Center for Creative Studies' uncreative bike rack at the Taubman Center. Nudge, nudge.

The Wheelhouse Detroit blog has an excellent discussion of bicycle parking and racks.

As Detroit becomes more bike friendly, more and more businesses and institutions are installing bike racks — which is great, no doubt about it. What is frustrating, though, is to see funds and good intent wasted when, simply put, the bike rack is not functional. This occurs when the rack is poorly designed or poorly placed.

This is perfect timing as the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals released a second edition of their Bicycle Parking Guidelines. Their first edition is available on-line, but this second edition adds:

• Guidance long-term bicycle parking
• Elements of a good bike locker, including specific performance criteria
• Maintenance best practices
• Sample site plans and diagrams to help avoid blunders in rack and locker placement
• Sample quantity requirements for bicycle parking to meet need by land use
• A worksheet for programming bicycle parking for a building or cluster of buildings
• Abundant images and charts to illustrate concepts and conditions

One issue is funding. Cities like Chicago rely on Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) funding for much of their bike parking. SEMCOG‘s CMAQ funding formula does not give the same priority to our non-motorized projects — something groups like MTGA want to change.

It also seems that once we find a funding mechanism, we can spur green job creation by having local steel workers creating bicycle racks. Why would a underemployed manufacturing city import these simple metal structures? We should be exporting bicycle racks.

SEMCOG issued a press release highlighting their analysis of the 2009 crash data. When it comes to their non-motorized crash analysis, we find it to be very superficial. This year is no different.

We did more year-to-year comparison and found some unreported and disturbing trends.

What SEMCOG says: “Bicycle crashes down - Traffic crashes … involving bicycles decreased just less than one percent in 2009 from 2008. There were … 967 crashes involving bikes in 2009.”

What the data shows: While there were fewer total bicycle crashes, that is primarily due to there being fewer minor crashes that left the bicyclist uninjured. Incapacitating injuries among cyclists increased significantly. The number of serious (fatal or incapacitating) bicycle crashes are up over 16 percent!

This is especially alarming given that statewide bicycling fatalities are down 24%. And, motorist fatalities within the SEMCOG region dropped by 5%.

In 2009, 47% percent of all Michigan bicycle fatalities were within the SEMCOG region as opposed to 36% in 2008.

The number of bicyclists involved in a crash increased slightly this year as well.

What SEMCOG says: “Pedestrian crashes down - Crashes in Southeast Michigan involving pedestrians totaled 1,180 in 2009; this represents a two percent decrease from 2008.”

What the data shows: While pedestrian crashes are down, pedestrian fatalities are up 4.5%. Statewide, pedestrian fatalities are up 6.1%.

In 2008, non-motorized fatalities made up 21% of all road fatalities within the SEMCOG region. In 2009, that percentage climbed to 23%.

Also in the press release, SEMCOG Executive Director Paul Tait says, “We are happy to report this continuing decline in traffic crashes in Southeast Michigan. A number of factors contribute to this downward trend, including the poor economy, higher gas prices, fewer vehicle miles traveled, and higher safety belt usage.”

If higher gas prices and fewer vehicle miles traveled meant safer roads in 2009, then why aren’t those goals within the Michigan’s Strategic Highway Safety Plan? It’s obvious that one of the most efficient ways of decreasing serious road injuries would be to reduce the vehicle miles traveled. It’s proven itself in 2009, yet it’s not part of the plan to improve road safety. Why not? Is the lack of political leadership trumping safety?

And, SEMCOG’s Camine Palombo commented on their analysis by concluding, “Finally – some news we can be proud of!”

We don’t agree.

It was a bit of surprise seeing a Google booth at the National Bike Summit.   They are here to announce biking directions on Google Maps. This is a nice complement to the driving, walking, and public transit directions.

The routing algorithm doesn’t shy away from routing cyclists on some main roads, like Woodward Avenue. Perhaps we can use this as another reason to make Metro Detroit’s streets more bike friendly.

One major issue: Google is showing sidepaths/wide sidewalks as legitimate bicycling facilities when they are not according to national design guidelines. This makes us think SEMCOG may have provided this data to Google. Despite our comments against doing so, SEMCOG included sidepaths/wide sidewalks as bicycle facilities maps. We’ll bring this issue up with Google.

Here’s part of the announcement from the League of American Bicyclists:

This new feature includes: step-by-step bicycling directions; bike trails outlined directly on the map; and a new “Bicycling” layer that indicates bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly roads. The directions feature provides step-by-step, bike-specific routing suggestions – similar to the directions provided by our driving, walking, or public transit modes. Simply enter a start point and destination and select “Bicycling” from the drop-down menu. You will receive a route that is optimized for cycling, taking advantage of bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly streets and avoiding hilly terrain whenever possible.

Visit http://maps.google.com/biking to try out this new feature. Biking directions for Google Maps is currently in Beta.

SEMCOG recently launched a new MiBikematch service and the Free Press has an article it.

MiBikematch, a service to match up bike riders who would be more comfortable taking the trip with another rider, has been launched, the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments said Wednesday.

Users register there, entering their starting point, destination, days they ride and their work hours. That information is compared to other users for potential matches. Participants may contact potential riding companions through e-mail or the Web site. The service is free, SEMCOG spokeswoman Iris Steinberg said.

The program is part of an effort by state and local agencies to encourage folks to think beyond driving to ease congestion and improve air quality in a state among the tops in the nation in the percentage of drivers commuting alone by car.

Note that after signing up, you can select how you prefer to commute: by bike, car pool, van pool, or some combination of those.

It’s apparent that in order to make this service a success, we need a lot of bike commuters signing up.

$5 per gallon of gas would hurt the program either.

If you spend much time perusing the available safety publications for Michigan, it becomes fairly evident that not much serious effort is put into bicycle and pedestrian analysis.

SEMCOG

One example is SEMCOG’s Crash Facts report where more analysis and pages are devoted to vehicle-deer crashes than either pedestrian crashes or bicycle crashes. This is despite the fact that deer caused just one driver fatality in 2007. There were 65 pedestrian fatalities and 7 bicyclist fatalities in 2007.

For 2008, SEMCOG issued a cheery press release because overall fatalities and crashes were down.

“We are extremely happy to report this continuing decline in traffic crashes in Southeast Michigan,” notes SEMCOG Executive Director Paul Tait.

SEMCOG failed to note that both bicycle and pedestrian fatalities were up. In fact, 18% of all fatalities were pedestrians and bicyclists in 2007. In 2008 that pecentage jumped to 24%.

It seems the “analysis” is simply plugging this year’s numbers into the same old template.

A worthwhile analysis would look at trends within the region and where within the roadway these crashes are occuring.

Do we really need SEMCOG telling us that “bicycle crashes were more common in warmer months…likely due to the difficulties of bicycling in snowy or icy conditions?” They’ve been recycling this same text since 2002.

MDOT

To their credit, MDOT has supported some pedestrian safety studies within the city of Detroit. The city of Detroit’s Traffic Engineering department is has applied for safety funding to make improvements that should reduced pedestrian crashes.

GTSAC

Also, the Governor’s Traffic Safety Advisory Council includes some good analysis within the Michigan Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Action Plan.

OHSP

One interesting analysis from the Office of Highway Safety Planning (OHSP) compares 2007 bicycle crash injury severity for helmeted and non-helmeted riders. We’ve rebuilt their data table as follows:

(Note that it is unreported whether helmets were worn in a little over half of the crashes.)

Among bicyclists wearing helmets in crashes, a significantly higher percentage suffered serious injury or death when compared those without helmets. One would expect the helmeted riders would have a reduced percentage of serious injury or death.

Can this be explained by risk compensation or demographics?

Nonetheless, the OSHP apparently didn’t do much analysis since they’ve cut-and-pasted a quote that’s unsupported by their own data: “Making the use of helmets the single most effective countermeasure available to reduce head injuries and fatalities resulting from bicycle crashes.”

And just to be sure that 2007 wasn’t simply a unique year, we looked at this data back to 2004. For every year, bicyclists wearing helmets in crashes suffered an equal or greater percentage of serious injury or death.

For what it’s worth, there is not a trend towards increased helmet use among those involved in reported bicyclist accidents within Michigan.