Yep, you read this right: we did it again, an encore to the Excellent Adventure 2019. Since I’m a software guy, I versioned it as Excellent Adventure 2.1.
It was a four day trip around northeastern PA using primarily – but with a LOT of holes – the Delaware & Lehigh and Schuylkill River Trails. That’s what makes these trips fun; if it were all just smooth rail trails without some kind of “deviation” it would just be tedious. This ride was definitely not that. Read on!
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4 trails, 3 days, 2 people, 1 excellent adventure! Charles and I just completed our three day bikepacking trip through the Monongahela National Forest from Lewisburg WV (near the Greenbrier Inn) to Deep Creek Lake in MD. It was a fantastic tour of about 210 miles over very remote terrain, mostly rail trails, but some rural chip and seal roads, gravel and finally smooth pavement into DCL. Lots of great industrial history in the area in addition to the riding, which included the gently sloped rail trails and some fairly steep hills that we used to connect the trails. These were very hard with a fairly loaded touring rig. And of course we found local beer at all of our overnight stops, which were not camping… The short version in video form:
For the long version, read on!
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As the person who is responsible for initiating the requirement 22 in the Central Park findings, it is important for me to explain the rationale for my (I do not speak for the rest of the Planning Commission) behind it. We are tasked with looking at developments in the city ostensibly per the comprehensive plan and the city code. There are numerous references in the 2009 Comprehensive Plan and the city code that give the Planning Commission broad guidance to look at these issues from a big picture standpoint.
Comprehensive Plan pages: 46, 49, 59, 60 and especially this:
9.2 From a regulatory approach, future development projects will be evaluated against their contribution to an area’s transportation performance broadly defined to include safety, transit ridership and cost effectiveness, heavy truck congestion, automobile congestion, bicycle and pedestrian circulation, and the existing nature and purpose of the surrounding road network. The City will develop regulations to implement this provision, which must include ensuring safe facilities for walking and cycling.
City Code: 20.24.120 – Blocks:
C. Pedestrian walkways through blocks not less than ten feet wide shall be required where deemed essential to provide circulation, or access to schools, playgrounds, shopping centers, transportation, and other community facilities.
It is through this lens when reviewing the Central Park development application that we attempted to provide for a non-vehicle connection.
Non vehicular connection between Central Park Development and Colony Drive outlined in red.
As we all know, Annapolis is a “nook and cranny” kind of town, due in part from our colonial history and the geography of the area. This makes mobility and circulation for all modes of transportation challenging under the best of circumstances. One of the main consequences of these limitations is that most often everyone has to use the same routes whether they are on foot, bicycle, or in a car to everyone’s detriment. In a car going a little extra distance or on a busy road is not typically an issue (other than traffic of course, but that’s a different story), however, for non auto users, this can be inefficient at best or dangerous at worst.
This is also not just my opinion, the effect of lack of connections between neighborhoods is well known in city planning circles and contributes to mobility problems. There was a good article about this on the Strong Towns web site that describes the issues: You Care About the Subdivision Regulations, You Just Don’t Know It (Yet).
The key to success in providing non auto choices for short trips is a safe and efficient network for people on foot and bikes to get to places they want to go. So often we hear from people who would ride a bike a short distance (less than 2 miles which is around most of the city) “I’d be happy to ride my bike, but I don’t feel safe riding on busy roads with vehicle speeds much faster than I ride”.
When you think about this connection, think about the experience on Hilltop. While there is a bike lane, traffic travels considerably faster than an average adult or child riding a bike (ie not the spandex crowd) and that is a deal killer for a large segment of the population. This is especially true when you consider from the perspective of a resident in the new development who might want to make a trip to Eastport or downtown on a bike and would have to make two left turns across traffic on Hilltop v. a low stress route through the back streets. The two left turns are not a problem in a car, but quite the challenge on a bike at most times.
As someone who rides a bike as a primary mode of transportation, I experience this issue daily. However, there are a number of similar connections – some very visible, some known only to a few – that have provided such non-vehicular connections with no adverse effects and are definitely precedents consistent with the Planning Commission’s finding 22. They are:
This safe, convenient and non vehicle connection from the Central Park development to the rest of Eastport is in the same vein as the ones I have mentioned. As a city, we need to encourage more of these which will benefit everyone.
I can certainly understand the objections of the Colony Hills residents and while there was no additional public testimony, their concerns were heard and what I said during our discussion was “the possibility of any kind of connection in the future goes away when the land is sold and becomes somebody’s property … given this [land] would be owned by the home owners association … it does provide in the future if homeowners association of Central Park and the Colony Hills folks in 25 years decide ‘jeeze I wish I could walk to see my neighbor’ and they decide mutually they want to do that, they can do that and it’s not walking through somebody’s back yard.” You can watch this part of the exchange with the developer’s attorney here: https://www.facebook.com/CityOfAnnapolis/videos/355182321712459/?t=4802
So nothing beyond the boundaries of the Central Park development will happen as there are other right of way issues, not to mention an existing fence whose ownership is unknown. I believe we are all at some kind of common understanding that provides that capability later if it is mutually acceptable, which is in my opinion a reasonable end.
A little late here, but before I publish the 2019 Edition, I had to at least get the basics of the 2018 Edition published. I’m not going to publish a lot about the experience because this ride is a well trodden, eh hem, path. However, it did happen to be the wettest spring in recorded history so we experienced at best wet or at worst hard rain the whole time. In brief:
Any readers of this blog – Bueller, Bueller, Bueller – are sure to know I’ve been talking about some long distance bike touring for some time. Finally some motivation, in the form of an email from an ABRT teammate, came along: “Hey, let’s ride from Pittsburgh to DC in 4 days.” Of course without thinking too much, I was IN. We went back and forth on the details but in the end we picked the third weekend in June to do the GAP/C&O.
We ended up riding the roughly 340 miles in 4 days. A bit on the aggressive side (most people do this ride in 5-8 days) with two long days to start, followed by two medium days:
Day 1: Pittsburgh to Confluence – 90 miles (Strava: GAP/C&O day one, Champagne Ride)
Day 2: Confluence to Little Orleans – 104 miles (Strava: GAP/C&O day two, the Little Orleans Shit Show)
Day 3: Little Orleans to Shepherdstown – 73 miles (Strava: GAP/C&O day three, hours of cyclocross mud, yee hah)
Day 4: Shepherdstown to Washington – 77 miles (Strava: GAP/C&O Day 4: A bit less mud 🙂)
It was a fun trip but hard, especially when getting to Little Orleans as there was a massive power outage in the area and 15 Mile Creek was way over its banks which made getting to the lodging and dinner, uh, difficult, thus the name of the Strava ride. But as they say, “What happens in Little Orleans, stays in Little Orleans”.
For a full album of photos see: https://photos.app.goo.gl/3vdfUU61LZHcNh4H9
I hope you enjoyed my Ignite Annapolis talk “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”. The talk was a really brief – but cheeky – overview of how choices we make in our zoning code and regulations often have unintended results that we really don’t appreciate until much later when we experience the consequences in a very real way. Also, it was a nod to the three people that have had the most influence on my thinking about urbanism: Charles Marohn, James Howard Kunstler and Andres Duany. If you know any of their work, you will hear them loudly in this talk.
It was a lot of fun and I hope it was thought provoking, but very challenging to fit more than a few concepts in the ignite format. In reality these issues are multi faceted and never as simple as snarky platitudes. I’ve created this post as an entrance point to help anyone interested in a deeper understanding of these concepts.
To be explicit, the two main takeaways from the talk are:
Perhaps we can add change to the Ben Franklin quote “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” The question is how do we accommodate change in a way that is not radical? Fortunately we have hindsight from the last 50+ years to learn from. After building cities in a tried and true organic way for hundreds – really thousands – of years, in the space of a several decades, we changed how cities developed without really understanding the long term consequences. I won’t engage in revisionist history and say that we should have know better than to go “all in” on autocentric development because at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. The lesson is not what we did but how we did it. Ultimately, we did not do it incrementally in a way that could see whether this was a good idea or not, rather it was radical and untried and that is the take home going forward: we need incremental and sustainable change.
Let’s consider this as the promise of autonomous vehicles revolutionizing transportation is touted. Let’s not make the same mistake again.
You can watch the live stream here (a better quality version on You Tube is forthcoming): I’m the last speaker at 2:16:10, but I highly recommend watching the prior 14!
There are number of concepts related to this and are discussed below with links to further reading for a much deeper dive on the subjects.
In the talk, I give examples of “walkable urbanism” and “people oriented places” as opposed to “auto oriented places” (Here is an article that describes each). From a qualitative standpoint, they are pleasant areas and that’s why we like them as I discussed, but there is a more fundamental concept behind them: they are fiscally productive. Fiscal productivity is essentially whether the development style pays for itself. ie does the area produce enough tax revenue to pay for the services consumed over the long term? The latter part – over the long term or the full lifecycle as it’s called – is the key. We have to consider what the costs are not just to build the initial infrastructure, but to maintain it in the long run and it’s not always a simple question. Typically developers put in infrastructure, a one time cost, and turn it over to the government to maintain, a recurring cost – forever. Might not be tomorrow, but in 20 years when the streets need to be repaved or in 30 years when the sewer and water pipes need service.
Read more on why walkable streets are more economically productive.
There are data unequivocally showing that people-oriented streets are more economically productive than auto-oriented streets — from big cities to small towns, from the heartland to the South. The company Urban3 spends much of their time visiting cities and towns across the nation to analyze their tax productivity, comparing how much tax revenue is produced per acre in different areas. What they’ve consistently found is that compact, walkable places produce far more tax value per acre than auto-oriented places—and that holds true in communities across America.
Read more on why density is the wrong metric for fiscal productivity.
Often people read “compact” to mean just add more density. The question often gets ask “what’s the right answer” on density? There is no right answer because it depends. Ultimately not all growth/development is the same and it requires one “Do The Math” for for your particular place or city to determine what is sustainable. It’s a function of how much the associated infrastructure around a place costs as compared to the tax revenue it produces (public v. private investment).
Read more about fiscal productivity in the #DoTheMath series.
A STROAD is a street/road hybrid and besides being a very dangerous environment (yes, it is ridiculously dangerous to mix high speed highway geometric design with pedestrians, bikers and turning traffic), they are enormously expensive to build and ultimately, financially unproductive. I single it out in the talk and here because it is so fundamental to fiscal productivity concept.
The following is a short video that will help identify STROADs and then convert them to either a productive street or a road:
and a longer version of this given as a TEDx talk:
If we want to build places that are financially productive and pleasant for people, we need to identify and eliminate STROADs. In the talk I pointed out Upper West Street where it transitions to 4 lanes near the Goodwill in a number of slides and Forest Drive which are Annapolis’ primary STROADs. Once you have the vocabulary to describe these places, you will explicitly see them everywhere. We need to stop devaluing streets that are fiscally productive by making them into STROADs by attempting to chase away traffic congestion with widening projects. This almost never solves the problem because of the concept of induced demand. You build for cars and you will get more cars. You build for people and you get more people.
Read more on what incrementalism is.
So often in the context of planning exercises in the city, I hear the term “we have to get it right”. Given the complexity of cities and our lessons from hindsight, it is very risky to believe anyone knows all the right answers and that if they are followed we can predetermine everything perfectly. It’s fine to set a long term vision as we do in our comprehensive plans, but we should take incremental steps to get there. As I mentioned in the talk, smaller steps are not only more palatable for people who are resistant to change, which is coming whether we like it or not, but it’s also a more resilient strategy. If we make missteps, which we inevitably will, we can correct them to minimize their effect. If we make big expensive and expansive changes, the risk is much larger and the mistakes much harder to correct. For example policies like urban renewal had wide ranging effects on cities because they were done at such large increments.
Read more on Incremental Growth in the Power of Growing Incrementally series.
Appearing in The Capital, March 9, 2019
The Forest Drive/Eastport Sector Study takes a small step in the right direction towards a more satisfying future. It is not a plan but it is a hope, a strategic hope. And one must hope and envision in order to get anywhere.
We need to accept the study and keep going.
The Sector Study does accomplish, among other useful things, a vision. It does this by taking what might seem a radical perspective, and that is the perspective of a person walking from one place to another. Why is this important?
Virtually every trip begins with pedestrian infrastructure, whether you are walking or using a wheelchair. People like to walk and ride bikes. You can see this in small and large cities around the country including the older neighborhoods right here in Annapolis.
There are several main factors that affect walkability: efficiency, interest and comfort. Trips have to be close, the path has to be interesting, and people need to feel safe and comfortable. People will typically walk a quarter to a half mile such as around downtown, West Street, Eastport, and West Annapolis because it’s pleasant, interesting and often easier than driving. Biking for transportation is pretty much the same except the distances you can cover are about five times longer, up to two miles for the average person.
But if the trip is interrupted by unsafe or uncomfortable spots with no easy alternatives, walking ceases to be an option.
Unfortunately, this is the situation along the Forest Drive corridor, a typical autocentric pattern where businesses are separated by long distances and the only connection between them is on a sidewalk six inches from 50mph traffic. This environment is hostile outside of a car, so everyone drives even if going between two neighboring businesses.
Furthermore, as we’ve seen areas where we attempt to mix fast traffic and commercial activity, the combination ultimately devalues the land resulting in ugly strip malls.
The area is this way because we’ve made it this way based on the zoning and autocentric requirements we’ve had in place for a long time. Band-Aid solutions such as adding a sidewalk or a multiuse path to the side of Forest Drive are not reasonable as they don’t fundamentally address the conditions that enable people to want to walk or bike.
The vision outlined in the sector study is the first step in addressing these problems. It suggests changing the existing character of specific areas to be more people oriented by having a pattern that is mixed-use and human-scaled, which is shorthand for “things are not far apart and it’s pleasant and efficient to get around outside of a car.”
If we have places like that, we have a real chance to move between them without requiring a car trip. It could be walking or biking or even some kind of specialized transit, like entrepreneurial, privately owned shuttles.
Of course, the area will still accommodate cars for people who need to drive and we will always have significant traffic on Forest Drive given it’s the only major road and the number of people who commute in and out of the city.
But walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods that are efficiently and pleasantly connected with the rest of the city will cut down on local car trips and provide options for people who don’t drive.
As mentioned in the study, under current law there is significant capacity for development now. Stopping the study does not stop development, it just gets us more of the same, which is clearly not working. A popular opinion I’ve heard at public meetings is we have to fix all the infrastructure before we do anything else.
That view assumes the status quo, doubling down on an untenable path. At the very least, the vision of the study moves in a direction away from the autocentric policies of the past.
Alex Pline is a member of the Annapolis Planning Commission. This editorial is his opinion and does not represent the opinion of the Commission.
Appearing on Eye On Annapolis, September 13, 2018
All the brouhaha around the Main Street bike lane has a very strong cultural component that is bubbling just below the surface of the discussion about the project. Sure there are issues of cost and process which are certainly understandable, but most of the visceral dislike revolves around the cultural perceptions of people riding bikes. These same reactions are occurring with bike infrastructure in Washington DC and Baltimore and around the country, so are not limited to our corner of the world. Cultural change is hard and when it happens, there is always a sense of loss.
The cultural change that I see people reacting to is two-fold: first, the perception of a “DC-ification” of Annapolis and second, that bikes are a recreational toy. The more the bike lane is discussed, the less it is about the lane itself, but the change it represents.
The popular local view that “Yuppies” have invaded and taken over the city since 1980 is very prevalent. People have called me a “carpetbagger” even though I have been here 20+ years, raised two kids here through public schools and been actively involved in the community in a variety of ways. People, especially of my generation and older – I am at the end of the boomer years – resent popular hipster culture and those they perceive as part of it, as it waters down the “Annapolitan” identity. Biking by young people for transportation and by “MAMILs” (Middle Aged Men in Lycra) on expensive bikes is viewed as the canary in the coal mine for a litany of undesirable changes from urbanization and traffic to increased costs of living and the death of traditional mom/pop retail, typically expressed in the coded phrase “destroying our quality of life”.
In the 1970s biking was marketed as a recreational activity and not for transportation. Cars are for doing serious work and we have all graduated to “big boy underpants” by driving cars to get around. There are many reasons for this, but suburbanization and its reliance on the automobile is seen as progress in the post-war era and is a predominant attitude of baby boomers. This along with the mom and pop retail stores, muscle cars, a working waterfront and the old Market House is emblematic of the pining for the “real” Annapolis of the 1970s before the “Yuppies” came.
The cover of the 1971 Schwinn Catalog showing the kids riding bikes on vacation strongly markets cycling as a recreational activity, not as a means of transportation.
Deep down, people know change is coming. We see it everywhere. The retail industry has been turned on its head. People are moving into the area. New things are being built. The city is urbanizing. Values for public space and transportation differ for younger people. These are all regional and national trends not specific to Annapolis. When these changes happen, especially disruptive economic ones, the fear is more change can only be bad so we need to keep the status quo to prevent losing more. There is very little credence given to the possibility that change can be economically positive. So much of this was expressed in public testimony at the City Council meeting on September 10, 2018 where there was an ad hoc hearing on the temporary bike lane experiment. It was always about losing something, parking, customers, historic value and the underlying “our way of life”. The resulting reaction is all what’s called Loss Aversion (from Wikipedia):
In cognitive psychology and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it is better to not lose $5 than to find $5. The principle is very prominent in the domain of economics. What distinguishes loss aversion from risk aversion is that the utility of a monetary payoff depends on what was previously experienced or was expected to happen. Some studies have suggested that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.
The ban on smoking in restaurants mentioned at the hearing is a great example of this. Restaurants claimed loudly that their business would be dead in a week if the ban was passed. The reality ended up being that it greatly improved restaurant business because it brought out all the people who refused to go because of smoking. Ultimately, there is pent up demand the status quo suppresses. This is also true for local recreational trails such as the B&A, Poplar and the trail around the Navy Stadium. These were all opposed because of the perceived negative consequences, but are now seen and sold as “amenities”. With respect to protected bike lanes, NYC has shown virtually no negative consequences of reducing vehicle lanes in lieu of protected bike lanes. At the time the conventional wisdom was this would result in gridlock and be an economic catastrophe.
There are changes happening in Annapolis that people do not like, I certainly get that; even some I may personally not like. But change is inevitable. Are these changes good or bad? That’s obviously a matter of opinion, but think of it this way: would you rather have an Annapolis that is experiencing severe economic distress like many of the small towns throughout the country that have been depopulated over the last 30 years, or a town that is experiencing distress at the opposite end of the spectrum where population is increasing and there is economic vibrancy? I certainly would like more of the later than the former. I don’t want Annapolis to be known as the place that always says “no” when it requires us to change our habits.
Everyone wants change until it requires us to change. From ifunny.com
And finally, some parting words on the changing attitudes towards cycling in the United States. Eben Weiss, known as “Bike Snob NYC” an acerbic commentator on cycling culture hopes we can just make cycling seem normal in this country as is common place in other parts of the world.
We’re able to comprehend riding bikes only as a means of recreation; confounded by the practical; aghast at the notion that women and children should be exposed to this high-risk action sport. Hey, I’ll take being told I’m doing the coolest thing somebody’s ever seen, and it sure beats having things thrown at me from car windows (this has happened to every cyclist), but what I’d like even more would be if what I was doing was so commonplace as to be utterly not worth mentioning.
For Annapolis, I too share this hope.
