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Washington, DC Officially Launches Bike Share Program

Washington, DC just became the first city in the nation to launch a technologically advanced public bike share program. I actually saw one of these things in action last week, and in general I think this is a very good idea.

However, I think the official launch is too small, and it is ridiculous that tax dollars are paying for it.

SmartBike DC will rent 120 bikes at 10 self-service racks mostly in the downtown area, including near the Gallery Place, Shaw and Judiciary Square Metrorail stations.

“We want to start small and start slow,” Sebastian said. “We don’t want the first-time people . . . we’re trying to keep this simple at first.”

Many of the kiosks are near streets that host some of the city’s 34 miles of bike lanes. Thirty-one miles’ worth have been added in the past seven years.

Why? If this is a good idea, and for once I actually think that it is, why start small? Starting small only makes it difficult to attract people – you’re naturally catering to a much smaller audience. If you want this to have mass appeal, make it available for the masses. Read the rest of this entry »

Operation Sentinel

God help us…That’s really all I have to say about Operation Sentinel, New York City’s massive surveillance plan targeting every vehicle entering the city.

It calls for photographing, and scanning the license plates of, cars and trucks at all bridges and tunnels and using sensors to detect the presence of radioactivity.

Data on each vehicle — its time-stamped image, license plate imprint and radiological signature — would be sent to a command center in Lower Manhattan, where it would be indexed and stored for at least a month as part of a broad security plan that emphasizes protecting the city’s financial district, the spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said.

Talk about a heinous abuse of government power.

Listen to me people – this does not make you safer. The only thing you are ensuring is the erosion of your privacy and civil liberties.

This thing is supposed to cost $40 million in FY08. New York’s mass transit system is falling apart and suffering from a massive budget deficit. The city is throwing around idiotic congestion pricing proposals because they can’t find enough money to fix things, but they have plenty of money to spy on you. Doesn’t that seem strange?

New York wants to base this system on London’s infamous surveillance network. The problem with that is the London cameras don’t do anything to reduce or prevent crime.

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

The cameras don’t prevent terrorism either. They didn’t stop the terrorist bombings of the London Underground on July 7, 2005, and they won’t stop anything in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Summer Streets – Success or Dud?

Success?

The question of how successful New York’s Summer Streets was this weekend is hard to answer, and different sources give different accounts. It seems that many businesses think it was a disaster, while most pro-bicycle organizations think it was a great success.

The impact on businesses seems to depend on the type of business you run.

Mark Barbosa, manager of Manhattan Cabinetry near East 30th Street, said his sales dipped 50 to 60 percent compared to a typical Saturday.

Barbosa said most of his customers arrive by car, and while they swarmed in once vehicular traffic was permitted after 1 p.m., the rush did not compensate for the morning lull.

Food places, on the other hand, were thrilled by the spike in revenues from hungry cyclists and pedestrians.

A Subway sandwich shop down the block reported a 10 percent increase in sales, and a Guy & Gallard eatery a block away raked in an extra $500, compared to average Saturday sales.

But the overall impact of this is unclear – if food stores make substantially less than other stores, their 10% increase could be a drop in a huge bucket of economic loss compared to other businesses.

The problem is New York didn’t seem to have a very concrete way to gauge the success of this event.  Read the rest of this entry »

Homeland Security Can Now Search Without Warrants

Overruled by DHS

In case you weren’t paying attention, the Department of Homeland Stupidity recently wiped its ass with the fourth amendment and threw it back in our collective faces.

Citizens’ personal electronic devices are now subject to search by Customs and Border Patrol personnel when you enter the country. This doesn’t mean you have to show the computer, it means that without suspecting you of a crime they can take it from you, turn it on, go through all of your files, and keep it for a “reasonable period of time” before returning it to you.

It’s funny they use the word “reasonable” – a similar word is also found in the amendment that DHS just castrated:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I’d also like to point out that this amendment clearly states that probable cause is necessary – in other words, you have to be suspected of something. Notice that there also needs to be a clear description of the intent for the search and the things that the government is trying to seize – you can’t just go on a trolling expedition.

To anyone who reads this and thinks, “well, I’m sure they’ll be reasonable about this” – look no further than the TSA’s gross abuse of power and ask yourself why Customs Officers should be any different? And if you feel it’s still OK, ask yourself if you think police should be able to walk into your house whenever they want and rummage through your closets for no particular reason, because that’s pretty much the equivalent of this DHS policy.

Does anyone really feel safer because of this?  How long until we allow these clowns to search emails or monitor the websites we visit in the interest of national security?  They already do that somewhere - it’s called China.

The ninth circuit unanimously upheld this nonsense – reasoning that laptops are like luggage and could therefore be searched. Guess what – unless there is some reasonable suspicion on your luggage, that shouldn’t be subject to search either.

You don’t give up your rights as an American citizen when you leave the country. These kinds of searches are completely antithetical to the Constitution, and we’ll all be a lot better off when the Department of Homeland Stupidity goes the way of the dodo.

Does “Induced Demand” Also Apply to Subway Capacity?

Inducing demand?

One of our readers, Eric W, brought up a very interesting point the other day.

We hear a lot about the “induced demand” hypothesis - If you expand road capacity, more people will use these roads, which will become more congested.

This hypothesis is the leading talking point in favor of slowing the growth of road capacity, while speeding up the development of mass transit systems like subways.

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that the “induced demand” hypothesis is correct.

Eric W’s question is: Why does “induced demand” only apply to road capacity, but not subway capacity?

If you build more subway lines or purchase more subway cars, won’t more people use them, making them more congested?

Following the logic, shouldn’t we slow the growth of subway capacity in order to prevent this “induced demand”?

New Variable-Speed Escalators for New York Subways

Today, The New York Times reports on an MTA plan to begin replacing its standard escalators with “variable-speed escalators”.

Variable-speed escalators

[use] infrared motion sensors, [and] the escalators will slow to a crawl of just 15 feet per minute when no one is on them, compared with the normal full speed of 100 feet per minute. The escalators will gradually accelerate to the full speed, over a period of a few seconds, once a rider steps on them.

The 35 escalators that are part of the experiment include 12 escalators at the 34th Street-Herald Square station on the B, D, F, V, N, R, Q and W lines in Manhattan; 8 escalators (4 of which have been installed) at the Roosevelt Island station on the F line; 5 escalators (2 of which have been installed) at the Jamaica-Van Wyck Boulevard station on the E line in Queens; and 10 escalators (6 of which have been installed) at the Parsons/Archer terminus of the E line in Queens.

According to the article, this will save electricity as well as maintenance costs. MTA projects that each of these escalators will save $1800 per year.

Sounds great – but I have to ask, is this actually going to save any money? Read the rest of this entry »

Traffic Congestion Costs Chicago $7.3 Billion Per Year

Chicago loses $7.3 billion each year in time, fuel, productivity, and environmental damage due to traffic congestion, according to a new study by the Metropolitan Planning Council.

The breakdown is as follows:

• $6.98 billion in lost time
• $354 million in wasted gas, based on 2005 prices. (In today’s prices, the cost would be about $681 million)
• $33 million in environmental damages

Another way to look at this is that, for every hour a driver sits in rush hour traffic in the Chicago area, he loses $14.58, or $3,014 a year.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is the fact that congestion is about as pervasive on arterial roads as it is on highways.

Only in the city of Chicago itself is congestion greater on the expressways than on arterial routes. In every other part of the region, the percentage of vehicle-miles and vehicle-hours traveled under periods of congestion are higher on arterials than on expressways. Likewise, the majority of total vehicle-hours of delay occur on arterials, rather than on expressways, with the exception of Chicago outside the CBD.

In other words, once you get off the main highway, traffic is just as bad if not worse. This makes sense, since arterial roads usually have fewer lanes, more intersections, frequent traffic lights, left hand turns, and are often lined with gas stations, shopping centers, and businesses.

So the question is, what to do?

The report offers some suggestions:

• Make better choices about land use and development patterns
• Provide more information to drivers on traffic patterns
• Introduce some element of pricing to motivate people and businesses
• Improve transit alternatives

The answer is most likely a combination of smarter development/planning, mass transit expansion, and yes, more road capacity to meet demand.

[Read the full report]

Filthy New York Subways

Add filth to the growing list of problems with New York’s subways.

A Post survey of dozens of stations found a decrepit, aging system fraught with overcrowded trains, crumbling platforms and stations, unfinished repair work, serious rat and cockroach infestations, mystery ooze dripping from ceilings and termite-eaten signs.

[NYC Transit President Howard] Roberts’ response: It’s extremely bad, and it isn’t going to get better any time soon.

Riders also related stories of a gross lack of communication as well as frequent misinformation within the system.

Mr. Roberts is a clown. MTA can find money to fund art for its stations, poems for its subways and buses, and staff an Office of Film and Special Events, but apparently asking that the stations not smell like piss is just a bridge too far. Roberts’ solution is basically to do nothing to try to curtail waste or prioritize his funding. What awe-inspiring leadership.

Roberts makes one interesting observation though:

With the MTA reporting a steep decline in revenue, especially at bridges and tunnels, straphangers won’t see any improvements. The two proposed fare hikes, Roberts said, would “only maintain the status quo.”

Oh man! Rising gas prices have driven people off the roads onto this system that can’t handle them, and now we have no money since MTA’s funding is dependant on people driving.

I wonder where you’ve heard about this problem before? Probably yesterday when I wrote about it, or maybe last week when I did the same.

The doofus (or doofuses) who dreamed up the current funding structure for MTA should be sent back to first grade to relearn the basic principles of math and logic. When you encourage people not to do something, you cannot count on them to fund something else by continuing to do it anyway. Eventually you get your wish and realize that you are a moron.

Rude Olympic Cyclists Arrive in Beijing

Disrespectful, ungrateful

Today, several members of the U.S. cycle squad arrived in Beijing for the Olympic Games wearing black respiratory masks.

The idea apparently was to make a political statement about air pollution, the environment, and possibly global warming.

I have a few comments for these U.S. athletes.

First, we the taxpayers are the USOC is sending you to China to race your bikes, not to make environmental statements. Please remember this.

Second, China is the host and you are the guests. Please show some respect.

Third, due to the intensely geo-political nature of these games, you are de facto U.S. ambassadors to China. You represent all of us. Please start acting like it.

Fourth, until you win your races and prove that you’re worth a damn, your opinions are insignificant. Please shut up.

Fifth, if this is really important to you, don’t go to Beijing at all. A half ass protest just makes you look foolish and selfish - I care about this cause, but not enough to forgo the opportunity to win a medal.

We often hear about how we need to not be so arrogant in our foreign politics. This applies to ordinary people as well as our elected officials.

UPDATE: August 8, 2008, 7:12 PM

Since this story first broke with a frenzy, the U.S. cyclists have apologized, and stated that they were not trying to make a political statement. No evidence has emerged to the contrary.

If we take them at their word, my 1st, 4th, and 5th comments above are no longer relevant. However, the fact remains these cyclists’ actions were incredibly rude and thoughtless. My 2nd and 3rd points stand.

Will NYC Congestion Pricing Just Die Already?

Faced with a looming $900 million budget shortfall at MTA, congestion pricing advocates have reared their ugly heads again to rally for the implementation of the fees in order to fund mass transit.  I make no attempt to conceal the fact that I’m not a fan of congestion pricing. But even if I was, the idea that you will use congestion pricing as the solution to this problem is absolutely the stupidest idea I have ever heard.

The whole idea behind congestion pricing is to alleviate congestion – in other words to take cars off the roads. Assuming congestion pricing would work, this will mean that you have less drivers paying the tax, and the other drivers who were priced off the roads simply get displaced onto mass transit.

Right now, New York’s MTA is in a hurt locker. They have horrible service and reliability problems, their maintenance is shoddy, and they are experiencing declining revenues despite a record ridership so high that they don’t have enough room on the trains. Putting more people on these trains will only compound MTA’s problems – there isn’t room for any more riders.

The only way to accommodate more people will be to expand the system’s capacity, but since the riders MTA already has can’t come close to covering the costs – currently they pay about 39% of them – that means you’ll have to get the money from the congestion tax again, and oops, no more drivers.

What will you continue to do – escalate the congestion pricing until you take all the cars off the roads? The argument is that the people who can afford to pay will do so – that’s great, so are the roads going to be free and clear for the 100 or so people in the city rich enough to pay oppressive escalating fees for public goods while 99% of the population waits for trains that aren’t coming?

The congestion tax is not your solution. New York estimated that they would bring in $500 million from the tax – that’s only a little more than half of the money you need, clowns. Currently a little over 15% of your federal gas tax pays for mass transit. New York charges an additional 41.2 cents on every gallon of gas and charges a sales tax on top of it. A large portion of that pays for mass transit. 33% of MTA’s budget comes from “dedicated taxes” – the majority of which comes from the Petroleum Business Tax and the Metropolitan Mass Transportation Operating Assistance Account – gasoline tax based revenue streams. So a congestion tax is a double whammy to MTA. Not only will you no longer get the congestion tax revenue once cars stop driving, but you’ll no longer get the gas tax revenue either.

This simply illustrates the absurd paradox that policymakers in this country have placed mass transit in – you want to encourage people to stop driving, but if they do stop, you’re screwed.

Mass Transit funding needs to be uncoupled from the gas tax. Mass Transit riders may not like the idea of a fare increase, but the harsh reality is that the only real solution here is to make the mass transit riders cover the fair share of costs for their system. We need to stop kicking around the idea that a congestion tax on cars will be mass transit’s salvation. The truth is that any successful implementation of a congestion tax could be mass transit’s apocalypse.

NYC To Sell Bridges

A typical day in Biketopia

This just in - Governor Paterson announced yesterday that New York may sell much of its infrastructure including roads, bridges and tunnels to “close a massive budget deficit.”

Luckily, a mysterious private financier has emerged to bail New York out of its predicament – a shadowy figure named… Dewis Lerkins.

Though the origins of Mr. Lerkins’ massive wealth are shrouded in mystery, it is whispered that he made his fortune speculating in the real estate market. After the market crashed, he aggressively lobbied the morons in Congress to bail him out of his loan obligations, allowing him to walk away with a significant windfall.

Mr. Lerkins has offered to buy all of the bridges, ferries, and tunnels into Manhattan as well as the island’s roads, subway, schools, police, and fire departments.

Though the deal is still in negotiations, Mr. Lerkins felt confident enough that the deal will go through to call a press conference and announce his new Sustainable Plan for a Livable New York - 2009.

According to Mr. Lerkins:

“I have stood by for far too long and watched as our city ran itself into the ground at the expense of reasonable, people-oriented, sustainable growth and planning. It ends today. I have partnered with the Livable Streets Movement to give New York’s bicycle community what it has sought for over three long decades – I give you Biketopia!”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Bicycles, Privatization | 5 Comments »

National Resources Defense Council Asks: Why So Much Bike Hate?

Today a National Resources Defense Council blogger asks why there is so much anger directed toward bicyclists.

Plenty of angry cyclists are quick to point out perceived persecution, but you don’t often hear a cyclist take the opposite point of view – that of a rational person who understands the shared responsibilities of the roads.

On our site, we get labeled everything from bike-haters to car apologists to buffoons for pointing to basic common sense arguments explaining why everything that the bike community advocates should not be taken at face value. Oftentimes, these arguments incorporate pro-bicycle ideas that are undermined by the social irresponsibility of cyclists and their demands. These cyclists may be a minority in their community, but they are by far the most vocal and visible. In their hurry to decry us for speaking truth to the establishment, it tends to go overlooked that two of us are actually cyclists.

In response to the question – why so much hate? - one commenter, who happens to be a cyclist, offered one of the best summaries of the flip side from a cyclist’s perspective that I have ever seen. Read the rest of this entry »

Bloomberg Against Privatizing Subways

Mayor Bloomberg - Genius

Mayor Bloomberg has come out against privatizing subways in response to Mayor Paterson’s call to sell state infrastructure to cover a budget shortfall.

“You could get somebody to do it, but they wouldn’t save you very much money because the potential for making a lot of money isn’t there,” he said.

Bingo, Bloomberg.

The unspoken, but very true, implication of this statement is that if you privatize the subways, the costs for average people will go through the roof.

What a surprise since these things are the most heavily subsidized form of transportation in existence on a percent subsidy per-user basis.

Hey Bloomberg, you clown, here’s another idea about how not to kill mass transit – don’t institute congestion pricing and take the cars that pay for your subways off the roads. Giving cars this disincentive would be especially catastrophic during the current gas crunch given the fact that your system can’t handle the volume of riders it has now.

Mass transit is both necessary and beneficial to New York’s transportation.  It’s only going to remain that way if you don’t kill it with your anti-car policies.

Doofus.

A Bicycle Lane Children’s Story

Today Bob Korfhage, the former president of Siskiyou Velo bicycle club, treated Southern Oregon’s large contingent of five-year-old Mail Tribune readers to an elementary lesson on bike lanes.

I am going to quote this in its entirety, and systematically ridicule it before your very eyes.

At the moment, I’m lying here between the paved traffic lane and the gravel shoulder, staying cool until the sun warms me up. During the hot day, most vehicles pass me by without giving me so much as a wink. I prefer to think that’s because they really don’t appreciate my importance.

I am a rather nondescript entity, just a strip of pavement on either side of the roadway, typically bordered with solid white stripes eight inches wide, with an occasional stenciled outline of a bicycle.

Ignoring the fact that this is written to appeal to people who can’t yet appreciate the complexity of Dr. Seuss, I think vehicles readily appreciate the “importance” of bike lanes. We take road capacity away from cars that constitute 86.7% of all commuting trips and give it to a form of transit that .5% of people use. Then we claim induced demand as a rationale not to expand roads despite the fact that we just forced the entire capacity of the “bike lane” into the remaining traffic lane which caused the problem in the first place. Next we compound the problem by turning this lane into a BRT lane and soon we’ll have a bicycle paradise.

And you know what, let’s not ignore the fact that this is written in a tone reminiscent of kindergarten nap time after all– who exactly is this supposed to appeal to? Do bicyclists find this cute? Am I supposed to find this cute? The tone of this whole thing speaks more to the lack of intelligence behind most bike advocacy rather than the need for more of the same. Read the rest of this entry »

You Get the Department of Homeland Stupidity You Deserve

Sonia Pitt

I’ve been thinking, we need to establish a new category labeled “Awesome” and file this one under it.

It seems Sonia Pitt, one of the clowns associated with the I-10 bridge collapse debacle, has been hired by the Department of Homeland Stupidity.

Ms. Pitt

was fired from her Minnesota post for unprofessional conduct, travel improprieties and misuse of state resources.

Pitt’s letter of discharge states she engaged in activities that violated MnDOT’s ethics code and was involved in “activities that cannot withstand public scrutiny without embarrassment. … do not safeguard the public trust in the integrity of MnDOT, and undermine public trust in the Department.”

After the bridge collapse Aug. 1, Pitt didn’t return to Minnesota for nearly two weeks, even as emergency officials struggled to recover the bodies of 13 people killed in the disaster.

Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles opened an investigation into Pitt’s activities after Star Tribune stories on her actions and found that she was a “belligerent, aggressive” employee who abused her position and billed the state for thousands of dollars in excessive compensation for airfare, hotels, mileage and personal cell phone calls.

Awesome. Were all of those bullet points on her resume?

Here’s the best part – guess where she’s going?

[S]he is working for Homeland Security’s Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) at its headquarters in Arlington, Va. Her job title is “Transportation Security Specialist.”

Great. I’m sure a “specialist” like this will really help to clean up our problems with all the abusive screeners, sex offenders, thieves, people asleep at the wheel, and the general morons staffing this agency.

When will the Terribly Stupid Administration, and the entire Department of Homeland Stupidity, die the slow, brutal deaths they deserve?