At a recent transportation engineer meeting in Farmington Hills a presenter told the following story.

An Australian businessman said that when he’s in the U.S., he schedules 3 meetings per day.  When in Australia, he schedules 4 per day, but when in Europe, he can handle 5 meetings per day.

In the U.S. he spent more time traveling between meetings compared with being in them.

The irony is there is more mobility in the U.S.  We have high-speed roads and expressways allowing people to move more quickly.  In Europe, transportation is not as fast, however, this has promoted greater density.  In other words, everything’s closer together.

This same issue was raised by Glatting-Jackson transportation engineer Ian Lockwood during his presentations in Detroit.  The more cities increase mobility, the more everything spreads out.

Accessibility/new mobility — being able to readily get between locations — is more valuable than high-speed mobility.

That’s a concept that’s been lost not only on most Metro Detroit road planners but on people like Oakland County executive L. Brooks Patterson.  Patterson has been sprawl promoter but has not connected the dots showing that inefficient land use leads to an inefficient and uncompetitive business environment — with or without gas at $4 a gallon.

Of course biking and walking suffer greatly when communities pursue high-speed mobility.  High-speed roads are rarely bike friendly.  And in these less dense communities, everything is further away which makes cycling and walking less attractive.  Lower density also makes public transit less effective.

Here is a great Streetfilm video from Paris that talks about how they’re doing things right.  Their engineers look at how to efficiently move people not cars.  It’s pretty basic and common sense.

The Road Commission for Oakland County is widening another road.  This time it’s Tienken between Livernois and Sheldon Roads.

If ever a county road needed bike lanes, this would be it. It would connect Livernois, the Paint Creek Trail, Stony Creek High School, and Sheldon Road (a main access point for the Stony Creek Metropark.)

We need cyclists to give their input to the Road Commission.

A public meeting is planned for January 21st from 4pm until 7pm in the auditorium at Rochester Hills City Hall, 1000 Rochester Hills Drive (south of Avon Road between Livernois and Old Perch roads).

According to the Road Commission, “Public input will help shape the ultimate project design.”

If you are unable to attend the meeting on the 21st, please submit your comments to:

The Road Commission for Oakland County
31001 Lahser Road
Beverly Hills, MI 48025
E-Mail: dcsmail@rcoc.org
Phone: 877-858-4804

If you can attend the meeting, the Road Commission will likely provide their normal technical brush offs.  Here are what you can expect:

Brush off: The Road Commission has a policy of not accomodating bikes on the road.

Answer: The Road Commission mission is “to provide the public with leadership in safe and convenient road.”  Bike lanes are the safest place a cyclist can bike.

Brush off: The Road Commission will build a safety path for bicycles.

Answer: Safety paths are wide sidewalks and are not safe nor satisfactory solutions for for bicyclists according to MDOT and AASHTO.

Brush off: On-road facilities aren’t safe.

Answer: Studies find that bike lanes are the safest place to ride a bike.  Wide sidewalks are the least safe.

Brush off: The Road Commission doesn’t have the money.

Answer: Ask them, “is there no money to make this road safe for cyclists?  Is there money to make this road safe for motorists?”  There is grant funding for non-motorized facilities. No less than one-percent of the Road Commission’s state road funding must be spent on non-motorized facilities such as bike lanes.

The City of Farmington Hills is updating their master plan.  The current draft promises Farmington Hills will continue to be one of the least safe places to ride a bike in Metro Detroit.

There is no planning for bike lanes, paved shoulders,  or similar on-road facilities that would make Farmington Hills more bikeable and safer.  There is no mention of building Complete Streets or even Safe Routes to School.

The draft plan does mention bike paths, which appear to be wide sidewalks — not AASHTO compliant bicycle facilities.

Area cyclists are encouraged to contact the Farmington Hills Planning Department to let them know you want to safe bicycling facilities that follow AASHTO guidelines and best practices.

There’s been a big push by many groups to get Green projects in the Obama economic stimulus package.  We’ve already mentioned the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s push.  The DNR Parks division has submitted about a quarter-million in infrastructure projects.  The Detroit Greenways Coalition has their trails submitted as well.

That’s all the good news.

The fear however is this stimulus package will also fund a significant amount of road expansion.

From Bloomberg.com:

While many states are keeping their project lists secret, plans that have surfaced show why environmentalists and some development experts say much of the stimulus spending may promote urban sprawl while scrimping on more green-friendly rail and mass transit.

“It’s a lot of more of the same,” said Robert Puentes, a metropolitan growth and development expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who is tracking the legislation. “You build a lot of new highways, continue to decentralize” urban and suburban communities and “pull resources away from transit.”

And decentralizing/sprawl also hurts bikability and walkability.

Some local concerns involve planned expressway expansion, notably I-75 in Oakland County and I-94 in Detroit.  Neither project made financial sense long before the recent declines in vehicle miles traveled.  Now they make less sense.

And they’re certainly not green, but they might get in the stimulus package.

The I-94 project is especially bad in that it would remove nine bridges over the expressways — permanently blocking bicycle routes within Detroit’s non-motorized transportation master plan.

And because the highway expansion was planned before the non-motorized plan, MDOT is ignoring the latter.  However, reading their Final Environmental Impact Statement only shows that MDOT wasn’t going to let non-motorized priorities get in the way of an expressway expansion.

That said, there’s not too much we can do until MDOT’s economic stimulus list becomes public and we see what’s on the list.

Detroit in 1905, a mural at the Detroit Public Library. This is 21 years before Michigan's first gas tax.

Most cyclists have heard or read it before: bicyclists shouldn’t have equal access to the roads because they don’t pay for them.

Those making that claim assume that fuel tax and vehicle registrations pay for all their road costs.

They’re wrong.

Perhaps the definitive report comparing the total costs of using the roads is Whose Roads? Defining Bicyclists’ and Pedestrians’ Right to Use Public Roadways by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute (2004).

Although motorist user fees (fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees) fund most highway expenses, funding for local roads (the roads pedestrians and cyclists use most) originates mainly from general taxes. Since bicycling and walking impose lower roadway costs than motorized modes, people who rely primarily on nonmotorized modes tend to overpay their fair share of roadway costs and subsidize motorists.

The automotive industry sponsored reports in the past have claimed motorists overpay their fair share.  According to Litman, these reports conveniently ignore some substantial road costs.  He concludes:

Virtually all studies that use appropriate analysis procedures conclude that motorists significantly underpay the costs they impose on society (FHWA, 1997; Delucchi, 1998; Litman, 2004a).

Some of those ignored costs are external.  One example is all the free vehicle parking.  All taxpayers and consumers pay for that through higher taxes and higher product costs.  Salon.com ran an interesting article that describes this external cost in greater detail.

To Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, parking requirements are a bane of the country. “Parking requirements create great harm: they subsidize cars, distort transportation choices, warp urban form, increase housing costs, burden low income households, debase urban design, damage the economy, and degrade the environment,” he writes in his book, “The High Cost of Free Parking.”

Americans don’t object, because they aren’t aware of the myriad costs of parking, which remain hidden. In large part, it’s business owners, including commercial and residential landlords, who pay to provide parking places. They then pass on those costs to us in slightly higher prices for rent and every hamburger sold.

There’s also another great summary of this very same topic on the St. Louis Regional Bicycle Federation web site.