Arriving in Austin, I did a bike count at a Portlandia-style coffee roaster in East Austin. Austin’s industrial expansion, along with the continued development of the music district along nearby East 6th Street is clearly driving changes to the neighborhood, and some of those changes are associated with cycling; I was just down the street from the pedicab garage.
A question I’m trying to answer is, why are utility cycling rates higher in some U.S. cities than others? It’s tricky to investigate for a number of reasons. The first is simple: Our data sucks. The second is complex: It’s just a difficult question. Utility cycling rates are driven by countless factors: the density and nature of the built environment, the character of the street network, weather, demographics, socioeconomic status, culture, and more. Each city has its own unique combination of these factors; extracting causal relationships from the paltry data is quite challenging.
On Friday night I did a bike/ped count at the Birdsong Brewery, which I’d been told was the place to see lots of bikes. The count turned out to be as just as fruitless as the others I’d done (a total of four bike riders in two hours), but the trip was fruitful. Even though I’d only been in town a few days, there were several people at the bar who I had already met. After a while, the group checked Strava to find their other cycling friends, who turned out to be at a different brewery.
I’m doing bike and pedestrian counts at selected parts of the city transportation network. The data that exists on cycling volumes in different cities is very spotty; the national American Community Survey data only covers work commute cycling and isn’t spatially located within the city. Unfortunately, in Charlotte the location didn’t seem to matter much; in none of the places I conducted a count in Charlotte did I see more than 5 bikes in a 2-hour period.
Charlotte is putting a lot of effort into developing greenways with multi-use paths. For utility cyclists, the creek paths are a mixed bag. One thing I immediately noticed in surveying them is that they’re poorly connected to the street grid. They’re also not maintained as if they are part of the transportation network.
After the breakfast meetup on Friday, I rode in to the government center with Matt Magnasco, one of the designers for Charlotte’s Department of Transportation. There, I met with matt and his colleague Ben Miller, also a cyclist. Matt and Ben do most of the design on bike-related projects in Charlotte. Charlotte does not have a funded bike infrastructure program. The Charlotte city council adopted a Complete Streets policy some years ago, but clearly hasn’t provided funding for it.
