Last week the Royal Oak Review attended the city’s initial meeting to discuss non-motorized planning — how to make it easy and safer for bicyclists and pedestrians in Royal Oak.

They’ve just published this article titled Pedal Power:

Mayor Jim Ellison said it was very encouraging to see all the people at the meeting and the ideas being tossed around. He said while funding is tight, having a plan is important.

Tom Regan, who helped start the movement for the city to develop a non-motorized plan, said he was happy to see the large turnout.

“What we’re demonstrating to the city officials and staff is that people in Royal Oak genuinely want these changes, and we’ll have an intelligent plan to make it happen,” he said.

If you want to stay on top of this planning effort, please “like” the non-motorized plan in Facebook.

Or if you were unable to attend and would like to submit comments, you can send them to Marissa Dolin at the Active Transportation Alliance.

Free bike parking at the 2010 Arts, Beats and Eats in Royal Oak

“Parking policy exerts great influence on mode choice and urban design.”
U.S. Parking Policies: An Overview of Management Strategies, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.

“The widespread practice of employer-subsidized parking is a significant but often overlooked determinant of mode choice for the journey to work.”
Employer-subsidized Parking and Work-trip Mode Choice, Pickrell, D. H. and Shoup, D. C.

Mode choice — whether someone choices to drive solo, carpool, take transit, bike, or walk is often determined by cost to park ones car.

Recently. this was proven very vividly in the city of Royal Oak.

With the Arts, Beats, and Eats festival moving to Royal Oak, the city looked to recover some city costs by charging for all parking around the event. The $15 parking price was high enough to prompt locals to keep their cars in their driveways and walk or bike.

And fortunately the event organizers partnered with KLM bike shops to offer free valet bike parking. There were two parking lots and both were quite full as the photo shows. In addition, bikes were parked all around the event perimeter.

Clearly, vehicle parking policy is a major determining factor in whether people drive, bike, or walk to downtown. If you provide below market pricing (including free) vehicle parking, don’t expect a lot of people to doing anything but drive solo downtown – especially downtown workers.

Recently the city of Royal Oak announced increasing the downtown parking fees a small amount – not to $15. This should help encourage biking and walking downtown, as well as ride sharing.

And according to “parking guru” Shoup, parking rates should be raised until there is a 15% parking vacancy rate. This reduces traffic levels by helping motorists find parking more quickly and it will likely encourage other modes of travel.

The key, however, is to re-invest those parking fees into the downtown.

From the press release from the Active Transportation Alliance:

Royal Oak city officials are creating a plan to make it easier for bicyclists, pedestrians and transit users to get around in the community. As they put this plan together, they want to hear your thoughts and ideas. Attend the public meeting on Sept. 28 to tell them where you bike and walk and where you wish you could bike and walk in the city. They also want to hear your ideas on how public transportation in Royal Oak can be improved.

• What: Non-Motorized Plan Open House
• When: Tuesday, Sept. 28, 7 p.m.
• Where: Farmers Market, 316 E. 11 Mile Rd., Royal Oak

All Royal Oak residents are invited to attend. This is your chance to help shape the city’s first plan for non-motorized travel.

Remember: The bike parking is always free at the Farmer’s Market!

There are no excuses to not ride your bike to a Detroit festival this weekend.

Detroit International Jazz Festival

From the Wheelhouse Detroit web site:

This weekend, we will happily park your bike for no charge at the Detroit International Jazz Festival. Bike parking is at the intersection of Woodward & Larned, smack dab in the middle of the festivities, which stretch from Hart Plaza to Campus Martius.

Festival hours are 4 to 11 p.m. on Friday; noon to 11:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday; and noon to 7:30 P.M. on Monday. See you there!

Arts, Beats, and Eats

KLM Bikes is providing free bike at two locations for the Art, Beats, and Eats event in Royal Oak. This is the easiest and cheapest way to get to the festival. The spots are available on a first-come, first-served basis. It looked like many people were taking advantage of this service.

The locations are:

• South side: Washington St. Just south of Lincoln, 800 parking slots
• North side: Washington Near Second Avenue, 1,000 parking slots

The Hamtramck Festival is this weekend as well. Though it doesn’t seem to have valet bike parking, it does have urban camping. How cool is that?

Wolverine cyclist and city planner Doug Hedges recently announced that “the initial meeting for the City of Royal Oak’s Non-Motorized Transportation Plan will be held at the Planning Commission’s next meeting of Tuesday, August 10, 2010, at 7:30 p.m. ”

The meeting location is Royal Oak City Hall, room 315 (on the 3rd floor) at 211 South Williams in Downtown Royal Oak.

Here is the outline of the presentation:

Royal Oak cyclist Tom Regan sent an email with the following note:

We will help ourselves a lot if we have a very large turnout at this first meeting, to show city planning commission members that Royal Oak needs to be made safer and more inviting to cyclists and pedestrians. The city planning commission will ultimately recommend policy changes to the city commission.

If you are able please spread the word any way you can.

Keep in mind that the presentation is not the first item on the agenda, so it won’t start right at 7:30pm.