Tag Archives: bicycle

Chinatown to Charles: the Bermuda Triangle for bikes in Boston

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When I bike to work, my route is simple. I head down Main Street in Cambridge, cross the Longfellow Bridge, and take a right on to Charles Street. I go diagonally across Beacon Street on to the Common, bike down the wide bike path there, and then bike half a block (or, if I’m on a Hubway, a whole block), slowly, down a sidewalk to the office. It’s simple, relatively safe and even pretty fast.

On the way home, I don’t even bother to try the reverse. It is damn near impossible to get from the Chinatown/Theater District/Park Square area to the Longfellow Bridge, and the options are dangerous and annoying enough that I wind up on the Commonwealth Avenue bike lanes to the Harvard Bridge to Cambridge, a less direct, but much safer route. As such the inbound and outbound portions of my ride are, except for half a block of Mass Ave in Cambridge, completely different.

But what about when I have to go to Kendall? There are several options for getting to the Longfellow, each of which has some major bikeability issue. The main issue is that Charles Street is one way, with no provision for cyclists going northbound. It’s sidewalks are narrow and riding contraflow is a death wish (oh, and it’s illegal). Beacon Hill—the neighborhood it traverses—is comprised of one-lane, one-way roads, and they have been signed in such a way as to prohibit through traffic, which is sensible since it was laid out way, way before cars were invented. This would be fine, but there is no parallel to Charles Street. To the east is Storrow Drive. To the west is Beacon Hill. There’s no good way to get the third of a mile from the Common to Charles Circle.

I’ve gone through the options (none of them good) and rated each from 1-5 for three categories: bike-car safety (how safe is it in spaces shared with cars?), bike-ped safety (how safe is it on spaces shared with pedestrians?) and bikeability (is it really annoying to bike?):

The Storrow double-cross is what you get if you ask Google Maps. It’s a pretty bad suggestion. The two crossings are coded as bike lanes, and while they do provide traffic-free crossings of Storrow Drive, neither is bike friendly, at all. To get to the bridges, you first have to cross four lanes of traffic on Charles Street, without the benefit of lights, unless you dismount and use crosswalks at the corner of Charles and Beacon. The path on the north side of the Public Garden is not bikeable. I call this the Beacon Weave. It’s not much fun on a bike.

And all that does is get you to the bridges. The first crossing (1) is the Fiedler Bridge near the Hatch Shell. To gain altitude, it has two hairpin turns on each approach, the bottom of which is completely blind. Biking at a walking pace, or walking altogether, is necessary going up and down this bridge, which often has heavy foot traffic. Assuming you navigate that bridge, you get a couple hundred yards of easy riding before you have to navigate another double-hairpin bridge (2) to get back across Storrow. This one is less blind than the Fiedler, but it’s narrower and just as trafficked. Even then, that only gets you to the far side of Charles Circle, where you have to jockey in traffic turning off of the Longfellow and on to Storrow before you can get to the bike-laned regions on the bridge itself. This require four separate crosswalks or some creative light-running.

This route would be a bit more doable if there were a path from the river bike path to the Longfellow. But there’s not. It’s pretty nasty.

Verdict:
Bike-car safety: 3
Bike-ped safety: 1
Bikeability: 0
Grand total: 4

The Beacon Hill Stumble-Bumble is probably the most direct route, but it fails for a variety of reasons. Mainly, it involves going down several one-way streets the wrong way, which causes Google Maps to say things like “walk your bike” in the directions more than once. Plus, these streets are steep, narrow and have blind corners. It might be fun if you are a bike messenger, but if you value your life, it’s a pretty bad option. If a car comes the other direction, there is not enough room to pass with any degree of comfort and safety. And the streets are designed to not let you through, so if you don’t know your way, you’ll wind up lost and spit out on to Charles, Beacon or Cambridge Street anyway.

Verdict:
Bike-car safety: 1
Bike-ped safety: 2
Bikeability: 0
Grand Total: 4

The Beacon Hill Crossover is another Google Maps suggestion, and it’s slightly better than the first. It has you cut across the Common (or you can go around on Beacon), climb Beacon Hill, and descend on Bowdoin Street. That part of the route, aside from the hill climb, is not too bad. Then you hit Cambridge Street. Outside of rush hour, this isn’t that bad. During rush hour, this backs up off of Storrow Drive, and to get to the Longfellow you have to slalom slow-moving cars, and then get through the intersection at Storrow. There, it behooves you to find the left-most lane, because most of the traffic is turning right on to Storrow with no idea that a bicyclist might be going straight. Charles Circle is bike no-man’s-land (no-bike’s-land?) and it is several heartbeats before you are in the relative safety of the bike lane on the bridge. Oh, and there are always hordes of pedestrians running across Charles Circle to get to the T stop. A variant of this route via the less-hilly but longer and more-pedestrian-mall Downtown Crossing, which scores similarly, is shown as well.

Verdict:
Bike-car safety: 1
Bike-ped safety: 1
Bikeability: 3
Grand Total: 5

The Storrow Shortcut is the route I actually use. It isn’t pretty, but it certainly gets the job done. The main issue is that it requires either biking a narrow, decaying sidewalk along Storrow Drive or, more comfortably, actually biking down Storrow Drive itself! Google doesn’t realize that Storrow is not officially closed to bikes, and that there is a sidewalk along that route, so I can only show this route in driving directions. And, no, it’s not as crazy as it sounds.

On the few hundred yards of Storrow I bike, the road is three lanes wide and it has a narrow-but-painted shoulder line. It’s definitely better than the rutted-and-cracked sidewalk. Traffic is usually very slow there in the afternoon, and I can usually glide past the gridlock for the couple of blocks up towards the T stop. Once there, I hop on to the sidewalk and the unused part of Embankment Road and then under the bridge before hooking a left towards Cambridge. It avoids one-ways the wrong way, it misses the thick of the pedestrians, and it requires a minimum amount of weaving through traffic (but doesn’t miss the Beacon Street Weave). It’s ugly, but it works.
  
Verdict: 
Bike-car safety: 1
Bike-ped safety: 4
Bikeability: 2
Grand Total: 7


All of this, of course, could be solved with a two-way cycle track on Charles. This has been proposed, but has not seen any steps taken towards actual construction. Charles is three lanes of traffic and parking on both sides. Its shops are mostly pedestrian-oriented, and it probably doesn’t need this parking, but taking it out would cause an uproar. However, the street would, and should, function perfectly well with two lanes. And such a lane would funnel Cambridge-bound traffic from the Back Bay across the Theater District and Chinatown to the Financial District and even the Seaport. It would be well used.

Bike sharing trip lengths

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For a transportation data junkie like me, one of the great things about bike sharing is that the system lets you log in and see your trips. I’ve been riding Hubway for about a month, and I’ve taken 21 trips. Of these trips, 20 have been ten minutes or less. The one longer trip was 13 minutes. At no time have I gotten even half way to the 30 minute cutoff. Over on the right is a chart of the trips I’ve taken. The frequent four-minute trip is when I jump on a Hubway at Charles and ride it across town to my office, docking it outside the building. It’s faster than taking the T another stop, fighting the crowd at Park Street and either walking the Common or taking the Green Line one stop to Boylston.

This will probably change once Hubway launches in Cambridge, especially if they manage to put a station in the park near my house (not that likely, since it’s a mostly residential area, although it is halfway between Central Square and the grocery stores on the river, so there might be good traffic to those areas; I’ve been lobbying Whole Foods by Twitter to sponsor a rack there). I figure a trip on a Hubway from home to work would take about 16 minutes, so I’d still be well within the limit. And if I were taking a longer trip on a shared bike, I’d probably be cognizant of the time limits and swap a bike in and out at a rack (you just have to dock and undock) to reset the clock and get another half hour. Fifteen seconds of my time is certainly worthwhile to save a few bucks, and most trips are bound to pass by a Hubway rack.

Anyway, bike sharing in New York City is getting readier to launch and there’s a bit of a hoo-rah about how high its marginal hourly rates are. It is worth noting that the 97% of rides which are under 30 minutes in DC, as quoted by this article, (and 99+% are under an hour) are rides for frequent users on a monthly or annual pass. Capital Bikeshare publishes a lot of data (*) on their website (from which the chart below was taken) and the number of trips under an hour, for annual users, is pretty staggering. The number of trips under 2 hours—at which point trip costs really get out of hand, is 99.83%.

The main impact of overage costs are on casual users. For casual users, only slightly more than half of trips are completed within the free half-hour time limit, and 25% of trips are longer than an hour. So these folks pay. This is okay with me, for the most part, since they basically subsidize the riders who pay $50 to $100 and ride the bikes for several months. (If I make 20 trips per month of 8 months, my $50 Hubway fee will divide out to about 30¢ per trip.)

There seem to be two types of casual user (someone buying a single- or multi-day pass). One are people who want to try out the system (or use the system) in a similar manner to a frequent user and understand fully how it works. These folks probably fall mainly within the time limit. The second group are the people using shared bikes in place of rental bikes (which CitiBikes encourages on their website for longer-duration trips). This is basically how carsharing and traditional car rental operate. For a short trip (a few hours) a shared car is most certainly cheaper than a rented one. For a multi-day trip, it’s probably cheaper to go with a rental car. Bicycles, not surprisingly, have shorter trip times, and more disparity between low-cost (or no-cost) shorter trips and quite expensive long ones.

And rental bikes aren’t that cheap. The first hour is $14. Half a day is $39. These rates are more expensive than bike sharing for the first 90 minutes, on par from one-and-a-half to three hours, and cheaper beyond that. So if you want to rent a bicycle to roll around Manhattan all day, bike sharing probably isn’t for you. But take a look at the number of trips in DC longer than two hours. It’s only about 5% (and casual users only account for 1/6th of all trips). So the number of users dinged for particularly long trips is rather small.

There’s obviously a learning curve to the pricing scheme, and a number of Yelpers in Boston have apparently not understood it (although, frankly, it’s not that hard to understand). Apparently Hubway could do a better job of communicating this, and maybe CitiBikes should as well. What I really am surprised by is how someone would take bike with no lock and keep it out in a city for five or six hours! It’s not like they’re riding a century on it. I’d have to assume that even an oblivious tourist would get scared off by Boston traffic after a while, or run out of room on the Charles River paths and make for a cafe or museum. And in New York, where most any bicycle parked anywhere is asking to be stolen, having a rental bike is a liability. With a shared bike, all you have to do is find the nearest dock and leave the bike there. No lock required. With well-placed kiosks, this should be relatively easy.

What will be interesting is how this affects revenue from casual users (looking at the data from DC, I doubt that more than a handful of frequent users will ever pay an overage fee). While casual users do not account for much of the ridership, they do provide a good income stream. It’s possible that the higher rental costs will drive away prospective users. Even with higher prices, the drop in ridership will result in less revenue from casual ridership.

However, we’re talking about New York. There are a lot of potential casual riders (tourists), so it might be good to have higher prices as a bit of a barrier to entry to keep casual users from usurping the transportation demand aspect of bike sharing. And New York tourists don’t seem particularly price sensitive. Visitors to the City are paying $300 a night for a hotel room, $150 for tickets to a show and $40 for a pre-show meal at a mediocre Times Square restaurant. At those rates, what is another $25 to ride a bike around Central Park for a couple of hours? The higher rates—especially for casual users—strike me as a good balance between keeping bikes in the system available and maximizing revenue.

* CaBi has CSV files with every trip taken, too. I’m drooling.

Poor sharrow/pothole placement

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I was biking up to Arlinton to check out the black raspberries along the Minuteman Rail Trail (sadly, there are many fewer than a few years ago when I cleared several pints) and was biking up North Harvard Street in Allston towards Harvard Square. I’ve biked this route frequently in recent months, and it’s a very convenient way to get from Brookline to Cambridge. It’s always faster than the 66 bus (I love the 66, but … walking is often faster than the 66) and usually faster than driving since there are delightful bike lanes to slide by traffic in several locations of Harvard Street. And there’s always traffic on Harvard Street.

Anyhow, I was approaching Western Avenue and there was a truck straddling both lanes, so I cut him a wide berth and aimed over the “sharrow” (the road marking of a bicycle and double-chevron) as I slowed towards the intersection. Since I was braking, my weight shifted forwards, and I kept my eye on the truck to my left. All of the sudden, I was looking at the sky, and a second later, I was lying on the ground. In aiming at the sharrow I had inadvertently aimed directly into the six inch deep pothole it pointed directly at (see picture below), and since my weight was already shifted forwards I managed a full-on endo.

I realized I’d hit my head and would need a new helmet, and got up, shaken, but otherwise mostly unscathed. (My most recent bicycle acrobatics involved a swerve around a car pulling out of a parking space on Chestnut Hill Aveune—and in to the streetcar tracks. I came out of that one completely unscathed since I somehow stuck the landing and wound up running down the street as my bike skidded away.) I was shaking too much to ride my bike, but there was a bike shop a couple of blocks away and I went there to buy a new helmet (my current one was only five or six years old).

I settled down and managed to get back on my bike and return to the scene of the crime. Here’s a picture of the offending pothole:

The high sun angle doesn’t attest to its depth. It’s about six or eight inches deep and the perfect size to catch a bicycle wheel and flip a decelerating rider. Like me.

Just as impressive is the fate of my iPhone. I had it in my pocket—and thank goodness the back was facing out. It took a lot of the force, it seems:

The amazing thing is that it works perfectly! I put some packing tape over the shattered glass—which I’m sure absorbed a lot of energy—and it’s good as new. And a new back costs $12 and is pretty easy to replace, so I’ll get around to that. Until then, I have one badass iPhone.

So, I took a picture with it of my old helmet in the trash and the above pothole picture which I sent off to Boston’s bike czar (I have her email in my gmail) and she suggested I contact the mayor’s 24 hour hotline, which I did. We’ll see if the hole is patched; I’m biking that route at least weekly for the next month or so. I’ll be interested to see if there’s much response—it’s definitely a hazard to cyclists.

I am going to take off my amateur planner hat and put on my bicyclist hat (helmet?) to take away a couple of lessons from this adventure:

1. WEAR A HELMET. I am flabbergasted by the number of cyclists I see biking around the city without helmets. I know all the excuses, generally in the form of “I don’t need a helmet because …”

  • I’m a good cyclist, I don’t need to worry. This is the stupidest one of all—most likely you are not going to be at fault for an accident. I can’t even begin to explain the inanity of this notion. I am a pretty good cyclist—I have thousands of miles of city riding under my belt—and I still have my share of mishaps.
  • I’m not biking at night. This accident occurred around noon; the pothole would have been even more invisible filled with water.
  • I don’t bike in bad weather. It was 85 and sunny.
  • I don’t bike in heavy traffic. There was almost no traffic when I was out midday the week of July 4.
  • I don’t ride fast. I was going about 8 mph when I hit this pothole.
  • I don’t take chances or run red lights/stop signs. I was slowing down to stop at a red light and giving a wide berth to a truck.
  • I don’t bike drunk. I was quite sober when I had my little flight here. As a matter of fact, I’ve never crashed drunk.
Basically, I was biking under ideal conditions, and I had an accident where a helmet meant the difference between walking away (and, a few minutes later, biking away) and going to the hospital. Please, please, please wear a helmet!
2. A lot of people are concerned about using clipless pedals and not being able to clip out when something goes wrong. Well, I’ve had two incidents in the past few months (the aforementioned streetcar track gymnastics and perfect landing being the other) and both times the force of the torque of the accident easily got my feet out of the pedals—and by easily I mean I didn’t have to think about clipping out, it just happened. Basically, if your feet go in a direction violently different from pedaling, you’ll clip out. (At least with my SPD cleats which are probably a bit worn down and have a decent amount of play; I’m sure there are pedal adjustments which would yield different results.)

3. Watch the pavement. Even in the summer. Potholes happen.

Happy biking.

(On a very slightly related note: the fact that, nearly 20 (!) years after it opened, there is no safe route through Arlington Center on the rail trail that doesn’t involve bricks and curb cuts is a travesty. How hard would it be to link the two sides of the bike path?)