E-Bike Users Leave Their Cars at Home More Often – Next City

Welcome to “The Cell Metropolis,” our weekly roundup of noteworthy transportation developments.

The objective of the “full streets” motion is to show automobile drivers from the first customers of streets to only one set of customers amongst many. Its promoters additionally hope that the road redesigns will cut back automobile use by making bicycling and strolling extra engaging. It seems that giving bikes an electric-motor increase might do extra to scale back automobile use than some other technique, if a latest longitudinal examine of motorbike riders in Oslo is any information. Certainly, the introduction of e-bikes to bike-share methods throughout the nation has led to a bounce in bike use — however one metropolis is bucking the pattern, for the second.

The COVID-19 pandemic, nevertheless, provides “full streets” a completely totally different that means. One of many main voices within the motion for full streets, former New York Metropolis Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, now presents a menu of the way to repurpose metropolis streets to do issues aside from transfer individuals round on this period of the “six-foot metropolis.”

One repurposing Sadik-Khan didn’t point out in her essay is to make use of streets as COVID-19 testing websites. The Hawaii Division of Transportation has defied an order from the Federal Freeway Administration, and transformed a tunnel on certainly one of Honolulu’s major freeways right into a surge testing web site.

E-Bike Customers Journey Extra, Drive Much less, Research Finds

Pedal-assist bikes, or “e-bikes,” are being added to bike-share fleets at a fast clip in cities throughout the nation. Their promoters see them as a technique to increase bike ridership by extending the vary bike riders can cowl and serving to them climb hills.

Till now, there’s been no strong knowledge displaying whether or not e-bikes understand that potential. We now have some knowledge, and it’s encouraging.

Biking Trade Information reports on a examine in Norway that finds that as e-bike customers uncover how a lot additional they will journey in a given period of time, they begin utilizing their bikes extra and their vehicles much less. The examine of Oslo bicyclists discovered that e-bike customers have been touring 340 % additional on common than they have been on their strictly human-powered bikes: the place they’d been touring a median of 1.3 miles on a daily bike, they now traveled 5.4 miles.

A number of the improve, they discovered, got here from e-bike customers merely utilizing their bikes extra usually. The examine additionally discovered that journeys as soon as taken by automobile or public transit had change into e-bike journeys; e-bike customers on common elevated the share of all journeys they took by e-bike from 17 to 49 %. In the meantime, the share of complete journeys taken by human-powered bike remained flat.

The examine additionally discovered that e-bike use continued to climb with the passage of time, rendering unlikely the potential for a brief “novelty impact” increase. The examine targeted on individuals who purchased e-bikes for themselves relatively than individuals who borrowed them for short-time use, which means that pedal-assisted bikes have enormous potential to reshape city mobility.

Bike-share system operators in a rising variety of North American cities want to advance that potential by including e-bikes to their fleets, however StreetsblogMASS reports that for now no less than, Boston is one metropolis that has declined to leap on the bandwagon. The Bluebikes community, which serves Boston and 5 adjoining municipalities, is operated by Lyft subsidiary Encourage. That firm additionally operates bike-share methods in New York, Chicago and a number of other different cities which are including e-bikes to their fleets. However Bluebikes is owned by the communities it serves — the cities of Boston, Cambridge, Everett and Somerville, and the city of Brookline — and a spokesperson for the Metropolis of Boston instructed Streetsblog that “it’s unlikely that we are going to add e-bikes to the Bluebikes fleet within the close to future.”

The article gave a number of explanation why, together with the truth that e-bikes are unlawful to be used on the town’s hottest bike paths. A invoice now shifting via the Massachusetts legislature will repair this, however a number of different objections stay, together with mistrust of the brand new expertise and fairness points arising from increased value of use. Nonetheless, Becca Wolfson, govt director of the Boston Cyclists Union and a StreetsblogMASS board member, sees the fairness difficulty from a special angle, one which she says ought to level towards the addition of e-bikes.

“Loads of lower-income communities and communities of shade have much less entry to transit, and longer journeys to jobs and companies,” Wolfson mentioned in a cellphone dialog with Streetsblog. “If e-bikes can cut back commute occasions and the quantity of bodily effort that’s required, which may really assist cut back the Boston area’s transportation inequities… Town has an obligation to discover this, to supply one other, simpler transportation possibility.”

Find out how to Flip Streets into Out of doors Rooms in “The Six-Foot Metropolis”

The dropoff in journey attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic has already led to a wave of road repurposings within the cores of many American cities. The most typical reclamation of area as soon as utilized by vehicles is the conversion of parking areas into eating areas, utilized by eating places whose social distancing necessities stop them from totally utilizing their present indoor area. In some in style eating districts, akin to Philadelphia’s Midtown Village, whole blocks have been closed to automobile site visitors on weekends so as to give eating places and their patrons some (literal) respiratory room.

Now Janette Sadik-Khan, the previous New York Metropolis transportation commissioner who has led the struggle to take again streets from auto dominance, argues that cities ought to have interaction in additional such closings so as to create socially distanced area for a bunch of different actions. Writing in The Guardian, she says that streets ought to change into the essential constructing blocks of “the six-foot metropolis.”

Noting that streets account for as a lot as 80 % of all public open area in cities, Sadik-Khan says that the issue isn’t that there’s not sufficient area to create a “six-foot metropolis,” however that it’s not correctly allotted or configured. In her essay, she proposes a number of methods metropolis blocks could be reworked into socially distanced exercise facilities: faculty classroom and exercise area, polling stations for elections, curbside pickup and supply, pedestrian procuring arcades, play streets and leisure area, and — after all — alternate technique of transport.

“Cities the place it’s doable to conduct a lot of life’s public actions safely — whereas sustaining the six ft [1.8 metres] of distance from each other that medical specialists advocate — can imply the distinction between a sputtering restoration that disrupts day by day life, the worldwide financial system and democratic establishments, and a sustained, surging reopening that permits nations to develop and thrive, and never simply survive,” she writes.

Hawaii Transportation Officers Defy the Feds and Set Up COVID-19 Take a look at Web site in a Freeway Tunnel

As most of you must know, even Hawaii has Interstate highways. After all, the three Interstates on Oahu don’t result in anyplace off that island, however they have been constructed with Interstate freeway funds.

Hawaii’s three major Interstates join the army services round Pearl Harbor to different factors on the island. The most recent, Interstate H-3, can be the one one which crosses the mountains in the course of the island on its manner from Pearl Harbor to the Marine base at Kaneohe.

In response to a report in Honolulu Civil Beat, Hawaii transportation officers have been effectively superior with plans to transform the principle tunnel on the freeway, the Tetsuo Harano Tunnel, right into a pop-up free COVID-19 testing web site on Sept. 1 after they bought an e-mail from the Federal Freeway Administration telling them they couldn’t do it. They went forward anyway.

Ed Sniffen, deputy director for highways on the Hawaii Division of Transportation, had despatched the request to shut the H-3 tunnel to his state FHWA counterpart the Friday earlier than. “We imagine H-3 is required for testing as all different websites used up to now, whether or not or not it’s for COVID-19 testing, meals distribution or different public profit efforts have resulted in vital site visitors, delay and security impacts to the fast web site and neighboring services,” Sniffen wrote.

The response from Ralph Rizzo, the director of FHWA’s Hawaii Division, cited each security issues and the street’s position in connecting two army services as grounds for denial: “We’re extraordinarily involved in regards to the impacts that the closure and non permanent different use of Interstate H-3 can have, in addition to the precedent that closing H-3 for well being testing will set,” he wrote.

Because the response got here 45 minutes earlier than testing was to start out, Hawaii DOT went forward with its plans regardless of the risk that it would lose Federal freeway funds. Sniffen famous that the Interstate has 5 miles of strategy roads resulting in the tunnel on both aspect that might be used to queue autos ready for assessments.

In response to the Civil Beat story, the state deliberate to repeat the pop-up on Thursday, Sept. 3, and it was alleged to ship an evidence to the FHWA for why it went forward with the plan. KTTV reported after the primary pop-up that complete visits have been beneath the 5,000 anticipated and that issues ran easily.