[lordofthemark]

@dasgeh 198751 wrote:

As for ANCC – I don’t know the story on those negotiations, but I know they happened before I was involved in this stuff – so > 6 years ago (and I’m pretty sure more than 10).

I was not involved as I have never lived in Arlington, but my impression was that there was significant pushback from the politically influential country club, and getting the connector (tied in with emergency vehicle access) was considered a big win by everyone in the bike community.

Getting a path all the way around a private club sounds really hard – Virginia code tends to protect property owners, and even when one is asking for a zoning waiver the concessions asked for have to be relevant.

[lordofthemark]

@zsionakides 198713 wrote:

Wards 2 and 6 cover downtown, the mall, and most the major employment areas in DC. Increasing bicycle accessibility in those employment centers is key to increasing bike commuting and should eventually drive greater demand in the residential oriented outer wards.

OTOH, Arlington and Alexandria have done almost nothing for cyclists in the employment centers, focusing more on their trail networks, which end short of where commuters need to go.

Downtown DC improvements will help with bike mode share in other wards (and also from Arlington and Alexandria – arguably its easier getting to the downtown DC bike infra safely from South Arlington and from Alex than from parts of Ward 4, certainly from wards 7 and

But from what many of my bikeDC friends seem to say, that is not the reason for the prioritization of improvements in W6 and W2 (the east downtown PBL on 9th would do more to get people downtown than the new PBLs near the soccer stadium). Its politics.

In general politics constrains staff. Staff can’t act without support from electeds. Electeds (mostly) look over their shoulders at (often autocentric) voters.

[lordofthemark]

@zsionakides 198632 wrote:

Quincy St was watered down before it even got to the public for discussion – it had gaps in even the most bike friendly design which was not even up to NACTO standards, which it’s supposed to be per the actual plan the county adopted. I would not let my young children ride on what came out of that design.

Veitch is good. Wilson is mediocre and short. Eads is hit or miss and has gaps.

The Columbia Pike cycletrack was easy as it didn’t require making any tradeoffs, except investing money in the corridor. 20th/21st takes away a lot of street parking in a dense area and it’s getting built. When Arlington builds something like that along Crystal Drive, Walter Reed Drive, or somewhere else that requires real leadership, then I’ll believe it’s getting real. Until then, it’s the same leadership that can only do easy projects, and often not even that.

21st street is in Ward 2. Bike advocates in DC have noted that DDOT has aggressively delivered bike infra in Ward 6 (strongly pro bike CM Allen) and Ward 2 (CM Jack Evan’s effectively neutered, and most ANCs pro bike.)Not so much in wards 3, 4, 5, and especially 7 and 8.

[lordofthemark]

Beerneuring #10. Public Option.

This was like the best beerneuring experience ever. Justifies this whole friggin freezing saddles.

So. Beautiful day. I ride to Public Option, up the nicely improved MBT, and finally found the right way to Franklin Street.

But Lord of the Stupid had forgotten to check the hours. Friday and Saturday only. Oh well, I can ride somewhere else.

Then a couple walk up and unlock the door. “You’re closed, right?” “You rode here, come on in. Take your bike in”.

They gave me a free beer. (They can’t charge when they’re closed ? But still, they didn’t have to do that, but they insisted) They are riders, WABA members, we talked bikes, freezing saddles, and the brewery business.

We. Should. All. Go. There.

Public Option Cream Ale.

Nice grassy hop aroma. I was too absorbed in conversation to really pay attention to the taste, but suffice it that it was balanced and pleasant.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]21297[/ATTACH]>

[lordofthemark]

@zsionakides 198625 wrote:

If Arlington were building PBLs across the county similar to 15th St NW, that would be a massive evolution from what they are doing today and I probably wouldn’t have much issue with the weak language in the Vision Zero document. The reality is almost every bike lane project in the county is heavily water downed by the time it gets to execution, to the point where it only serves highly confident riders.

Even though DC has issues with getting some of their PBLs going, the ones they do build are pretty good and tend to be contiguous. You look at projects such as 20th/21st NW or P St SW and those types of projects are almost never even proposed in Arlington, let alone built.

Have you ridden on 1st St SE. On Eye Street SE? DC has plenty of non contiguous PBLs.

[lordofthemark]

@zsionakides 198625 wrote:

If Arlington were building PBLs across the county similar to 15th St NW, that would be a massive evolution from what they are doing today and I probably wouldn’t have much issue with the weak language in the Vision Zero document. The reality is almost every bike lane project in the county is heavily water downed by the time it gets to execution, to the point where it only serves highly confident riders.

Even though DC has issues with getting some of their PBLs going, the ones they do build are pretty good and tend to be contiguous. You look at projects such as 20th/21st NW or P St SW and those types of projects are almost never even proposed in Arlington, let alone built.

DC has a bike commute mode share of about 5%. (you can probably double that for transporation riders for whom biking is not their predominant commute mode) A constituency of at least 10%. ArlCo’s bike commute mode share is well under half of DC’s.

Non bike commuters in DC are more likely to be transit users or walkers than in people who drive alone to work. Not so, yet, in Arlington.

DC has gotten to where it is by years of WABA advocacy for incremental bike infra, including loads of incomplete bike lanes, door zone bike lanes, etc, etc. (Arlington also has generally better traffic enforcement than DC, other than the automated enforcement in DC)

By all means advocate to make PBLs more complete where possible, or to substitute a PBL for a door zone lane (you could really do a lot by getting involved in lobbying to make the Crystal Drive SB lane into a PBL – one of the worst door zone bike lanes in the region, and no good reason I know but inertia why its not already a PBL) but that does not mean attacking all other bike lane projects.

And its really not about the language in the VZ doc. Alexandria has a better VZ doc, with specific numeric goals, and lots of details on programs.

We still have FEWER PBLs than Arlington. Fewer buffered bike lanes than Arlington.

I can really only encourage getting actively involved in bike advocacy. You will learn so much, and your posts to the forum will be better informed.

[lordofthemark]

@zsionakides 198622 wrote:

There’s a common perception that many of the bike lanes are largely used for recreational riding by the lycra crowd, vice transportation. This is going to happen where there are gaps in the network or the lanes are unsafe (e.g. door lane zone or a lot of mixing at intersections). If you look at the bike counter data on unprotected bike lanes, most all of them are extremely low, and barely justify their existance.

1. The “common perception” is false, and AFAICT is just dishonest rhetoric from NIMBYs (and they usually just claim no one at all is riding in them)

Also I wonder if you actually believe that “lycra” = recreational? Lots of people commute to work in lycra, and plenty of people make recreational rides in regular clothes. The equation is pretty much something done only by people ignorant of, and generally hostile to, biking.

2 There is no where in the USA (in fact I think few places in the English speaking world) where there are not gaps in the network, bad intersections, or door zone lanes.

3. The most heavily used bike lane in the region, 15th Street in NW DC, has a number of challenging intersections, and its design has been critiqued by many riders. Nonetheless it is crowded to the point of justifying nearby parallel PBLs

4. Unprotected bike lanes are typically justified as general traffic calming – but also provide connections to better bike infra (making the latter more heavily used) They also often place hold for better infra. On 1st Street SE for example unprotected lanes came first, and will soon be replaced by PBLs. They are also trivially cheap to install. So not much is really needed to justify them, unless of course you heavily value the higher motor vehicle speeds that accompany undieted roads in the places where unprotected bike lanes are typically installed.

[lordofthemark]

@zsionakides 198617 wrote:

The statement that the bike lanes built are for the lycra crowd ends up with a fair amount of truth to it, as they become recreational facilities instead of transportation ones.

Which bike lanes in Arlington or Alexandria (or DC for that matter) do you think are not used for transportation?

In Arlington I routinely use the Eads street lanes, and the Long Bridge Drive lanes, as part of my commute. I use lanes on 34th street in Fairlington to ride to synagogue. I use the King Street lanes in Alexandria to ride to Old Town for any number of reasons. I use the bike lanes on Eye Street in DC as part of my commute, and see lots of other people doing so.

[lordofthemark]

@zsionakides 198617 wrote:

If the county wants to lead, they need to go all in with the strategy, whatever that is. If we’re going to greatly increase bike usage, then actually build the facilities to do so. If cars and buses are going to be the strategy, then they need to stop pretending it’s otherwise.

1. Buses are a complement a bike/ped strategy, as people need to walk to bus stops, and need safer streets to do it. And people who go car free of car lite often benefit from both.

2. No city or county in the USA, that I know of has attempted to go from “zero to 60 ” so to speak – to get a complete, go everywhere, comfortable from 8 to 80 bike network, at a time when their bike mode share was below 5%, and their auto mode share much higher than that. The politics do not work. Going for a complete network of class A bike facilities requires a lot of money, an awful lot of street real estate, or both. You need an existing constituency for that. The only way I can see to get that constituency is incrementally, by growing biking, and using incomplete and imperfect infra to help do that.

At a recent community meeting I had someone tell me that Alexandria should be building bike facilities for everyone, like Amsterdam. Complete network of off street trails. This in a City where raising the tax rate to pay for rehabbing crumbling and overcrowded schools is drawing cries of “The City should live within its means!” . Well, the Federal govt should pay for it, like in the NL, my fellow citizen replied. I didn’t know what to make of this since the meeting was to shape CITY transporation policy. Of course the individual was from one of the civic associations that opposed the (imperfect, but used by more than the lycra clad already) Seminary Road bike lanes/road diet. He was not honestly interested in a national program of bike trails. He wanted Seminary to be four lanes, so he would not face delays between 8 and 8:30 a few days a week. The language of bike infra perfectionism has been coopted by people who want no interference with car culture.

Note, of course his assumption (like yours) is that these are done only for people on bikes. On Seminary, as in parts of Arlington, as in many other parts of the country, road diets are implemented to make it safer for pedestrians (A. By slowing driver speeds B. By providing sidewalk buffers C. By eliminating the multiple lane threat at crossings ) and also for nonspeeding drivers. Once you are doing that, it makes sense to use the space created to add to the bike network.

Early in the Seminary process, I said this to one opponent. Her response – ok, if its not about people on bikes, then just don’t call them bike lanes and don’t but bike symbols in. Again I was dumbfounded. Why would you NOT call them bike lanes? Doing so is no incremental harm to non bikers, and they ARE an addition to the bike network.

There are plenty of people who will ride in an imperfect or incomplete bike network, who are not the 1% of take the lane everywhere Vehicular Cyclists. Its those people who will get us from 1 or 2% mode share to 5% or higher, when we will have a constituency for better (even that will likely take multiple steps)

[lordofthemark]

@peterw_diy 198598 wrote:

That doesn’t sound like much. How many are there now?

Alexandria City fairly recently began to admit that traffic enforcement positions are basically budget neutral – they generally generate enough revenue from fines to cover their salary, benefits, etc. So if the goal is Safety First you’d think the county would hire as many as they could, up until they can’t write legitimate citations fast enough to pay for themselves. My guess is that the local jurisdictions could each use 3-5 times as many traffic enforcement officers as they have today and still generate the same average revenue per officer.

BTW Alexandria has also posted budget proposals online; after a quick skim I don’t see any proposed increase in traffic enforcement positions.
https://www.alexandriava.gov/budget/info/default.aspx?id=113700

I am pretty sure ALX has increased the size of the traffic squad in the last two years. One of the bigger VZ initiatives underway recently and continuing, IIUC, is getting ALL officers (not just traffic squad officers) focused on traffic enforcement.

[lordofthemark]

@wheels&wings 198609 wrote:

I filled out the Goals-of-Vision-Zero questionnaire last night. As others note, the six goals are wishy-washy, all about striving, e.g. for data collection. Stop “striving” and just do it, Arlington!

They try to please everyone… “strive to ensure safe transportation, no matter how you get around,” rather than seeking to protect the most vulnerable road-users (pedestrians, bicyclists, other micro-mobility users). Those driving 4000+ lb cars and SUVs will survive in Arlington, no matter what. The language reminds me of “share the road” signs, as if we’re all equally at risk.

Also the goals speak of protection as a “community-wide responsibility,” which seems evasive… we should be focusing on concrete steps the County can take to improve safety… enforcement, signaling, protected lanes, right-on-red restrictions, etc.

And they say their initiative is about striving to serve every Arlingtonian in a way that meets their unique needs. Huh? Not sure what they were smoking when they wrote that.

Most VZ programs do make it a goal to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries for all, including drivers and passengers in motor vehicles. For the most part programs that advance that will also improve safety for vulnerable road users, and vice versa. This also improves political feasibility I believe – both of the VZ program as a whole, and of specific initiatives.

The real weakness I see is “striving”. Its certainly true that numeric goals may not be met for perfectly good reasons – but without a hard numeric goal (and well defined qualitative programmatic goals) , there is no way to measure success.

[lordofthemark]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]21203[/ATTACH]

Thanks to my handy tool owning friend, who is now being rewarded with coffee and bagels!

[lordofthemark]

@lordofthemark 198312 wrote:

Thanks so much, I will see you there then. I will let you know if Emm’s idea works (but my lock is OnGuard).

Thanks also to W&W for your offer.

Thanks again to Casey for bringing me the graphite at PY, when he had yet ANOTHER civic meeting to attend and so could not even stay for the presentation.

Sadly, the graphite lube did not help, nor did WD-40. I may try spending more time trying, but I don’t think that will work.

At this point I need to saw through it? (A locksmith would be wimping out? And what would they do?)

What kind of saw do I need?

[lordofthemark]

@CaseyKane50 198308 wrote:

Yes, I plan to be there. I will bring the graphite in case the other suggestions don’t work.

Thanks so much, I will see you there then. I will let you know if Emm’s idea works (but my lock is OnGuard).

Thanks also to W&W for your offer.

[lordofthemark]

@CaseyKane50 198278 wrote:

You might try squirting some graphite lubricant into the lock and on the key. I’ll bring some to WTFC tomorrow

Thanks, but

I will probably not be able to conveniently arrive at coffee club tomorrow (and if I do, it will be because I’ve already solved the problem )

Will you be at the PY North meeting tomorrow evening?

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