Some comments on the WAMPO MTP 2035 list

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.

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

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.

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

[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.

Douglas Design District Streetscape Improvement Plan: Some comments

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.

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

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.

An image to ponder

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.

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

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