Bike licensing: Why? Photo: Wild Bell

Putting up barriers to healthy choices like biking makes no sense from a policy perspective — especially since many people cycling are children or very low-income, for whom the registration and licensing process may be especially difficult or offputting. (By the way, if you don’t have a car, how do you legally get to the registration point?)

But in case you needed another reason, James Sinclair at Network blog Stop and Move has a good one for us today: police profiling. Sinclair points to a recent statement from the police department in Clovis, California:

From what I understand, Clovis still has a law on the books requiring that all bikes be registered (with a fee). Fortunately, that law hasn’t been enforced in years, and it’s entirely possible the current PD doesn’t even realize that law exists.

Anyway, in the title of the post, I mention that profiling is included. What do I mean by that? Well, the ABC news broadcast has a very unfortunate quote from a Clovis PD rep.

Calli Biaggi of the Clovis Police Department is quoted as saying:

If we stop somebody and they’re on a bicycle and it doesn’t look like maybe they should have that bicycle, we can run the serial number of the bike and then we can see that its owned by someone else. And then we can contact that person and see if that bike is supposed to be with that person.

Sinclair responds:

That sounds exactly like a healthy dosage of profiling and it shouldn’t be something that department is boasting about doing.

Unless we’re talking about an adult on a bike intended for a small child, how exactly can an officer determine that “it doesn’t look like maybe they should have that bicycle”? We all know what’s actually going on here, and it’s wrong.

Sinclair says he does support voluntary bike registration as a way to assist police in recovering stolen bicycles. We concur.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Urban Velo goes into further detail about the problems with bike licensing. Bike Delaware celebrates the First State’s new status at the country’s 10th bike friendliest. And Copenhagenize is disappointed with New York City’s new pedestrian and cyclist safety campaign, because it is aimed at cyclists and pedestrians rather than motorists.

The Bullitt Foundation's "Living Building," which it calls the "greenest commercial building in the world" was nearly hamstrung by environmental regulations. Photo: The Bullitt Foundation

The problem, Adam Bejan Parast at Seattle Transit Blog writes, is that we are stuck with environmental regulations from a bygone era:

I have thought for a while that each generation of environmentalists is shaped in response to the differing environmental challenges of their time. While older generations of environmentalists were shaped by the back-to-the-land movement, one that believed in an essentially rural solution to environmental problems, young environmentalists are exactly the opposite, believing that dense cities are the primary solution to the problems we face.

Call it Vashion Island environmentalism vs Capitol Hill environmentalism. I find these underlying beliefs to be a helpful organizing structure when talking about density, tree preservation, parking requirements or other issues facing infill development.

Parast links to a post by Dan Bertolet, who argues we are entering a “fourth wave of planning,” influenced by climate change, energy concerns, food systems and sustainable regional development. How long will it take for our environmental regulations to catch up?

Elsewhere on the Network today: The League of American Bicyclists unveils its project aimed at memorializing every cyclist killed on American streets. Steven Can Plan compares traffic injury rates in the Netherlands to Chicago. And Brown Girl in the Lane discusses obstacles to women in the cycling movement, and how she developed a sisterhood of supporters.

This is the message and image being used to promote a $6 billion transit-and-roads referendum in greater Atlanta. Photo: Decatur Metro

We’ve written a few times about how transit referendums need a simple, to-the-point message summarizing what voters can expect to receive in return. Here’s how they’re doing it in Atlanta.

In their quest to win voter support for a $6 billion funding package that would be split about evenly between transit and roads, proponents have settled on the phrase ”Let’s Untie Atlanta’s Knot.” Equating the ballot measure to a referendum on Atlanta’s notorious congestion woes seems like a smart idea.

Network blog Decatur Metro decided to evaluate the “untying” claim on its central promise — congestion relief — and found that it passes the sniff test, especially when it comes to transit:

The AJC this morning has summarized the Atlanta Regional Commission’s findings from a 10-year traffic simulation program and shown that the figures overall are either impressive or underwhelming, depending on what area you look at and/or which expert/non-expert you speak with. Atlanta’s infrastructure is a big ol’ expensive mistress, and though $6 billion may sound big compared to, say, our annual salaries, it’s a drop in the bucket for the metro area’s collection of road and rail. Or Mark Zuckerberg for that matter. But some figures seem heartening…

From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

On average, the number of metro Atlantans able to reach job centers in under 45 minutes would rise just 6 percent by car, and about 20 percent by bus or train, if the projects are built. The new transit projects expect perhaps 75,000 or more daily boardings.

Regional planners insist that in the world of transportation design, a 6 percent or 20 percent jump in good commutes is a big deal.

This should be a slam dunk for Atlanta. We’ll be following it through voting day in July.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Grid Chicago continues to evaluate Chicago’s transportation “Action Agenda” in a second sit-down question-and-answer session with DOT Commissioner Gabe Klein. Bike Lane Living shares a video documenting Indianapolis’s Bike to Work Day. And Alex Block weighs in on the density debate spurred by Richard Florida’s comments at the Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Palm Springs.

Looking at median housing prices and Walk Scores in more than 250 cities, Emily Washington found a clear correlation. Photo: Market Urbanism

As part of her graduate studies, Emily Washington at Network blog Market Urbanism set out to determine if people were willing to pay a premium for housing in a walkable urban setting. She developed two different models to see if there’s a link between housing prices and Walk Scores in 259 cities. Wouldn’t you know it, she found a pretty clear connection. Washington shared the results of her research in a post yesterday and is asking for feedback on her methodology:

I tested the impact of Walk Score on median house prices controlling for household income, unemployment, and cost of living. The sample includes 259 cities for which I had Walk Score data and Census data by Metropolitan Statistical Area for the other controls. The results suggest that for a one-point increase in Walk Score, we can expect a .5% increase in a cities’ median house price, and this result is statistically significant.

In another way of measuring the same question (an IV regression using the year the city was founded as the instrument), I found that a one-point increase in Walk Score can be expected to increase home prices by 3%. This result is also statistically significant, but I have less faith in this model.

For the most part, the other studies that I’ve seen of Walk Score’s relationship to house prices look at one city or a few cities and control for variables like a neighborhood’s crime rate and housing quality. While there are obvious advantages to these more detailed, local studies, I think the national view gets around the sample selection problems that make other results ungeneralizable.

Elsewhere on the Network today: An exhibit brings the trains rejected by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to Milwaukee, demonstrating what might have been if it weren’t for political antics, reports Urban Milwaukee. BikeWalkLee writes that a Fort Myers area women who fell asleep at the wheel and killed a local cyclist won’t face criminal charges. And Bike Portland highlights some of the successes from the local political action committee dedicated to walking and biking issues.

Photo: Salon

Today Adonia Lugo at Urban Adonia points to another unexpected source of venom: the feminist blogosphere, a.k.a. ladyblogs. These bastions of tolerance and acceptance have a strange blind spot for cyclists, Lugo writes:

When the topic of bikes comes up, there’s always a mini-war in the comments between people who despise “bike hipsters” (read: entitled, privileged jerks who think they own the road) and people who actually ride bikes. Commenters trot out their most extreme stories of negative interactions they’ve had with people on bikes, sometimes concluding with things like “F#%* BIKING HIPSTERS I HOPE A BUS HITS YOU.”

These are the same websites that promote things like fat acceptance and anti-bullying campaigns. Why are bicyclists portrayed as inhuman creatures unworthy of sympathy, dismissing an incredibly diverse world of practice (bicycling) because of the stupid behavior of a few jerks? And, this is the thing that really confuses me, why do people find jerk bicyclists so harmful to society when they constantly interact with motorists who run red lights and stop signs, use infrastructure like traffic circles in dangerous ways, talk and text in the car, drive without looking from side to side when entering intersections, and engage in other dangerous behaviors that kill people every day?

I asked a few of my friends, one a bicyclist and one less inclined to the bicycling arts, what they thought about this phenomenon. Both responded that it’s because you can see a bicyclist’s face, whereas it’s easier to think of a motorist as a car. The interactions with bicyclists stick out in people’s minds, and maybe they feel more personally insulted by the face-to-face flouting of laws. I think it’s also because we’ve trained ourselves to think of driving as passing through an obstacle course rather than moving through a social space. Cars that do dumb stuff are a nuisance, but they do not interrupt the illusion until there’s an actual crash. Bodies that do dumb stuff are a threat to the idea that driving is a no harm, no foul activity. You might actually hurt someone!

Elsewhere on the Network today: Mobilizing the Region shares a story about New Jersey high school students who are fighting for 0.2 miles of sidewalk at a dangerous turn by their school. Greater Greater Washington sees parallels between the misperceptions of New York City’s bike-share plans and the days preceding the launch of Capital Bikeshare. And the Transport Politic says Dallas’s Trinity highway plan, which will parallel a new light-rail line, represents “transportation planning at its worst.”

Stephen Lee Davis at Transportation for America took an in depth look yesterday at how transit advocates in this Deep South city built a broad, diverse coalition to make the case for transit:

Hundreds of Baton Rouge residents turned out for strategy meetings on how to save the local public transit system. The wide-ranging campaign worked. Photo: T4A

Even before the prolonged fiscal crisis hitting governments everywhere, Baton Rouge’s Capital Area Transit System (CATS) struggled to do more with less. Over the last few years, service had degraded to the point that the wait for a bus exceeded 75 minutes and average rides were over two hours long. The system was saved repeatedly only by last-ditch city budget shuffles, creative grants and even private donations.

After cobbling together grants and funding to make it through 2011, the mayor appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission to make recommendations not only to save the service, but to create something much better. But the first job was to save the system, as Rev. Raymond Jetson, the chair of that commission, told the Baton Rouge Advocate:  “Before there can be a robust transit system, before you can do novel things like light rail between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and before you can have street cars from downtown to LSU, you have to have a backbone to the system,” he said. “And that backbone is a quality bus system.”

The commission learned that Baton Rouge was the largest city of its size in the country to have a transit system without a dedicated revenue source, subsisting on annual local government appropriations.

For the message, especially in the key districts with heavy transit usage and service, the campaign kept it very basic. “Save our system.” They noted that Baton Rouge was the only city of its size without a decent transit system, and talked about the people who depend on it each day: Perhaps the nurse who cares for your mother at the hospital, or your neighbor or friend. The campaign steered clear of some of the typical statistics in transit campaigns about reducing traffic congestion, gas prices or environmental impacts.

Here’s the ballot measure’s election day team:

Approval of the measure will allow the city to shorten wait times from 75 minutes to 15 minutes and keep the city of Baton Rouge running smoothly. Great job by everyone involved!

Elsewhere on the Network today: Systemic Failure takes issue with an LA Times article saying California High Speed Rail has an unrealistic timeline. Extraordinary Observations wonders if deregulation of the taxi industry would improve service. And Greater Greater Washington reports that Virginia Governor Bob O’Donnell threatens to halt the expansion of a new segment of DC’s Metro.

The Nationals' new stadium has turned a dead urban zone into a hotspot. Photo: NRDC Switchboard

But that doesn’t stop too many cities, and there are examples of places that have gambled on sports facilities and won big.

There’s a new member of that club now: Washington, DC. It’s been nearly 10 years since the city green-lighted a package of 30-year bonds for a new home for the Nationals baseball franchise in a depressed southeastern section of the city. Kaid Benfield at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Switchboard blog reports that the investment is paying off:

According to developers in the area, building didn’t really become financially feasible there until the city committed to the ballpark. Today, the neighborhood’s new projects are about 30 percent built. In addition to the new commercial properties, the area’s residential population has increased from about 1,000 to more than 3,500 and should eventually reach 16,000.

It is especially heartening that even those originally opposed to the stadium like what they see. Neighborhood resident Naomi Monk was a prominent skeptic, arguing that the park would only be an eyesore benefiting millionaire players and businessmen, with nothing in it for low-income residents. But in March she told Fisher that “I have to say, it’s been for the betterment of the community. Our crime seems to be under control. The neighborhood looks 100 percent better. The new housing is a great improvement.”

I’m not going to make a broader point about the extent to which public investment in sports is a good thing. It’s likely situational and, though it has been enormously beneficial here in Washington twice (though in the case of Verizon Center the city paid only for infrastructure), and it also appears to have been beneficial in nearby Baltimore, the facts and circumstances vary.

Benfield reports that the tax issued on big businesses to support the stadium is bringing in twice what was expected. Plus additional property taxes related to new investment have added $13 million to the city’s coffers. Nice, for a change, to see a city enjoying a windfall at this moment in history.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Bike Delaware shares a League of American Bicyclists’ report showing that one in four collisions between cyclists and cars involve cyclists being hit from behind. Bike Portland reports the city’s first open streets event of the season attracted an astounding 28,000 people. And Transit in Utah says sustainable transportation advocates need to do a better job developing sales pitches and buzz words.

This campaign season, opponents of smart growth policies are running against urbanism in greater Portland. Photo: The Oregonian

Even in Portland, a group called the Oregon Transformation Project is running candidates to overturn the region’s longstanding commitment to urbanism. Engineer Scotty at Portland Transport posits that the smart growth opponents are motivated by self-interested fear of the urban renaissance:

Some density opponents are staunch conservatives, motivated by cultural politics, free-market economics, or political solidarity with other conservative constituencies such as big oil. Many other density opponents come from the left — viewing big-ticket capital transportation projects (as well as urban renewal projects designed to encourage infill) as little more than corruption and cronyism, indistinguishable (other than in scope) from the antics of Wall Street banksters, with greenwashing being used to deceive a gullible public. But a common theme that motivates many of the critics on both the left and the right, is a dislike of density itself.

A billboard run by OTP compares a picturesque view of Mount Hood with a grainy, black-and-white photo of downtown Portland, with the words “CONGESTION DENSITY CRIME” lying under the latter. The implication being that if the current course continues, much of Clackamas County will soon resemble the worst attributes of Portland. There seems to be a fear that single-family neighborhoods all over the tri-county area will soon be overrun by apartment housing of the worst sort, and that middle-class communities will be transformed overnight into budding Rockwoods. In some cases, this fear is expressed in near-apocalyptic terms, with dire warnings about an urbanist tyranny literally forcing people out of homes and cars and into Soviet style block housing. (The term “Potemkin Village” gets used quite a bit as well — although the term originates from Tsarist Russia and has nothing to do with communism or forced living arrangements.)

For many people, public investment in new urbanism represents public disinvestments in where they live. One other geometric fact about density is that unless the local population explodes, density can’t go up everywhere. If the overall population stays more or less constant, and one neighborhood sees its density rise, then simple mathematics dictates that some other community will see its population decline. Property values and tax base will go down; and the quality of services will decline, leading to a vicious cycle of decay.

Given all of that, it’s not surprising that a backlash is continuing to brew. The recession hit many people hard, and when government elects not to maintain the status quo, it’s not hard to see how people feel abandoned or even threatened. People are attached to their homes, and will often go to great lengths to defend them.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Extraordinary Observations examines how college graduates cluster in cities. A View from the Cycle Path looks at average commuting distances across Canada’s largest cities. And Human Transit analyzes Tweets about transit agencies in an attempt to assess performance.

The West Town Girls' Bike Club in Chicago's Humboldt Park. The neighborhood, once resistant to bike infrastructure, now embraces it. Photo: Grid Chicago

The perception of bike infrastructure as a sign of gentrification used to hold sway in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood too. But John Greenfield at Grid Chicago reports that attitudes toward bike lanes in this Latino and African-American neighborhood have shifted from resistance to enthusiasm:

People in Humboldt Park, a largely low-income Latino and African-American community on Chicago’s West Side, once opposed bike facilities as well. So it was a good feeling yesterday when I took my first spin on new buffered bike lanes under the giant Puerto Rican flag arches of the neighborhood’s Division Street business strip. I viewed them as a sign of how much attitudes about cycling have changed in Humboldt Park over the last decade. And as the city moves forward with the Streets for Cycling plan to install 100 miles of protected bike lanes within Mayor Emanuel’s first term, the story of the Division Street bike lanes offers a lesson on the need to engage local people in the process.

In 2003, the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) installed bike lanes in gentrified, bike-crazy Wicker Park, located just east of Humboldt Park, on Division from Ashland Avenue to Western Avenue, the border between the two neighborhoods. The stretch of Division in Humboldt Park between Western to California Avenue, known as the Paseo Boricua (“Puerto Rican Way”) and defined by the flag arches, is the same road width. But Chicago aldermen have final say on whether bike facilities get built in their wards and Billy Ocasio, Humboldt Park’s alderman at the time, opposed extending the lanes into his ward, according to CDOT spokesman Pete Scales.

The Paseo, lined with Puerto Rican cafes, restaurants, bodegas and salsa clubs, has retained its character over the past decade, but times have changed since Ocasio vetoed the lanes. Wilson, who’s white, says he worked hard to get the blessing of local community leaders before opening West Town on the Paseo in 2009. Since then his organization has taught safe cycling and mechanics skills to hundreds of at-risk kids in Humboldt Park. The store also offers affordable repair services in a neighborhood that already had a vibrant cruiser bike culture as the home of the Chicago Cruisers, a mostly Puerto Rican club that organizes rides with dozens of members parading on classic Schwinns.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Transportation for America outlines its “Transportation Vote 2012″ campaign to bolster smart transportation policies in the upcoming election. Mobilizing the Region reports on how the Connecticut Legislature blew it this session when it came to transportation safety measures. And Walkable Dallas Fort Worth explains why the city’s grand plans for a central park are unlikely to succeed.

Dallas wants to add another downtown freeway. Jason Roberts says the city will soon have to confront the limits to car-based planning. Photo: Freelancecrunch.com

This Dallas highway proposal could turn out differently than previous ones. There is real opposition at the grassroots level. And even though the majority of local decision makers are supportive, a notable few have vocally joined the opposition.

Still, the endless road widening campaigns and the complete lack of vision are getting to Jason Roberts at Bike Friendly Oak Cliff – and to other people he knows. Roberts says the Big D’s apparent inability face up to its unsustainable development patterns will be its downfall:

What we’re witnessing today is a generational divide where outdated philosophies are represented by a leadership that refuses to acknowledge the obvious fact that their children are all saying, “I’d rather live in Austin/Portland/NY/SF/Chicago than Dallas.” Stubbornly, the parents keep saying, “they’ll come back for the jobs,” without realizing that the jobs are starting to go where the people want to be.

We’re well aware of the $1.4 billion levee toll road, and the Winfrey Point parking debacle at the Dallas Arboretum (both ironic due to their nature vs. machine conflict), but another instance also making the news is the “lack of parking” headlines in the historic (and walkable) Bishop Arts District. Every week we’re seeing one costly issue after another related to our endless pursuit of maintaining unsustainable suburban development patterns, and the solutions are always the same: take more land, and give it to cars. For some reason, the adage “When you’re in a hole, stop digging” has been completely ignored, and I’m beginning to become numb to the monthly, “I’m finally leaving Dallas!” emails that friends keep sending me.

While other major US cities are disincentivizing auto use and incentivizing mixed transportation models in order to balance their costly strain on infrastructure, we continue to do the reverse.  It’s obvious that our leadership is going to have to eventually take a stand (and a few arrows) and say, “we’re going to have to try something different,” or else they’re going to be the embarrassing “Before” picture to an eventual leader who decides to take the inevitable path that every other city around them is taking. Like George Wallace in 1963, Dallas is waiting for its Bobby Kennedy.

Elsewhere on the Network today: The Washington Area Bicyclists Association tells how they determined that DC-area police don’t know much about cycling and traffic law. Walk Bike Lee shares an expert’s advice that complete streets should be adapted to their surroundings, not shaped by a cookie cutter. And Mobilizing the Region reports that New Jersey’s Camden County is getting bike-share.