Pedestrians and cyclists hit the streets on May 14 from locations across the metro area. Bike Walk Ambassadors were at the forefront of promoting the Twin Cities celebration (and expanded concept) of the national Bike to Work Day event. Preliminary data show it was a great success--a 51% increase in registered participation from last year! Ambassadors encouraged businesses, schools, and places of worship to host events and teams, helping to foster more people-powered transportation. At Battle Creek Middle school, for example, students and teachers biked from school to the down town St. Paul celebration.
The participation profile shows that 65% biked, 18% walked, and 17% biked and walked as a part of a trip. First timers made up 11% of registrants, 22% reported doing “it every now and then”, 37% report doing it in “fair weather”, and 30% report doing it year round.
Thanks to the many hosts and sponsors who enable such a community event to come to life. The partnership list is an impressive collaboration: 494 Commuter Services, Anoka County TMO, ABC Ramps, Bike Walk Ambassadors, The City of Minneapolis, The City of St. Paul, Downtown Minneapolis TMO, Hennepin County, Metro Transit, Minnesota Department of Transportation, St. Paul Smart Trips, and Bike Walk Twin Cities. See a full list of sponsors here.
Similar success was reported across the country. More than 200,000 people biked to work for San Francisco's 15th annual Bike to Work Day. There were twice as many bikes as cars on Market Street during the morning commute. 8,000 bicyclists registered to celebrate Bike to Work Day 2009 at locations in the Washington, D.C., suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia areas - a new record. Marin County, CA enjoyed a great day on May 14 as over 4,300 cyclists participated in Bike to Work Day - contributing to the 36% regional increase over last year. New York City DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan was a bike commuter on Bike to Work Day, leading a commuter ride from Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza to City Hall.
Read more about the Twin Cities 2009 Bike Walk Week, including Katie Eukel’s blog from the show-stopper breakfast hosted by the Green Institute, attended by nearly 300 bicyclists and pedestrians, and Jamez Smith's blog from an early morning Bike Walk Day event, and see a list of all the Bike Walk Week news coverage. A full report of the week will be available on www.bikewalkweek.org in late June.
Interview with MnDOT's Tim Mitchell
On May 18, we sat down with MnDOT's Tim Mitchell and asked him a few questions. For an hour we discussed topics ranging from Mitchell's ideal-world bicycle and pedestrian project priorities, the obstacles and encouraging signs in Minnesota's cultural landscape for bicycling and walking issues, and his strategic priorities. Tim Mitchell is the Bicycle and Pedestrian Section Director in the Office of Transit at the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
What’s the MnDOT statutory authority over bicycle and pedestrian transportation and what does the law say about the work that you do?
The basic crux of it is that we have an obligation to consider bicycle and pedestrian accommodations on our projects unless there are conditions or issues that would dictate that those accommodations not be made. If adding those elements is outside the scope of the project as far as a physical location that makes it difficult, if there’s a significant—and this is a tough term to define—but a significant cost increase that’s realized to a project to add those elements, that would be a reason for not doing it.
We want to ask you to dream big. You have $100,000,000 in bike/ped funding you’ve just been given, no strings attached, and you’re in charge. How would you like to spend that money?
I would love for us to have bicycle and pedestrian accommodations on all of our major bridges, specifically the ones that span significant barriers, such as rivers. I’d love for us to be able to take advantage of that funding to really improve the pedestrian and bicycle environments in our heavily urban areas. I also would really like to utilize that funding to develop the Minnesota scenic byway system that’s been bantered about for a number of years out in the rural areas to give us a world-class touring opportunity for cyclists. Those would probably be the three main priorities.
In terms of that vision, or perhaps smaller scale visions that you might have to deal with, what are the greatest assets in Minnesota right now that would enhance that vision and what are the greatest obstacles?
I’ll start with the obstacles. We still work in an environment where we focus on our largest customer base, which is the motor vehicle operator. And it’s often easy for us to forget about small little improvements we can do that really can have huge benefits to the other modes. I think that’s the significant barrier. There are no funding barriers, there are no policy barriers per se, and there really are no institutional barriers left in place. I think we really have gotten past a lot of what was blocking progress historically.
The things that we really have here that I think are leading us to success are just people’s lifestyle evolutions or changes that they’ve made with the spike in gas prices last summer and the climate change issue and people’s growing awareness to land use have really caused a lot of people to change how they live their lives and seek out different kinds of communities. That’s led to, as we’ve all seen and Bike Walk Twin Cities has been able to document, significant increase in walking and biking and transit use.
One thing we’ve struggled with as bicycle and pedestrian professionals over the years is we don’t have good data. We don’t have a good understanding of the numbers of users do we have out there, what happens as far as mode shift when improvements are made. Obviously the funding situation has been getting better and better, especially from the federal level.
We have one of the national leaders in a municipality in Minneapolis, which I think has been that shining light within the state that everybody is starting to look at. We’ve had a lot of progress in municipalities and counties in adopting complete streets policies and a lot of them looking at them. I think that’s a really strong indication that we’re going in a good direction. We have what appears to be the potential to be a really great advocacy situation in the state now with the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota coming up. The trail system that we have here statewide is second to none, and that obviously provides a great backbone to a system, especially when we’re talking about people who want to be active as far as walking or inline skating and bicyclists who maybe aren’t as comfortable on the roadways as others, so giving different options is a really valuable asset.
Just going back to the obstacles for a moment, you said you didn’t really see institutional barriers or funding barriers particularly but it sounded like you were just seeing this historic focus on the motor vehicle user.
Yeah, there’s still a culture at MnDOT where we tend to focus on our largest customer segment--motor vehicles. And that’s fair. There’s a lot more discussions that begin and end with how we can make our environments better for bicycling and walking than maybe there were in the past. Our commissioner has made a commitment to becoming a multimodal agency that delivers on that idea and I honestly believe that the people who work in this agency and in general the community across the state area also coming around as well.
In developing policy and implementing projects, the dynamics are very complex: there MnDOT, there’s FHWA, there’s the MPOs, there’s cities, there’s counties, there’s ASHTO stuff, there’s the legislature. For people reading the e-newsletter thinking “is there an easy way to get a handle on the flow and the responsibilities,” is there a way you could boil that down to a few quick sentences for us?
Wow, how can I approach this in an easy way? This commissioner is trying to instill in all of us that the top of our organizational chart is the traveling public, or the people of Minnesota. In many regards the planning for projects really starts at the local level and begins to ascend up. So we start with the needs of the public in specific locations and for us working with our different partners--whether it be a city or county level or other organizations-- and plan and develop projects that are respectful of those needs. And then we work with metropolitan planning organizations and Federal Highway Administration as things progress. So it’s really, as you said, a dynamic process--lots of people involved and lots of competing interests and different viewpoints.
How might the interaction with MnDOT, particularly on bike/ped issues, feel or look differently to local communities than it has in the past?
That’s a good question. This commissioner—and I completely support this—has really tried to instill an environment here where we strengthen our partnerships and we have a more collaborative dialogue with the local units of government. He’s a huge proponent of context-sensitive solutions and flexibility in design and he wants us to, as we’re planning our future projects and developing those projects, really focus on the context in which we’re operating.
We’re also trying to figure out different ways that we can understand our success instead of just looking at benchmarks or performances measures that we’ve had in the past--vehicle throughput or level of service or congestion hours. We want to look at how many people are we moving through a corridor during an hour or through the course of a day and how are we impacting people’s quality of life; getting at some more of those human factors as well as the traditional engineering factors.
Anything else we should have asked you?
One of the things that I didn’t mention is that as a department we are really spending more of our effort and time on pedestrian-related issues than we have in the past. One of the driving forces behind that is safety. Besides having too many bicycle-related fatalities over the past year we’ve had too many pedestrian-related fatalities and we want to be more aggressive in trying to understand how our infrastructure may put people at risk.
Working with the disabled community and making our environments function better for people with disabilities has become one of our strategic initiatives. We’re putting more resources towards building a wider body of knowledge about our responsibilities and the kinds of improvements we can make that allow our infrastructure to function better.
And that would only be on state roads, correct? So your reach is fairly limited.
Correct. It is fairly limited, but we hope that we also can, to some extent, provide some kind of a leadership role for the rest of the transportation community out there in regards to this issue. And we want to help where we can with fostering those dialogues between the municipalities themselves and then also with the disabled community where appropriate.
What’s the MnDOT statutory authority over bicycle and pedestrian transportation and what does the law say about the work that you do?
The basic crux of it is that we have an obligation to consider bicycle and pedestrian accommodations on our projects unless there are conditions or issues that would dictate that those accommodations not be made. If adding those elements is outside the scope of the project as far as a physical location that makes it difficult, if there’s a significant—and this is a tough term to define—but a significant cost increase that’s realized to a project to add those elements, that would be a reason for not doing it.
We want to ask you to dream big. You have $100,000,000 in bike/ped funding you’ve just been given, no strings attached, and you’re in charge. How would you like to spend that money?
I would love for us to have bicycle and pedestrian accommodations on all of our major bridges, specifically the ones that span significant barriers, such as rivers. I’d love for us to be able to take advantage of that funding to really improve the pedestrian and bicycle environments in our heavily urban areas. I also would really like to utilize that funding to develop the Minnesota scenic byway system that’s been bantered about for a number of years out in the rural areas to give us a world-class touring opportunity for cyclists. Those would probably be the three main priorities.
In terms of that vision, or perhaps smaller scale visions that you might have to deal with, what are the greatest assets in Minnesota right now that would enhance that vision and what are the greatest obstacles?
I’ll start with the obstacles. We still work in an environment where we focus on our largest customer base, which is the motor vehicle operator. And it’s often easy for us to forget about small little improvements we can do that really can have huge benefits to the other modes. I think that’s the significant barrier. There are no funding barriers, there are no policy barriers per se, and there really are no institutional barriers left in place. I think we really have gotten past a lot of what was blocking progress historically.
The things that we really have here that I think are leading us to success are just people’s lifestyle evolutions or changes that they’ve made with the spike in gas prices last summer and the climate change issue and people’s growing awareness to land use have really caused a lot of people to change how they live their lives and seek out different kinds of communities. That’s led to, as we’ve all seen and Bike Walk Twin Cities has been able to document, significant increase in walking and biking and transit use.
One thing we’ve struggled with as bicycle and pedestrian professionals over the years is we don’t have good data. We don’t have a good understanding of the numbers of users do we have out there, what happens as far as mode shift when improvements are made. Obviously the funding situation has been getting better and better, especially from the federal level.
We have one of the national leaders in a municipality in Minneapolis, which I think has been that shining light within the state that everybody is starting to look at. We’ve had a lot of progress in municipalities and counties in adopting complete streets policies and a lot of them looking at them. I think that’s a really strong indication that we’re going in a good direction. We have what appears to be the potential to be a really great advocacy situation in the state now with the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota coming up. The trail system that we have here statewide is second to none, and that obviously provides a great backbone to a system, especially when we’re talking about people who want to be active as far as walking or inline skating and bicyclists who maybe aren’t as comfortable on the roadways as others, so giving different options is a really valuable asset.
Just going back to the obstacles for a moment, you said you didn’t really see institutional barriers or funding barriers particularly but it sounded like you were just seeing this historic focus on the motor vehicle user.
Yeah, there’s still a culture at MnDOT where we tend to focus on our largest customer segment--motor vehicles. And that’s fair. There’s a lot more discussions that begin and end with how we can make our environments better for bicycling and walking than maybe there were in the past. Our commissioner has made a commitment to becoming a multimodal agency that delivers on that idea and I honestly believe that the people who work in this agency and in general the community across the state area also coming around as well.
In developing policy and implementing projects, the dynamics are very complex: there MnDOT, there’s FHWA, there’s the MPOs, there’s cities, there’s counties, there’s ASHTO stuff, there’s the legislature. For people reading the e-newsletter thinking “is there an easy way to get a handle on the flow and the responsibilities,” is there a way you could boil that down to a few quick sentences for us?
Wow, how can I approach this in an easy way? This commissioner is trying to instill in all of us that the top of our organizational chart is the traveling public, or the people of Minnesota. In many regards the planning for projects really starts at the local level and begins to ascend up. So we start with the needs of the public in specific locations and for us working with our different partners--whether it be a city or county level or other organizations-- and plan and develop projects that are respectful of those needs. And then we work with metropolitan planning organizations and Federal Highway Administration as things progress. So it’s really, as you said, a dynamic process--lots of people involved and lots of competing interests and different viewpoints.
How might the interaction with MnDOT, particularly on bike/ped issues, feel or look differently to local communities than it has in the past?
That’s a good question. This commissioner—and I completely support this—has really tried to instill an environment here where we strengthen our partnerships and we have a more collaborative dialogue with the local units of government. He’s a huge proponent of context-sensitive solutions and flexibility in design and he wants us to, as we’re planning our future projects and developing those projects, really focus on the context in which we’re operating.
We’re also trying to figure out different ways that we can understand our success instead of just looking at benchmarks or performances measures that we’ve had in the past--vehicle throughput or level of service or congestion hours. We want to look at how many people are we moving through a corridor during an hour or through the course of a day and how are we impacting people’s quality of life; getting at some more of those human factors as well as the traditional engineering factors.
Anything else we should have asked you?
One of the things that I didn’t mention is that as a department we are really spending more of our effort and time on pedestrian-related issues than we have in the past. One of the driving forces behind that is safety. Besides having too many bicycle-related fatalities over the past year we’ve had too many pedestrian-related fatalities and we want to be more aggressive in trying to understand how our infrastructure may put people at risk.
Working with the disabled community and making our environments function better for people with disabilities has become one of our strategic initiatives. We’re putting more resources towards building a wider body of knowledge about our responsibilities and the kinds of improvements we can make that allow our infrastructure to function better.
And that would only be on state roads, correct? So your reach is fairly limited.
Correct. It is fairly limited, but we hope that we also can, to some extent, provide some kind of a leadership role for the rest of the transportation community out there in regards to this issue. And we want to help where we can with fostering those dialogues between the municipalities themselves and then also with the disabled community where appropriate.
Bike Walk Twin Cities Funds Social Marketing Campaign at St. Paul Smart Trips
On May 5 the Transit for Livable Communities board voted to provide funding to St. Paul Smart Trips for a residential social marketing program in the Union Park neighborhood of St. Paul. This program is based on an effective model of targeted outreach to encourage biking, walking, and transit. Smart Trips completed a similar program last year in the Summit-University neighborhood of St. Paul; see the final report of that effort here.
The Bike Walk Advisory Committee and TLC Board were very supportive of this investment for our pilot. I am most excited about the facet that will extend programming and outreach into the cycling/walking challenge seasons (fall/winter/spring). Can we convince people to extend their nonmotorized travel into wind breaker and long underway weather? For those opting to return to more sheltered travel after a glorious summer, can we encourage them to jump on the bus instead of into their car? St. Paul Smart Trips has included significant opportunity to test messaging and measure results, so stay tuned as the story unfolds. If you live in Union Park, be sure to register for the programs beginning in a few months. The cherry on top…the Marshall Avenue project funded by Bike Walk Twin Cities in the heart of Union Park will be constructed this summer – the perfect ped/bike red carpet for residents.
Bike Walk Twin Cities will continue to enhance educational, outreach, and behavior change aspects of our program. To learn more about social marketing in other areas see projects in Portland, OR, Sausalito, CA and Columbia, MO.
