our decisions about infrastructure priorities. That Mr. O'Toole apparently feels we are compelled to lie prostrate before the automobile and its needs would seem to me a surrender of liberty that, as I said in yesterday's post, I'd think he'd want to resist mightily as the good libertarian that (I assume) he is.

To frame this discussion in Us vs. Them terms is not helpful, in other words. With careful, thoughtful planning, we can easily create urban cores whose streets can accommodate both cars and people afoot and on bikes and whose land-use laws can lead to less need for cars (and lest anyone misunderstand me, not needing a car is not the same thing as being hostile toward them). Those who read the comments section for the Eagle article will find what follows familiar, for a couple of folks there already pointed this out: Complete Streets designs result in streets that can bear the same or greater amount of car traffic as conventional streets and, at the same time, apportion space for cyclists buses and pedestrians--all the while making those streets safer for everyone. The Douglas Design District sees the wisdom in executing a Complete Streets design on one of the very busiest streets in the city, as I noted last month.

Such a reasonable accommodation makes the street, again, a truly public space, and a safer one as well. If this is appeasement, then sign me up.

Local blog round-up (Super Sunday edition)

2010-02-07T11:21:00.003-06:00

An antique bike in New Orleans' French Quarter. Image found here.

In the spirit of Super Sunday, here at the top of this week's Local Blog Round-up you'll find some links to some prominent New Orleans cycling blogs. But Colts fans shouldn't despair; at the bottom of this post you'll find an equal number of Indianapolis cycling blogs.

N'awlins blogs: NolaCycle Bike Map Project, What I Saw Riding My Bike Around Today [UPDATE, Feb.8: have a look at What I Saw's chronicling of "mass high fivery" in the Quarter after the game], On the Rivet with Randy.

Hmm: "Local" and "blog" in the title are a bit troublesome, as they were last week. Ah, well. Things do happen elsewhere than the area cycling blogosphere that seem, to your correspondent, to be of interest or in some way pertain to that which we're about here at this site. So, like, Deal. And for my part, I'll come up with some permanent title for this feature that is more inclusive.

Friday's Eagle had this story about a talk given here in town by Randal O'Toole of the Cato Institute. According to the article, O'Toole's talk wasn't especially Wichita-centric; it was more of a general critique of recent tendencies in urban design to create a more walkable urban core, as well as the usual methods of encouraging businesses to build downtown and the financing of such projects. Cato's reputation as a libertarian think tank precedes it, so O'Toole's observations should have come as no surprise to his audience. Personally, I'm puzzled by O'Toole's implicit support of a car-centric infrastructure; that infrastructure is expensive to build and maintain and so requires lots of (taxpayer) money, not to mention government regulation: two things that good Libertarians would resist. I'd think that the bicycle would be an excellent choice for Official Vehicle of the Libertarian Party. But I do admit I was glad to see this bit in the article:

O'Toole encountered some pushback from members of the audience who said there are a lot of Wichitans who want more walkways and bike paths.

"I don't think it's a fad like you're saying," said resident Janice Bradley.

Even better is the give-and-take in the comments section. Those supportive of a more walkable downtown acquit themselves quite well there; they respond to O'Toole's defenders there with actual, well, arguments in favor of walkability.

Keep in mind that at a certain level, the comments are worth only what they are worth. Who knows, really, the extent to which the ideals of bike-friendliness, walkability, and all the rest are becoming more prominent ideas here in town. The fact remains, though, that people are making arguments on their behalf in public fora, and that is very much to the good.

I don't think Kansas City has a Cycle Chic blog yet, but via Kansas Cyclist comes an announcement of something that not even all Cycle Chic cities can claim: a Tweed Ride, to be held on April 3rd at Loose Park. As Randy notes, Tweed Rides are popping up in lots of places with fairly well-established cycling communities; the idea is to evoke something of the elegance of cycling from a century before and have a good time while doing so (and I also think I detect a humorous hitching onto of the Steampunk movement). The KC riders' organizers are pretty self-aware (pay very close attention to the prize categories, for example), but their larger purpose is, I think, the same as that of promoters of Cycle Chic and, thus, a serious one: Not only do you not need to be an athlete to ride a bike, you don't need to dress like one, either.

On to the blogs, now:

Two bloggers went out in last weekend's snow and brought back pics. Over at Adventure Monkey, Eric went for a Sunday ride in the snow. Here's what he saw. Meanwhile, Robert of River City Cyclist went out with a friend along the Arkansas River path and later posted these pictures.

From Bike Topeka come two items of interest. First is another very nice write-up, this one in the Washburn Review, about Topeka's new Community Cycle Project. The other is that Topeka is participating in a pilot project, sponsored by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, called the Capital City Wellness Project; part of that project is called the Bikes for Wellness Program. Cyclists who have a program sticker on their helmets can show this sticker at participating businesses and receive discounts for their goods. I would think that something like this would be easy and inexpensive to implement here in Wichita--and not necessarily through government agencies, either . . .

Speaking of bicycle collectives, Wichita's own version of that enterprise extends an invitation to Riders of Rohan's two-year anniversary celebration on February 26th.

And--as promised . . .

A scene from Indianapolis's burgeoning bike culture. Image found here.

Indy bike blogs are very hard to come by--surprising, given the national reputation of The Indy Cog. I gathered via my bumping around that Indy cycling culture is about as nascent as Wichita's is. Having said that, though, if folks from Indy happen to find their way here and know of some good cycling blogs, by all means be sure to let me know in comments. Urban Indy is not, strictly speaking, a bike blog, but one interested in livability issues; meanwhile, there's Indy Bikehiker, the blog of a self-described "theological jackalope" (a Wesleyan-oriented advocate of peace-and-justice issues) who also happens to be an avid cyclist.

That's all for this week. Enjoy the game!

The Daily Commute IV: Things thought and observed

2010-02-06T13:03:00.002-06:00

A deer at Chisholm Creek Park. Image found here.

Friday was head-out-to-Andover day. A quick look at the forecast (20% chance for snow; high in the mid-'30s), a quick decision ("I'll risk that"), and I set off.

I'll dispense with all the I'm-woefully-out-of-shape stuff first. The results of my hiatus from regular cycling over most of the summer and into the fall and winter really showed yesterday, especially on the return trip: even if I hadn't stopped to talk to the Mrs. via cellphone, it would have taken over two hours for me to get back home. By the time I made it downtown, I decided I was just too tired to risk riding in the street on 8th or Murdock or whatever it is (which is what I usually do), so I rode on the sidewalk till I reached Waco. My legs felt such that I was afraid they would feel terrible this morning. But, amazingly, they don't. There's weariness today, but not soreness. So, I know the next trip will be easier.

Now, on to the happier Cycling-in-Wichita talk. I know the route I've chosen is not the most direct, but I like it: it's scenic for much of the way, and because almost all of it consists of dedicated bike paths, I'm able to travel a bit faster than I'd be able to on the street. Also, once the connecting path from MacAdams Park (the present north end of the Canal Path) to Grove Park (where the K-96 path begins) gets built, that will cut at least a mile (not to mention some pretty rough pavement on 17th St.) off this route.

The way out: Though it was overcast, it wasn't too cold, and there was no wind. I didn't know how passable the paths would be, whether the previous night's rain would take care of most of the snow; and I admit to being a little worried about the condition of the path under I-135 as well. As it turned out, though, the Canal Path was completely clear and almost completely dry--just a little mud in a couple of places. It also appeared, at least on that part of the path that passes through Chisholm Creek Park, that the city had cleared the snow off the path some time before. Elsewhere, there was some slush and standing water to contend with, but nothing bad. There was actually more snow along Rock Road at the bike/ped crossing than there was anywhere else. I saw a couple of people out on bikes; they seemed to be rec-riders, though. (Since I didn't have to be in Andover until 10 that morning, I missed whatever commuting "traffic" there is on the north and east sides of town.)

Without any question, the most pleasant part of the ride was through the park. Some birds were foraging for seeds, and I startled a couple of deer who saw fit to run right in front of me (I saw either another one or one of these two on the way back as well). I'm already looking forward to riding through there in the spring.

The east side of the K-96 path, as those who have ridden it know, crosses the abandoned railroad right-of-way that runs along 17th St. As I mentioned a while back, one of the WAMPO-approved projects is a conversion of this same right-of-way, but only from I-135 to Oliver. It was hard not to gaze westward down the easement and think how much more connectivity the bike-path network would gain by extending the path at least to K-96, or even (a boy can dream, can't he?) on in to Andover. Alas, it may be the case that there are disputes over just who has clear title to the right-of way along that stretch; and it's my understanding that the council member through whose district the right-of-way runs opposes such a project in any case. I of course wish neither were the case; if any of you reading this happens to feel the same way, especially if you live in that district, I hope you'll let that be known.

Those of you who live on the east side of town know that 13th St. has recently been widened and, as part of that work, now has for most of its length one of those soon-to-be-ubiquitous 10-foot-wide multi-use paths. What can I say?--it's a concrete sidewalk. But it's in good shape, and the people who live nearby seem to use it. Compare/contrast, though, with the, ahem, "work" done to some sidewalks at the corner of Piatt and 21st St. (which I passed by on the way home--I changed my route home a bit) to patch up after some underground utility work had been done: Just a mound of asphalt, with no effort made to level it out, to replace the sidewalk that had to be removed and that, a few good rains from now, will crumble away. To assume that this sort of thing is okay to do because it's in a part of town where people aren't likely to complain about half-assed work (sorry, more polite language won't do) like this is beyond cynical.

I reached Andover and went to Butler's facility on 13th St., a couple blocks east of Andover Road, where I tutor on Fridays. While I was there, I had a nice conversation about my ride over with a colleague who lives not too far from me. She said she's been giving some thought to riding out to Andover as well when her schedule permits; she has to get her bike in shape first, though. So: maybe another commuter.

A quick word about Butler's bike-friendliness: It's lacking. Its buildings don't have dedicated bike racks (I locked mine up on a railing by some stairs), but I know students ride there occasionally, so a rack would be nice to have. Butler will soon be launching a wellness program, but we don't yet know the details of that. I am hopeful that cycling will somehow figure into it; if it did, bike racks might make an appearance as a result. Also, one of Andover's WAMPO projects will be the building of, you guessed it, a multi-use path that will run along Andover Rd. from 13th to 21st street--right where Butler's other two Andover buildings are, along with a middle school and a high school. There's a lot of pedestrian traffic through there, so the sidewalks are much needed.

The way back: By the time I left Andover at about 1:30, the north wind was beginning to blow a bit and, when I reached K-96, some sort of precipitation started to fall--not snow, but at least some of it was freezing, I think. That let up around the time I got off the Canal path to turn west for home. But the only misery I felt was just from being so tired.

The upshot: All told, it was (still) a good ride. I know this because I'm looking forward to next week.

WAMPO updates

2010-02-02T14:31:00.001-06:00

Via WAMPO's Valerie Robinson come these reminders of this month's meetings:

On Monday, February 9, 2010, at 1:00 PM, the Metropolitan Transportation Plan Project Advisory Committee (MTP-PAC) will be meeting in the Large Conference Room on the 10th floor of Wichita City Hall. At 3:00 on that same day, the Transportation Policy Body (TPB) will meet in the same room. The stated agenda for MTP-PAC is as follows: "[M]embers will continue development of a final project list for the MTP. They will also discuss project cost and revenue inflation assumptions as related to the project list." (The WAMPO-obsessed among you will remember that I posted that the first part of that agenda began last week.) As for the TPB, there's no agenda description, but that meeting is also open to the public.

On Thursday, February 18, 2010, from 4:00-6:00 PM, the MTP will hold an open house at the WATER Center, 101 E. Pawnee Street. If you would like to be part of the selection process for these transportation projects but have so far not participated in the WAMPO survey and/or have wanted to but not weighed in on these meetings, attending on the 18th will be crucial: On the 22nd, MTP-PAC will be determining the final project list, and that will be formally presented to the TPB on March 9.

I'll be in attendance at both next Tuesday's meeting and the open house, and I'll have posts on those events here.

Local blog round-up (snow day edition)

2010-01-29T21:36:00.001-06:00

This year's route map for Biking Across Kansas. Image found here.

No trip to Andover today, as Butler cancelled classes for the day. So, my faithful dog Scruffy and I stayed inside most of the day, watching it snow, listening to music, and reading blogs. And what did you do with your time today?

The blog links are forthcoming. First, though, a reminder and some "ringer" entries: a couple of things that aren't local or in the immediate area but are indeed worth knowing about.

The reminder: Sunday the 31st is the last day to participate in the survey for the Wichita Initiative to Renew the Environment, which I posted on and linked to here.

I learned just a couple of days ago by accident (through a link to this humble blog) of the existence of Bike Topeka, a fairly new blog that appears to be very much a part of a burgeoning cycling community there. Topeka has of late become a hive of activity regarding cycling and livability issues. Most local folks know that Topeka's city council passed a Complete Streets ordinance back in November, and in this recent article, the city council overrode (by an 8 to 1 vote) the mayor's veto of a plan to fund the extension of a bike path. Today's post is a reprinting (if that's the right term in the online world) of an article that appeared in the online edition of the Capital-Journal about the just-opened Topeka Community Cycle Project. (We have one of those, too, as some of you know--drop me a line, guys; I'd like to pay a visit.) Anyway, it's good to see these green shoots of bike culture springing up in the state capital.

Meanwhile, from more or less the corner of the state opposite Topeka comes the news via Kansas Cyclist that Garden City's comprehensive plan calls for a complete streets policy. I can only say both that a) I'm happily stunned to learn that Garden City is this forward-thinking; and b) that it's frankly a bit embarrassing that a city of around 20,000 in a remote area of the state is more forward-thinking in its street planning than the state's largest city is. I know, I know: change is coming here, too, and sooner than some might think. But still.

On to the round-up. Not many new posts out there, so apologies for the brevity:

Speaking of the Wichita Bicycle Collective, it's beginning to stir from its winter hibernation: It now has a clean garage and everything. An early spring on the way?

If you haven't found your way to Adventure Monkey yet, you need to. Eric's generous entries (a combination of trip diary, motivation and really fine photographs of Flint Hills landscape and buildings and small towns) are infectous in their joy and enthusiasm. In this post from last Sunday, Eric rides into a strong north wind to Council Grove and brings back some stunning pictures, especially of clouds moving in.

The Coasters Bicycle Club has a quiz up that tests participants' knowledge of Coaster club and Wichita bicycle lore. I failed miserably, but you probably won't--and even if you do, you get the answers and get an education.

Over at River City Cyclist, Robert announces his intention to ride in this year's Biking Across Kansas. He is nervous but excited and even has a "battle plan" to get in shape for the June ride. Wish him well.

That's all for this weekend. There'll be another round-up next weekend

More good news for the Northern Flyer Alliance

2010-01-28T20:38:00.002-06:00

A week ago I posted on the cause of the Northern Flyer Alliance, which seeks to establish regular passenger rail service between Ft. Worth and Kansas City by way of Oklahoma City and Wichita. Today, along with President Obama's trip to Tampa to tout the investment of $8 billion in ARRA funds for high-speed rail, the White House released a list of funded projects. And there on page 3, last but not least, is grant money for further studies in several states, among them Kansas. This isn't rails-on-the-ground news, of course, but it is a vote of confidence in the Alliance's work thus far, a vote that I hope will attract the attention of regional and state bodies who have their hands on purse-strings. But an even better way to attract that attention is if the Alliance can show a broad range of support among people in the region. Be sure to visit the Alliance's website and join, sign and circulate the petition to reclaim Union Station, etc.

Still need more persuasion? Are you thinking this is some wild-eyed liberal idea? Then have a look at this letter from the mayor of Meridian, Mississippi.

UPDATE: More detail in this story in yesterday's Eagle.

Down to the WIRE

2010-01-28T06:37:00.002-06:00

I really should read my e-mail more often . . .

Via Janet Miller's District 6 weekly e-mail to citizens in her district (which I received Monday and I'm just now reading (I am a bad citizen)), I learned more about something I'd heard news about on the radio, the Wichita Initiative to Renew the Environment (WIRE), sponsored by the KU School of Medicine and incorporating the involvement of numerous citizens' groups around town. WIRE is asking people to do some reading and see some videos addressing various environmental concerns in the area--not just the familiar ones of waste, air and water but also land-use concerns. For each of these, there's a survey which asks participants to prioritize these issues as concerns and their interest in addressing them.

There's some urgency to completing the survey: WIRE wants to have your--yes, your--input on this survey by the end of January so that it can submit its findings to the EPA in March as part of a grant application. On the one hand, this is very short notice, I know. On the other, it's supposed to be damned cold this weekend. So, since you're probably going to be staying inside, filling out an online survey which gauges your concern and interest in local environmental issues strikes me as a decent way to spend a part of your weekend.

The Daily Commute III: Things thought and observed--and a Thank You

2010-01-27T06:05:00.002-06:00

The astute among my readers have no doubt noticed that for a blog called "Cycling in Wichita," there's been precious little posting about cycling here since I began posting again. Now that the new semester has begun and my bike is up and running, I should be able to post more regularly about things I see while I'm out and about. Yesterday I rode out for the first time this semester, about which more later.

A couple of words about my commutes this spring. Yes: it's plural. I teach at McConnell four days a week, but my schedule is such that only Tuesdays, for now, work well for me to ride there on my bicycle. I may add Mondays to the list after spring break (one of my afternoon classes will end then), but we'll have to see. I'll also need to change the route map I've linked to in the right gutter: It's the same up to where Mt. Vernon crosses I-135; from there, I now take the Canal path south to Pawnee, get on Minneapolis south to Wassal, then take the footbridge across I-135 to make use of the new-ish path that runs past Joyland and then Gypsum Creek to George Washington. It's longer than the old route but takes about the same amount of time because I don't have nearly as much traffic to contend with. On Fridays I tutor in Andover, and beginning this semester (though not this Friday because the weather is supposed to be bad) I'll try out this route. I know it's not at all direct, but 13th in town is heavily trafficked in the mornings; besides, I'm in no hurry. I'll let you know how it goes.

Even though it was in the upper 20s or low 30s yesterday morning, I rode to work wearing cargo shorts, a lined windbreaker over a t-shirt, and gloves; aside from my ears getting cold, I was quite comfortable: It was sunny and there was no wind to speak of. I know, though, that such an outfit won't work on days when it's cold and the wind is blowing or it's raining. I saw a couple of other riders who looked like they were commuting to work, but judging from the gravel in the bike lanes over on Mt. Vernon, I imagine that winter weather reduces our numbers. Some drivers on the stretch of Mt. Vernon between Southeast and Broadway, on my afternoon commute, seemed a bit impatient with me as they passed (the street is pretty narrow there, and it was rush hour as well), but no one honked or cursed me or tried to injure me.

One nice addition since last summer: at the intersections of Mt. Vernon with Main and Water (each of those streets is one way in that part of town), there are now three-way stops at those intersections (Mt. Vernon traffic used to have preference there). The stops have the effect of slowing traffic a little more, thus benefiting cyclists in the lanes.

Just a quick visit for a moment to the Wichita front in the tensions between cyclists riding on streets and motorists: I spoke with two colleages yesterday at some length about my riding into work. Neither rides a bike to work (though one of them, in her college days thirty years ago, regularly rode from Wichita to El Dorado), but each is supportive of increasing cycling infrastructure on streets and to the rights of cyclists to be on the street in the absence of bike lanes. But, neither can abide cyclists who behave as though traffic laws don't apply to them but who, in the same breath, ask that motorists respect them. My colleagues, I repeat, are not opposed to seeing us on the street. They welcome us, in fact; they understand that, times becoming what they are becoming, having more cyclists on the road is a good thing. What they do not welcome is scofflaw behavior on the street.

Rather than wade into debates about Idaho Stops and such this morning, I just want to complicate the discussion a bit by suggesting that it's a mistake to turn the dynamic into a simple Us vs. Them debate. That leads to polarization, and we see how well that's working in Congress these days: after a while, no one is really listening to each other. Speaking frankly, cyclists' justifying running red lights by arguing things like cars are bigger than us sounds whiny, even if it is true. Semis are bigger than Mini Coopers; should that give Minis the right to, oh, drive underneath the trailer if they so desire? Cyclists are on much firmer ground when they assert that under the law, when they are on the street they, too, are operators of vehicles and should be regarded by others as such. But that also should mean that cyclists should behave as though they regard themselves as such, as subject to those same laws.

Some of those motorists out there, they like seeing us out there; we make some of them feel guilty for not being out there themselves. Good. Especially in a town like Wichita, we can't afford to tick those people off.

Enough of that. On to some happier (if self-centered) news. One of my above-mentioned colleagues is involved in the College Hill Neighborhood Association and had, as she put it, a teeny-tiny hand in discussions regarding the Douglas Design District's recent streetscape proposal. As we talked about the plan and its likelihood of being implemented, she told me that in discussions someone used something I had written somewhere in support of its Complete Street design. It of course pleases and gratifies me to know that I contributed to that discussion in some small, positive way. I can't tell, just by looking at hit counters, who is reading and to what good or nefarious uses (or any use at all, for that matter) they put what they find here. This blog doesn't receive a lot of traffic to begin with, and much--perhaps the majority--of the traffic is not from Wichita. It's hard to know, therefore, whether this blog is doing what I intend for it here in the Air Capital (see the banner for a statement of that intention). I have a little evidence now that people are reading and thinking about this stuff. I am glad. And I thank you for reading.

Yesterday's WAMPO meeting: Notes, comments, and some musing

2010-01-26T15:54:00.002-06:00

A glimpse of Wichita's future? Light rail did come up, sort of, in yesterday's meeting. More about that later. Image found here.

From one point of view, Monday's WAMPO meeting covered little ground beyond a (very) initial discussion of the committee's sense of the various scenarios to determine which projects would be approved for federal funding for this new master plan. From another--mine, at least--yesterday was valuable in that it led me to think about what appear to some basic truths about how transportation planning has been handled in the past in Wichita and how that probably needs to change.

First, something of a housekeeping note regarding the WAMPO survey seeking public input on the projects to be funded for the 2035 master plan: Those of you who took the survey may have noticed on the for the "Transit/Maintenance and Operation Scenario" that (at least so far as I could see) the only description provided was that it entailed the removal of 57 projects from the Initial List. At the meeting, I asked where one could find that list of 57 projects. Kimberly Spielman, the Public Involvement Coordinator, said that the link for the various additions and removels was on the page linked to up above but, as it happened, she had just that morning noticed that the link was well to the bottom of the page and was easy to overlook. She said that after the meeting she would relocate the link so it would be much more visible, and I'm happy to report that that indeed has been done. (Here is that link, by the way.) Again: If you've not visited and taken the survey, please do so. They seem entirely sincere when they tell me they want public input; Ms. Spielman seemed very pleased that I had posted a link to the survey on my blog. And: February 22 appears to be something of a deadline for participation in that survey, as it will be on that date that the committee will examine public input and make a final selection of a scenario.

BUT: before you visit the survey, some things came up in the meeting with regard to the various scenarios that you'll want to know. So: Wade with me a bit into the weeds of WAMPO wonkiness. I promise it will lead, Prufrock-like, to an overwhelming question facing not just WAMPO but all such advisory committees--and, for that matter, the municipalities they serve. So. Let us go and make our visit.

As occurred last week, there was another presentation of the various scenarios that are the subject of the online survey. Yesterday, though, Mitch Coffman and Chris Nazar, who are, respectively, the project manager and consultant (the folks who determine the extent to which how these scenarios and the addition/subtraction of specific projects affect traffic flow) provided more information about the Transit/Maintenance and Operation scenario and its 57 deleted projects. (Full disclosure: This is the scenario I chose--not that you should, of course.) They were deleted because they did not alleviate congestion enough to justify their expense. While that certainly sounds fiscally responsible, Nazar reported that among those deleted projects are several bridge rehabilitation/maintenance projects that, clearly, are important for reasons other than alleviating congestion. (Which would we rather have: slow-moving traffic across a bridge or a collapsed bridge?) So, Nazar said that the committee might want to consider adding at least some of the bridge projects back to the scenario. And, of course, the committee could tweak any of the other scenarios as well if it so chose.

Now: Here's where the overwhelming question arose (for me, at least) that made me strangely happy I had attended. Just after presenting the committee with this new information, it seemed clearly Coffman's and Nazar's desire to lead the committee to express at least an initial preference for one of these scenarios ((snark alert)That's what their PowerPoint slide says the committee needed to do, after all . . . (snark alert off) But, in their defense, they're just doing their job: by mandate, the committee has a deadline to meet for presenting the final list to both the government and the area municipalities who will then pick and choose from the list what projects they'd like to see built.) But Richard Schodorf of Wichita's Transit Advisory Board asked a pretty good question, which I'll sum up as follows: Does the initial list of projects or the various scenarios in fact reflect a coming future reality, or does it instead reflect the assumption that the future will look pretty much like the present, only with more people? Schodorf noted the present, less-than-adequate-but-improving state of bus service in Wichita (though--good news!--there's a projected increased ridership of around half a million for this year) and called attention to those cities in the region either building or considering light rail systems, not because it's the cool thing to do but because they are looking ahead to a future of growing metro areas, pressure on budgets due to the need for increased infrastructure and constrained revenues, higher gas prices, and the need to move people around efficiently. He noted the complete absence of light rail proposals from the initial list of projects and asked, quite passionately, whether that was a mistake.

Two responses to Schodorf emerged in the ensuing discussion, though they merged, to my mind, at the same place. The first response, coming from a member of the committee (I didn't catch her name) who was responsible for selecting the projects on the initial list, said that she and the others involved had a total of around 300 projects submitted by the municipalities in the WAMPO district and had done, to her mind, an excellent job of selecting only those projects that seemed especially valuable (there are around 120 projects on the initial list). The other response, articulated chiefly by Tim Norton, the chair of the committee, was two-fold: 1) That all the scenarios under consideration included a substantial funding increase for Wichita Transit that would permit a grid-route system (rather than the current hub-and-spoke system) and commuter service to outlying communities in the WAMPO district (basically, Sedgwick County plus Andover); the Transit/Operations and Maintenance option, in fact, includes enough money so that people would be able to ride the bus for free. Along with the fact that none of the scenarios calls for removing bike/ped projects from the final list, it's abundantly evident to me that WAMPO is very much in favor of mass transit and alternate transportation 2) Light rail systems need a vibrant urban core to make good financial sense, and Wichita, to be perfectly honest, does not yet have that. Once more people are living and working (not just playing) downtown, then it would make sense. In the meantime, though, WAMPO needed to see some evidence of not just the desire for light rail but also the need for it. (But that is also true, at least for this incarnation of WAMPO, of traditional road projects: the Northwest Bypass (project #366, on p. 9 of the initial project list) pretty much was eliminated from consideration for the final list during yesterday's meeting due to the fact that it does not serve any obvious need that anyone can tell. So, WAMPO will pour concrete, but it won't do so indiscriminately.)

In the back-and-forth between Schodorf and Norton, I learned that some initial research into light rail has been done, and there may yet be included some money for more. This is good to know. But--and this is crucial--WAMPO does not propose projects. The municipalities do that. WAMPO only decides which proposed projects are worthiest of consideration that comply with rules for federal funding and fall under budget; it's still up to the municipalities to decide whether to build those projects. So, WAMPO can at best adopt a passive-aggressive stance with regard to the selection process by deciding to prioritize projects that, for example, won't contribute to sprawl--which I think one can argue it is doing via nixing the Northwest Bypass and its protecting of the bike/ped projects and funding increases for Wichita Transit. But still: it can work only with what the cities in its area propose for consideration. Those of us interested in seeing WAMPO endorse more (and more kinds of) mass/alternate transportation need to encourage our cities' representatives to make decisions regarding land use that make such projects not just nice to have but really, truly practical.

We need a new status quo, in other words. It appears to be on its way. Let's help it along a little.

New WAMPO survey now online

2010-01-24T08:02:00.002-06:00

[UPDATE: Just a quick note to remind people that the next WAMPO meeting to discuss the plans that are the subject of this survey is tomorrow (Monday the 25th) at 1:30 on the 10th floor of City Hall.]

As mentioned in my post on last Tuesday's WAMPO meeting, the survey regarding the 2035 master plan is now live. I just finished taking it; you should know that it will require at least ten minutes from you of looking at maps and project lists, in addition to a PowerPoint-style presentation that talks through the different scenarios presented at the meeting on Tuesday.

A few things to keep in mind:

1) The map shows projects that are explicitly bike/pedestrian projects in green; keep in mind, though, that many of the road projects, especially in outlying areas, include the 10-foot-wide multi-use paths. Of interest to Delano District folks: one of the bike/ped projects is the conversion of the abandoned railroad right-of-way that runs from Seneca northwest to Meridian; meanwhile, folks near the old railroad corridor that roughly parallels 17th Street should be happy to see that corridor's conversion to a path from I-135 to Oliver. True, these are presently a few years away; but, for reasons I mentioned in last week's post, external circumstances may very well compel the city to speed up the construction of bike/ped and other public transit projects. I'd also note that, of course, I would much prefer to see more green on the map--in particular, more east-west routes and something/anything west of Sedgwick County Park; but the ones that are there will add connectivity to a bike/path system that, as users know, is sorely lacking it.

2) As near as I can tell, while the various scenarios involve the removal of various larger road projects, all assume expanded bus service to outlying towns (Andover, Derby, etc.), and none involves the removal of bike/ped projects.

3) As one of the slides in the presentation tells you (and as I reported last week), none of the scenarios appreciably reduces congestion or drive-times--doing any one of the scenarios has the same overall value as doing nothing at all. So, the survey in essence asks citizens to express a preference for an overriding priority that future transportation planning and construction should address.

I didn't develop this idea in that last post, but: The WAMPO region is of a size (i.e., not populous enough) that truly massive mass transit projects that would lead to reductions in road traffic, such as light rail systems, don't make financial sense. If a transportation priority for the coming decades is to provide transport options that encourage people to leave their cars at home a little more often, the entities best able to do that right now are the municipalities, via zoning that encourages high-density, mixed-use development and discourages sprawl, and via adding on-street dedicated bike lanes (or even sharrows) on those streets where it makes good transportation sense to do so. We obviouly have some work to do in persuading (some of) our elected representatives to this way of thinking, as Jim notes here, but not only is this a Good Fight, it will become, whether said representatives like it or not, a more and more necessary fight.

So, WAMPO needs to hear from us via this survey; but so also do the municipalities who present their wishlists to WAMPO--and who, in any event, have more power to effect real change in transportation (via not building a single road) that will make their cities more livable.

Local blog round-up (bike repair edition)

2010-01-23T14:07:00.002-06:00

Image found here.

It had been my intention, last weekend and this, to ride around to a couple of places to get a sense of the current state of things regarding the overt subject of this blog. Alas. I came to realize last Saturday that a) my rear tire wasn't holding air; and b) my tire pump was broken and so couldn't air up my tire. So, as I type this my bike is up on the rack over at Bicycle X-Change; in return for this link to their place, my bike is getting some new tubes and the basic maintenance stuff, for--wait for it--full price for all of it! Oh, these perks we get in Blog Land!

(Just so no one misunderstands: Of course I didn't tell them I'd be mentioning them here, much less hint around for a discount. If my tires hold air and hold up through the coming year, I'll be more than happy, and Bicycle X-Change will get more of my business and, I hope, some of yours as well.)

Here are some links to what local and area cycling bloggers have had to say in the recent past:

Actually, this first post isn't especially recent (it's from last August), and it isn't from someone who self-identifies as a cycling blogger. But Jim's open letter to the City Council and, in particular, District 4 Representative Paul Gray is worth drawing belated attention to. For Councilman Gray to be dismissive of cycling on the grounds that it isn't a major form of transportation and no one on the council bikes to work is, sadly, a widespread attitude here--one that runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously, one hope I have for this blog is that it can do something about at least complicating that attitude. True: not many people bike on a regular basis here in town, but more people should--and would--if the city were inclined to be more foreward-leaning in providing infrastructure and encouraging development that is conducive to cycling. As for the "no one I know" argument, well, the rebuttal to that is, "Well, there are lots of people you don't know--and many of them would ride bikes to work if the city would spend a few tens of thousands of dollars and re-stripe a few streets."

Okay. Consider the choir preached to. Thank you, Jim, for your post. I don't know how many people read it, but it needs to be re-read. Here's hoping some eyeballs find their way over there.

Over at Adventure Monkey, Eric has two long but worthwhile posts up (with pictures) about a couple of long-distance rides he's just made. But they're more than simple "this is what I saw" posts; Eric has a long-term goal of getting in shape for this year's Dirty Kanza 200, so he writes as well about the psychology of these long rides, especially when confronting fatigue or wind. Their honesty and enthusiasm make for compelling reading, I think. Here, for instance, Eric's great lesson is that physically he can hang with at least some folks more accustomed to riding long distances; and here, he writes compellingly about the power of visualization to get him through a stiff headwind:

Even on the way back riding into the wind, I was pushing harder than I have in a long time. I felt great, mentally and physically. Any negative thought was captured and removed before I let it fester in my mind. It was a dreary morning with a strong headwind, and it felt great to be alive. Part of this was because I was on a bike. Bicycles are magical and have the power to let you experience the world first hand in a way that can only be felt while powering yourself on a bike. When I had made it home and completed my ride, I felt incredible, invincible. My adventure Monkey was curled up in a ball, sucking his thumb, asleep with a full belly.

Good stuff and, in all seriousness, something I'll hang on to the next time I hit that strong headwind those last couple of miles of my commute to McConnell.

Over at Cycling & CX, David does some out-loud planning for National Winter Bike to Work Day (back on January 20) in his role as the faculty sponsor of the Newton H.S. Bike Club. Here's hoping that went well. David's post leads me to throw out a bleg to my reader(s): Do you know of any other school-sponsored cycling clubs in the area? Let me know if you do, either in comments or at "blogmeridian AT sbcglobal DOT net."

At River City Cyclist, Robert posts on the small dirt track at Chapman Park; he includes a satellite photo and some pics on the site itself. It appears to get little use, so those who are so inclined need to head down there and remedy that particular problem.

Randy of the Coasters Bicycle Club notes that the club will be participating in the Delano District's annual St. Patrick's Day Parade on Saturday, March 13.

That's all for now. The next round-up will be next weekend-ish.

[Update: I've been fiddling around here--I've added a "Search Cycling in Wichita" box, rearranged the links some so that they feel a bit more logical in their sequence, and added some links (in particular some more Cycle Chic blogs) and a Streeetsblog badge as a small thank you to them for having featured a couple of posts of mine on their main page. Some more rearranging to come, perhaps.]

"Objects in the Road"

2010-01-23T06:27:00.001-06:00

I know, I know: "Ethics at 6 in the morning??"" Where's my coffee?, you're thinking. Bear with me.

Andy Cline of Carbon Trace has a nice post up on thinking ethically about street traffic that puts things quite elegantly, I think, while at the same time exposing blind spots, as it were, in the thinking of otherwise decent people when it comes to their sharing the road with bicycles. Read the whole thing, of course, but here are some snippets:

I ask [students] to identify with one or more of the various theories of ethics or at least talk about something they found interesting. For many students these are their very first stabs at thinking about ethics on purpose.

[snip]

Several students agreed with the idea that other human beings are not means to our own ends; they are ends in themselves. And I chimed in that living up to this deontological ethic would argue that, say, we should not treat people on the road (using whatever conveyance) as objects to be gotten around; rather we should treat them as people sharing a public space.

This is where the discussion gets interesting because acting in this way flies in the face of what the culture teaches us driving is and what the automobile — the machine itself — teaches that we should expect. And guess what? A big part of what the culture and the car teach us is that traffic laws are suggestions, enforcement is a hassle unless it’s happening to the other (object) guy, and 40,000 people dead per year is just the price you pay for a transportation system.

How do we change that?

Good ethicist that he is, Andy goes on to answer.

This struck me because, when I mentioned in one of my classes that I'm a cyclist, a student sort of blurted out, "I hate cyclists in the street." I took no offense and she didn't mean it personally--but that's precisely the problem: Her statement reveals indifference (at least, when she's in her car) to drivers other than herself. Yet, it's such a common attitude that I don't have a ready rebuttal to it. I mean, it's hard to rebut indifference. It's hard to get someone to see how indifference is potentially harmful to others.

I think, though, that Andy has provided me (and you, too--if you care, that is) with a means of doing this.

Of course, cyclists often also exhibit that same indifference via they way they regard the traffic (and the laws regulating that traffic), even as they insist on respect from motorists. This post is for those folks, too.

Speaking of downtown grocery stores . . .

2010-01-22T20:49:00.001-06:00

This month's issue of the College Hill Commoner has a story on p. 5 titled "Bus Station Bodega," about Ray Sales Co., located at 206 S. Emporia. It's mostly a human-interest story, though it also contains some wistfulness about how the business will change now that the Intrust Arena is a going concern and WDDC is getting revved up. (Ray's has been there almost 40 years; "funky" is a pretty apt description of the place, judging from the article, so something is bound to change.) At any rate, for those of you persuaded of the need for small corner grocery stores' inclusion in mixed-use developments and older parts of town, and for those of you wondering how new downtown development will affect the area's character and its long-time business people, this story is well worth your time, I think.

As for such a store's capacity for community building, how's this for a quote: "'We get all kinds in here,' [Rusty Johnson, one of the workers] says. 'Most are nice. Every once in a while you'll get somebody who's having a bad day or off their meds, but it hasn't happened in a while.'"

Good news for the Northern Flyer Alliance

2010-01-22T09:50:00.006-06:00

[Jan. 24th: Those interested in furthering the cause of the Northern Flyer Alliace should read this comment by the Alliance's Board of Directors.]

[Jan. 23rd: Edited to explain to out-of-towners the particulars of Wichita's present passenger rail service (or lack thereof).]

The proposed route for the Northern Flyer. Click image to enlarge. Image found here.

For most people in this country, trains are nostalgic, romantic. For millions and millions of people all over the world, though, trains are a vital means of moving large numbers of people efficiently and safely over long distances. I have some personal experience travelling by train. When I lived in Mexico in the mid-'80s, I made several long-distance trips by train; when time wasn't of the essence (Mexican trains are not as punctual as European ones), that was my preferred way to travel in that country. On all these trips, the trains I rode were crowded with people from every social class--for long distances, the train was cheaper than the bus. As our nation contemplates a coming future when we will be less dependent on oil, passenger rail needs to become a much larger presence in our nation's transportation system. The Obama Administration recognizes this in an admittedly modest way, having included $8 billion for high-speed passenger rail in last year's stimulus package. The recently-proposed high-speed rail system in California alone is estimated to cost $45 billion. While expensive, such systems are still far cheaper than are equivalent infrastructure investments in expanded highway and air travel needed to move the same number of people.

Wichita at present might as well not have passenger rail service. The nearest stop is in Newton, about 20 miles away. That in and of itself isn't terrible--people often drive much farther to get to an airport--but for train travellers south of Wichita, there's at present only the most indirect means of getting here. As my mother (who lives in Austin) and I learned to our dismayed surprise when she was considering taking the train here for a visit a few years back, travellers in Texas wanting to get to Newton have to go by way of Chicago before doubling back and travelling half again the distance they've already travelled. As the map above shows, the addition and upgrade of a few hundred miles of track would cut well over a thousand miles out of that journey; that connectivity should also encourage more people to consider taking the train here in the Plains states as rail travel becomes more direct.

So, very much in keeping with this blog's larger subject of alternate and mass transportation, I wanted to pass along some information about the Northern Flyer Alliance, which seeks to establish regular passenger rail service from Kansas City through Wichita and on to Oklahoma City and Fort Worth. I'd heard through the news last year that the Alliance had formed, but I confess to not having investigated further. However, the Alliance has been participating in WAMPO meetings, and it was through a WAMPO e-mail yesterday and a visit to WAMPO's website that I first visited the Alliance's website.

The Alliance has posted the results of a study conducted by the University of Kansas that determined approximate costs and benefits of regular passenger rail service through south-central Kansas and the midsection of Oklahoma. A summary of the study is here; the summary of the summary is that passenger rail would indeed be a good investment for this region, with a break-even return on investment in the first year of operation and annual revenues generated by business travel and tourism through the region. Here in Wichita, the trains would stop at the old Union Station depot downtown.

Such as this blog can offer, we support these findings and urge that passenger rail become a reality in the area. I suspect there's a strong need and desire for this service; speaking for myself, I'd dearly love one day to meet my mom at the train station--or, for that matter, take the train to Austin to visit her.

The WDDC's Goody Clancy presentation: Some comments

2010-01-21T22:42:00.001-06:00

This presetation took place back on the 13th. I wasn't in attendance, but today through the wonders of e-mail I received links to both what was shown to those who were there and a survey of audience responses to what was said.

Here is a link to the presentation made to the audience. It's full of familiar topics--and full of familiar ways of talking about making downtown "livable": the demographics of the city according to ages, sizes of households and incomes; what sort of housing people would like and can afford; what downtown would need to offer in the way of housing, shopping, dining and entertainment (note those latter three items--I'll come back to them later) to attract people to downtown; and, as I mentioned a while back, the theme of making downtown more walkable and bike-able. These are, of course, very good things to see being said, for all the reasons that all of you reading this blog probably know by heart.

Here, meanwhile, is a survey or audience responses to the presentation. I'd like to highlight some of the findings that I think are in some way attention-getting.

In response to the question "What is the most significant challenge for downtown housing, the largest number of people (42% of 131 surveys completed) said, "Building new housing at a price the market can afford." This is good to see. My sense of other cities' attempts to make their downtowns more livable is that housing costs and rents there effectively price people out of the market who would would otherwise be good fits for the urban core. The rent ranges that the research suggests the market will support seemed surprisingly reasonable, in fact. Now: whether builders and other investors will actually want to sell or rent at affordable rates is another matter.

For the question "What is the most significant opportunity for downtown retail?" the largest number of respondents (31%) said, "Satisfy unmet demand in the Wichita region for retail options in walkable settings." Again, good to see, and matches the results of the responses to the question, "What is the most significant opportunity for a more walkable downtown?": The two highest responses were, "Satisfy unmet demand in the Wichita region for living, working and/or shopping options in walkable settings" (36%) and "Make downtown streets more interesting and vibrant" [whatever that means] (35%). And finally, when respondents were asked to select from a list of items the three streetscape improvements that would most effectively improve walkability and transportation options in downtown, "Street amenities" received the highest number of responses (89), but in second and third place were "On-street bicycle lanes/cycle tracks" (55) and "Pedestrian wayfinding" (48).

The respondents, whoever they were, have the right ideas, it seems. I do wonder, though, whether anyone said anything about the need for a few small but full-service grovery stores for the 3,000 or so people the consultants say they think would like to live downtown. Perhaps they would be included in the category "retail"? (I won't go into the vagueness of a lot of the language in the presentation and survey questions.) I'm asking this because, as long-time readers of this blog know, I think that such places contribute significantly to a neighborhood's livability by not just selling food for residents but also providing them with places to meet and come to know each other as they visit there a couple or three times a week (the stores are close enough to walk, so there'd be no need either to drive or make one big trip per week). They contribute to building a sense of place, in other words. To encourage people to live downtown but not provide places to shop for food just turns downtown into another suburb, in terms of traffic patterns: traffic doesn't get reduced; those nice wide sidewalks don't get used as much as they could or should. Shopping, dining and entertainment are all well and good; but if people are genuinely living downtown, as opposed to, basically, just sleeping there, they'll need stuff other than places to amuse themselves. Stuff like, you know, food.

Central Wichita is already underserved by full-service grocery stores; to add yet more people here yet otherwise not plan for something so basic as places to buy food would be a mistake, I think. I'll spare you more ranting about this tonight and instead remind myself (and you) that perhaps the best place to rant further would be at next month's charrette at the Wichita Art Museum, as I noted here.

In addition to the survey, there's an attached article about the presentation that appeared in the Eagle. Curiously, it dwells at considerable length on something that the survey doesn't mention: the glaring need for hotel space downtown. While over 70% of business travelers to Wichita conduct business downtown, that area has only 12% of the town's hotel rooms. Another need, one the survey and the article both address, is the need for more office space downtown that's suitable for the technology that businesses require these days. The upshot of all that is that several large buildings, some of them multi-use, will be recommended in the urban core. Assuming the same people who work in those buildings will also be living in them or within a few blocks of them, then daytime automobile traffic should be much less than it would otherwise be.

As I think about WDDC, I keep going back to something we were told in the WAMPO meeting on Tuesday: That whether all or none of the projects under consideration were built, congestion and drive times would remain the same under any course of action. While I understand that it's a transportation board's job to build transportation stuff, it seems to me that it'd be a wiser course of action for municipalities to reduce the need for future road capacity by adopting policies that positively encourage people not to drive so much. Zoning that encourages high-density, mixed-use development in already-built areas--such as what will be happening downtown--is one of those ways. So is the development and expansion of public transit and alternate transportation. The idea is to provide infrastructure and options to get people to consider changing their behavior, rather than enabling the behavior and at the same time kind of hoping they'll see the light and not engage in the behavior being enabled. WDDC, it seems, is, or wants, to be headed in a positive direction. If they're not, they certainly talk a good game.

Notes and observations from Tuesday's WAMPO meeting

2010-01-20T02:05:00.002-06:00

Catch WAMPO MPT 2035 planning fever!! Here is a PSA intended to stir your inner transportation wonk.

Tuesday afternoon's meeting of WAMPO's Metropolitan Transportation Plan Project Advisory Committee (MTP-PAC) was informative and thought-provoking in ways I had not anticipated. There was a fair amount of wonk (which I'll go light on in this post) presented via PowerPoint slides and 3-ring binders that can hold two reams of paper, but I was able to step back and see a larger picture of the future--one that, compared to how things are now, looks pretty good for cyclists, pedestrians and advocates of public transit and, if certain other things come to pass (as they appear they will), will look even better.

First of all, a quick word about how all this works: WAMPO in essence serves as a kind of mediator between, on the one hand, the Federal government and its rules governing the allocation of monies for transportation projects and, on the other, the various municipalities in the immediate Wichita area with their wish lists for projects. WAMPO seeks to prioritize these projects, but it's ultimately up to the communities to build them. Thus, I learned, when I asked during the public comment segment, why there are no on-street bike lanes among the projects despite the fact that bike lanes are dirt cheap compared to the proposed off-street 10-ft.-wide multi-use paths (which cost about $1 million per mile to build): As of now, federal money will fund these streets' construction only if those paths are included. If the Complete Streets Act becomes law, the rules will change. Until that time, the decision to incorporate bike lanes is up to individual cities.

As my friend Jane Byrnes (WAMPO's cycling and pedestrian rep) put it to me, this meeting was all about pouring concrete. It's unfortunate that many of the projects on the initial list (all of which, by the way, are still under consideration) either deal with or will encourage more sprawl. But it's also the case that a lot of that concrete will be poured on behalf of cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. Moreoever, as I'll explain a little later, it may yet come to pass that for various reasons, there's a good chance that less of that automobile-centric concrete will get poured.

Kimberly Spielman, WAMPO's Public Involvement Coordinator, in addition to being responsible for drawing my (and thus your) attention to the PSA linked to above, made a couple of announcements of interest to most people who've read this far. The first was that the next WAMPO open house will be on Thursday, February 18th at the Water Center (101 E. Pawnee) from 4-6. Citizens can look at the list of proposed projects, ask questions, and offer comments. Despite the rather awkward meeting time, I recommend trying to attend if at all possible. At last summer's open house, I was able to meet other like-minded folks; and if my experience at yesterday's meeting was any indication, the WAMPO folks do indeed note--and appreciate--who shows up and who speaks up. Spielman's second announcement was that WAMPO will soon be posting an online survey that will allow the public to express its preferences for projects on the initial list. When that appears, I'll be sure to point you its way.

The next and longest segment of the meeting was a discussion of five or six travel demand models whose intent is to gauge the efficacy of the implementation of all, some, or none of the projects with regard to decreasing congestion and drive times. Apart from the various proposals for bus routes out to outlying communities, none of the models took into account alternate transportation or variables such as increased gasoline prices, federal mandates to reduce pollution levels, etc. Be sure you notice this: The results of the various models was that there would be no appreciable difference in reductions of congestion and drive times, no matter what projects were or were not done, or even if none of them were done. I'm sure you're thinking exactly what I thought as I sat there: Why do any of the road projects at all, then? Why not, instead, invest in trying to encourage more people to stay off the roads? A partial answer is that some of these projects need to be done for maintenance or safety reasons: bridge repair, the re-engineering of intersections and on- and off-ramps, etc. But by no means do all of the projects fall under that category.

As I alluded to above, other factors may come into play, some sooner than others, that will make less urgent the need to increase road capacity for cars. All that the model creators took into account was expected population growth; other members of the Committee, though, asked them to revisit their models to take into account such things as increased fuel costs and the fact that, with the EPA's new air quality rules, Sedgwick County will be found to be non-compliant and will therefore have to take steps to improve air quality through, chiefly, reducing the number of automobile trips made in the county. In other words: though buses were figured into the models we saw today and showed a modest increase in actual numbers of daily riders even with free fares figured in, it seems all but certain that traditional transportation projects will be de-emphasized, and public transport, ride-sharing programs and (in conjunction with ordinances that encourage high-density development) walking and cycling will, in the coming new decade, play much more prominent roles in the area's transportation future.

As I have noted many times on this site, I believe cycling can play a more vital role in that future through a combination of more on-street bike lanes (especially east-west routes and any routes at all west of Sedgwick County Park) and linkage between existing bike paths. None of the bike/ped projects on the list are located west of the park. Linkage, though, is another matter: The two long-promised projects that will link up paths, the one that will run from McAdams Park to Grove Park to link the Canal and K-96 paths, and the one that will run from Garvey Park to Plainview Park to link the Arkansas River and Gypsum Creek paths, are on the initial list and, several people told me, are all but certain to make the cut (Federal scoring of projects prioritizes bike-infrastructure these days). Also proposed is the conversion of the abandoned railroad right-of-ways between Andover and Wichita. I also chatted after the meeting with Dan Squires, a city engineer with the city of Derby (which, some of you know, has been building a pretty extensive bike-path system), and he mentioned plans for Derby to link its paths not only with some paths proposed to be built south of McConnell (thus, via Oliver and Mac Arthur, there'd be connectivity with the both the Gypsum Creek and Arkansas River paths) but also with Mulvane's paths.

So. Changes are coming to this area's transportation. Some of it will be forced on us, but I sensed no resentment of those facts among MTP-PAC members. Jane Byrnes confirmed that impression, in fact, that WAMPO recognizes the importance of a robust alternate transportation system to this area's future development and health. This may sound as though interested parties need do nothing, but though funding for bike and pedestrian projects is more certain than it is for other projects, it's not certain that all of them will be. That's where public input is needed: the Committee and, later, the various cities need to know which projects are important enough to people that they'll make time in the middle of a work day to speak up on their behalf.

The next meeting is on Monday the 25th at 1:30 on the 10th floor of City Hall. See you there?

New places to visit

2010-01-18T19:25:00.002-06:00

Via Kansas Cyclist and River City Cyclist, here are some new-to-me area cycling blogs . . . and a bike-powered delivery service:

Adventure Monkey. Eric is an avid cyclist and photographer in Emporia. His pictures are chiefly landscapes, and most of them are of the Flint Hills and other Kansas-y places.

Cycling and CX. David is in Newton and describes his interests this way: "I teach debate and love cycling. I talk about those things."

Vélocourier Wichita. Serves much of central Wichita during the daylight hours of the business week.

I'll be posting links to these folks in the appropriate places in the right gutter.

Douglas Design District Streetscape Improvement Plan: Some comments

2010-01-18T15:14:00.001-06:00

Image found here.

Yesterday, while bumping around the Wichita blogosphere looking for stuff that might be of interest for readers of this blog, I ran across the Douglas Design District's streetscape improvement plan, which was submitted last month. The plan amounts to a re-imagining of three miles of Douglas from Washington east to Glendale (one block east of Oliver), and much of it will look very familiar to those who know that stretch of Douglas that runs from the river to Seneca (the plan even comes with a "Lessons Learned from the Delano District" appendix): a reduced speed limit (from 35 to 30 mph); two-lane traffic each way with landscaped medians from Washington to I-135 and, east to Glendale, one lane of traffic each way with a dedicated left-turn lane; curb bulb-outs that create space for buses to pull over at stops; wide, pedestrian-friendly sidewalks. But the Design District's plan differs in a truly important way: It is a full embracing of the Complete Streets concept, with dedicated bike and bus/parking lanes on both sides of the street.

If and when it's built, Douglas will serve as an effective demonstration of the most counter-intuitive argument in favor of the complete street concept: that reducing the number of lanes dedicated to cars and adding dedicated bike and bus lanes actually increases a street's traffic-bearing capacity and efficiency. The Design District report states again and again that, based on their modeling, eliminating two car lanes and adding the bike and bus lanes will not appreciably slow traffic flow, and the reading I've done elsewhere regarding other cities' experiences confirms this. As genuinely nice as it is to have Mt. Vernon as a smaller-scale Complete Street from the river to Broadway, that stretch (almost exclusively residential) just doesn't have enough traffic to demonstrate the truth of that argument. Given Douglas' literal and figurative centrality in Wichita, the evidence will be if not unavoidable, then at least more evident to more people.

No: I will rarely if ever ride my bike on that stretch of Douglas. But the point of infrastructure is not to benefit the few but the many. Complete Streets don't benefit only cyclists and pedestrians at the expense of motorists; they're designed to make streets safer and more efficient for everyone who uses them. The even greater good, meanwhile, will be that other neighborhoods will see this and begin dreaming dreams for their own major thoroughfares. And you know the rest.

Wichita Cycle Chic?

2010-01-18T11:56:00.002-06:00

This picture and the accompanying post sparked a heated discussion of, well, how to write about women on bicycles--on a bike blog in Portland, Oregon, of all places.

The bicycle . . . became an important part of the history of the emancipation of women. The bicycle gave women a freedom of movement that few had known. Even the restrictive clothing of the day--long, flowing dresses that clearly didn't work on a bike--began to wilt before the new device. . . . Susan B. Anthony declared that the bicycle "has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." . . . [However,] Marguerite Lindley, a professor of physical culture in New York, warned in 1896 that cycling hindered "feminine symmetry and poise" and was a "disturber of internal organs." --Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution, p. 34

I am asked to volunteer on a committee for a bicycle organization “because we need more women.” The person who invites me says that he had been frantically calling every woman he knows in the bike scene, and explains that at this point, expertise matters less than gender. --Elly Blue, "Editorial: My Year as a Woman in a City of Bikes," BikePortland.org, January 12, 2010.

[W]hen more women begin riding, that will signal a big change in attitude, which will prompt further changes in the direction of safety and elegance. I can ride till my legs are sore and it won’t make riding any cooler, but when attractive women are seen sitting upright going about their city business on bikes day and night, the crowds will surely follow. --David Byrne, reviewing Pedaling Revolution, quoted here.

Navigating gender politics is tricky, as any thoughtful person will tell you. Navigating them by bicycle in Wichita may be more fraught with peril than I know.

I'll just blurt out my question: Do you know or have you seen women here in Wichita who regularly bike for reasons other than recreation?

Over the weekend, as I read the first two passages quoted above and was reminded of Byrne's declaration, I was struck by the irony that despite the bicycle's role in changing social attitudes among and about women, nowadays biking for utilitarian purposes is, even in bike-friendly Portland, a predominantly male activity. Anecdotally, I can attest that here in Wichita, I see plenty of women riding recreationally but have yet to see a female cyclist who is obviously commuting; I have seen a couple of women on bikes at the grocery store, though. Of those readers who visited here regularly, the vast majority were men. The first sentence in Byrne's quote is surely right, and it is indeed something I hope will come to pass in Wichita. But it's the implications of his second sentence--in particular, the adjective "attractive"--that also seems to have been a sticking point regarding the post accompanying the picture above. More women, we hope, will be attracted to cycling because of its practicality and because, as I have said in various contexts, cities benefit from having more cyclists, male and female, out and about. To focus on the, shall we say, aesthetics of women on bikes is potentially patronizing or demeaning. The Cycle Chic movement, as I note in particular here, with its goal of "riding pretty," seeks not to separate practicality from aesthetics but observe that, for women in particular, looking good matters no matter how they commute. Commuter-cycling would seem to present challenges for women that other modes of transport do not, especially in cities that aren't bike-friendly. Cycle Chic's implicit rebuttal is, Not necessarily.

So, Wichita. As I also note at the end of the post I just linked to, it may be too early for Wichita Cycle Chic to emerge--after all, we have no cycling culture at all to speak of--but I'd dearly love to be proven wrong. For, you see, one thing that Pedaling Revolution makes clear with regard to cycling culture is that what we might see as success at consciousness-raising is actually more akin to self-fulfilling prophecy: If you ride, they will join you.

At least, I hope so. They have to see you first.

WAMPO meetings and WDDC doings

2010-01-17T17:29:00.001-06:00

First, the WAMPO meetings: The next two will be on Tuesday, January 19th, at 1:00 pm., and Monday, January 25, at 1:30 p.m. Both will be held in the Large Conference Room on the 10th floor of City Hall. The initial list of projects to be discussed at these meetings is here (.pdf file). (Bike and pedestrian projects are on the first two pages; some of the bridge and road projects include bike and pedestrian accommodations as well, so be sure to look through the whole document.) I cannot say with certainty that all these are still being considered, but some of them are.

I will make the meeting on the 19th, but duties call on the 25th; I hope those of you with work schedules that permit such things will be able to attend. It's my understanding that warm bodies, there, being warm on behalf of these projects, count for a great deal. I would just make the quick observation that, yes, many of the road projects designed to expand capacity for cars will include 10-foot-wide multi-use paths, but it seems that the Powers That Be would save a great deal of money by building narrower sidewalks and making narrower lanes for cars that would then permit the addition of bike lanes on these streets. Assuming the same number of lanes for motorists and a modest amount of bike traffic, you'd actually increase the roads' capacity and save on construction costs as well. But maybe in these days of budget shortfalls, I'm deluded into thinking that more efficient use of transportation monies is a better idea than it in fact is. In any case, I plan to speak up on behalf of some bike lanes on the 19th, and I hope those of you in attendance will as well.

Now on to Wichita's downtown development. The overview for the downtown master plan--really more like a statement of principles and the justification for them--is here: as you can see in the presentation, the consultants the city has hired value walkability, which is, in the abstract, good news for us livable-city types. The next big public events will be on Thursday, February 25th from 5:30-8:30 p.m. at the Scottish Rite Temple, at which Jim Cloar will talk about the movement from planning to reality; and a charrette all day on Saturday, February 27th at the Wichita Art Museum. The gathering on the 27th sounds like it could be really fun. Thursday's, not so much, admittedly, but it's the people planting themselves in hard plastic chairs that get heard at these things. I'll actually be able to attend both of these, so I hope some of you will be there, too.

Returning

2010-01-17T07:52:00.004-06:00

The human body is not designed to go faster than fifteen miles per hour. Our sight, our ability to interpret things, to process things is bicycling speed. Anything higher is against human evolution. And I'm convinced that as people end up spending more of their lives at a human speed, they're going to be happier.

--Dan Burden, early-'70s cycling advocate, as quoted in Jeff Mapes, Pedaling Revolution, p. 28

Cycling in Wichita is back, though not (yet) with a vengeance. Too much catching up to do with regard to this blog's subject. However, I hope to begin doing some of that catching up this morning and afternoon and have a couple of posts up today.

I received Pedaling Revolution from my in-laws as a Christmas present and have been reading it. Much of it is familiar, but not all, and seeing as its tone is that of the passionate advocate, it preaches pretty directly to this particular choir. But the quoted passage is here as an indirect explanation for why this blog has languished for so long: Due to circumstances beyond my control having to do with my wife's health, I'd not been able to live my life at human speed--some days, at any speed. Regular riding, and blogging about it, became lesser concerns.

It's hard to type when one's fingers are crossed, but I think I can say that things are now such that I can update here on a more or less regular basis. It's good to be back.

In which your correspondent draws a bright line regarding advocacy

2009-07-14T19:08:00.004-05:00

I don't believe I'll be speaking before the City Council on behalf of this idea anytime soon. However, your "cycling as economic stimulus" jokes are welcome.

Very short notice . . .

2009-07-14T12:15:00.002-05:00

Just received this e-mail from Greg Standifer ("gcstandifer AT gmail DOT com"):

. . . I wanted to see if you think anyone would be interested in getting together for a city ride tonight. Ryan Duzer, a passionate biker, is riding across America and is making a stop in Wichita today. I'm meeting up with him this afternoon to show him around and offer a bed for the night (he usually sleeps on picnic tables).

I sent a message to the Facebook Bike Wichita group, but wondered if you thought it was appropriate for your blog too. Let me know--email [me]. http://ryanvanduzer.com/

Thanks,
Greg

I have to stay close to home today/this evening, but I hope some of you can join Greg and Ryan today.

And, in case anyone's interested: I'm well--just very distracted by various things. Look for some posts later on this week.

Local blog round-up IV (holiday edition)

2009-07-03T07:55:00.002-05:00

First of all, best wishes to all for a happy and safe Fourth of July.

**Some very good news: Via the Coasters Bicycle Club comes this Craigslist ad:

some fellow cyclists and I are working on a community bike shop, a non-profit co-op with the goal of promoting bikes as viable transportation by teaching bicycle maintenance and repair while recycling discarded or donated bicycles into affordable, sustainable transportation. We're calling it the Wichita Bicycle Collective. These types of organizations exist in many other cities and we feel Wichita is long overdue for a little progress in this area. To learn more, visit bikecollectives.org, If this is something you'd like to see happen, we need your help! Donate your time, money, or old bikes or parts and tools, the most important part of a community bike shop is the COMMUNITY, and it won't happen without YOU.

The ad goes on to list a few bikes ready to be picked up for suggested donations.

I'd heard about and posted on this initiative before, so it's good to know Mike has things up and running. This is indeed a worthy endeavor, entirely in keeping with the truth that good quality, inexpensive bicycles should be made available to as many people as possible. If you're interested in donating or volunteering, you can reach him at "mike AT wichitabicyclecollective DOT org". (Note to self: I gotta get hip and start checking Craigslist.)

**In Oz Bicycle Club's June newsletter, the Editor's Corner (pp.1-3) contains a fairly lengthy--and accurate--assessment of city and state (in)action concerning cycling in Wichita and Kansas more generally. While nothing there will be new to anyone who regularly rides a bike here in town, it's nevertheless good to know that other folks are noticing. I would simply add as well that all of us single voices crying in the wilderness need to do a better job of crying collectively in order to change things at City Hall and in Topeka (and I'm not excluding myself from that, either).

**Over at River City Cyclist, Robert has some excellent advice for summertime bike-commuting--especially for dealing with a regular problem I have: sweat in the eyes. He also promises instructional videos and the introduction of something every city's bike culture needs: "Wichita's very own 'Cyclist Secret Wave.'" (Thanks also for introducing me to "steelo."

**And finally: I am officially on the public agenda for the City Council meeting on Tuesday, July 7. I'll be asking the council to consider adopting a Complete Streets policy for the city. The meeting starts at 9:00; first will be some awards and recognitions, followed by the public agenda. I hope some of you can attend; it'd be a pleasure to meet you.

Front Porch Cycle Chic: The Delano District as community-state

2009-07-02T12:35:00.002-05:00

The 2003 re-zoning map for the Delano District. Click on the image to enlarge. Image found here.

For this third Front Porch Cycle Chic post (the others--and, be forewarned/forearmed, they are lengthy but not vital to have read for this post--are here and here), I want to try to link up some things said earlier to my post from April on Rob Horning's "Hobby Economy." By way of reply to the April post, Karen of Delano Wichita posted "Delanonomics," where, within the context of the Delano District's quest to have some gateways built to demarcate the neighborhood, she links to some articles about various DIY projects taken on by other neighborhoods when they got tired of their local governments' inactions. She closes with this:

I’m still not sure where to go with all that. Is it the (an?) answer to the recurring, “I’m a resident of the Delano Neighborhood/member of the Delano Neighborhood Association. What’s in it for me” question? Which is, you guessed it, the subject of another upcoming post.

She is asking, in other words, about the community's sense of itself, its identity. How can Delanonians come to regard their neighborhood as a place not merely where they sleep, but where they live?

Delano Wichita is, to my mind, very much part of that discussion--not in the sense of what in grad school we called subject-formation, but in the sense of providing the District with, well, a virtual front porch, a place where neighbors can share and comment on the news. It's the commenting-on where the work of identity begins: out of that commentary emerges, over time, a clearer sense of what is important to Delanonians as Delanonians--that is, what their commonly-held concerns are. Out of that discussion will emerge, over time, a peculiarly Delanonian sense of their common good. (For a nice discussion of the difference between common concerns (what Augustine called "loved things held in common") and common good, see the comments section, beginning at the 6th comment down, of my friend Russell Arben Fox's Front Porch Republic post, "Communitarianism, Conservatism, Populism and Localism: An Updated Survey.")

But, as Delanonians' frustration with not having gateways shows--indeed, with there being some confusion even at the official level with the very boundaries of the Delano District--it's difficult to establish what common concerns are without the existence of common goods--which, as I just said above, ideally arise from and as expressions of common concerns. This is why the Delano Clock Tower (image found here) has become so iconic: for now, it's the only public-space expression of the District that signifies with anything like adequacy that one has arrived in the District. But the tower isn't in the center of the District but on its eastern end. Meanwhile, there are street signs that say "Delano" along Seneca on the approaches to Douglas, but they point only east: as if to say that "Delano" consists only of Douglas from Seneca to McLean. And to my knowledge no signage, accurate or not, of any sort appears on the western edge of the District.

So, the need for some sort of prominent--and accurate--gateways, or at least signage, for the Delano District: that will define a space mutually acknowledged not only by Delanonians but by Wichitans generally . . . a visible first step in establishing a community-state's distinctiveness. But boundaries are as much (more?) for other people as they are for the residents who live within the space they delimit. Communities are defined not just by boundaries but by what they contain. And besides, you may be thinking: what does all of this have to do with bicycles?

Well: as I said at the beginning of this post, I think of Delano Wichita as being something like the District's virtual front porch, but it still needs a physical space that performs that same function, one of such a nature that people would bike/walk to and in it--in other words, a space seen primarily as Delanonian (though not to the exclusion of Wichitans, of course). The long-proposed, till-now-delayed bike path, which I first mentioned here and and recently spoke with Janet Miller about here, is a good example of what I mean: the path, plus what the path would have the potential to foster as people propose and develop residences and businesses physically and conceptually oriented toward the path and its traffic. A space distinctively, clearly Delanonian, because it would be a destination as well as a thoroughfare, in which, via not only residences and commerce but also public gatherings of whatever sort--some integrated with Wichita events, some more neighborhood-oriented--Delanonians cultivate and participate in the communal life of the District. Such a space might also provide impetus toward the development of the urban village called for in the District's revitalization plan. The bike-path and the space on either side of it would by its very nature not have to be car-centric in the way Douglas's recent re-design is; it would be the sort of space that people so inclined would regularly want to walk or ride their bikes to, and not just for recreational purposes--especially if there were residences on the path as well as near it, and especially if basic shopping were provided . . . like, say, a corner grocery store.

There'd be no other part of Wichita quite like this. It'd be cooler--because more livable--than any other part of the city. I'd think that Delanonians would be quite all right with being identified with such a space.

Open thread #3: We know the bad stuff about the 'burbs . . . but what's good about them?

2009-07-01T06:11:00.007-05:00

No time just now to write a legitimate post on this, but I wanted to bring it to your attention:

Via Streetsblog comes this post from the new-to-me Oklahoma blog imagiNATIVEamerica that asks a simple but genuine question: is there a sympathetic non-fiction treatment of suburban life? Another way of asking--in a non-mocking way, I assure you: What, if anything, about the suburbs is worth fostering and/or preserving as cities begin to re-imagine themselves and adopt land-use and infrastructures better suited to a future landscape less oil-centric in nature?

Comment away.

UPDATE: The comments over there are quite good--if the questions I ask in this post are of any interest to you, go visit 'em.

UPDATE II (July 2): Some background reading, also via imagiNATIVEamerica: This brief Atlantic article on the career of Robert Moses, the "father of the postmodern American landscape."

A quick comment on Waxman-Markey and logic

2009-06-30T17:06:00.004-05:00

Something that visitors here might be interested in reading: Over at good old Blog Meridian, I have a post up on illogical--but sound--reasons for supporting Waxman-Markey (the huge cap-and-trade/renewable energy bill that just passed the House of Representatives. Here's an excerpt:

If you've read this blog for a while, you've probably figured out without my telling you that I'm in favor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the complex cap-and-trade, reduction-in-carbon-based energy, investment-in-alternate-energy legislation that just passed the House of Representatives and faces an admittedly uncertain future in the Senate. My reasons for supporting it, though, include one that may surprise many of you, given that a) it's not usually one that comes up in the debates about the bill and b) that its source is John McCain.

I'll talk about (b) first because it will lead inexorably to (a). At some point during last year's campaign (the primaries, I believe), during a debate when the question was about climate change legislation, McCain said something to the effect that even if reducing carbon emissions does little or no good in affecting what may after all be a naturally-occurring phenomenon, there are still-indisputable goods to be obtained by passing such legislation: a cleaner, healthier environment and greater self-sufficiency (political as well as economic) due to reduced dependency on foreign oil. I agreed with very little McCain offered up as reasons to vote for him, but on these points, at least, he was absolutely right (and would be now, if he still felt it expedient to make them). However, it's equally indisputable that one reason these points don't get raised is that, as desirable as these things are, you can't quantify them so as to include them in any of the various cost-benefit analyses being offered up in support of or against Waxman-Markey. Thus, they become inadmissible as evidence.

Just once, I wish someone would come along and say, When clean-water and clean-air legislation were enacted in the '70s, businesses pitched fits about their increased costs and having to pass those costs on to consumers. Well, sure: and as a result we pay more because businesses were forced to change behavior they were very likely not to have changed out of the goodness of their hearts (because there was a time when it cost literally nothing to dump waste as people saw fit, air and soil and water quality be damned--and it showed, I well remember those days). But is anyone opposed to Waxman-Markey, or anyone opposed to "excessive government regulation," seriously going to argue that that our quality of life would be better if not for the creation of the EPA, given the clear road we'd been heading down? The resounding No we'd hear, true, doesn't fit into a strict cost-benefit analysis, but the fact that it shows people prefer--and benefit from--cleaner air and water surely needs to figure into this debate. Or have our cleaner air and water become such givens (the '60s and '70s becoming ever more distant memories for many of us) that they strangely seem negligible as a consideration?

Mr. B. goes to City Hall: A preview

2009-06-28T11:21:00.007-05:00

As I noted a while back, I plan to speak before the City Council on Tuesday, July 7th, during the public agenda portion of the meeting, to ask that the Council consider adopting a Complete Streets policy. What follows are some excerpts from what I'll be saying. As you'll see, my goal is to emphasize the practicality of such a policy--something that I think is true and compelling but doesn't often get voiced. Also as you'll see, I'll be referring to the June 11 Complete Streets webinar that WAMPO hosted and that I posted on here.

[O]ne crucial thing the webinar forcefully brought home to me that I would like to share with the Council is that Complete Streets are not just nice to have but are also extraordinarily practical.

During the webinar, one of the speakers described a street in Orlando, Florida, that has recently been converted from a four-lane, two-way street to a three-lane street with dedicated combination bicycle/bus lanes on either side. This street is a very busy one—in its previous form, 20,000 cars a day used it. But since its conversion, that street has seen a 43% reduction in accidents and an 87% reduction in injuries from those accidents—and, surprisingly, an increase in its use of 1,000 cars per day. The lesson here seems obvious to me: by not widening the street but by reapportioning its surface for various uses rather than one, the city of Orlando made that street at once more efficient and safer.

Perhaps the most practical argument in favor of Complete Streets, especially these days, is that some of these projects are much less expensive than conventional street-building and –widening, and some are much cheaper even than bike paths. WAMPO’s Regional Pathway System Plan, adopted in 2007, proposes three major east-west re-striping projects totaling 12.8 miles, one on Douglas from Webb Rd. to I-135, one on Waterman from I-135 west to the railroad tracks, and one on Maple from Garden Plain and Goddard to west Wichita, that in 2007 had a total estimated cost of under half a million dollars—far less money than the cost of the recently-approved and much-needed bike path that will connect the Canal Route path to the K-96 path (for which, by the way, I thank the council for approving).

I am not an engineer or traffic planner, but it seems to me that it is the rare principle of infrastructure design that can simultaneously increase a street’s traffic-handling capacity and actually make it safer, do so more efficiently without widening it, and save the city a substantial amount of money both in terms of construction and, later on, in terms of the costs saved because that street is safer. The fiscal conservatives among us can surely see the financial virtues inherent in these benefits. But there is also the more intangible but no less important benefit that Complete Streets provide: they contribute to making the city a little greener, a little more livable, a place where people and businesses don’t just want to locate but want to stay. It’s the rare idea that progressives and conservatives, that cyclists, pedestrians and motorists can agree upon, but surely Complete Streets is one of them. I urge that the Council consider making a Complete Streets policy an integral part of its planning for Wichita’s future.

Some quick notes from Janet Miller's District VI coffee

2009-06-27T15:42:00.002-05:00

This morning I attended Janet Miller's end-of-the-month coffee with constituents, held in its new venue of Mead's Corner. The chief order of business was to discuss the city's projected budgetary shortfall of $13 million for the next fiscal year and some of the measures being considered for dealing with it--some of which you may have read about here. Miller announced that on Wednesday, July 1 in the evening the Council will hold a public meeting in the council chambers. See this story in the Eagle for more information, including an e-mail address for sending your questions about the budget.

Given the subject matter, this wasn't among the cheeriest meetings I've ever attended. But after the meeting's official end, I spoke with Miller for a moment about my upcoming appearance before the Council and some admittedly-vague observations based on some things thought here about the Midtown path and the proposed path through the Delano District. It struck me the other day that, given the new central library's location and the potential for integrating activities between it and Exploration Place and other venues along the river, that might encourage the city to grant a higher priority to funding the Delano District path; when I mentioned this to Miller this morning, she agreed and gave me the impression that she had been thinking along those lines as well. When I mentioned that the path isn't quite in her district, she said that she is a strong advocate for that project and for the neighborhood. Good to know. It is, in fact, something of a shame (and with no offense intended toward the Delano District's other representative, District 4's Paul Gray) that the vagaries of district boundaries dictate that so little of Delano falls within District VI, given that strong advocacy (I think everyone there this morning was from Riverside--that includes the couple who self-identified as being from "North Riverside"). Regarding the Midtown path, she agreed with me that the potential is large for encouraging development and projects along its route that will make it an attractive space for residents. She mentioned to me that a couple of the schools along the route would be creating murals along the path, as well as other projects that would seek to integrate the path with the school's campus. For my part, I wondered aloud if some of the businesses along the path who, let's be honest, have sides facing the path that only a passing freight train could love, could be encouraged in some way to remodel their buildings so as to take the path into account--something along the lines of the Douglas Street streetscaping and facade improvements from McLean to Seneca.

In one way, talking with Janet Miller about such things is preaching to the choir: in each meeting I've had with her, she has never wavered in her commitment to cycling infrastructure and larger issues having to do with livable cities; today was no different, despite the fact that we had just been talking about a very large shortfall in the city's projected revenues for next year. That said, the city is not exactly awash in money just now . . . and even if it were, there's still the fundamental matter of changing hearts and minds so that the city (and the public) come to see that cycling infrastructure, if done right, can be a practical, long-term investment that will not only save the city money over time but also attract and keep people here as the city becomes a little more livable, a little less car-centric. Especially when money is tight, having this conversation becomes even more vital, even with those council people who already agree with you: they need to know their constituents' thinking so they can present--and represent--that thinking in their deliberations and voting.

Local blog round-up III (Heat-advisory edition)

2009-06-27T06:46:00.001-05:00

Various things, some of them actually happy, have conspired to keep me from posting this past week; on the other hand, thanks to the Mrs. (a "combination Christmas-birthday-Fathers' Day-anniversary present," she says), I have a new computer monitor! Can you tell?

Anyway. "Summer," as you have no doubt noticed, is now here in spirit as well as in the letter of the calendar. It's in that spirit that, as you'll see, some of the past week's cycling-related posts from the area's bloggers have some strategies for dealing with the heat:

Eddie of Clicks and Whistles links to a list of "brews and bikes": beers that are in some way connected to cycling. Locals may recognize New Belgium's wonderful Fat Tire; my ignorance of the others on the list suggests to me that I have some future research to conduct. In moderation, of course.

I missed seeing this for inclusion in last week's Round-up: Randy and Nova recently went to Galveston, and all they brought us was this video of their ride along the Seawall.

Robert has several posts up over at River City Cyclist. Here, he posts notice of a night ride for 10 p.m. this evening (that's one way to avoid the heat); and here, he makes the case for why it's safer to ride on the street than on the sidewalk.

Russell's In Medias Res isn't a cycling blog, but he has an advice-filled post on on ways to make hot-weather cycling a little easier. Russell's an inveterate bike-commuter, so he knows whereof he speaks.

Also, I want to extend thanks to a few folks who have seen fit to link to this humble blog--thanks to them, some people have found their way here: the above-mentioned Clicks and Whistles; BikeBlogs.com (an online directory of cycling blogs whose orientation is sports/recreation; we're listed in both "Miscellaneous Blogs" and "Regional Blogs"); Green Eco Service's "Kansas" page; and Charleston Cycle Chic. Readers of this blog know there's not a whole lot of ostensible Cycle Chic to be found here (except in the philosophical sense), but I'm still grateful for visitors . . . and I hope they're not too disappointed when they come by.

Local blog round-up II

2009-06-18T20:06:00.004-05:00

This week's survey of recent and/or interesting posts from local cycling blogs and clubs:

A quiet week last week on the blogging front.

Bicycleptic goes on a ghost hunt--without his bicycle, but wishing he'd taken it with him.

Eddie of Clicks and Whistles commented on this blog for the first time last week. By following the links in his profile I learned that he is an avid cyclist--in fact, he'd tried to complete Biking Across Kansas this year but had to leave the ride due to some pretty bad knee pain. In my response to his comment, I linked to his BAK posts. Meanwhile, he's gone to the doctor, and here he reports on his knee . . . along with some other minor surgery he had performed that day. Though Clicks and Whistles is not, strictly speaking, a cycling blog, you'll quickly get the message that the man has got it bad for bicycles. There are worse addictions.

It's been a week for injuries that keep folks off their bikes for a while. Over at River City Cyclist, Robert reports that he's been laid low by back pain.

Heads up (with a correction)

2009-06-17T20:37:00.004-05:00

I'll be requesting time to speak to the City Council about the virtues of Complete Streets at their weekly meeting on Tuesday, ~~June 30~~ July 7*. It will start at 9:00 a.m. I hope some of you can make it.

____________
*I learned this week that the Council doesn't meet on 5th Tuesdays in a month.

Announcing the Wichita Bike-Commuter Map project

2009-06-16T17:55:00.001-05:00

A little inspiration: The très-cool logo for the NolaCycle Bike Map Project, a little bit about which below.

Some of you know that today is known as Bloomsday: on this day in 1904, the Irish novelist sets the action of his novel Ulysses. That novel describes the wanderings and adventures of one Leopold Bloom in a Dublin so carefully described, you could do a pretty substantive recreation of the city as it was on that day. Certainly, you could map it pretty well. It seems appropriate to me that the project I'm announcing here also involves maps and a city.

I am pleased to announce that Robert of River City Cyclist and I will begin to collect information that will lead to the production of a map of Wichita that will show information that those of us who travel in the city via bicycle--not just bike-commuters--tell us they find useful. But this begs the question: What do riders want and need to see in a map of the city? Established bike-paths and bike-lanes, to be sure, but what else? Recommended routes to shopping, schools, etc.? Information such as the wealth of information the NolaBike project shows (things like pavement conditions, traffic speed, dangerous intersections, etc.)?

To be honest, we don't want to presume--and besides, we hope this project will be at once a collective expression of the local cycling community and a node around which that same community can begin to define itself.

So: please e-mail us with maps of your routes, your suggestions for content, etc. You may reach me at "blogmeridian AT sbcglobal DOT net" or Robert at "robert AT rivercitycyclist DOT com"

Thanks in advance.

". . . and yes I said yes we will map our city Yes."

Turn-of-the-century Topeka Cycle Chic

2009-06-15T21:45:00.001-05:00

Earlier today Randy of Kansas Cyclist, apparently noticing the pictures accompanying the Front Porch Cycle Chic posts, ~~decided to humor me~~ surprised me with an e-mail that had a link to this picture (click the image to enlarge it), from Kansas Memory (a service of the Kansas Historical Society):

The accompanying caption reads, "Mr. and Mrs. George Hackney posed with their bicycles, Topeka, Kansas.//Date: Between 1900 and 1905."

In his accompanying note, Randy writes, "Regular folk riding bicycles in everyday clothing ... the days when bikes were respectable adult transportation, even for the elderly... Cool old pic!" Yes, indeed. These people exude Cycle Chic as Randy describes it here: It's hard to escape the sense as you look at this picture that these bicycles were more than simple props for the Hackneys.

Seeing it jogged my memory of something I gave a little thought to as I was looking for images for the Front Porch Cycle Chic posts and I ran across lots of images taken in Wichita of people pictured with their bicycles--individuals, families, and riding clubs: gather up and post a collection of them as part nostalgia trip but also as a subtle reminder that bicycles were once a part of people's everyday lives here. Not such a bad thing to be reminded of. Anyway, look for that sometime down the road.

Just what are we promoting here?

2009-06-15T07:00:00.001-05:00

(That is, "we" as in "I" and "here" as in this space.)

Over at Carbon Trace recently, Andy has been looking a little more carefully at the vocabulary he employs as an advocate of cycling. In response to my first Front Porch Cycle Chic post, for example, he examines--and decides to ban from his vocabulary--the word "lifestyle" when discussing cycling. Then this past Saturday, he posts the at first startlingly-titled "I No Longer Like 'Commuting.'" Here's what he means:

I certainly commute to work by bicycle, and I recommend it to anyone willing to give it a try. But there is general cultural block that makes riding a bicycle to work seem terribly difficult — especially for women. How to dress. Fear of sweating. Time pressure. Social pressure. Traffic fear. All of these and more play a role in the perception that bicycle commuting is difficult.

I now think emphasizing bicycle commuting as a part of bicycle advocacy is a bad idea. It just throws up too many culturally-bound barriers and fears.

He decides that a better way to promote cycling is to emphasize its utility through his idea of "the 1-Mile Solution" (which I've also discussed).

At one level, I could easily say: Well, part of Andy's day job is teaching rhetoric--of course he's going to fret over little stuff like this, poor guy. But you know, MY day job is teaching English, so language is kind of a big deal with me, too. So, I got to thinking about the cause(s) that Cycling in Wichita speaks on behalf of and the language it uses in doing so. After all: I took up cycling at all primarily because of its usefulness for getting to and from work cheaply. I thought back to the conceiving of this blog when I was thinking about its title, some clunky versions of which would have included some form of "commute." I have spoken many, many times on behalf of the connectivity of already-existing bike paths so as to make them more useful to would-be bike-commuters, and on behalf of the inclusion of bike lanes in future planning to facilitate on-street cycling. Though I have been known to engage in riding just for the sheer pleasure of it (on Saturday, for example, I rode to the Old Town Farmers' market and then visited several of the Delano District's neighborhood garage sales for the best reason of all: Just Because), I barely mention recreational or sport cycling here. And finally, I'm doing a little thinking about a project, soon to be announced here, that I came up with specifically with the needs of bike-commuters in mind. So, I asked myself if all that may have caused some of the more casual visitors to this site to shy away from the idea of just cycling more, and to more places, than they might otherwise.

Short answer: I hope not.

As regular visitors here know, I don't post exclusively on the details of my own commute or on commuting generally. But I do have lots to say about re-framing the way cycling has historically been thought of here in favor of a more-inclusive view whose ultimate goal is a bike-friendlier city: the above-mentioned connectivity between already existing bike paths and more on-street cycling-specific infrastructure, yes; but also fundamental re-thinking about street design and development in general: how and where to design walkable (read: livable) urban environments--something I hope the good people of WDDC are giving thought to, of course, but so also should every neighborhood association. The less car-centric and more people-centric city planning is, the more livable a city becomes.

I don't know . . . maybe Cycling in Wichita is too narrow a title . . .

WAMPOpalooza: More meetings!--a government entity's idea of after-event parties

2009-06-14T09:55:00.001-05:00

Via Jane Byrnes comes the meeting schedule for WAMPO's Metropolitan Transportation Plan Project Advisory Committee (MTP-PAC) and Transportation Policy Body (TPB) for the rest of this year and the first half of 2010. These meetings will concern formulation and discussion of the 2030 Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP), and all are open to the public. It was my understanding from Thursday's meetings that all these meetings (all on Mondays and Tuesdays) are held on the 10th floor of the city hall building.

Jane notes sends along the following, versions of which you've already heard plenty of from me but which cannot be said enough:

I believe citizens who choose to attend will reap benefits long before 2035. . . . The meetings are short, only one hour so there may not be an opportunity for attendees to speak--but staff assured me that the mere presence of multimodal transportation would be effective.

For convenience's sake, in the next day or so I'll put together a separate entry that pulls together all the LRTP links and post a link to that over in the right gutter. As to "What now?": I have said my words, and you are wise.

WAMPOpalooza: WAMPO Open house

2009-06-12T14:10:00.001-05:00

[For the curious, my post on the WAMPO-hosted Complete Streets webinar is here.]

Yesterday afternoon's open house was more sparsely attended than the webinar but, to my mind, more reflective of the city: one, for example, runs a business in Old Town and is interested in public transit; another is a bike commuter in west Wichita, which, as you know, has no paths or lanes of any sort. Perhaps because of this more eclectic mix, my mood this time was the reverse of my mood at the webinar: initial frustration but increasing optimism regarding the future of cycling/pedestrian and public transportation infrastructure in the area. There were two chief orders of business: to present the list of those projects eligible for inclusion in the 2010 fiscal year's Transportation Improvement Program (hereafter known as TIP); and to announce the beginning this fall of work on the Wichita Area 2030 Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP--its process is here).

(Full disclosure: As you may have already surmised, this post will be flecked with acronyms of various sorts, some of which I was introduced to only yesterday. I do not pretend to be entirely clear as to the purpose(s) of all the entities indicated by these acronyms, just so you know; what follows is my best understanding of all this. When you find yourself getting confused, do what I do and visit WAMPO's website (though that place, too, is a bit difficult to navigate--perhaps fitting, perhaps ironic, for an office that manages transportation planning and funding.)

The list of eligible TIP projects presented yesterday does not yet appear on WAMPO's website; when it does, though, it should appear here. And keep in mind that literally all we saw was a list of projects--there was not even a summary description of the work each would entail. Even so, every single project listed was a road or bridge project; moreover, as Jane Byrnes (who was also in attendance there) noted, almost all these projects would, in her words, "promote sprawl": they are on the outer fringes of the city. None of them was explicitly bicycle/pedestrian/public transportation-oriented. It's possible that some of the road projects will include some sort of infrastructure feature such as an accompanying bike-path/sidewalk, as was done for the work done last year on 13th Street from K-96 to Andover, or maybe even bike lanes. But based on what we saw yesterday, I have no way of knowing.

But then again, as we were told, the listed projects were only the ones that people had spoken on behalf of. WAMPO's official role is that of a policy body--it facilitates the long-term planning process and determines what projects get funded with the (so far) approximately $11 million/year in federal funds allocated to the area covered by WAMPO's mandate (Sedgwick County, plus Andover and Mulvane). It has no say in what projects actually get submitted to it. That is determined by the elected officials of the municipalities in the county. Hence the futility of my polite but pointed unloading on Derek Clark one of the two WAMPO presenters at the event, about the absence of bike-infrastructure and public transportation despite the fact that the re-striping of a couple miles of streets downtown (WAMPO proposals in the about-to-expire master plan) would cost only a little over $80,000. He was a good sport about it, but he was clear: it's not WAMPO who is to blame for the promotion of suburban sprawl on the city's outskirts at the expense of smarter policies such as Complete Streets. As I noted in the webinar post, the city's hand on these matters will almost certainly be forced by government requirements. But it would be nice, would it not, to see something like Complete Streets at the forefront of thinking for all planning as a matter of policy (assuming we can't have it as a matter of principle).

Something we learned at the webinar is that people overwhelmingly want their departments of transportation to be more people-conscious (rather than car-conscious) in their planning; WAMPO's own survey last year (in which some of you reading this participated) shows we are no different. Yet, the projects that actually get built don't reflect those desires because people don't speak on their behalf at planning meetings, City Council meetings, etc.

And that leads me to the second part of the open house, a heads-up about the start of meetings leading to the producing of the 2030 LRTP. The first step in that has already been accomplished: the survey from last year whose results I linked to just above. Clark noted the overwhelming interest among survey participants in expanding and improving (via, in particular, connectivity) the current system of bike paths and bike lanes. Our task now is to make sure that interest is not only reflected in the LRTP but also, come the portioning out of monies for these projects, that we speak on their behalf to our district representatives and at council meetings.

The initial LRTP meetings haven't yet started but apparently will begin this fall. If you want to receive e-mail announcements of these, contact Kimberly Spielman at "kspielman AT wichita DOT gov" In the meantime, a good place to begin thinking about all this would be to have a look at these chapters (.pdf files) from the Regional Pathway System Plan, which was approved in 2007: A chapter that identifies transit corridors that should be used to facilitate cycling; and a prioritized list of so-called "missing links" in our area's cycling infrastructure. Some of these, it should be noted, have already been completed, are underway (the Mt. Vernon resurfacing), or soon will be (those described as being "actively planned"). But those that remain are very good, functional proposals that have the virtue of improving the connectivity of the existing system.

We're not at the point in Wichita where their merits are self-evident. We're getting there, but these arguments still need their advocates--they can't carry the day on their own.

In Mexico, there's a saying: "If people do not ask, God does not hear."

Time for those of us interested in these issues to get some religion.

Bike Across Kansas

2009-06-12T10:53:00.004-05:00

I'd missed this nice story in yesterday's Eagle which interviewed some riders as they passed through Towanda on Wednesday.

Nice passage, in keeping with your correspondent's constant linkage between cycling and the fomenting of community (as opposed to cars' insulating, isolating effects):

"The great thing about BAK (Bike Across Kansas) is you get to stop at places like this," Jim Hadley, another cyclist, said pointing at the cafe. "Yesterday, we stopped in Stafford and had pie and coffee for breakfast at 9 o'clock, but I don't care because we did 75 miles yesterday."

Eric Massanari, a bicyclist from Newton participating in his first BAK, said biking across the state provides a different experience than driving across.

"It slows me down. I tend to notice things that I don't normally," he said. "For instance this morning, the smell of a wheat field on a dewy morning, it's something in a car you don't think about."

WAMPOpalooza: Complete Streets webinar

2009-06-12T07:20:00.003-05:00

Image found here.

Yesterday's WAMPO events, the webinar at the City Council chambers and the open house at the Water Center, created in me a strange combination of frustration with the status quo and hope for the future. (Do keep in mind as you read this that I am by nature optimistic.)

For the reader's sake, I'll discuss the webinar here and, in its own post, the open house.

Though there were about 30-40 people in attendance, most of them were city-planner types. To my knowledge, Janet Miller was the only city council member in attendance, though in conversation afterward I was pleased to hear that District 1 representative Lavonta Williams has also been an advocate for mass/alternate transportation (just as she wrote me--us--that she was). It was also my pleasure to meet Jane Byrnes, who, as I've mentioned before, is the the Bicycle and Pedestrian Representative on the Metropolitan Transportation Plan Project Advisory Committee (MTP-PAC). There were a couple of us "civilians" there, too, and they and I chatted and exchanged e-mail addresses. I'm not by nature a networker, but I seem to be headed that way.

The webinar itself was quite informative even for people like me who have a nodding acquaintance with Complete Streets. The moderator for yesterday's meeting was Gabe Rousseau, the program manager for the Bicycle and Pedestrian Program of the U.S. Department of Transportation; the two presenters were Barbara McCann, Executive Director of the National Complete Streets Coalition; and Michael Ronkin, a former planner with the Oregon Department of Transportation who now consults with municipalities on Complete Streets planning. In his opening remarks, Rousseau (who himself bike-commutes to work) confirmed what I have noted here in the past: that the current administration is keenly interested in promoting (and funding) public and alternate transportation. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (who even has a blog) has in several speeches promoted these other modes and has held up Portland, Oregon, as a model of city planning. Personal observation: when President Obama nominated LaHood for the position, many commentators noted that he had not shown much interest in transportation issues during his career as a senator. Maybe it's just that I've become more attuned to these issues than I'd been in the past, but I can't think of a more engaged secretary of transportation than this one has been. Of course, this may be because the President is engaged on these issues as well . . . still, all accounts are that LaHood has so far shown genuine enthusiasm for his work.

[UPDATE: In today's USA Today is an interview with LaHood in which he says some more of the right things. Have a look.]

I'll refer you to the Complete Streets link above if you'd like a fuller explanation of the concept; alternately, though, take a drive down Mt. Vernon between Broadway and Greenway to have a look at one version of a Complete Street. Here, I'll just share some surprising information that, if presented as part of advocates' arguments in favor of cycling/pedestrian infrastructure, could turn some district representatives' heads. McCann noted that one of Complete Streets' coalition partners--and one of its most vocal supporters--is the American Association of Retired Persons. In a poll of its members, AARP learned that 47% of its members have to cross a street they feel is unsafe to cross; 54% feel their neighborhood is inhospitable to walking or cycling; and 56% strongly support Complete Streets policies. In case it's not obvious why this is important: 1) AARP's support complicates the stereotypical image of cycling and pedestrian infrastructure as for the young and middle-aged and/or primarily for recreational purposes by arguing that complete streets are safer streets (about which more later); 2) Older people vote. They are more involved in local governance than younger people; moreover, these folks want to be out and about, but they--as anybody would--want to feel safer as they go about their business. I'll just add here that in my own riding about town, older people constitute a high percentage (less than half, to be sure, but not too far south of that) of the folks I see on bicycles--on the street as well as on the paths. So, AARP's support is not by any means out of left field.

A question I'd had before yesterday concerned street capacity on re-designed streets. In theory, as I said at the conclusion of this post, "a street designed to accommodate pedestrians, bikers and buses as well as cars actually maximizes that street's traffic capacity: more people can use the same space than if it were designed strictly for automobiles." But I had no evidence--not even Mt. Vernon--that this was true: Aside from the bike lanes and wider sidewalks set farther away from the curb, the stretch of Mt. Vernon from Greenway to Broadway is unchanged--it's still a two-lane, two-way street. Besides, it's not anyone's idea of a busy street. But Ronkin in his presentation mentioned the example of a street in Orlando, Florida, that was once a busy (about 20,000 cars/day) 4-lane undivided street that was converted into a 3-lane street (center left-turn lane) with bike/bus lanes on each side; on that street, not only did accidents decrease by over 40% and injuries by 87%, its traffic load actually increased by about 1,000 cars/day. I could hear the planners sitting behind me oooh and aaah a little when they heard this. The point of this: if done right, Complete Streets kills two urban-planning birds with one conceptual stone--it both increases a street's capacity and makes it safer.

Over 80 political entities--a half-dozen states, many cities, and a few counties--have adopted some sort of official language making Complete Streets the principle that guides project design and funding. Moreover, in Washington the Complete Streets Act of 2009, submitted in both the House and the Senate, is in search of co-sponsors (hint, hint). Given the current legislative climate, language advocating Complete Streets principles is fairly certain to find its way into federal legislation. To be blunt about this, if Wichita (and the State of Kansas) want federal money for transportation (duh!), we'll be seeing Complete Streets principles applied to some near-future construction. But not to all; not all transportation construction is eligible for federal money and so does not have to conform to those design guidelines. Hence the frustration a couple of us felt at the make-up of our webinar audience. Planners can propose and plan out the wazoo, but it's ultimately elected officials who will decide what projects get funded and, for that matter, those projects' guiding principles. The fact that Janet Miller knew everyone in the room either as her constituent (me) or as already active in these issues or as city staff is a little disheartening.

Those of us citizens who stayed and chatted for a while, though, came from all parts of the city, and each of us have heard the same thing from more than one person: "I'd bike to work/the store if only . . . ," that blank more often than not filled in with comments about missing or inadequate or impractical infrastructure. I strongly suspect that if you've read this far, you also have heard these same remarks from others (or have thought them yourself). Two council people that I know of (and Mayor Brewer, judging from his remarks concerning downtown revitalization) are supportive of these matters; but they are only three people on a seven-person council, and in any event they are usually going to vote in accordance with the sentiments of those constituents they hear from the most. All that said, it was also clear from this conversation that some councilpeople are, shall we say, more responsive to their constituents than others are. The point: however cathartic it is to complain to friends or on blogs about the present state of things, these things will not change until/unless enough of us speak up often enough and long enough on their behalf to people with their hands on the pursestrings.

Fair warning: that last sentiment will also be the predominant message of my post on the WAMPO open house, here.

Local blog round-up

2009-06-11T06:05:00.002-05:00

While trying to fall asleep last night, I thought: Why not try to do for local cycling blogs once a week what Bobby of Douglas and Main does for the entire Wichita blogosphere on a near-daily basis? Surely I can manage once-a-week. So: on Thursdays during the summer, at least, I'll be linking to new and/or interesting posts on the other cycling blogs and news from the cycling-club websites. If it doesn't appear in this space, it either has not been updated since I last checked or it has gone moribund. In the meantime: if you know of other "local" cycling blogs, I hope you'll let me know.

The first notice I want to post here is not from a cycling blog, but bicycles may be involved . . . today begins the Delano Area-Wide Garage Sale. Various residences will be holding garage sales from today through Saturday. Go here for the addresses of who will be selling when and for a link to a downloadable/printable map. I plan to ride through the area this morning before heading to WAMPOpalooza (consider this a reminder of those events, too), so I look forward to the chance to meet a reader or . . . well, a reader.

On to the cycling blogs now . . .

Over at the Coasters' Bicycle Club website, Randy has posted notice that Thursday, July 2 will be the Patriotic Pub Pedal (for more on the what and where of the weekly Pub Pedals, go here).

Over at Bicycleptic, Bryan gives a brief report on his 50-mile ride the previous weekend to benefit ADA that apparently went from El Dorado to Cassoday and back. Bryan is usually a fixed-gear guy, but he reports that the wind that day made him grateful that on that day he had decided to be a mere mortal and leave it at home in favor of a multi-speed.

What to call something that has a website on whose homepage is the declaration that it "is not an organization"? Wichita Critical Mass. I'll just say again that I can fully support Critical Mass's ends--they are why I started this blog, in fact; I welcome a discussion, though, about the means to those ends.

Chris has not posted at Random Chaos since his ominously-titled post from last October, "Am I dead yet?" I sincerely hope the answer is "No."

Anyone want a good-looking tandem bike? Go have a look at the one over at Randy and Nova's place.

Robert continues to add content to Wichita's newest cycling blog, River City Cyclist. In his most recent post, he affirms the sheer pleasure of cycling above and beyond its obvious practical benefits. He's also added RSS feeds for Kansas Cyclist's list of bike rides and, even Craigslist ads for bikes for sale. Go have a look.

Have I missed anyone? Any other cycling blogs out there? Let me know.

[UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias isn't local, but this post's larger message is exactly on-point with regard to today's WAMPO events: the better and more available public transportation is made, the more people of all social classes will use it. In the cities I've visited with robust public transportation that I've used--New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Mexico City--buses and trains are both plentiful AND crowded with folks of every social description. Streets and highways are convenient because they go everywhere--they've been built everywhere. Public (and alternate) transportation options obviously can't go everywhere, but they can be designed to go along the major routes that people tend to travel by car and given their own lanes. Even in Mexico City, drivers respect the dedicated lanes . . . because the buses run so frequently, AND against the traffic besides.

See? There are ways . . . ]

Two quick reminders, and a new link

2009-06-10T05:09:00.005-05:00

Today, Biking Across Kansas comes to our corner of the Plains--the riders spent the evening in Halstead (on U.S. 50 just west of Newton), and today they will pass through Sedgwick, Furley, Towanda, and El Dorado on the way to tonight's stop at Eureka (here is the Google Map of the route). For further information, including daily updates, visit the Biking Across Kansas website.

And tomorrow (the 11th), that one-day wonkfest of local transportation planning, WAMPOpalooza: from 1-2:30 in City Council chambers, WAMPO will be hosting a Complete Streets webinar; then from 4:30-6 at the Water Center, 101 E. Pawnee (that's Herman Hill Park, by the way), WAMPO will have an open house to discuss the status of the 2010 Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) (a brief description is here).

For those of you interested in gaining some sense of how local planning fits into a national context (read: if you'd like something like an opening act to heighten your anticipation for tomorrow), Streetsblog now has a new page called Streetsblog Capitol Hill, which follows debates, recommendations, and the progress of mass/alternate transportation legislation through Congress. The page went live only yesterday, but it already bears the good news the House Appropriations Committee has just approved $68.8 billion for the upcoming fiscal year for the departments of Transportation and Housing & Urban Development--a 25% increase over last year. That money, by the way, is in addition to the money to be allocated in the six-year transportation bill presently working its way through Congress. Translation: assuming the economy doesn't utterly collapse and/or the State of Kansas and the City of Wichita have their respective planning ducks in a row, lots of money will be available to do some very good things.

Here's why our participation in these discussions matters: No matter our respective politics, both liberals and conservatives should be able to support mass/alternate transportation projects because of their cost-effectiveness. Yet another message of the picture you see at this post is that a street designed to accommodate pedestrians, bikers and buses as well as cars actually maximizes that street's traffic capacity: more people can use the same space than if it were designed strictly for automobiles--and, in the case of re-striping projects such as some of those proposed by WAMPO, these things are dirt-cheap when compared to widening projects. Public transportation and bike-lanes and bike paths look like luxuries only when people don't use them. But a time is coming, and sooner than we think, when these projects will become more and more necessary if we want to have transportation infrastructure at all.

The daily commute: Things observed and thought II

2009-06-09T18:01:00.005-05:00

The gateway over the new Midtown Bike Path; click on image to enlarge. Via Coasters Bicycle Club).

Thanks to Copenhagen Cycle Chic's and Streetblogs' and Carbon Trace's linking to the "Front Porch Chic" posts, this humble blog had over 300 unique visitors over the past two days (an average day here is between 20-30). (By the way: you should be visiting those good people on a regular basis, and not just because they linked to my posts.) But with this post, rest assured, I will return this blog's visitor counts back to their accustomed bottom-feeding depths as I talk about stuff that may be of interest only to people in this mid-sized city in Kansas.

As before, what follows is actually a hodge-podge of items in some way associated with getting around town via bicycle, some of which are from before last weekend. Take "The Daily Commute" to indicate more a state of mind than a rigorous recounting of the day's ride.

**Among the items for consideration on today's City Council agenda (WARNING: 429-page .pdf file!!) is a motion to increase funding for design work for the long-discussed bike path linking the north end of the Canal path to the west end of the K-96 path. Apparently, the extra money ($25,000) is needed because the city has asked the designers to make it more shovel-ready so as to qualify it for non-ARRA (you know "ARRA" better as "Stimulus Fund") money (the project wasn't approved for ARRA funds). The recommendation is to approve the funds. It's not clear from the agenda what sorts of schedules this project is on--a fairly tight one, it's safe to assume. I will try to find out more at the WAMPO meetings this Thursday (I think June 11th, by the way, should be dubbed WAMPOpalooza).

I do not have to tell you how much this project would facilitate bike-commuting from the northeast side of town to the urban core. It of course does not reduce the necessity of an east-west route (or two) through the city's middle latitudes, and it obviously does not at all address the complete absence of bike paths of any sort west of Sedgwick County Park. But for those who live near the K-96 path and work in the downtown area or even as south as far as McConnell/Boeing, this linkage suddenly makes both paths much more viable as commuting options than they had been. But here's the deal: though the city's political climate is, I feel, slowly shifting in "our" favor, if the federal money weren't there, it wouldn't get built. According to this story in Sunday's Eagle, the city has a $7 million shortfall in operating funds, a total of $17.5 million in projects on its wishlist for federally-funded environmental and energy-saving projects, but only $3.5 million in federal money. This situation is of course being played out in cities everywhere these days; indeed, we can be thankful that this money, little though it is, is explicitly designated for these kinds of projects.

Still: the fact that this request for more money for design work is on today's agenda suggests that building the path has some priority and that, if the financial stars align properly. work will begin on this project soon.

**Speaking of bike paths long in the works, on Friday I rode down to Garvey Park, which, as you know, is the southern terminus of the Arkansas River path, in part because I had not ridden all the way down there in a while and in part to see if by any chance work had begun on the path to link that path with the south end of the Gypsum Creek Path (short answer: No, at that end, at least). Depending on the weather tomorrow (there's a chance for storms in the afternoon), I may ride out to Plainview Park after my class to see what I can see from there. [UPDATE: Nope--no work there, either.]

Gentle suggestion to the Parks and Recreation Department: The content on the home page for bicycles has not changed in the year that I have been looking at it on a fairly regular basis. I for one would welcome posted announcements of projects, openings of paths, etc., individual maps of the new paths and updates to the old ones showing the new extensions . . . and an updated city map of paths that indicates the newly-completed paths and the new bike lanes on Mt. Vernon: some small gestures to indicate that cycling occupies more than oh-by-the-way status in the city.

**And speaking of newly-completed bike paths, on Friday I had a closer look at the just-opened Midtown path (a map of which I would link to if one were online--see above), and on Monday after class I rode that part of the just-completed extension of the Canal path that runs from the west side of I-135 at Wassal up to Pawnee. The Midtown path, in case you don't know, is a converted railroad right-of-way: it runs from Central right next to the county jail on its west side (perhaps there should be signage along the path warning against picking up hitchhikers?) due north to 9th, where it hitches to the north-northwest up to Prospect Park and Otis Park, continuing on to 15th. I don't know if there are plans to extend the path still further along the right-of-way, but that land appears to available for at least a couple more blocks to the north--ideally, all the way up to 21st Street via the right-of-way or, alternately, from 15th up Market to the future NOMAR International Market (and even if that didn't come to pass, it would appear to be a simple matter to designate a bike lane for a half-mile along 15th over to McAdams Park. Knowing a little about the aspirations the people of the Delano District have to convert their own stretch of abandoned railroad right-of-way, I was interested in looking at the immediate environs around the Midtown path to see if, here and there, there might be occurring a reorientation of the neighborhood in the direction of the path. Well, silly me: the path only opened in April. So, you know the answer to that. That said, though, the potential for that sort of thing happening seems large to me, especially in the area immediately around Otis Park and just to the north. Just a little vision, some money and, of course, clear claim on the property rights up to the actual path . . . but what I saw up there made me feel frustrated that the Delano District's path isn't yet built--around that route, there's even more space for a combination of established businesses and new, mixed-use development to appear and, potentially, become the District's true focal point as a community.

Now to the new southern extension of the Canal path. As I've said before, once I cross Pawnee at the pedestrian-controlled crosswalk, I head straight into the neighborhood: down Minneapolis to Glen Oaks, then left to Minnesota and then south on Minnesota to where it T-intersects Wassal. The official path, though, runs on the south side of Pawnee to the intersection with Southeast Drive, then follows that street south to Wassal. On my return trip Monday, I decided to check out the that path. I must be frank in my assessment: though there are probably legal reasons why it takes the route it does (since the city already owns the land it's on, there were no purchases to have to deal with?), it still makes no real sense. Two examples: on the stretch along Southeast, there's both a bike-lane and a bike path on the same side:an amazing redundancy in a city that is just now adding on-street bike lanes. Meanwhile, that part that runs along Pawnee from Southeast to the ped crossing crosses a couple of very tricky entrances to the large strip mall on that corner. This is a very clear instance when it's obviously safer for a cyclist to be in the street rather than on the sidewalk. As for the route I take, Minneapolis is a wide street with some on-street parking but little traffic, and Glen Oaks and Minnesota are a little narrower but otherwise the same. I much prefer it to the official path.

**As I mentioned last week, I stopped by Tom Sawyer Bicycle Shop, at the corner of Broadway and Mt. Vernon, and I spoke with one of the staff (whose name I didn't get) about the new bike lanes and about the state of cycling in the city. He said he hadn't seen any increase in people riding, or in the store either for that matter. He also seemed fairly pessimistic about the likelihood of more Wichitans' becoming serious riders any time soon. I suggested that perhaps things are changing, but he said that it would take $4/gallon gas to see real change. Granted, Tom Sawyer isn't exactly located in Wichita's cycling epicenter (such as that is); the chief reason I feel as I do about the ground shifting in cycling's favor is that I see so many more people bike-commuting here in the Riverside and Delano neighborhoods than I had seen last year--something that south Wichitans would not necessarily have witnessed. Also, I sense the conviction among the (admittedly few) people I've met in city government that cycling and alternate transportation need to matter more here than they have historically.

But finally, there's a bit of (positive) fatalism at work in me as well: our economy is changing, in some ways gradually and in some not so, as we speak and whether we like it or not, away from its dependence on oil. The Obama Administration has clearly prioritized projects for mass transit, rail, and alternate transportation such as bicycling in its funding. The twin pressures of more people choosing to bike (a bottom-up pressure) and meeting federal requirements in order to obtain funding for infrastructure (top-down) will lead Wichita to add that infrastructure. There are signs that the city is becoming more forward-leaning on these issues. We just need some people to encourage them to keep leaning forward.

Front Porch Cycle Chic: A bicycle on every autarchist's front porch

2009-06-07T12:10:00.007-05:00

[Welcome, visitors from Streetsblog(!), which was kind enough to honor this post with a plug on its current front page [update: and welcome to visitors from Carbon Trace, too]. I hope you enjoy your visit.]

The Roberts and Gregory families, Kentucky, early 20th century. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

What follows isn't exactly a continuation of yesterday's post. It's more like a picking up of another thread and unraveling a perfectly good idea from Front Porch Republic so as to hastily (and, no doubt, clumsily) re-weave it here in combination with other recent concerns of mine as a garment to hang in cycling's metaphysical closet. I'm not sure, incidentally, whether the following, famous injunction from Thoreau's Walden--"I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes"--implicitly condones or condemns that re-weaving. But if the latter, I take some presumptuous hope from George Bernard Shaw's statement, "All great truths begin as blasphemies."

Enough preambling. On with the ambling.

One of the central causes of what the writers of Front Porch Republic contend is our current cultural and political predicament is a perversion of our understanding of property and the resulting policies and politics arising from that perversion. This matter gets addressed directly in James Matthew Wilson's "The Need for Autarchy": Following Hannah Arendt, Wilson argues that that perversion is the result of "the specious conflation of the idea of private property (which Aquinas was right in defending as necessary to a good society) with that nefarious invention of modern usury, unlimited wealth accumulation." Here's Arendt, as quoted by Wilson:

Private property is not a euphemism for anything I happen to acquire, but a reference to the place in the world that is necessarily mine if I am not to be reduced to dependence on another. The way to secure such property is not usually to expand it and widen its frontiers (though that may sometimes be the case), but to fortify it, to fill it with the productive means necessary to maintain it and for it to maintain me. That kind of security and self-sufficiency-in a word, autonomy and autarchy-requires stewardship and conservation rather than expansion and avarice. Such virtues serve the purpose of having the property remain my property with a permanence approximating to the solidity of its literal foundations. [. . . ] [W]e reply to the capitalist that he does not defend private property but, instead, rationalizes endless wealth accumulation, and in so doing he does not defend the one, best hope for the wide distribution of private property. He advocates, rather, the source of its usurpation and dissolution.

Wilson then sums up Arendt's argument: Private property, once freed of market capitalism's co-opting of it, "is a public good but also provides for the individual household the basis for what is itself a great good, the foundation of a family’s liberty: autarchy [which literally translates from the Greek as "self-sufficiency" and thus is not to be confused with "autocracy"]. And the autarchy of the family household, I contend, is the analogous foundation, the microcosmic model, for still another public good: the sorely needed autarchic independence of our country." (Wilson's italics)

So: what does all this have to do with cycling in particular and, more broadly, issues of livability?

In the first "Front Porch Cycle Chic" post, I noted toward the end that "bicycles' practicality and portability create that version of independence that arises not from mere mobility but from self-reliance in all its senses." Surely one of those senses--or, perhaps, better put, that which is essential to self-reliance--is self-sufficiency. The automobile, while it evokes in the American psyche images of freedom and independence, in fact requires a massive, state- and corporate-maintained infrastructure in order to sustain those images on a mass scale; paradoxically, then, car culture has made us more dependent on both government and business, and less self-sufficient. Moreover--just to revisit the picture you see here within this slightly different context--car culture is both symptom and cause of our consumerist mindset: the automobile consumes and occupies those resources known as raw materials and not just the physical space it happens to occupy but, by extension, the physical space the automobile's infrastructure occupies as well: not just roads and parking lots, but car dealerships and repair shops, gas stations (and, for that matter, a goodly proportion of the petrochemical industry) and, in a more virtual way, the state bureaucracy devoted to the regulation of automobiles--even, indirectly, the space and resources occupied and consumed by the fast-food industry. Yet, as the events of the past year have made abundantly and painfully clear, if no one is interested in buying cars anymore--at least, not this country's current version of cars--suddenly they don't seem nearly as essential as they once did . . . even as their revenue-generating centrality to both commerce and the state has likewise become painfully clear via the loss of much of that revenue. The centrality of car culture to American life thus encroaches on the individual's access to private property as defined by Arendt; moreover, the direct and indirect expense of participating in that culture puts at risk our independence (both individual and national) from others--if not actively excluding many from autnomous participation in it by forcing them into dependence upon others.

As I have mentioned before, it was last summer, when I really paid attention to the fact that many of Wichita's street people and working-class folks use bicycles, that cycling revealed its practicality as transportation to me. Without at all meaning to suggest that we should not be concerned for the welfare of these people, clearly bicycles make their lives a little easier than they would be otherwise: they can cover more ground in search of work and shelter; and, as cheap as bus fare is, owning bicycles allows them to save that money for food and other expenses. A reorientation in our collective thinking in the direction of cycling as practical personal transportation and, at the governmental level, a rethinking of infrastructure (in the form of retrofitting existing streets, planning future streets, encouraging high-density, mixed-use development and discouraging suburban sprawl via zoning and mass transit) would, first of all, have the effect of freeing up some of the space and resources car culture demands. That freed-up space thus becomes more truly public in that greater numbers of people can utilize it. Granted, public space, very broadly defined, is not private property, but in its status as commonly-held property it enriches us, at its best, in a way best described as "aesthetic": culturally, intellectually, emotionally.

[Just a quick aside here: My misgivings about Critical Mass as a concept are connected to this idea. If it's an assumption of Critical Mass that motorists monopolize public roads at the expense (and to the endangerment) of cyclists and pedestrians and thus, in political terms, constitute a tyranny--one I don't necessarily disagree with--it's counterproductive to what should be cyclists' larger cause, gaining and earning the respect of motorists as equal users of those roads, when Critical Mass events in other areas (I cannot speak of Wichita's Critical Mass), at their worst, supplant the tyranny of motorists with a tyranny of cyclists. The fact that it occurs for a few hours on one Friday night a month doesn't make it any less tyrannical. Public space by definition should--and must--always be safely open and accessible to all who seek to use it.]

So, then, due to their lower costs and vastly-reduced demands for resources and infrastructure, the increased and encouraged ownership and use of bicycles presents itself as a means by which many, many more of us can enhance our holdings of private property as Arendt defines that term: that which frees us of dependency on others. At the same time, I'd like to suggest, larger numbers of folks going about their daily business by bicycle also fosters a stronger sense of and appreciation for place and, ideally, can lead to an enhancement of that place's self-sufficiency, its autarchy. In "Cycling in the rain" I try to make the case that cycling by its very nature shapes the cyclist's thinking according to a localist bent. By way of winding up that post's recognition of the Delano District's need of one/a few small full-service grocery store(s), I wrote:

No: cycling can't make corner markets appear in a neighborhood. But I think that cyclists, by being alert to and patronizing their neighborhoods' products and services, can play a role in affirming the community as a place unto itself, with a measure of (economic) sovereignty relative to the city that surrounds it. To tar with a broad brush: cars encourage us to leave the immediate area, to perhaps even see that space as in some way lacking, and don't encourage us to get to know the neighbors--they insulate us from a community's "weather," from its nature. Bicycles encourage their riders to take stock of that same area's resources and, at least in my own brief experience as a cyclist, to see it as richer than they once thought it to be. Far from being "flat" economically, the business topography of healthy communities is varied and often surprising.

Car culture, and all that car culture hath wrought, will not disappear any time soon. But it seems clear that in the decades to come it will not be as pervasive a presence as it currently is; it will no longer be the designated driver, as it were, of the thinking behind infrastructure decisions. Given the enormous individual and collective costs of car culture, I am far from mourning this. So, while I share much of the collective dismay of those over at Front Porch Republic regarding the enormous economic, political and cultural mess in which we find ourselves, I also see signs--and, via the seat of my bicycle, some of the means by which--we can begin to work our way out of those messes . . . and reinvigorate our understanding of and appreciation for community and, in the bargain, become more individually and collectively self-sufficient.

UPDATE: Here is Andy's Springfield-centric version of what I'm after and will pursue in a future post. Thanks again, Andy, for the plug and kind words.

Front Porch Cycle Chic: The revolt against lifestyle

2009-06-06T23:54:00.010-05:00

[Welcome, visitors from Carbon Trace(!) and Copenhagen Cycle Chic(!)--and thanks to Mikael for his kind mention of this post. I hope you enjoy your visit.]

Two people converse next to a high-wheel bicycle at the fence of the first home of Alfred W. Bitting, 259 North Emporia Avenue, Wichita, c. 1882. Unknown photographer. Click image to enlarge. Repository: Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum. Image found here.

I don't know whether the bicycle in the picture belonged to the Bitting family or to their visitor. But it doesn't matter. What matters for purposes of this (very long) piece is what that bicycle suggests to me and, indeed, what cycling has come to embody for me: an easy, practical means for its owner to maintain a connection with others who don't live within its owner's immediate vicinity.

Something I'd never before imagined myself seeing was a philosophical kinship of any sort between Copenhagen Cycle Chic and Front Porch Republic. But that was before this morning. As strange a confluence as this is, though, it matters to you--or should--if you share my interest in trying to shift the conceptual frame cycling gets placed in by Wichitans--even by most cyclists--known by the insidious term "lifestyle." Until that shift occurs, we'll continue to see really, really nice bike paths built that don't really go to places where people live, work and shop and, at the same time, a continued lack of on-street infrastructure for cyclists that would facilitate their getting to places where they do live, work and shop.

As recent visitors to this blog know, I've written approvingly in a couple of posts over the past few days about the Cycle Chic movement. The idea, despite the name, is really very simple: You don't need a fancy bike or clothes; ideally, you don't even need a helmet. Just put on the clothes and shoes you'd usually wear for work or shopping, dust off your one-speed cruiser, and go. The coolness of Cycle Chic is precisely that the rider wears what s/he usually wears, goes where s/he usually goes and does what s/he usually does--just on a bicycle. There's absolutely no affectation involved with Cycle Chic, no "in" crowd, no special gear; the entire point is not muss and fuss, but the absence of it. Or, as Henry David Thoreau memorably put the matter regarding the general affairs of one's life, "Simplify, simplify!"

But as many of you know, in-town cycling is now, well, chic. Those of us who want to cycle as a practical and inexpensive means of getting around town to do what needs to be done are now a Market: a group of people who need Stuff, whether or not they in fact need that Stuff. And yesterday Mikael of Copenhagen Cycle Chic put up a lengthy post identifying a couple of the more disturbing manifestations of this fact that have recently appeared: Shimano (the company that almost certainly manufactured your 21-speed bike's shifters and derailleurs) is now apparently marketing "'Cycling shoes' that were completely normal shoes, just with a Shimano logo." Or this passage from a recent Reuters story:

In keeping with the city's efforts to promote cycling, luxury apparel maker LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton asked students at the Fashion Institute of Technology to create chic yet affordable cycling gear.

"We want to do everything we can to raise the profile of biking in New York," Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, said at the news conference to announce the winning design.

"Having functioning, attractive gear so you can arrive at work looking stylish should be very encouraging," she said. "No one wants to show up at work looking like bike messengers."

To which Mikael replies, "Unbelievable. '...functioning, attractive gear'? Open your closets. Buy a chainguard. Fenders. Off you go."

In the face of market capitalism, Mikael concludes, "Let's sell bicycles and bicycle culture. Let's make our cities nicer places to live": activities not usually thought of as being among the contributive causes of the wealth of nations. In other words: the buying and selling of bicycles aside, Cycle Chic is very much about its participants' extricating themselves, if only a little, from the consumerist dynamic.

This idea has been one of this blog's central assumptions almost from its very beginnings:

Because Nature matters to cyclists, they become different sorts of consumers of their world. Topography and weather and their bodies' and bicycles' needs, not fantasy, shape their choices--indeed, those factors reacquire an immediacy that, [Fredric] Jameson argues, postmodern culture had assumed for them. The local and immediate are what catch and hold their attention. Theirs are pragmatic sorts of choices, and being compelled to make such choices has a way of revealing just how superfluous and self-indulgent most people's choices are. This, of course, is something the vast majority of manufacturers, marketers and merchants would prefer we not dwell on too thoughtfully or for too long.

I'm not arguing that serious cycling is at its heart anti-capitalist but, rather, that it goes against the grain of how consumerism has come to shape our thinking about wants and needs and how to meet them. It thus opens up a space for the individual to see him- or herself relative to those dynamics and respond with a bit more autonomy than s/he might otherwise have.

It's here that we perhaps can begin to see why the term "lifestyle" is so unhelpful as a frame for contextualizing cycling. Within the context of economics, that term has the effect of re-inserting cyclists back into the very dynamic that we're trying to remove ourselves from; within the context of debates about city infrastructure, that term makes it all the easier for the skeptical to respond, "No one's making you ride your bikes" or "Get on the sidewalks, then, if the streets are too unsafe."

A quick perusal of the OED is very instructive here: "Lifestyle" first appeared in the 1920s as a term from psychotherapy "to denote a person's basic character as established early in childhood which governs his reactions and behaviour." It was only in the 1970s, though, that the word acquired its current, more familiar meaning, "A way or style of living." Though it's true that, strictly speaking, there's nary a whiff of consumerism in that latter definition, the mere existence of "Christian Lifestyle" stores--I mean, really: ponder the implications of such a concept--is all you need to know about the extent to which consumerism pervades our thinking about how we live: we live as we do because we choose that manner of living; it is our "style." An entire economy has thus emerged whose purpose is to produce and market items that will outwardly mark for others the style we've chosen.

How we live is sold to us rather than constructed by us; "lifestyle" is designed more to say something to impress others than to say something essential about us as individuals.

Front Porch Republic's "About" statement in effect makes these same arguments about consumerism and/but also identifies Big Government as complicit with corporations: an aiding, abetting co-conspirator eating away at the vitality of what, in this blog, I've been calling communities:

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. It also threatens to worsen the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

Yes indeed. To link these sentiments more directly to the concerns of this blog: It is a sad irony that our cities, entities deliberately planned by and for human beings, in fact more often than not feel denuded of their humanity--assuming they had any humanity to be denuded of in the first place. This has happened because, too often for the past 100 years, city planning plans not with human beings but with automobiles in mind.

Another essay at Front Porch Republic, Patrick Deneen's "A Republic of Front Porches," examines what it takes to be the signs and symptoms of the dissolution of community (broadly defined) in the U.S. via Richard Thomas's 1975 essay, "From Porch to Patio." In the italicized passage below, Deneen quotes Thomas directly, then comments afterward:

When a family member was on the porch it was possible to invite the passerby to stop and come onto the porch for extended conversation. The person on the porch was very much in control of this interaction, as the porch was seen as an extension of the living quarters of the family. Often, a hedge or fence separated the porch from the street or board sidewalk, providing a physical barrier for privacy, yet low enough to permit conversation. The porch served many important social functions in addition to advertising the availability of its inhabitants. A well-shaded porch provided a cool place in the heat of the day for the women to enjoy a rest from household chores. They could exchange gossip or share problems without having to arrange a “neighborhood coffee” or a “bridge party.” The porch also provided a courting space within earshot of protective parents. A boy and a girl could be close on a porch swing, yet still observed, and many a proposal of marriage was made on a porch swing. Older persons derived great pleasure from sitting on the porch, watching the world go by, or seeing the neighborhood children at play.

By contrast, the patio reflected both new settlement patterns and the increasing desire for privacy and withdrawal from interaction with one’s neighbors. “In communities with high rates of mobility, one did not often want to know his neighbor. The constant turn-over of neighbors worked against the long-term relationships which are essential to a sense of belonging.” The patio, it was believed, was a symbol and practical expression of our independence, our liberation from the niggling demands of neighbor and community. Yet, Thomas insightfully notes that it was just as much a symbol and reality of a new kind of bondage, the bondage especially to the automobile and to the grim necessities of mobility, including long commutes and increasing isolation from a wide variety of bonds.

At the end of his essay, Deneen challenges us "to revive our tradition of building and owning homes with front porches, and to be upon them where we can both see our neighbors and be seen by them, speak and listen to one another, and, above all, be in a place between, but firmly in place." I would like to suggest, in keeping with my sense of the picture that begins this post, that bicycles can play a significant role in that revival by in effect serving as a kind of virtual extension of our individual front porches: as we cycle through our communities, we have an intimacy with them simply not possible when in our cars--and those neighborhoods through which we commute become, if not our own, then certainly something more than some streets with houses on them that automobile travel converts them into. Indeed, I have come to feel an emotional tie to that part of south Wichita I regularly ride through that, I feel certain, simply would not have occurred had I driven that same route. Yet, bicycles' practicality and portability create that version of independence that arises not from mere mobility but from self-reliance in all its senses.

Bicycle-riding thus, to my mind, has a significant role to play in the reviving of the importance of place as envisioned by the writers of Front Porch Republic--and the Cycle Chic movement is, to my mind a version of that role--assuming, that is, that it not be co-opted by consumer capitalism. Far from being merely a "lifestyle," cycling is, in the deepest senses of the phrases, life-enhancing and life-affirming in ways no lifestyle ever could be.

If you've read this far, you probably wouldn't mind reading some more about the self-sufficiency of Cycle Chic. Here you go. Andrew's own gloss on these ideas is not only also worth your time, it's a whole lot shorter than what you just read.

Some new links you may be interested in

2009-06-06T14:34:00.002-05:00

Pirates' Alley, in New Orleans' French Quarter. Imagine some spaces like this--a mix of shops, restaurants, and residences, through which automobile traffic is severely restricted--in Wichita's downtown, the Delano District, the 21st Street area, etc. A fella can dream, right? Image via the Project for Public Spaces, about which more below.

Over the past couple of days, I've run across various places and linked to them over in the right gutter. I don't have a real sense of how often those link lists even get looked at, much less used, so I wanted to round up a few of the more significant ones here.

First and foremost, I want to note for you the recent appearance of River City Cyclist in the still-small but expanding Wichita cycling-blog universe. Though it's still early in its existence, Robert, its creator, is thinking big: he even has a separate forum set up. I hope you'll link to him and pay him a visit.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago that I would do, the gutter now features a list of U.S. blogs in the style of the venerable Copenhagen Cycle Chic. Yes: the pretty-girls-on-bicycles aesthetic has its own immediate and obvious virtues; my larger intention in linking to them, though, as I said the other day, is to encourage Wichitans during these days of envisioning what a more livable city could look like to look at these images and ask ourselves, Why can't we have an urban core and a Delano District that foster this, too, along with paths and bike lanes from outlying areas into those areas--and not just on weekends? A city whose streets feel safe enough for women to ride bicycles in street clothes becomes a safer city, period [EDIT: Right on cue . . .]--and, not coincidentally, a city where people (and their employers) will want to live and work.

More imagination-candy: Take a gander at the Project for Public Spaces--a visual treat for those of us who look at all those wasted or underutilized lots and buildings in Downtown, the Delano District and elsewhere in the city and imagine what could be done with them. The concept is a simple one: Attractive, multi-use public spaces not only attract visitors; with the right planning, they attract businesses and residents, too. Located at or near transportation crossroads (in our city, that would be things like intersecting bus routes and bike lanes/paths), they can become the focal points for high-density development that, if done right, creates spaces where people genuinely live--like, for example, shop for food there and not have to leave the neighborhood to get groceries--and not just sleep in overpriced loft apartments.

At any rate, Project for Public Spaces is part of a small gathering of links over in the right gutter called "Community, Urbanism, Policy, Politics." If this sort of stuff is at all interesting to you, I hope you'll spend some time clicking and following links . . . and not forget to attend some meetings.

Douglas & Main bait

2009-06-06T02:33:00.003-05:00

As you can't help but see, we're trying out the John Brown-on-a-bike image as a header for the blog. I've been surprised that each time I've used it, no one has commented on the image; I have no idea what that might mean. Meanwhile, lately I've been wanting to do something to enliven the blog's look. The Minima template is, well, minimum: on its own, it conveys exactly zero sense of what cycling in Wichita--the activity itself as well as the blog--is "about."

Too much? (Not just size (the image might need some cropping); I don't at all intend for it to convey the image that I or others on bikes are terrorizing the city; on the other hand, it appeals to me because of its implicit reference to advocacy for cycling issues.) Too joke-y? Not joke-y enough? Should it be more Wichita-centric? How do locals/Kansans see it? How do out-of-staters and foreigners (this blog somehow attracts a fair number of European visitors) read it?

Let me know in comments; I'd especially appreciate knowing if you're local or from out of town, if I don't already know that about you. If you'd prefer to e-mail me your comments, write me at "blogmeridian AT sbcglobal DOT net"

Biking Across Kansas coming to town, sort of

2009-06-05T14:15:00.001-05:00

This year's route for Bike Across Kansas. Click image to enlarge. Image from Biking Across Kansas via Kansas Cyclist.

Bike Across Kansas, the state's pre-eminent cross-country cycling event (Randy notes that more than 800 riders will be participating), begins next week. Over at Kansas Cyclist, Randy has a nice preview of the route and points of interest along the way. You can find more, including updates on the event as it happens, at the BAK website.

As you can see on the map (here's the Google Map for more detail), the route comes quite close to Wichita this year, stopping on the evening of Tuesday the 9th in Halstead (on U.S. 50 just west of Newton) and then, on Wednesday the 10th, passing through Sedgwick, Furley, Towanda, and El Dorado on the way to that evening's stop at Eureka. If I were not teaching on Wednesday, I'd head out there somewhere to see the riders pass by and see if maybe, just maybe, I get inspired to ride with them next year. After all, if 10-year-olds and people in their 70s can complete the ride (as has happened in the past, then surely I . . .

If some of you are able to, head on out to some place along their route and give 'em an Atta boy/Atta girl.

June 11: WAMPO (events) Gone Wild!

2009-06-05T09:35:00.001-05:00

Thursday, June 11 has turned into a significant day for anyone interested in the future of Wichita's and Sedgwick County's transportation infrastructure--which is very likely you, if you're visiting this blog. On that day, the Wichita Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (WAMPO) will be hosting two events of major importance. I know I posted one of these in my previous post, but for convenience's sake I'll re-post it here.

As I already noted, on the 11th from 1:00-2:30 WAMPO will be hosting the Complete Streets webinar in the City Council chambers. You can learn more about Complete Streets here.

But as if that weren't enough transportation wonkiness in one day for you, this morning via Jane Byrnes I received the following announcement:

You are invited to attend a WAMPO Open House.

When: Thursday June 11, 2009

Where: Water Center, 101 E. Pawnee, Wichita, KS

Time: 4:30p.m. – 6:00p.m.

Stop in anytime between 4:30p.m. – 6:00p.m. and get the most up to date information regarding the 2010 Transportation Improvement Program (TIP).

A brief summary of the TIP can be found on the WAMPO website: [here]

As I noted in my post on the Delano Neighborhood Association meeting, the City's representatives could not have stated the matter more bluntly: People who speak up in favor of issues gain their collective ear (and money)--if enough people talk it up enough. Those of you in the area who, like me, want and envision for Wichita a transportation infrastructure more accommodating of alternate and public transportation--the 11th will be your day to be a warm body in support of that vision. As I've been saying in various ways in these last few days, I sense we are at or very near the point where we can tip the discussion in this city in the direction of gaining more attention and resources for alternate transportation and the larger issue of how to make Wichita a more livable city.

I'm planning to be at both events. I hope to meet some of you there. I'll be easy to spot--I'll be the one glassy-eyed with optimism.

An image to ponder

2009-06-04T15:19:00.002-05:00

UPDATE: Just to make sure no one misses this--and very apropos of this post's subject . . . An anonymous commenter left notice that on June 11 (a week from today) WAMPO will be hosting the Complete Streets webinar I'd mentioned here. It'll be in the City Council chambers from 1:00-2:30 p.m. I plan to be there; I hope some of you will be, too.

Often, proposals for adding streets and widening already-existing streets include the argument that they are needed to alleviate congestion. Perhaps, though, just perhaps, other means exist by which we can ease congestion:

"Bicycle - 90 sq. m for 71 people to park their bikes; Car - 1000 sq. m for 72 people to park their care (avg. occupancy of 1.2 people per car); Bus - 30 sq m for the bus." Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

The above picture makes the case more eloquently than any number of words I can offer here, but I'll try anyway: so long as the single-occupant automobile remains the default setting for city planning--by which I mean not only street-building but other things such as zoning ordinances requiring businesses to provide a certain number of parking spaces to accommodate customers--cities will not alleviate congestion but only perpetuate it and even drive it (no pun intended) to other streets as drivers, no fools, seek and find faster (because less-congested) routes and those routes become congested. But imagine streets designed or retrofitted to accommodate and encourage alternate means of getting around, and/or augmentations of public transit in the form of more routes and more service along those routes. Not all those 72 people would take the bus or ride their bikes instead of drive their cars, no; but if even, say, seven of them were to do so on a regular basis, streets would become 10% less congested. Multiply that by the population of a city and . . .

As I noted in my previous post, bike-commuting in Wichita already appears to be increased compared to last year, but not because of anything the city has done to facilitate on-street cycling, the new bike paths and the bike lanes on Mt. Vernon notwithstanding. External circumstances--the cost of gas or other, more dire economic realities; concern for the environment; etc.--are nudging people into making that choice. At the same time, most of us know or have actually been told by others that they would like to commute by bicycle if the city's streets were more conducive to doing so. To my mind, the city could, with a few strokes of a paintbrush, simultaneously encourage these folks to leave their cars at home on occasion and save millions on expensive street-widening projects by re-striping a few well-selected streets (preferably east-west streets and some streets west of Sedgwick County park) to incorporate bike lanes. Obviously, such projects would directly benefit those already cycling on the streets and those interested in giving cycling a try. But, as the picture above makes clear, by thus reducing the number of cars taking up space on the roads, these projects would also not-so-indirectly benefit even those who choose never to cycle on the street by alleviating congestion--and that would in the long run save the city money by reducing wear and tear on streets that require repair and, further on down the road, forestalling the need to increase a street's car-carrying capacity.

Another way of saying all this: cyclists interested in making the case for bike-friendlier cities make their cases weaker if they stick only to some version of the "cyclists are people, too" argument. While that argument is certainly true, I think it's actually easier and more persuasive to demonstrate how providing on-street infrastructure that accommodates cyclists and promoting public transit ends up benefiting everyone who uses city streets, even (especially?) those who never ride a bike or take the bus. The proof of this is as plain as the picture at the top of this post.

The daily commute: Things observed and thought

2009-06-04T12:05:00.001-05:00

A sign like this one now appears at the intersection of Mt. Vernon and Market. More about this welcome development below. Image found here.

First in an occasional series . . .

Unless otherwise noted, what follows is a description of my route from downtown to McConnell: From Keeper Plaza, south along the Arkansas River path to the Harry Street bridge; south for a block to Exchange; south to Mt. Vernon; east along Mt. Vernon to Minneapolis; south on Minneapolis to Minnesota, then over to the Canal Route path; south to Pawnee, crossing at the new bike/ped crossing at Pawnee and Minneapolis; south on Minneapolis to Glen Oaks; east to Minnesota; south on Minnesota to Wassal; cross I-135 via the pedestrian bridge; pick up the new extension of the Gypsum Creek path at Wassal; east on that path to George Washington; then south along GW to McConnell.

**During the summer, at least, both "daily" and "commute" are misnomers: I teach only on Monday and Wednesday mornings, but I will otherwise be out and about on my bike. Just so you know. So, what follows are Things Observed during yesterday's ride.

**I lost count, but yesterday I saw a good half-dozen cyclists along my route; all but two of them appeared to me to be bike-as-transportation types (i.e., panniers, handlebar pouches, etc.). As I've already noted in several posts this spring, my purely anecdotal survey of things is that substantially more people are using bikes to get around the city than was the case at this time last year. This is happening, you'll note, not because all that much has changed in terms of infrastructure but because of external pressures beyond the city's control but to which it eventually will have to respond in the form of accommodating these people's choices--just as, beginning around a century ago, cities, states and the nation gradually responded to mass ownership of automobiles. Far better, in my view, to respond proactively now, while the expense of responding is still relatively modest . . . but if you're reading this, you likely need no persuading as to the truth of this. Still: it's important for those of us who already recognize this to acknowledge--and tell others--that the ground in Wichita is shifting, household by household, in favor of choices that will contribute to making our city a more livable, healthier, safer place.

**The re-paving and re-striping of Mt. Vernon proceeds apace. Work is finished now from Greenway to Broadway, with dedicated bike lanes on both sides of Mt. Vernon up to Market (one block west of Broadway); there, to accommodate a dedicated left-turn lane, the bike lane disappears and in its place appears a "Share the Road" sign. Meanwhile, re-paving (but not re-striping) is done on Mt. Vernon from Broadway to Topeka; in the very near future, then, re-striping and (I assume) new signage will soon appear. I can't tell how much usage the lanes are getting; some gravel has already accumulated in them, and I didn't spot any tire marks through it. Still, that stretch of Mt. Vernon--that running west from Broadway to the river--is the stretch less travelled. As the bike lanes are extended eastward (that is still the plan, right, City of Wichita?), the Mt. Vernon route will become more useful to east-west commuters and, I hope, see more use . . . which, one can hope, will encourage the city to fast-track some of WAMPO's proposals for re-striping other streets to incorporate bike lanes.

As it happens, Tom Sawyer Bicycle Shop is located at the corner of Broadway and Mt. Vernon; on Monday afternoon I plan to stop by on the way home and chat with them to get a sense of how much the new lanes are getting used.

**Back in March, I'd noted signs that the extension of the Gypsum Creek path would have some additional landscaping. That's since become the case: there are substantial plantings of trees in various places, including evergreens in a couple of stretches intended to serve as screens between the path and residential properties. Also, where the path crosses Hillside and intersects with George Washington, there are now water fountains and stands for those waiting to catch buses. Right now, a large pile of dirt being used for landscaping (in the form of terracing) on the east side of Roosevelt is covering the path, but that work should be finished soon.

**On the first day of class, I'd told my students about this blog and said a few words about cycling as being about more than recreation or exercise; among other things, I'd mentioned that depending on how you tally such things, that about 80% of all car trips in this country are of distances less than 2 miles and that most anyone could walk or ride a bike that distance "to pick up a can of pop at the Quik Trip." Well: on Wednesday, one of my students asked if I'd biked to the base and I said I had. He volunteered that he'd taken his bike for a spin on Tuesday--he was going to visit a relative who lives four blocks from him and was about to jump in his car to go there when, he said, he got to thinking about what I'd said about all those short car trips and decided to ride his bike there instead.

Who knows if my student's decision will result in some larger commitment to cycling? The important thing to me, though, is that he considered it and acted on it--he now sees cycling as a possible alternative when, before, the idea hadn't entered his mind. He is one person. But so am I, and so are you who reads this. It took my seeing working-class and street people on bikes to begin giving serious consideration to cycling as transportation. All it takes is enough people seeing enough others cycling on the streets to and from work, school and shopping to encourage them at least to think about cycling as legitimate transportation, period--even if they don't see it as an option for themselves.

**A (very) long-term goal: to get a city ordinance passed forbidding steady wind speeds greater than 20 mph . . .

Charleston Cycle Chic

2009-06-04T08:09:00.005-05:00

[W]hen more women begin riding, that will signal a big change in attitude, which will prompt further changes in the direction of safety and elegance. I can ride till my legs are sore and it won’t make riding any cooler, but when attractive women are seen sitting upright going about their city business on bikes day and night, the crowds will surely follow.--David Byrne

Yessir:

(Hat-tip: Andrew

(Be sure to have a look at their images of vintage cycling posters.)

Imagine, if you will, a revitalized downtown or Delano District that looks like this, not just on weekends and not just in Old Town . . . There's clearly an obvious aesthetic appeal here, but the not-so-obvious but just-as-aesthetic appeal is of an urban core in which, in such an environment, the streets become, yes, a little slower-moving, but a whole lot safer for everyone.

The "Cycle Chic" blogs are beginning to pop up on this side of the Pond--yet another sort of Critical Mass that serves to emphasize cycling's practical value. I'll soon be posting links to them over in the right gutter.

"You better ride, ride, ride, ride/Ride, ride ride awaaaaay": David Byrne talks up cycling's future

2009-06-03T20:58:00.000-05:00

The cover of Pedaling Revolution. Image found here.

Over at Front Porch Republic, fellow Wichitan (and bike-commuter) Russell Arben Fox posts an excerpt from David Byrne's recent New York Times book review of Jeff Mapes' book, Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities. (Thanks, Russell, for plugging good old Cycling in Wichita in your post, and welcome, visitors from Front Porch Republic, to our front porch.) This is a new-to-me book, but it appears to be getting good reviews; furthermore, as Byrne reports, even though it at times appears to preach to the already-converted, it has material in it to ease the already-converted's efforts to evangelize to the whatever cycling's equivalent of the unchurched would be. And the price is right.

Of course, you should read the whole thing. But below, I've selected some passages in which Byrne, who says he has used a bicycle as his primary transportation in New York City for the past 30 years, surveys from his particular long view of things cycling's present and likely future:

Mapes finds the experience of riding around Portland [Oregon]— North America’s most bike-friendly city (though I think Vancouver is close) — so enjoyable that he takes as a given that it’s a positive thing, something that more communities should accommodate without question. But as he and I know, there’s a lot of opposition. The United States is as much a car culture as ever, even if the companies that helped make us that way are now in ruins. And governments and urban planners have all been in on the game, helping make the idea of cheap, effortless transportation and a car of one’s own a dream every American might aspire to.

[snip]

As Mapes points out, when more women begin riding, that will signal a big change in attitude, which will prompt further changes in the direction of safety and elegance. I can ride till my legs are sore and it won’t make riding any cooler, but when attractive women are seen sitting upright going about their city business on bikes day and night, the crowds will surely follow. [Aside: Anyone who has spent any length of time at Copenhagen Cycle Chic knows Byrne knows whereof he speaks.]

[snip]

Toward the end of the book, Mapes gets into debates over bike lanes (are they really safer?), safety rules (should cyclists have to obey stop signs?) and traffic ideologies (should cyclists claim a full space in a lane, or stick to the edge of the road?) that only an obsessive or an advocate (hello!) is likely to be interested in. But the debates he presents may end up helping us all. Greenways, safer bike lanes, pedestrian zones and bike parking places will make our cities not only more comfortable and enjoyable, but also, as Janette Sadik-Khan, the New York City transportation commissioner, said recently, more economically competitive as well, as more of them become places where people with ideas and creative ambitions want to both live and work. (Emphasis mine)

This last point may be the strongest argument cyclists and their allies have as they seek to gain the attention (and financial largess) of government officials: that bike-friendly cities are simply more desirable because more livable. I can't find it now, but a recent post at The Atlantic's website, Richard Florida noted an interesting correlation over the past year: the "greener" a city, the less the fall in housing values in that city. Translation: People want to live in places like that if at all possible. Property values remain higher in such places (translation: higher tax revenues). Relatively modest investments in cycling and pedestrian infrastructure are one way--and certainly not the only way--a city like ours can secure a brighter future in an economy that is going to change whether we're ready for it or not.

Hither and Yon #4

2009-06-02T19:05:00.001-05:00

I have been away longer than intended. I had intended to spend only the Memorial Day weekend in Topeka but ended up staying until Sunday, helping my father-in-law, as part of a big landscaping project at the in-laws' house, move lots and lots of rocks ranging from "inch-and-a-half" gravel to rocks the approximate shape and only somewhat smaller than the state of Ohio. And summer school began yesterday. I think, though, that now I'll be able to maintain something like a regular posting schedule for most of the summer.

A round-up of items regarding cycling and other livability/sustainability issues:

**Regarding my recent post about community bike shops, Mike James of the Wichita Bicycle Collective noted both in comments and via an e-mail to me that it's a long-term goal of the Collective to establish just such a shop. If you have bikes, bike parts or, most importantly, time to donate to this project, write him at "mike AT wichitabicyclecollective DOT org."

**Via the Kansas Transportation Online community comes an announcement of a free webinar on Complete Streets on June 11. The full announcement follows:

FREE COMPLETE STREETS AND CSS WEBINAR
-> According to the May 19th issue of PBIC News, "ContextSensitiveSolutions.org and the Federal Highway Administration will present a free webinar on June 11, 2009, from 2:00-3:30 PM EST to discuss the role of Complete Streets in creating Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) that provide safe and efficient transportation options for all users.
"The 1.5 hour-long webinar will provide an overview of the Federal Highways Administration perspective on Complete Streets, including a discussion on the importance of pedestrian and bicycle issues, and what federal programs and policies are available to support communities in their Complete Streets efforts."
Link to Join the Meeting: http://tinyurl.com/od5h9g
On the login page, enter as a guest by typing your full name and clicking the "Enter Room" button. Login to the conference at least 10 minutes prior to the start time to secure your space.
Phone Number to Join the Audio Portion of the Conference:
800-779-1509
Password: 4033692

**Some of you have mentioned seeing my letter to the editor in the Eagle that, at least online, appeared on Friday May 22. Here's the letter, in full:

Road partners

I hope Wichitans will come to consider cycling as not just for recreation but also as a legitimate and potentially significant mode of transportation in our city that should be planned for and encouraged accordingly. Streets that are safer for cyclists are safer for everyone who uses them, and fewer cars on the road mean reduced gas consumption and less noise, congestion and pollution.

I urge our elected officials and planning commissions to be more proactive in developing, prioritizing and implementing projects that conceive of cyclists as full partners in our city's transportation network.

And, in case you're curious, here are the responses it garnered:

they can't even get their regular road planning together. you think they they will find a way to fit bicycles in comfortably? maybe when kellogg gets finished. ha.

-----

AMEN, mr [B.]!! critical mass next friday, donut whole @ 5:30

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Mr [B.], there are few people as self absorbed and self righteous as bicyclers. You and others like you belong on the sidewalks, not in the streets. I am fine with bike lanes but any bike on the street proper should be ticketed, impounded, and the rider left to walk home. This is Kansas, not a high density urban city, even buses can't make money on our density! Please stay out of my street, I will not drive quietly behind you!

-----

[in response to the above comment] drivers like you are the problem, not the cyclists. You call Mr. [B.] self absorbed and self righteous and then exhibit the very characteristics you accuse him of!

Under the laws of the state of Kansas, bicyclists have the same rights and responsibilities as drivers of vehicles. Perhaps you missed that chapter in the drivers handbook.

-----

... and another thing... cyclists can be ticketed for riding on the sidewalk unless there are signs specifically permiting it, like downtown. Sidewalks are for pedestrians (hence the word "walks"). Bicycles are considered vehicles under Kansas law.

One quick observation: even the most vocal objector to my letter writes, "I am fine with bike lanes." So, s/he and I have more in common with each other than s/he thinks we do. My alleged self-absorption and self-righteousness aside, if this is the worst that the Wichita comment-o-sphere can offer up by way of vitriol directed at cyclists, I'd say those of us interested in seeing a bike-friendlier Wichita may be further along in changing people's minds than we know.

Another sort of Critical Mass?: Some observations regarding last night's Delano Neighborhood Association meeting

2009-05-20T13:57:00.002-05:00

Image found here.

Thanks to Karen (she of Delano Wichita--her post on the meeting is here, by the way) and her kind note in a comment, I attended last night's meeting of the Delano Neighborhood Association (DNA), which had as guests two representatives of Wichita's planning commission to discuss progress on Delano's neighborhood revitalization plan (which, by the way, includes a rails-to-trails conversion that will cut an east-west route through about a third of the breadth of the neighborhood)--and surprise (to me) visitor, District 6 council member Janet Miller (An added bonus: a representative of the Wichita Public Library was in attendance, as well, ostensibly to talk about the library's summer reading program but who fielded questions about the new central library building, to be built in Delano). It was a pleasure to meet both Karen and Janet and, even though, as Karen phrased it, I actually live in "Greater Delano" and not in the actual neighborhood, I was made to feel welcome there. I look forward to attending future meetings.

Karen told me that last night's meeting was well attended--she'd done a good job of getting word out: all told, there were about 20 people there.

Some personal impressions later. First, though, a few words on the rail-to-trail project. Here's a summary description:

Convert vacated railroad right-of-way into a linear park with small plazas, water features and activity nodes; thus connecting neighborhood parks and expanded recreation opportunities in the neighborhood and the waterfront.

The route appears on the city's bike-route map as the tan line running about a block north of Douglas from the west bank of the river to two blocks west of Seneca.

As the description makes clear, this project would be very much in the mode of the recently-completed Midtown Bike Path--and will cost about the same amount of money to build ($1.7 million in all). And about that money: According to the handout given to us by the Planning Commission's Dave Barber, the money is currently in the city wish-list, but not until the 2013-2014 fiscal year. As I listened to the discussion, it was clear that everyone who spoke is in favor of getting this project done; indeed, the recurring question was, in essence, Why isn't this thing built already?--and one person mentioned the Midtown Bike Path by way of implying that Delano's wishes for something similar had been passed over in favor of the wishes of another part of town. Barber pointed out that the Midtown path had also been years in the making, from proposal to ribbon-cutting, and the solution to ensuring that the Delano project stays in the funding pipeline is to keep speaking up on its behalf in meetings and in letters to our representatives (Janet Miller and Paul Gray)

(Aside: as a first-time visitor to DNA, I'm afraid to say too much on this matter, but it seems clear that Delano folks don't feel that their wishes for their neighborhood always get acknowledged at City Hall.)

This project, it's clear, matters to Delano folks, not just in and of itself but also because it is the first step in the direction of achieving something larger, also mentioned in the Revitalization Plan:

Create a world-class multi-use neighborhood village, taking strategic advantage of proximity to Exploration Place, the Arkansas River, Downtown, and the Museum District. This will serve as a catalyst for additional fill-in and renovation.

A fuller description is here--scroll down about halfway to find it.

As I understand it, the linear park would run through that part of the Delano envisioned for this space and would itself serve as a catalyst for the development sought there. I will need to pick the brains of those in the DNA who are more knowledgeable about the initial discussions of the Urban Village, but it's clear from the description of the concept that it's very much in line with notions this blog has supported with regard to creating urban spaces that envision people actually living there--and not just in the Delano, either. Surely, there's space elsewhere for such a concept.

Some personal impressions, now, colored by both my usual optimism and by the fact that I'm going on first impressions. Last night felt like an important night for the Delano. On the one hand, there were folks who have lived in the community all their lives and who love it and its potential but who, well, have been at this for a very long time (some of these folks are in their seventies and eighties). The changes they want to see, they know they will not live to see completed--thus for them, to borrow a phrase, the fierce urgency of now: they know how bureaucracies work, that once some money actually gets spent on something it's hard to shut it down until it's completed. On the other hand, it seems equally clear, thanks to folks like Karen stirring the pot, that the chance to get these things started on is stronger than it has been in some time. She told me, in fact, that she'd Twittered so much about the meeting that Cindy Klose got in touch to ask her if the station should send a crew to the meeting. (I told Karen that she should have said, "Yes--there will be people there with hand-painted signs!!") And even better, there are friends of cycling and livable cities on both the council and in the Planning Office: Janet Miller, whom I immediately liked, is every bit as committed to cycling in person as she is in writing, and she passed on to me the word about cycling allies in Planning.

So, like, good, y'know? But, again: my big lesson and reminder from last night is that true governance at its best, especially at the local level, is not top-down but a dialogue among citizens, elected officials, and administrators. It seems clear to me that, in the Delano at least, there's strong interest among residents for something better for their section of the city and strong receptiveness among those city officials who were there. But the twain need to meet--and keep meeting.

Community Bike Shops

2009-05-19T12:26:00.001-05:00

Some of Austin Yellow Bike's yellow bikes. Image found here.

Yet another reason (as if I needed another) to love Shearwater (and apologies in advance for the new-to-me tone of this post):

It was via a visit to that band's website the other day that I learned of the existence of something called community bike shops. On the 21st Shearwater will be playing a benefit for the Austin Yellow Bike Project, which is presently building itself a new facility. The YBP describes itself thus:

The Austin Yellow Bike Project (YBP) is a community supported ALL-VOLUNTEER 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to providing human-powered transportation for the people of Austin, running a community bike shop, and educating kids and adults. People-power is a way to limit the traffic congestion of a rapidly growing city. It also provides an inexpensive, healthy, and sustainable alternative to the reliance on motor vehicles. Our project promotes cleaner air, land, and water, while encouraging people to meet their transportation needs through an active lifestyle and community participation.

That same page has links to other, similarly-minded community bike shops in this country; of the states bordering Kansas, only Colorado has them.

A look at YBP's Projects page reminded me of something I've been musing about (and have mentioned in passing in various posts) since I started riding last summer. Here on the western edge of downtown, I see lots of working-class and street folks on bicycles obtained by various means, some more legal than others. It was seeing these folks on bikes of every description and condition that first really drove home to me the practicality of bicycles as economical daily transportation and not just a new, cool thing for yuppies to do. But it has also caused me to wonder if there weren't room in Wichita for a bike-rehab-and-donation program for people in need.

Something to muse on a bit.

Ride of Silence

2009-05-18T21:18:00.004-05:00

Image found here.

Via Kansas Cyclist comes a Ride of Silence organized by Oz Bicycle Club. A Ride of Silence commemorates those killed or injured while riding a bicycle during the previous year.

The announcement follows in full:

Event : Ride of Silence *
Date & Time : 05-20-2009 (6:30 PM)
Description :

Ride of Silence

Date: May 20, 2009

Time: 6:30 PM

This ride is sponsored by the OZ Bicycle Club of Wichita.
On May 20, 2008, at 6:30 PM, we will start at the North West Christian Church, 10850 W.21 st.North, just West of 21st and Maize road on the North side of 21st. The names of those injured or killed will be remembered at this time, if you know of someone whose name was not mentioned, please let us know at this time. The ride will start after the reading.
Please park at the Southeast end of the parking lot. (Please watch for children in the parking lot).

Sunday-Morning bicycling music II

2009-05-17T07:59:00.005-05:00

Image from Copenhagen Cycle Chic.

"I Love Watching You Ride Your Bicycle," The End of Science. First I've heard of them, too. But a pretty good post-rock song, if you're into that sort of thing. And hey: it's a free and legal download, too.

Band website; Last.fm page.

Also via Copenhagen Cycle Chic: From somewhere in India, this remarkably-composed picture by Flickr user Meanest Indian:

For lovers of images of a truly bike-friendly place, Copenhagen Cycle Chic is the place to visit--it will make one wistful and/or check travel package costs on Expedia. Very true: Copenhagen is even further away from Wichita in terms of its cycling culture than it is geographically. Looking at that blog, for your correspondent, is somewhat akin to Moses' getting to look at but not actually enter the Promised Land. But he envisions a future for Wichita when at least some sections of the city (parts of downtown, for example?) could kinda sorta look like that faraway place.

Bike-to-Work Day!

2009-05-15T19:14:00.004-05:00

Well? Did you do it? How was it? I hope you'll leave a comment or drop me an e-mail.

The Eagle had a nice story in today's paper about Bike-to-Work Day (kudos to John Thompson of Start-Thinking for providing the great quotes and for being a bike-commuter himself. The comments are positive, though they also note the lack of on-street infrastructure for cyclists.

Baby steps/little victories, I know. Still, a good sign, all the way around.

A cautionary tale

2009-05-14T19:20:00.002-05:00

Need some, um, persuading as to the efficacy of bicyclists' wearing helmets and obeying traffic laws? Here you go.

Some food for thought for the WDDC, the Delano District, etc., etc.

2009-05-14T12:13:00.005-05:00

No time to comment on this (I shouldn't even have been reading what I'm about to link to--Finals Week, you know), but via Matthew Yglesias this morning comes this post from the excellent urbanist blog Greater Greater Washington, DC, on results of the steps that city took in the '80s and '90s to revitalize a formerly-moribund part of their urban core.

A couple of paragraphs:

DC created the DD in 1991 to shape the revitalization of DC's downtown. The office center of gravity had moved to K Street and the Golden Triangle, but as that area filled up, developers began looking back at DC's historic downtown. Planners wanted to avoid reproducing the Golden Triangle's monoculture of law firm offices, low level of ground floor retail, inactive sidewalks, numerous garage entrances and repetition of boring boxes. What to do?

The 1981 "A Living Downtown" plan recommended retail on F, G, and 7th Streets; hotels around the Convention Center, Thomas Circle and "Downtown East" near Union Station; residential development in the Penn Quarter and Mount Vernon Square, and offices around Franklin Square and Judiciary Square. In 1991, DC implemented zoning rules requiring residential units and arts or retail in various areas throughout downtown. The zoning also required transparent glass over a majority of the ground floors on certain streets, with entrances no more than 40-50 feet apart and no garage entrances.

To create an incentive for desired development, the DD created a Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) program. Any residential, arts and retail, or historic preservation exceeding the requirements generated TDR "credits" that developers could sell to projects in various "receiving zones," including parts of downtown, NoMa, the western half of the Golden Triangle, the Southwest Federal Center, and what's now the Capitol Riverfront (ballpark) area. Buying those credits would allow new buildings in those areas to reach the maximum allowable heights, creating an economic incentive for more housing, arts, retail and historic preservation downtown.

[snip]

The DD was a great success. Counting buildings currently under development, there will be 12,580 residential units, especially in the Penn Quarter and Mount Vernon Triangle, exceeding the goal of 12,410. Museums and theaters comprise 1,218,000 square feet downtown, concentrated around Gallery Place, beating the goal of 900,000. There are 1,600,000 square feet of retail plus another 400,000 in the pipeline. That falls short of the DD's initial 5,600,000 goal, but planners now believe that goal was probably unreasonable. And many historic buildings remain downtown.

Once the dust settles from Finals Week, I plan to come back to this in combination with some comments over at Momentum, the WDDC's blog--where, by the way, more people need to visit and comment.

Critical Mass event this Friday

2009-05-10T21:16:00.005-05:00

The cover for Critical Mass: Bicycling's Defiant Celebration. Image found here.

Via an e-mail from District 6 City Council Member Janet Miller comes new-to-me word that, as of May 7th, Wichita now has a Critical Mass group, with a MySpace page (EDIT: and a website) and everything.

Here's their announcement:

Come join us May 15th for a massive street ride through downtown at 5pm - The Donut Whole 1720 E. Douglas! Mood: rockin'

To be very honest, I have mixed emotions about Critical Mass events. On the one hand, raising community awareness about cycling and the benefits that constructing bike-friendly infrastructure is clearly a good, especially in Wichita, where, as I've noted recently, interest in bike-commuting seems to be on the rise this spring. It's also good, even if it's only a coincidence, that the 15th is National Bike-to-Work Day; the two events, assuming decent levels of participation at each, will serve to reinforce each other. On the other hand . . . .

I'll be wrapping up Finals Week on Friday, so I won't be able to attend Critical Mass. I hope it goes well, though and, assuming it does go well and as I receive news of upcoming rides, I'll be happy to announce them here.

Sunday-Morning bicycling music

2009-05-10T10:13:00.006-05:00

Image found here.

Bosques de mi mente, "Los titanicos esfuerzos de una bicicleta oxidada por avanzar" ("A Rusty Bicycle's Titanic Efforts to Move Forward").

If you like this, you'll like all of Bosques de mi mente's work (the name, by the way, means "Forests of My Mind"). . . and, even better for you, it's all available for free. You can find it either at his website or at Last.fm.

Something more serious now . . . The Wichita Downtown Development Corporation has just received funding from the city council to support its development of a master plan for the urban core and has a site called Momentum where it is posting info and soliciting input from citizens regarding their vision of downtown. I just wrote them a long-winded letter in which I expressed my desire that they envision their residents as not just sleeping there or being entertained there but as genuinely living there and so should make the area more alt-transportation friendly and see about recruiting a large full-service grocery store or a couple of smaller ones along those same lines. I hope you'll visit their site as well and write them as the spirit moves you.

John Brown says . . .

2009-05-09T11:28:00.002-05:00

National Bike-to-Work Week is next week! National Bike-to-Work Day is next Friday, May 15. If what I have observed round about town these past few warmer weeks is any indication, interest in bike-commuting is growing here in town; I'm hoping we'll be visible enough next week that we'll inspire others to consider cycling to work and motorists generally to see cycling as beneficial to them even if they themselves don't give up driving to work.

I encourage the bike-curious to plot a route to work and give it a try for at least a day or two. If you need maps to help with your planning, click on the "Bicycle Wichita" graphic in the right gutter for a .pdf file of bike routes. For inspiration, visit Bike Wichita. And if you happen to see me out on the south side of town on my burnt-orange Fuji, give me a wave that I'll interpret as a more-or-less friendly gesture, and I'll be sure to reciprocate.

Finals Week is next week; more (and more substantive) blogging will resume here after that. In the meantime, read this post by Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (hat-tip: League of American Cyclists) and take heart that cyclists appear to have the ears of several folks in Washington who actually do have their hands on the purse strings.

(Photoshopping by the Mrs.)

Coming up for air

2009-04-29T21:50:00.002-05:00

Sorry I haven't posted for so long--work and other matters have been and will continue to keep me away at least until next week some time.

The end of this semester cannot come soon enough.

While I'm here, though, I do want to draw attention to Michael James' comment at my previous post. There are rumblings out there--quiet ones, to be sure (we're on bikes, after all), but this spring they are pretty audible.

I'll see y'all soon.

Be careful. We're out there.

2009-04-22T06:11:00.001-05:00

Just a quick acknowledgment that everywhere I go of late, not just in my part of town--which has what I'd guess is the heaviest bike traffic in Wichita--cyclists of varying levels of seriousness are far more numerous on the streets than last year. That's good.

What's not so good, though, is when--as I observed last night--a whole gang (by which I mean a half-dozen at least) of these folks think it's okay to just sort of roll out of the alley by the Society of Decorative Arts building at the intersection of Seneca and McLean without checking for oncoming traffic . . . one of whose number happens to be the author of this blog.

Had I hit one of them--how would that be for some irony? Right up there with semiotician Roland Barthes' crossing a street against the light and being run over by a truck.

This isn't meant to be a Dumb/Ignorant/Careless Cyclist post. It's more in the vein of those "It's the first robin of the spring" posts combined with those "Look out for little kids because school's back in session" PSAs. Well, that, and a "Gee--both McLean and Seneca (at least between Kellogg and the river) could really use dedicated bike lanes" post.

It's great to see all the cyclists out there. Really. But cyclists, let's do what we can to keep some of you around long enough to learn the rules of the road and ride accordingly. And motorists: Patience.

Sunday's Readers' Ride: A Lutheran and a rabbi go for a bike ride . . .

2009-04-21T07:57:00.004-05:00

(Note: Later I'll replace this note with a link to a map of the route I and then Moti and I took; check back again in a day or two.)

This past Sunday dawned ominously for anyone looking forward to a pleasant ride: it was chilly, overcast and threatening rain . . . and our constant companion the wind, this time in the guise of a steady 20 mph north wind, was paying a visit. I ran a quick morning errand to the post office and the downtown Intrust bank on my bike, and when I turned up Waco to head back home, let's just say my first thoughts were not informed by Christian charity. That was the slowest 4 blocks, psychologically-speaking, that I think I've ever ridden. Still, within half an hour of getting back home, the clouds began to break up, and actual direct sunlight appeared. So, in my best tough-guy mode, I thought, "It's on."

My route over to the intersection of Kellogg and Armour was one that I had ridden from east to west before, but never west to east: thus, the initial climb up the hill on Mt. Vernon that begins immediately past the intersection with George Washington really took me by surprise with its steepness. Of course, I'd already ridden about 6 miles and, as I noted here, I'm not in the best shape after the long winter layoff. So: combine my weariness from that with heading north into the wind when I picked up the Gypsum Creek path at Woodlawn, and the upshot is that, by the time I reached Kellogg and Armour a few minutes before 2:00, I was glad to sit a spell.

A little after 2, Moti (he of the excellent blogs FedReb and Jewish Simplicity and a long-time good friend of this humble blog) arrived, and we chatted while waiting to see if others would arrive. Moti is the proud owner of his father's '70s-vintage 3-speed Raleigh with, as Moti put it, "all original equipment." He said his dad had bought it, rode it a couple of times, then just put it away in the garage--thus, in terms of miles, his bike is basically brand-new. Moti bikes daily from his home to the office (a distance of a couple of miles) and runs other occasional errands via the bike. We also talked about our respective work and families and "politics" in the very vaguest and wide-ranging of ways (I don't intend anything by that other than the fact that we didn't dwell on any topic in particular), and a bit about variations among Jews' observance of the Sabbath and the work of the Wichita branch of the Jewish Federation (for the benefit of this Gentile).

No one else joined us, and so at 2:20 we set off. Despite Moti's living just a few blocks away from where we were, this was his first trip down the Gypsum Creek path. He seemed to like it. And I have to admit that I liked this about him: When we reached the sewer line construction at the path's intersection with Pawnee that I'd mentioned here, he saw that we could easily get around it and continue on our way. And so we did.

We rode together to where the new extension intersects with I-135, and there Moti turned back for home. Along the way, we talked about other possibilities for rides: I mentioned my recent post soliciting proposals for neighborhood rides, and Moti mentioned the possibility about longer rides outside the city, such as up to Newton. Both these suggestions strike me as muse-worthy, and I hope those reading this who are so inclined will join us in musing on these and/or other possibilities for exploring the city and environs by bike.

Then, the ride home. It must be a function of topography, the distinct impression I have that the winds along the long north-south stretch of the Arkansas River path seem more intense, there below street level by the river bank, than they do at street level. Whatever the case, the winds were so strong (and I a bit weary, after having by that time ridden around 20 miles) that I had to pull over to the side a couple of times to rest a bit. But by the time I got home, I had to say to myself, "Good ride." It was a genuine pleasure to meet and talk with someone who has faithfully read this blog for many months of its still-young existence; and, my weariness was itself confirmation that I needed the exercise. Yes indeed: it was all good.

"The Hobby Economy": Not just for your mama's basement anymore?

2009-04-19T09:19:00.004-05:00

Deluded by grandeur, or a worker-bee in the new economy? Image found here.

Via Andrew Sullivan comes what is, in effect, an economic answer to--and justification for(!)--the question, "Why do we blog?": "Hobby Economy," by Rob Horning. You'll want to read the whole post, especially if, like me, you even find yourself wondering what good(s) (in all its senses) blogging on things like, oh, I don't know, riding a bicycle around Wichita contributes to the real-world commonweal. But what follows are some especially pithy passages that ask us to consider re-thinking traditional notions of economies, commodities, the relationship between labor and wages, etc. (Note: The passages are cut-and-pasted from Horning's post; all wording is his. Emphases, however, are mine.):

[T]he internet, as a relatively affordable and powerful means of production available to many noncapitalists, has perhaps started to make possible an alternative to wage legitimation of labor. Tyler Cowen, in a post from a month or so ago, responded to BusinessWeek economist Michael Mandel’s theory that the alleged productivity gains from the IT boom of the past decade and a half were illusory. Cowen writes, “My take is this: there was some productivity growth but much of it fell outside of the usual cash and revenue-generating nexus. Maybe you will live until 83 rather than 81.5 and your pain reliever will work better. In the meantime you will read blogs and gaze upon beautiful people using your Facebook account. Those are gains to consumer surplus, but they don’t prop until the revenue-generating sectors of the economy as one might have expected.” In other words, gains in productivity derived from things like the internet aren’t showing up as more money in our pockets, and they are not showing up as corporate profit, but they do exist in a kind of nascent alternative economy. The “consumer surplus” is being generated outside of capitalist structures, outside of the market, though it is still occurring within a capitalist, consumerist society. It’s being made through activity that has in the past been generally dismissed as hobby behavior—collaborative open-source projects, online content production and archiving, tagging information, sharing and organizing useful data, etc., etc. The internet amasses this effort, consolidates it, distributes the example and rewards of it, and draws more people into contributing.

[snip]

Weirdly, I feel fortunate to be able to be motivated to do all this work for free. The source of that motivation remains obscure to me, but it’s clearly a product of the (perhaps imaginary) audience the internet appears to marshal for my activity. Getting paid might even discourage me. Right now, I keep writing in part because my motives are obscure. They taunt and provoke me, make me restless and frustrated with procrastinating. If there was a cash payment involved, I’d know exactly why I was doing it, and would feel much better about procrastinating and putting in only the amount of time I thought I was being paid for. I suppose there’s a chance that I like not having a price attached to what I am doing here because it frees me from having to see how little it is really worth. But the more ambiguous rewards, those that the internet as a means of production allows for, seem to be more generative—one must keep trying different things to try to secure them.

[snip]
Re technological innovations on the Web such as open-source software:

Since no wages are paid to produce them, and they generally don’t cost anything once they are made, they are outside of the market; yet they exist, and innovation is clearly being harvested there. But the use of innovation and productivity to justify income inequality doesn’t hold up—innovation is taking place outside the income-distribution system; the winners in that system are gaming in in some other way—through financial chicanery recently.

[snip]

If our social production in our spare time on the internet is where we experience the true gains in our life—if that is where we notice marginal improvement, if that is where innovations beneficial to society are being developed more or less spontaneously (see Clay Shirky’s book)—a sensible society would permit us to spend more time doing that stuff. The market and wages don’t direct us to do it, but we do it anyway. Theoretically (and this is getting pretty techno-utopian), we will be able forgo wages (work less) in favor of such social production, since the rewards we get from online participation come cheap. Whether or not employers will be so flexible is another question—traditionally, according to Marx, employers must purchase our labor in blocks of time so as to squeeze surplus value out of us.

An important question is whether this nascent hobby economy now developing alongside the capitalist one has become symbiotic with capitalism—is it helping to perpetuate a system that would otherwise become intolerable without the outlet that it provides, while feeding traditional capitalism with innovations to keep it dynamic?

This last segment is especially intriguing to ponder, in that some descriptions of capitalism-as-system-of-power contend that that which could potentially challenge capital's hegemony becomes co-opted by it so as to render it harmless or, at least, less-threatening. Still, the Internet economy--the exchanging of information and ideas--is clearly the engine driving recent discussions popping up everywhere, it seems, about the need to re-think and, even, re-engineer most if not all of that which has made possible our consumerist economy (most philosophically at Front Porch Republic; pragmatically at any number of the newish urbanism blogs). It is way too early to know how this new economic model will effect real change, but the ubiquity of the 'Nets makes it clear that it will, and profoundly.

UPDATE: Karen of Delano Wichita kindly linked to this post and added both some links in the same vein and some ruminating on existentialist questions pertaining to the Delano District. Local folks--especially those interested in thinking about notions of neighborhood and community that aren't entirely contingent on state action (or lack thereof) or on the usual ways of thinking about economies--should pay a visit over there and, maybe, get inspired.

A tentative idea: Neighborhood Rides

2009-04-19T06:58:00.001-05:00

This morning, while thinking that we've run out of major bike-paths to explore on our Readers' Rides (at least till the main connector between the Arkansas River and Gypsum Creek paths gets built) and catching up with Karen's yeo-woman's labor of a blog, Delano Wichita, it occurred to me that an ideal augmentation of the Readers' Rides would be pre-routed rides through the city's neighborhoods. A basic subtext of this blog is that cycling can help foster a sense of neighborhood and community and, really, what better way to see what a neighborhood is really like than by walking or riding through it? I admit to there being two political angles to this, as well: biking through some neighborhoods in town could oh-so-subtly impress upon riders the value of adding sharrows along some streets, if not full-blown bike lanes; and it would drive home the idea that "community" consists of more than retail businesses.

Here's where readers can join in the fun: I'd like to invite readers in the city to propose routes that are pleasant and relatively safe, traffic-wise, through their neighborhoods, map it using a map-making program such as MapMyRide or Veloroutes, and send me the link, either here in comments or via e-mail. Think as well about what neighborhood warts you'd like for us to see--not just the Norman Rockwell stuff. The idea is for us to see a community's strengths and weaknesses so as to begin discussions that could jump-start and foster a stronger sense of identity for that part of town. Anyway, I hope that those who propose these routes will also be willing to serve as our guides along these routes, so also suggest possible dates and times for these rides when you'd be available, and I'll post about them here--as will, I hope, those other bloggers who are neighborhood-inclined.

Neighborhoods such as the Delano, Riverside, and College Hill are obvious candidates for these rides, but here is a map of other possibilities to consider.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Saturday Readers' Ride: Some good news

2009-04-18T21:30:00.001-05:00

Route: Map My Ride. I wasn't able to save my route on Veloroutes, alas. Weather: cool-ish, but the rain held off.

First of all: There's some storm sewer construction that is entirely blocking the Gypsum Creek path on the south side of Pawnee; thus, our ride on Sunday will be shorter than I'd anticipated. But this isn't the good news.

This morning, no one met me at Linwood Park, so I set out on my own. It was a good ride, though my tiredness at the end was a reminder of just how long it'd been since I last rode for any real distance. But this isn't the good news, either.

It is this: Mt. Vernon from Greenway almost to Broadway now has brand-new dedicated bike lanes on the street. As in, solid lines on the pavement on both sides of the street, bike logos in the lanes, No Parking signs, and even signs telling bikers to ride with the flow of the traffic. They are spiffy, let me tell you, as are the new sidewalks (the old ones had been difficult in places even to walk on). Also, there are some marked bike lanes just north of Pawnee on Minneapolis and Swan, intended to help ease passage from the Canal path over to the new sidewalk crossing at Pawnee and Minneapolis. These are only on one side, though, and this morning they were filled with standing water from last night's rain, so they didn't elicit quite the same glee from me as I passed that way. Ah, well.

As I've mentioned before, Mt. Vernon is in the process of having storm sewers installed; the stretch with the bike lanes is the completed part of that work, and the preliminary re-paving of the two blocks or so up to Broadway has been done. The sidewalks still have yet to be done. Meanwhile, on the east side of Broadway the construction in the street has begun. So, it indeed appears that the work there is following the recommendation listed in WAMPO's Priority Missing Links list (see #13).

Anyway. A sincere thank-you to the City of Wichita for providing these lanes. I'm very much looking forward to seeing more of them.
__________

I left a little early this morning to get a look at the new Midtown Bike Path, which as you know was just opened. It's very very nice, though it makes some odd hooks here and there as it approaches some streets. But on the whole it is very functional. And, it's already been put to some pretty intense use: one straightaway has numerous very long skid marks from bike tires.

Then it was off to Linwood Park, where I waited for others to arrive; I finally left around 9:20. The ride down to Pawnee and then through the quiet neighborhood to the pedestrian bridge that crosses I-135 at Wassall was very pleasant. It's a minor complaint to note that the bridge is the weak link in the connections between the Gypsum Creek's western terminus and the Canal path's southern one--crossing over by walking the bike just took a couple of minutes. Since I last rode the new stretch, the city has seeded and covered the dirt along the the path. I met no other riders and, strangely, I didn't see any dogs out; but I did meet something I hadn't counted on: small swarms of insects flying just about head-high. A couple flew into my eye at different times, making steering a bit tricky. A pair of goggles might not be a bad idea to wear along that way.

After riding to George Washington, down to Oliver, then along the turnpike up to the construction at Pawnee, I turned back and, when I reached the Geo. Washington-Oliver intersection, I noted the time: I was curious to see how long it would take to get from, more or less, McConnell to my place. The short answer: about an hour--about the same time it takes to go the way I had been going. Following the paths adds about a mile to the trip--from 10 to 11 miles--but that's more than compensated for by being a safer route that cuts out a net four traffic lights and the hard-for-me climb of the overpass over I-135. Bike-to-Work Week should be a good time to try it out under actual commute conditions.

I'm looking forward to meeting some of you tomorrow afternoon at 2:00 on the south side of Kellogg at Armour.

April Readers' Ride

2009-04-14T06:07:00.003-05:00

It's spring! Finally! Time, therefore, to resume our approximately-once-monthly Readers' Rides this weekend. We'll explore most of the Gypsum Creek path, with a deviation from the path at George Washington to include the just-opened stretch I posted on a while back.

Saturday, April 18th, 9:00 a.m.: Meet at the south end of Linwood Park (the intersection of Mt. Vernon and Kansas). We'll follow the Canal Path south to Pawnee, continue south along Minneapolis and Minnesota to the pedestrian bridge over I-135, cross over to Wassall to pick up the head of the new path, then ride along it and the Gypsum Creek path up to where it intersects Kellogg (at Armour).

Sunday, April 19, 2:00 p.m.: Meet on the south side of Kellogg at Armour and ride the same route in the opposite direction.

As always, this is a friendly, meet-and-greet recreational ride; our only goals are to meet like-minded people, explore one of the city's bike paths, and have some fun. So, please feel welcome to bring family and friends. I hope to see some of you there on Saturday and/or Sunday.

Midtown Bike Path ribbon-cutting

2009-04-10T08:42:00.001-05:00

From Randy of the Coasters Bike Club comes this post (complete with KAKE video) about Wednesday's Midtown Bike Path ribbon-cutting. It looks like a decent crowd was there--good to see. It was also gratifying to hear Sharon Fearey's observation in the video that this path fulfills the very real need of giving kids in the near-downtown area a safe path to walk or bike on to get either to the schools the paths pass or to Riverside Park. In other words: bike infrastructure has benefits beyond the obvious that are as valuable (if not more so) than the obvious.

Thanks for sending me the link, Randy.

Here and there

2009-04-09T06:22:00.004-05:00

I didn't have a chance to do this yesterday . . .

I wish to extend congratulations to Lavonta Williams (District 1), Jim Skelton (District 3) and Janet Miller (District 6), who won their respective City Council races this past Tuesday. As readers know, Williams and Miller were kind enough to take time to send me their thoughts on cycling infrastructure (Williams' is here; Miller's is here. Given all sorts of political and economic realities, some imposed on us from without, some not, Wichita finds itself at what I would argue is a crucial crossroads regarding the funding of infrastructure. Cyclists have an opportunity to play a significant role in the setting of priorities. We will be in that mix, just because of the nature of those realities. But just how we are part of that discussion will be in large measure up to how much we speak up about what projects would better serve the needs of cyclists who see cycling as more than recreation. This blog will do what it can, but--let's be frank--blogospheric triumphalism is a delusion under which some bloggers labor. Those interested in these discussions will need to do more than read this blog.

Speaking of voting with our feet (as it were): did anyone get to attend yesterday's ribbon-cutting for the Midtown Bike Path? Leave a note (or links, if you've posted something) in the comments.

New bike-path opening ceremony

2009-04-07T06:10:00.001-05:00

Via a commenter comes news from the Coasters Bicycle Club that on Wednesday the 8th at 6:00 p.m. there will be a ribbon-cutting to mark the opening of the Midtown Bike Path. The festivities will be at Otis Park, NW Corner of 13th and Market. I will be in class at that time, alas, but I hope some of you can make it there to show your approval of this newest addition to Wichita's cycling infrastructure.

I noted the announcement of this path back in October (you'll find a map of the route there), and a few weeks ago I rode the path for its then-completed length of Central to 11th. I'll just repeat here what I said in October: this is nice to see (and, I might add, in a part of town where numerous near-downtown people who don't fit the usual image of Bike-Commuters use their bikes for just that purpose). That said, a genuine need, for purposes of overall connectivity between/among the major paths already existing, remains a couple of east-west routes that intersect those routes and run into the urban core. As I noted earlier this morning, right this moment we have a perfect forum for voicing our support for this need: a period for public comment on the spending of federal money set aside for transportation. Make it to Otis Park Wednesday if you can and wave at/shake hands with the public officials there if you can; but don't forget to e-mail some folks about ARRA projects, too.

ARRA Project Public comment

2009-04-07T00:49:00.002-05:00

Via Jane Byrnes ("janebb AT sbcglobal DOT net"), the Bicycle and Pedestrian Representative on the Metropolitan Transportation Plan Project Advisory Committee (MTP-PAC), comes WAMPO's list of projects identified to receive American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (that's "Stimulus Package") money. Appendix E is where the list actually appears. WAMPO is receiving public comment on the list until 8:00am Monday, April 13, 2009; you can e-mail your comments to Brenton Holper at "bholper AT wichita DOT gov"

As far as cyclists and alt-transportation are concerned, there's not much there: a combination bike path/sidewalk along Andover Rd.; bike racks placed at various places along bus routes to encourage bus usage by cyclists, and the transit department's purchase of three hybrid vehicles. Most of the rest consists of resurfacing projects, though a stretch of Maize Road will be widened to 5 lanes.

I admit to not knowing just how firm this list is--the now-familiar term "shovel-ready" seems to be a defining criterion--but I made note to Jane and will cc to Mr. Holper the fact that according to WAMPO's "Priority Missing Links", the already-listed projects of re-striping Douglas from Webb to the Canal Route and restriping Waterman from the Canal Route to the river so as to create dedicated bike lanes (paint-ready projects?) would cost an estimated $81,000 total. Given both the cheap cost and the enormous value these east-west routes would add to the existing system's connectivity, maybe enough people writing Mr. Holper could sway his panel to do some reshuffling of funds.

Just a word about Jane--and thanks to the anonymous commenter who gave me her name: as a result of our brief exchange of e-mails, she strikes me as being a strong advocate of cycling and pedestrian interests. She herself is a member of the Sierra Club and a health and fitness advocate; she has a brother who is a bike-commuter; she is concerned about increased sprawl into farmland and the (so far) car-first infrastructure that comes along. She describes herself to me as "carefully assertive": a nice phrase. It'd be good to let her know that we have her back. Squeaky bike-wheels get the funding grease.

Further comment: It seems indicative to me of the default assumption about cyclists and how best to serve them (the subject of this recent post) that a) there's only one "shovel-ready" project involving cycling infrastructure; and b) it's a combination bike path/sidewalk that is c) located in the far suburbs (AND, again, runs north-south)--this, when the WAMPO Priority List contains a total of 3 re-striping projects that would create bike-lanes on east-west streets that are, apparently, not deemed shovel-ready. Granted, re-striping doesn't put many folks to work, nor does it do so for very long--the other purposes of ARRA projects--and no one argues that already existing streets don't need repairing. But still: only one bike-infrastructure project is ready to go? Really? This lack is obviously not WAMPO's fault: they've done their work.

More planning--that is, some actual engineering--please. Especially given the fact that, sooner or later, transportation, energy, liveable-city and sustainability will become issues that cities and states will have to address, let's see some signs that in Wichita, cycling-infrastructure and mass transit and alternate transportation projects are something more than afterthoughts.

Road class 1

2009-04-06T06:38:00.003-05:00

Over at Carbon Trace, Andrew has posted a podcast (13 minutes) in which he interviews two instructors of the Road Class 1 session, sponsored by the League of American Bicyclists. Some of the commentary is Springfield MO-specific, but I could tell, just from having listened, that I would benefit from taking such a class. Moreover, it's perversely comforting to learn that . . . how to put this delicately . . . examples of bad riding habits are to be found everywhere.

Anyway--I hope you'll give a listen, if you have the time. Alternately, if you've gone through one of these courses yourself, I hope you'll share your experiences in the comments.

The Bubbafication of Bike Culture

2009-04-05T16:17:00.001-05:00

Via Austin on Two Wheels, who needs bike lanes and dedicated paths when you can scrounge up an 8x8, a 2x6, and two tall-boys?:

Lavonta Williams' position on bicycle-advocacy issues

2009-04-05T14:34:00.006-05:00

What follows is the statement just sent me by Lavonta Williams, candidate for the District 1 seat on the Wichita City Council, the elections for which are this Tuesday, April 7:

John, I am sorry it took so long to respond - but I am very interested in increasing the opportunities of bike paths within our Wichita community. All of us should be intersted - no matter which district because I for one want to make the connections across the city. I sit on a Health & Wellness Coalition and we are looking at the possibilities of Wichita being involved in Complete Streets. It looks as if there might be 2 more paths created soon if funding becomes available. Let's keep our fingers crossed.
Lavonta

As noted earlier, the appearance of this letter here should not be construed as an endorsement of this candidate.

Changing "default assumptions" about cycling: The case for the need to do so

2009-04-04T18:40:00.002-05:00

Two recent news stories, one from Oregon and one from yesterday's Eagle, are worth addressing, especially as, to my mind, they serve as a fairly accessible entrance into something more existential I've been giving some thought to of late regarding my sense of the status of cycling culture in Kansas--or, at least, in Wichita.

The Oregon story comes by way of U.S. News and World Report and is rather provocatively titled, "Do Bicyclists Deserve to be Taxed?" It concerns a proposal before the Oregon state legislature to require cyclists "to pay $54 every two years for a bike registration - the same price as a car's registration." The argument in favor of the proposal is pretty straightforward: cyclists use the roads, just like motorists; therefore, they should contribute monies toward their upkeep. The arguments in opposition are varied but equally straightforward: a bike's wear and tear on the roads is minuscule in comparison to that of a car; many cyclists own cars as well and so would be asked to in effect pay double into the system; would cyclists be assessed this same fee per bike?; etc. As you might imagine, in bike-friendly Oregon this proposal is getting a fair amount of discussion. As you'll see in the article, some make an argument that I find a bit surprising: that cycling contributes so positively to the welfare of both cyclists and those who choose to drive--and therefore should be encouraged--that they fear the tax could persuade some to stop commuting via bike and discourage others from taking it up. Others, though, counter that the tax will go toward the maintaining of cycling infrastructure (in Oregon, that's not a small investment, either) which, it stands to reason, cyclists should be willing to fund.

I'd just push that last statement a little harder: while one can quibble with proposed amount for the tax (it strikes me as a bit high, especially if it's the same amount at which a car is taxed) or method of assessment (maybe there could be small surcharges for bike purchases and on certain ordinary but necessary maintenance-related items, such as tires, tools, etc.), the state should feel no reluctance to ask cyclists to be asked to help maintain the infrastructure which makes their cycling safer. Though bike infrastructure is relatively cheap, it's not free; having it is a privilege and not a right. Speaking for myself, this blog's implicit assumption is not to presume that the city and other governments owe cyclists anything in the way of infrastructure. Sure: I keep harping on wanting to see one or two genuine, right-through-the-middle-of Wichita, east-to-west bike paths or dedicated bike-lanes, that request isn't exactly on the Founding Fathers' list of self-evident truths. Or, at least it's not on the Kansas version of that list.

That brings me to the Eagle article, "Bob Aldrich says Janet Miller's mailer could mislead voters." The chief issue in the piece is whether Aldrich, in not permitting public comment at a meeting of a planning commission subcommittee, was in violation of citizens' right to petition if not in violation of committee rules. However, the commenter forwarded me the link because in the piece Aldrich addresses Miller's mailer's noting of Aldrich's not approving a proposal to link the northern terminus of the K-96 Bike Path with the north end of the I-135 Canal Path. Aldrich "opposed the bike paths because he felt the money would be better spent on the city's crumbling roads." The commenter also speculates that because of that oppostion, Aldrich hadn't responded to the e-mail I sent him and Miller, in which I asked them to state their thinking on cycling's place in Wichita's transportation scheme.

Perhaps the commenter is right that Aldrich is reluctant to state such views here, but I would be disappointed if that were the case. It's obvious that this blog favors more and improved cycling infrastructure for the city, but neither cyclists nor motorists would argue with Aldrich's position that the city's streets are in a bad way and urgently need attention. His argument is not only perfectly legitimate, it's also pretty compelling--especially during a time when revenue for infrastructure will be reduced for some time to come. If by any chance you or someone on your campaign committee is reading this, Mr. Aldrich, I sincerely ask that you consider speaking to this issue via this forum. I promise that the full and unedited text of your response will appear on this page. I'm not at all hostile to reasoned, reasonable discourse and debate--the John Brown picture notwithstanding.

And here's the crux of the matter for cyclists in Wichita: if the right to free-to-cyclists bike infrastructure isn't a self-evident one in Oregon, of all places, it's considerably less self-evident here. This seems borne out by, if nothing else, the fact that, of the 6 people running for city council in next Tuesday's election, I have received responses from two of them. I hasten to add that I don't resent their not having responded--they have campaigns to run, after all; it's not as though I'm a potential donor or someone who commands a great deal of political clout (the Underserved Cyclist demographic is still pretty small in this town, you've got to admit). It does seem to suggest, though, that when candidates speak of their vision for the city, bicycle infrastructure is on the periphery, as it were. This means that our task here is a rather different one--and, frankly, a more a priori one--and thus a very difficult one: to begin to shift the default setting for thinking about cycling from where it presently sits in the minds of many policy-makers and politicians (not to mention many citizens--cyclists as well as motorists). Here's how I put the matter the other day in an e-mail to Randy of Kansas Cyclist:

If the default setting for assumptions about cycling in this state--or in Wichita, for that matter [. . . ]--remains "middle-class white people tooling around on Saturdays by the river" and "Spandex-wearing racers in the Flint Hills," we're not going to see much money for even something as simple as sharrows, much less true bike-lanes or "complete-streets" projects.

So: projects may get proposed but don't get funding because, well, the powers that be don't see any evident need for them--"Look at all those bike paths not getting used during the week!" (That's because many of the paths don't actually go where many people work.) In the meantime, people who'd like to bike-commute stay off the streets, and then when the issue of bike lanes gets raised again, there's still no apparent need for them because there's (still) no one cycling on the streets. In the collective mind's eye, cyclists remain recreationists first, almost to the exclusion of any other conception. It all becomes a vicious circle/self-fulfilling prophecy (take your pick).

I'm interested in exploring some ideas on how to begin breaking out of that cycle that incorporate both national trends and things I and others have observed here in Wichita. As I have said many times before here, it's difficult to imagine a city better suited to a thoughtfully-planned on-street cycling infrastructure, in terms of topography and present size, than Wichita is. (The wind is another matter entirely, of course, but . . . oh, well.) The problem is that the right people (and the right number of people) aren't seeing this potential, in large measure for the reasons I mentioned above. This is something I'll be returning to as my schedule permits, both here and at the KTOC Bike and Pedestrian forum (which you should also join); in the meantime, though, I encourage you to give this thought as well and post your responses at your own places--and be sure to leave links here in comments or e-mail them to me

You going to argue with this man?

2009-04-04T14:57:00.006-05:00

"You will ride with us!"

Click image to enlarge. Photoshopping courtesy of the Mrs.

I in no way want to distract from Neil's effort over at Bike Wichita--do be sure to let him know that you'll be participating--but I got to thinking of Kansas-specific images that could be used to promote Bike-to-Work Week, and a little musing (along with my wife's skill) led to this. Hope you like it. If you do, credit where credit's due and all that.

Anyway--it was either John Brown or, uh . . .

Bike-to-Work Week in Wichita

2009-04-03T20:07:00.003-05:00

"Recycle," a free-to-download image from Start-Thinking.

I confess to wanting to post a little something about Bike-to-Work Week, an event sponsored by the League of American Bicyclists to encourage and promote awareness of bicycle-commuting, to be held May 11-15, but just hadn't gotten to it. But today, via both Randy of Kansas Cyclist and prolific commenter Anonymous, I learned about a new blog, Bike Wichita, which appears to have been around for about a week and which, at the moment, is geared toward encouraging individuals and businesses to participate in and support Bike-to-Work Week. Neil has also provided links to other sites and posted other material intended to motivate and/or inspire.

Bike Wichita sees to be a project of a green-minded advertising and promotion firm here in town, Start-Thinking. Here's another of their images intended to encourage the viewer to think a little more greenly: As it happens, Bike-to-Work Week is also my school's finals week, which means that my schedule will permit me to participate: a first for me this spring. I hope some of you will head over to Bike Wichita, get inspired, do a little advance thinking about a bike-route to your workplace--highly recommended--and then saddle up on May 11-15.

KTOC

2009-04-03T08:53:00.001-05:00

Thanks to following some links suggested by that most-prolific of commenters in the blogosphere, Anonymous, this morning I learned for the first time of the Kansas Transportation Online Community, a service of KDOT. KTOC has been up since January of this year (here is the press release); as you'll see, its intention is to bring together anyone and everyone, whether or not you're a Kansas resident, with an interest in transportation issues. Even ordinary mortals can join it, and--despite the fairly lengthy sign-up process--I want to encourage you to at least go have a look.

The Bike and Pedestrian section of the forum is in need of some conversation: before I posted something there this morning, the most recent post had been back in January. However, if the combination of increased traffic here at this blog and the more-numerous bike-commuters in my neighborhood that I've been seeing of late mean anything, it's that there's growing interest in discussions of securing a more prominent place for cycling-as-legitimate-transportation in discussions and planning for infrastructure. Maybe we collectively can begin to shape things in that direction.