Bike Commuting Continued: Expectations vs. Reality

 After a couple years now of biking to work (most days) in the Quad Cities, I have a few thoughts I'd like to share on the idea of expectations versus reality: both where my expectations have been positively exceeded and where they've been underwhelmed. Overall, I enjoy commuting by bike, but there are specific things that make that possible for me, and I'll try to make it clear how that works or doesn't in what comes below.

1. Easier Than Anticipated

Overall, I would say that using a bike as my primary mode of commute this year has been much easier than I anticipated. I'm not going to pretend that our infrastructure here in the Quad Cities is great for bikes--it sucked significantly that the city took weeks-to-months to redo the bike underpass under Harrison--but for the ~1 mile distance I'm usually riding (5 miles roundtrip including two school dropoffs, but 1 mile-ish straight line to work) it's more than adequate.

This guy can do a bunch of roundtrips on one charge, as can my other main cargo bike, and as you can see from the bulging saddlebags, I don't have any difficulty either taking what I need to work and back or stopping for an errand or two. Obviously it's not in child-carrying mode in this photo, but that works just fine too. 

Are there days I need to use the car? Yes, because sometimes I'm taking the kids to the dentist across town or meeting my partner in Illinois or something. But for everyday commuting and normal errands within the neighborhood and just outside of it, the bikes work great. And the kids even demand them: we went to the library and the grocery store this week and I offered them bike or car and we ended up on the bike. It's a treat for school dropoff too, because we can skip the car line but not go as slowly as we would walking. And then I get to work energized and can park the bike right next to the building I work in, so really it's a good deal in the mornings.

2. Roads Are Worse But It Matters Less

The roads here are worse than I expected for the bike (I've had multiple blown tires from that!) but they matter less than I expected for the experience. Why? Because for all their faults, most QCA roads are wide. Here's a section of Locust (not actually on my route, and the photo is taken from the sidewalk which I don't bike on, but it should suffice to stand in).

The road isn't in great shape, but this is actually one of the less bad sections. I'd call it serviceable: if you were actually biking on it you'd notice a lot of little bumps and ridges, but big cargo bike tires take care of that just fine. The street is way wider than it needs to be here, to the point where it's probably too wide for the speed that cars are supposed to take (25 mph, there's a school right there). But while that makes speeding cars a danger, it also means that there's plenty of space in the lane and even out of it for cars to pass you on the bike. 

This is typical of the QCA biking environment. It's not great, because no cars expect you there and the roads aren't good for biking on. But it's not horrific, because they're wide enough to make up for that in most instances. Now, if you biked here at the absolute height of rush hour, or during the infinite construction season that sometimes narrows those wide roads, there would be more bike-car interactions (derogatory) but for most purposes it actually works out.

3. Lessened Flexibility In Surprising Ways

I knew that I would need the car for things like getting to Moline or Bettendorf from Davenport. I hadn't quite realized how much I would need it (or need to plan ahead) for smaller trips as well. I know I said above that it works great for errands around and just outside the neighborhood, and I stand by that! But it requires a bit more planning ahead than perhaps I was used to. If it's going to take 10 minutes instead of 5 to get home or to work, or 15 minutes instead of 7 to get my kid from school, I've learned that I'm evidently the sort of person who leaves that to the exact required margin--and thus changing the margin has made a surprisingly large impact on my time.

If I were a person who believed that on time was late, perhaps this would not be such an issue.

This is a fast vehicle compared to my own legs walking or acoustic cycling. It is a slower one compared to a car. 

Now, there are still times I've surprised myself by how quickly I can get from place to place, especially when there's construction on a main road (which I tend to avoid on the bike anyway) or problems with parking (rare in the QCA but possible, and the bike tends to have an advantage). But by and large commuting via bike requires just that little bit more planning ahead and awareness of time--even when I can leave a virtual meeting, much less one in person--and that's something I somehow hadn't anticipated.

Have you commuted by bike, here or elsewhere? What does it change about your routine, and how did it live up to your expectations?

A Somewhat Frustrated Rant

 It has struck me repeatedly recently that there are some very odd things about how we do infrastructure around cars: and particularly the ways in which building our cities around cars have made them significantly less safe.

1. The Obvious

The most obvious point is probably that cars do, demonstrably, kill people. 

A death machine.

Now, of course, trains kill people too. So do bikes. So does walking. 

But not in the same way or at the same rate. 

So maybe it would be better to not build our cities around vehicles that do that.

2. Individual Operation

Part of the reason for that deadliness is that cars are driven by individuals, often licensed only once early in their lives, and pretty much every vehicle is single operated or carrying one passenger at most. 

Tired? Still gotta drive yourself. Sick? Same. Drunk? Well...

Yes, you can carpool, you can call a cab, you can phone a friend, but...the default is to drive yourself. And there is societal and economic pressure to do that: cabs aren't cheap, and it's generally considered a bit odd to ask someone else to drive you unless you have a particularly close relationship or a very distinct and obvious impairment.

Plus if you're tired, drunk, sick, etc. somewhere other than home, your car is going to be stuck wherever you are if you call someone else. That's not insuperable, but it's a barrier, and a major one if you're far from home--which in turn incentivizes driving yourself precisely when you have the furthest to go, regardless of impairment.

Pictured: a bunch of vehicles that definitely aren't driving themselves yet.

Pictured: a vehicle that allows one driver to transport multiple people regardless of their fitness to drive (and a car).

The view from a vehicle that allows zero drivers to transport a great number of people (thank you Vancouver SkyTrain).

3. The Law

And of course, as you might imagine, all those individual operators aren't the best at actually following the law, even if our laws were ideal for safety.

It's great that Islington is a 20 kmph borough. And given congestion, maybe it actually is. But people don't actually follow the speed limits, do they, unless there's another car in the way?

 If the driver of this speeds, there's an awful lot of signals and supervision that tell him to stop--and we can easily identify the individual driver who did it. If a car speeds--well, so's everyone else.

And don't get me started on stop lights and turn signals and all the other ways that individual drivers don't actually stick to the rules that might make the road safer.

Cars are good at one thing: allowing you to go from one point to another while only caring about other people's presence when they're actively in your way.

They're not good at actually moving people around a city. And it would be nice if we stopped building cities pretending they are.

Running in the Street

 No pictures today, because I'm talking about something that people do in my neighborhood a lot and since it involves actual people doing actual things in person I don't want to show anyone's faces.

But an awful lot of people in my neighborhood jog or run for (as far as I can tell) exercise most mornings. 

And they do it right in the street.

I have...concerns.

1. Vehicle-Pedestrian Interactions

It might not surprise you given some of what I've posted on this blog, but I do not live in a legal low-traffic zone or, even further from it, a pedestrianized area. In fact, there's an emergency room with a highly active ambulance bay a block or so away, and major bus routes (for the QCA, which is to say hourly but multiple routes). There are schools as well, which given the lack of non-car options for student dropoff and pickup means a lot of cars. 

In other words, jogging in the street here is basically automatically creating vehicle-pedestrian interactions in the middle of the street, which is famously not a particularly good thing for the pedestrians. Or the cars, but as Douglas Adams much more memorably indicated in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that tends to be worse for one side of the equation.

2. Terrible Infrastructure

Look, I get that our sidewalks suck: they're not particularly flat, they're not as straight as you'd think something paralleling a straight road would be, and they aren't wide enough for two to comfortably run abreast. 

But other than the last thing, the same is true of our roads, and they have the notable disadvantage of having cars on them.

They're littered with potholes, which are just as likely to turn an ankle as to pop a tire on a bike or a car, the available paths are a lot less straight than you'd assume--made much worse by the fact that the options are zig-zag around parked cars or jog literally in the middle of a street with cars driving on it--and unlike the sidewalks they're actually tilted towards the edges for water drainage. 

I am not quite sure why this makes them attractive for jogging.

3. Lack of Alternatives

Of course, the real secret here (not that secret) is that the jogging in the street is most likely because of a lack of reasonable alternatives.

There is a multiuse path up by Duck Creek, but that's 1-2 miles away from this part of the neighborhood so unless you're driving to jog or going on a run over 4 miles you aren't going to get any real use out of it. And otherwise there's basically the roads and the sidewalks: none of our parks are large enough for that kind of running, unless you're willing to do some very narrow laps or go, again, at least a mile out of your way (which is little in a car but a lot on foot). 

So I do understand the logic--except that I still really don't.

Anyone else have any idea of why this is so popular?

Love/Hate/Interstate

I have, as the title might suggest, a love/hate relationship with the US Interstate system (and its cousins, like the TransCanada Highway). I love that there is a public infrastructure network to link together cities and towns across the country; I love, for instance, that I can get on I-80 and zip over to Lincoln or Chicago at need; I love the systemic regularity of where the numbers go in the country and how you can get to pretty much anywhere from pretty much everywhere.

I hate actually driving on it, especially for long distances, and I hate that it is the practical replacement to an equally comprehensive network of rails that used to carry passengers across the country.

So for today, I wanted to dive into those feelings: what makes the Dwight D. Eisenhower Interstate Highway System great, and how that greatness masks a weakness in US public infrastructure, especially around cities.

1. So Many Roads, So Little Much Time

I grew up in Seattle, and spent formative years in both Chicago and Rochester. What these cities have in common is that they don't just have I-90 going through them (yes, it's I-90 in my blood, especially when you consider that Boston is also on it) but also other interstates intersecting with it. I-490, I-5, I-405, I-390, I-80, I-55, I-57, I-355, I could literally just keep going on.

Even the Quad Cities, small as it may be and non-I-90 as it is, has not only I-80, but I-280 and I-74 to call its own.

The highway system doesn't just connect like little lines on the big map of the US, in other words; it tentacles outwards so that urban and suburban spaces are continually covered with big, open asphalt. 

That's great in the sense that you can use those highways to get into the city, get around the city, get through the city. But it's terrible when you consider just how much of the city turns out to actually be the highway.

And somehow there are still massive backups on these highways (though much less here in the QCA than in the three cities mentioned above).

Somehow I-5 in Seattle's U-District manages to both massively divide two neighborhoods with a giant asphalt pit and also be bumper-to-bumper over the Ship Canal Bridge. 

Somehow I-90/94 in Chicago manages to both make it extremely unpleasant to walk across large portions of the city while causing the El to be noisy and windswept as it stops mid-highway and be incredibly dangerous and slow at the same time.

Pictured: one of the few northern Blue Line stations that isn't mid-highway. Of course, it's O'Hare, which has its own problems.

So you have to hurry up and wait, 55-60-65-70 mph signage or not, while you also depress the value of property and the pleasure of walking, and oh by the way the creation of these giant urban freeways wasn't great either.

2. Point to Point, But Not

At the same time, what urban highways don't actually do is the thing that urban railways do do, which is really bring you into downtown directly.

This OuiGo in Paris Gare du Nord is faster and more central than those highways I was talking about above--except maybe the capped I-5 under Seattle, but even that skirts the edge of downtown and is notoriously dangerous to exit there.

Basically, even in the cities where the highway goes "downtown," it doesn't actually go downtown, because if it did then downtown would have to move--because there'd be a freeway there and people and businesses don't actually like to congregate near a freeway (not to mention the space they take up).

A paradox that rail travel does not experience.

Even Boston's Big Dig which goes under the north side of downtown, isn't actually great for getting you to downtown--because of the abovementioned slowness and danger.

As I feel like I mention all the time: cars give the illusion of going point to point more efficiently than trains because you are in the car the whole time, but the actual access for the car and the time in the car are not necessarily all that efficient. Urban highways are a great example of this, because they don't usually go downtown for realz.

And when they do, like in Milwaukee? Well, I'm on the record about how I feel about that too. A good downtown shouldn't make me feel like I need to duck down to walk in it.

That said, I do like that I can get on the interstate and just go. As I said: love/hate relationship. It's great that I can slide onto I-5 and head out of town at the Seattle Convention Center, when I need to. It's just not great the rest of the time.

3. Breathing Free

The stereotypical view of the American highway is the open convertible gunning it down the empty open roads of the American West.

Something like this, but not parked and with the top down and the sun up.

But while that is a lovely vision (see, this is the love part), all too often the highway actually makes it much harder for everyone else to breathe. Gas fumes; tire particulates; a lack of sun and an excess of noise: the urban highway is not an engine of freedom for everyone who isn't on it (this is the hate part).

And again: what speed are you actually making on the way when you're in the city? Would you want your convertible top down if the car next to you has its exhaust pointed at your head (or is a truck with the exhaust above your head)?

On a map, the Interstate Highway System is a marvel, and if it could operate only on the basis of that map I'd be as big a fan as anybody. But when you get down onto it and actually drive? Well, I'd rather have a robust train network any century.

It's a shame we don't, at present, get to make that choice.

Who Runs the Transit?

 This article made me think about the question of how best to organize our local transit agencies here in the QCA for better service. Or, more specifically, what lessons we can take from other places about how to manage transit across multiple kinds of internal legal divisions: municipal, county, state, geographic. After all, the Quad Cities has (more than) four cities, by definition, as well as a state boundary that happens to be a major, wide river in the midst of everything.

But we are not the only place to have such boundaries, even if the Mississippi is a particularly large river. So what can we learn from others?

1. Collective Decision-making

The biggest lesson is that the more we make local decisions about a collective problem (how to move people around the area) the more problems we'll have. When Rock Island decides to make it harder to open shelters because they want to "spread services more evenly across the region," but does so unilaterally, we just end up with less services. The same goes for transit. 

Good transit services, like ThamesLink above, cut across administrative boundaries to provide service that will serve the people who live there regardless of their particularized municipal or regional government. What does that mean here in the QCA? It means not making Bettendorf Transit decisions for Bettendorf and CitiBus decisions for Davenport, or Iowa decisions for Iowa and Illinois decisions for Illinois, but making regional decisions based on populations and potential trips. If a bunch of Iowans work at the Arsenal, or John Deere, we should probably have transit that helps them get there. If a bunch of Illini work at Arconic, same deal--not to mention the two downtowns with their distinct cultural and social amenities.

2. Unify Agencies

More than collective decisions, there's also a collective action issue. You could argue that we actually have some decent collective decision-making here: there's one agency on the Illinois side, and it technically manages the Bettendorf Transit as well, and the Davenport transit connects to it. But the connections are clunky and they happen inconveniently by city boundaries rather than in logical places for a line to actually start or end. 

Just like the TTC used to end awkwardly around the boundaries of Toronto but now emerges into the Greater Toronto Area where it makes sense, it would make a lot more sense to have a single line running down Locust/Middle Road than to have to get off and transfer in a literal Burlington Coat Factory parking lot.

There is a 1-Line TTC stop right on the Vaughan/Toronto (North York) line, but it's not the end of the line or a transfer point; it's just there because there are meaningful things to go to. Similarly, there should still be a stop near I-74 and Middle Road/Locust, but it shouldn't be where the lines stop and force a transfer. 

The fix for this, ideally, is a unified agency (ala the TTC, TfL, WMATA) that runs transit with regard to where the people need to go and not where the city lines sit. 

The DC Metro would be a lot less useful if it only went to the boundaries of DC.

3. Meaningful Transit for an Integrated Community

Of course, the secret background lesson here is that all of these communities run more transit (even per capita) than we do here. And I'm not advocating for DC/London/Toronto levels of transit here in the Quad Cities! But if you want people to unite together to make a collective community, you need to make it not just possible but easy for them to get around.

In a way, the Mississippi could even be a major blessing here, paradoxically because it is so annoying to cross. We only have three main crossings (plus the I-80 Bridge out in LeClaire), which funnels traffic across them and creates major issues when one or more are shut, e.g. for a race. It's hard to put a lot of cars between the two sides of the river, and there's a reason that I meet people who (say they) never go across the river if they can help it.

But mass transit thrives in a situation where a lot of people want to get from one place to another across a narrow channel. 

If we truly integrated our transit, we could make it the easiest and best way to get from one side to the other, and knit the community together.

I'm not advocating for a Blackfriars Station-style bridge-as-transit-station (above) but wouldn't it be cool?

And more to the point, it's a good example that a river doesn't have to mean bad transit connections. In fact, it can mean that people gravitate towards transit, because it makes getting past that barrier easier.

I know this likely seems idealistic, since we haven't managed this in 190 years of having Davenport on the opposite side from Rock Island. But there's no reason we couldn't, if we take the lesson of not dividing our transit and letting it instead tie us together.

Boring Places

I was walking down the street near my house and it occurred to me that, boring as I found the street, it was no more boring than the street next to the hotel I'd stayed at the last time we were in Toronto.

But my memories of that trip are not boring at all, even though we walked there just as I was walking here--similarly late at night, even. 

So I wanted to think: if it's not the streetscape that makes it boring, what might it be? Or, to think more positively, if that's not what makes somewhere interesting, what is it?

1. Connections

The most obvious answer is that nothing actually makes it more interesting in itself, but rather the Toronto spot was more interesting because of where you could go from it and how--the connections that the space had.

The space itself was similar, but from that spot in Toronto, even well after dark, I could easily get anywhere else I wanted, without a car and without much effort on my part. Partly from a light rail line, but also just because of buses.

Here in the Quad Cities, well, I could walk a long way or I could drive. That was it.

And either of those options requires a lot from me: time, if walking, and both sobriety and the willingness to be in charge of navigating, conducting, and parking a vehicle, if driving. None of that responsibility and much less of that time was required in Toronto.

2. Community

I'm not going to lie: there were not a lot of people in that particular part of Toronto all the time. The Don Valley Freeway was nearby, and Eglinton Ave was not hopping. But there were more than there were in the QCA, for sure--and the fact that I was on foot was not itself inherently remarkable or unusual.

Kinda different here.

Actually, very different.

In Toronto even on a quiet street, the presence of the connections (see #1) creates a sense that the space is intended to be potentially used by people even if they are temporarily absent. In the QCA, the design makes it so that the street is clearly not intended for anyone even if the street temporarily has someone walking by it. The sense of community is different, as one implies an absent community of souls and the other implies that any present community is a threat or an abnormality, not a good thing. One is not excited to see another pedestrian here; the question arises of why they're out, even though you are too.

3. Accommodation

Part of this feeling is the little bit of a lie I told above: the street design does indeed differ somewhat in a meaningful way. Even though both are pretty boring, the Toronto (technically North York) area site is clearly accommodating of pedestrians and the QCA is not, or at least no more than minimally.

For example: the beg buttons in Toronto not only actually work but some are labeled as "audible signal only"--that is, they are there for visually impaired pedestrians to know for sure they can cross, but the pedestrian light will change anyway. For another example, the sidewalks were actually maintained to a point I wasn't tripping as I walked. Seemingly obvious, but...

I could go on. There was a staircase where it was needed to connect sidewalks to businesses despite a hill. The bus stops (present in both locations, technically) were not only marked but sheltered in Toronto. And so on.

Again, not to mention the light rail line--the bus stops did this too. But I like the light rail line, so that's the picture.

One space accommodates people; the other doesn't technically ban them. The difference is palpable, even in places--like, I re-emphasize, both these spots--that are basic, boring, and pretty empty.

We could do a lot better here.

Bloody Sidewalks Again

For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I still go places on foot, I have been thinking about sidewalks again.

I recently read an article about how delivery robots require good sidewalk infrastructure to work. And this is likely true, but it struck me as deeply ironic that someone's reasoning for making sidewalks actually functional would be robotic, rather than human. After all, sidewalks are fundamentally something (that ought to be) designed for humans, even if robots may use them, and humans should matter enough that we design them and maintain them and repair them, robots or no.

But of course, we don't.

1. Sidewalks Get Least Priority

There's a lot of construction going on around the part of the Quad Cities where I live and work, and that means a lot of construction signs.

Can anyone identify for me the problem that this signage might cause? 

How about this one?

Yes, a delivery robot is going to have trouble with these, but so too does my human body. The need to tell cars that something is coming trumps the need to allow pedestrians to move safely at all. Can you imagine putting signs for a sidewalk blockage in the street in the way of cars just to make sure that it communicates without blocking the pedestrians? Of course you can't.

And yes, cars go a lot faster and there is a much higher chance of a serious accident if a car driver doesn't know that their lane is disappearing. But that's just more evidence of how dangerous car culture is, not a good reason to screw over pedestrians.

2. Sidewalks Are Abandoned 

Look, we have pothole problems in the QCA too.

As someone who bikes over these and has had so many popped back tires on my ebike that the back wheel is dented, I am highly aware of this. 

But potholes get fixed, even if slowly, badly, and without consideration for non-car road users.

The only times that I can recall our sidewalks getting fixed are for ADA compliance at intersections, and as you can see, that isn't near as...undisruptive a process as filling a pothole.

Note that there are multiple issues of mismatched heights on sidewalk pavers around this corner and the fix to the corner didn't come with any further repairs.

Our sidewalk infrastructure isn't just a lower priority, it's actively crumbling. 

3. The Sidewalk Isn't Even Access

And to add insult to injury, we've built our cities so much around the car here in the USA that you can't actually use the sidewalk to access businesses and services in some places--even when there is a sidewalk. I'm not even talking about the 1/3 of the population that lives where there are no sidewalks. I'm talking about walking somewhere with a sidewalk--but the sidewalk doesn't let you get where you need to go anyway.

Here's the front door of a local clinic. But you can't actually enter via the front door on the sidewalk. You have to walk around back to the parking lot. 

And the business next door, which I didn't feel comfortable photographing at the time, is literally drive-through only despite the sidewalk going right past it.

And just because there's supposed to be a sidewalk doesn't mean there actually is one, anyway.

It's just so very frustrating--and it makes me annoyed that this is being reported as a problem for robots when it's already such a problem for people.