$6 million bridge to nowhere

On Fri, 29 Jan 2016 17:48:56 -0600, AMuzi wrote:

On 1/29/2016 5:17 PM, Tim McNamara wrote:
On Fri, 29 Jan 2016 07:53:35 -0800 (PST),
wrote:

An isolated trail connected to nothing is not useful.

Only if you misunderstand what building bike infrastructue like that is
for. It's not for bikes. It's for cars and getting those goddamn commie
bicyclists the **** out of the way so real Americans can drive.

Sorry for the dudgeon, but local color commentary on some bike projects
made it very clear that most people think bicyclists on roads are
freeloading assholes using up the resources that should be dedicated to
cars.


Yep, one half drunk fixie rider flagrantly blowing a red
light creates animosity toward the other 99% of cyclists.

Actually, according to the CHP report of accidents in LA County it was
the folks who were determined to be at fault in nearly 60% of all
accidents between autos and bicycles, where fault could be determined,
are probably the ones that creates the animosity.

(reality is sometimes painful)
--

Cheers,

John B.

On Friday, January 29, 2016 at 3:07:01 PM UTC-8, AMuzi wrote:
On 1/29/2016 3:53 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, January 29, 2016 at 12:09:32 PM UTC-8, Joerg wrote:
On 2016-01-29 07:53, wrote:
On Thursday, January 28, 2016 at 5:11:35 PM UTC-6, AMuzi wrote:

Don't know if its a bridge to nowhere. The article says it connects
several parks together. Maybe a bit expensive due to the wet ground
you have up there. Down where I live we take old abandoned railroad
beds that used to run in town and out of town and convert them to
paved bike trails. Sort of cheap since the base material is already
there. Just put a coat of asphalt on top and you have a trail. And
use the old abandoned railroad bridges across the rivers, don't build
new bridges. We have hundreds of miles of paved bike trails in and
around town. Used frequently by the biking community. A definite
improvement in town. Many of the trails are connected, like yours
will be with this project, and you can make large loops and get many
places and directions in town. Unfortunately some of the trails are
not connected and some parts of town do not have trails, so those
parts of town and trails are not used much at all by bikes. Trails
only work if they go many places and are connected. An isolated
trail connected to nothing is not useful.


Absolutely. An example how not to do it:

http://www.edctc.org/C/Non-Motorized..._plan/Map1.pdf

They want to pave the whole MTB trail yet it connects to nowhere in the
west. They list a class II bike trail on White Rock Road which is
baloney. There is nothing connecting to the existing MTB trail (El
Dorado Trail), that road is almost suicidal for cyclists. Not even a
tiny shoulder on long stretches. After a few very close calls I quit
riding that, other than in my car.

The problem is that some towns such as Folsom understand cycling and do
an excellent job with bike path. Others like ours (Cameron Park)
understand nothing and then you have large gaping holes in the system.
The result is that hardly anyone rides.

Gasp! White Rock Road is the killing fields! http://tinyurl.com/zlazn6l How does anyone ride on that. The shoulder . . . it's too smooth! Gaaaaaaaa. I need a system!


-- Jay Beattie.


One of my customers was an engineer for the county who had a
study (with actual 2 years testing) done in the early
seventies which showed that paving county road shoulders (as
shown in your image) saved money in two ways. First off,
snowplows could work at faster speeds and secondly herbicide
reduction. He concluded a 4 to 6 year payback without adding
the benefits to cyclists.

That's my first pick -- wide shoulders, and I'm perfectly fine with shoulder bike lanes and use them all the time. After last week, I'm permanently avoiding the SW Moody St. cycletrack -- supposedly the finest bicycle facility in Portland. It's a f***** nightmare killing field that makes White Rock Road look like a nature trail. Only slightly less dangerous is the SW Broadway cycletrack that goes in front of Portland State and is filled with texting students. If those idiots are our future, we're in bad shape.

One thing I really like about two way bicycle traffic (common with separate bike facilities) is that you can enjoy getting blinded by to idiots with the mega-lights pointed in your face. Not that I'm in love with my mood light and StVZO beam cut-off, but riding in a facility, it's a whole lot more neighborly.

And lastly, who has a system of seamless bicycle trails in their city? Most of my riding is on plain old streets.

-- Jay Beattie.

On Sat, 30 Jan 2016 08:34:05 +0700, John B.
wrote:

Actually, according to the CHP report of accidents in LA County it was
the folks who were determined to be at fault in nearly 60% of all
accidents between autos and bicycles, where fault could be determined,
are probably the ones that creates the animosity.

(reality is sometimes painful)

I'd study the details of a large sample of those reports before I drew
sweeping conclusions from them.

A member of a bicycle club I used to belong to was hit by a motorist
playing "scare the biker"; afterward the driver stood over him and
said, "Sorry about hitting you, but you don't belong on the road."

By the time the deputies got there, the rider had passed out and the
cause of the collision went down in the record as "He swerved into my
path."

On the other hand, casual observation makes it plain that half the
riders on the road have never had instruction of any kind, and the
other half have been taught to do harebrained things.

For example, if two riders are side-by-side and they see a car coming,
one of them must dash across the car's path so that they can force it
to pass between them. This "makes more room", according to the
uniformed deputy in the classroom.

(I'm pretty sure that that particular nonsense hasn't happened in my
current county; on the other hand, we are vigorously and with great
enthusiasm promoting the habit of riding on walkways.)

--
Joy Beeson
joy beeson at comcast dot net

jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, January 29, 2016 at 3:07:01 PM UTC-8, AMuzi wrote:
On 1/29/2016 3:53 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, January 29, 2016 at 12:09:32 PM UTC-8, Joerg wrote:
On 2016-01-29 07:53, wrote:
On Thursday, January 28, 2016 at 5:11:35 PM UTC-6, AMuzi wrote:

Don't know if its a bridge to nowhere. The article says it connects
several parks together. Maybe a bit expensive due to the wet ground
you have up there. Down where I live we take old abandoned railroad
beds that used to run in town and out of town and convert them to
paved bike trails. Sort of cheap since the base material is already
there. Just put a coat of asphalt on top and you have a trail. And
use the old abandoned railroad bridges across the rivers, don't build
new bridges. We have hundreds of miles of paved bike trails in and
around town. Used frequently by the biking community. A definite
improvement in town. Many of the trails are connected, like yours
will be with this project, and you can make large loops and get many
places and directions in town. Unfortunately some of the trails are
not connected and some parts of town do not have trails, so those
parts of town and trails are not used much at all by bikes. Trails
only work if they go many places and are connected. An isolated
trail connected to nothing is not useful.


Absolutely. An example how not to do it:

http://www.edctc.org/C/Non-Motorized..._plan/Map1.pdf

They want to pave the whole MTB trail yet it connects to nowhere in the
west. They list a class II bike trail on White Rock Road which is
baloney. There is nothing connecting to the existing MTB trail (El
Dorado Trail), that road is almost suicidal for cyclists. Not even a
tiny shoulder on long stretches. After a few very close calls I quit
riding that, other than in my car.

The problem is that some towns such as Folsom understand cycling and do
an excellent job with bike path. Others like ours (Cameron Park)
understand nothing and then you have large gaping holes in the system.
The result is that hardly anyone rides.

Gasp! White Rock Road is the killing fields!
http://tinyurl.com/zlazn6l How does anyone ride on that. The shoulder
. . . it's too smooth! Gaaaaaaaa. I need a system!


-- Jay Beattie.


One of my customers was an engineer for the county who had a
study (with actual 2 years testing) done in the early
seventies which showed that paving county road shoulders (as
shown in your image) saved money in two ways. First off,
snowplows could work at faster speeds and secondly herbicide
reduction. He concluded a 4 to 6 year payback without adding
the benefits to cyclists.

That's my first pick -- wide shoulders, and I'm perfectly fine with
shoulder bike lanes and use them all the time. After last week, I'm
permanently avoiding the SW Moody St. cycletrack -- supposedly the finest
bicycle facility in Portland. It's a f***** nightmare killing field that
makes White Rock Road look like a nature trail. Only slightly less
dangerous is the SW Broadway cycletrack that goes in front of Portland
State and is filled with texting students. If those idiots are our
future, we're in bad shape.

One thing I really like about two way bicycle traffic (common with
separate bike facilities) is that you can enjoy getting blinded by to
idiots with the mega-lights pointed in your face. Not that I'm in love
with my mood light and StVZO beam cut-off, but riding in a facility, it's
a whole lot more neighborly.

And lastly, who has a system of seamless bicycle trails in their city?
Most of my riding is on plain old streets.


At the risk of sounding like what's his name plain old streets are the
system of seamless bike trails most of us grew up riding. But there are
places where those painted stripes give me right of way and sometime that's
a good thing.






--
duane

On 1/29/2016 12:09 PM, Joerg wrote:

The problem is that some towns such as Folsom understand cycling and do
an excellent job with bike path. Others like ours (Cameron Park)
understand nothing and then you have large gaping holes in the system.
The result is that hardly anyone rides.

Same thing in the Bay Area, but the inertia to fill in the gaps only
comes when people see that there would be a complete system if their
city would get off their butts and do something.

Palo Alto started it in our area, thanks to the late Ellen Fletcher.
Once the Bike Boulevard extended to the border with Mountain View,
Mountain View saw it and did their portion. Once other cities saw the
multiple freeway over-crossings in Palo Alto, they wanted to do it to,
and now we have good crossings in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Santa
Clara. My wife's office is going to move to where my old office was in
Santa Clara, and where I used to take the unpaved under-crossing of the
freeway, now it's a really nice paved route that goes right past Intel
HQ, Levi's Stadium, and on to Alviso. There's an unpaved, but rideable
with road tires most of the year, section behind NASA that continues to
Mountain View's Shoreline trail. Now they're fighting to get the Stevens
Creek Trail completed from Sunnyvale to Cupertino, though there is no
money to do it properly since it would require purchasing a bunch of
buildings in the right-of-way, so they want to just put signs and paint
on residential streets which some residents object to.

We have a new bicycle bridge that was way more than $6 million, it
ballooned to almost $15 million. That was because our transit agency and
city government is so corrupt and incompetent. But at least we got
something for our tax money that people actually use. Better than the
money spent running big empty buses all over the place.

On 1/29/2016 12:09 PM, Joerg wrote:

snip

This one came in with a cost estimate of $17 million. There's an
under-crossing there now but it's only open part of the year.

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/print/...ic-bike-bridge

Personally I prefer more functional, less costly, over-crossings. You
could have two regular bike/ped bridges for the amount they spend on an
"iconic" bridge.

On Saturday, January 30, 2016 at 5:23:34 AM UTC-8, sms wrote:
On 1/29/2016 12:09 PM, Joerg wrote:

The problem is that some towns such as Folsom understand cycling and do
an excellent job with bike path. Others like ours (Cameron Park)
understand nothing and then you have large gaping holes in the system.
The result is that hardly anyone rides.

Same thing in the Bay Area, but the inertia to fill in the gaps only
comes when people see that there would be a complete system if their
city would get off their butts and do something.

Palo Alto started it in our area, thanks to the late Ellen Fletcher.
Once the Bike Boulevard extended to the border with Mountain View,
Mountain View saw it and did their portion. Once other cities saw the
multiple freeway over-crossings in Palo Alto, they wanted to do it to,
and now we have good crossings in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Santa
Clara. My wife's office is going to move to where my old office was in
Santa Clara, and where I used to take the unpaved under-crossing of the
freeway, now it's a really nice paved route that goes right past Intel
HQ, Levi's Stadium, and on to Alviso. There's an unpaved, but rideable
with road tires most of the year, section behind NASA that continues to
Mountain View's Shoreline trail. Now they're fighting to get the Stevens
Creek Trail completed from Sunnyvale to Cupertino, though there is no
money to do it properly since it would require purchasing a bunch of
buildings in the right-of-way, so they want to just put signs and paint
on residential streets which some residents object to.

We have a new bicycle bridge that was way more than $6 million, it
ballooned to almost $15 million. That was because our transit agency and
city government is so corrupt and incompetent. But at least we got
something for our tax money that people actually use. Better than the
money spent running big empty buses all over the place.

Why are they running big empty buses all over the place?

BTW, there is never a complete system. Look at your trails -- they comprise a few connectors widely disbursed over a large area. http://www.vta.org/sfc/servlet.sheph...68A0000001FcPL It appears that most run along rivers (or former rivers).

Not that there is anything wrong with these MUPs, but most cyclists are undoubtedly riding on roads. Creating parallel infrastructure is impractical and counter-productive in some ways -- fostering the notion that cyclists should be in special, separate facilities. OTOH, parallel facilities make sense when handling a lot of bicycle traffic -- but those facilities have to exclude pedestrians (or have separate facilities for pedestrians) and be designed as bike highways. MUPs may add to the charm and livability of a city, which is a good thing, but I don't regard them as serious alternatives to ordinary surface streets. I take the MUPs when I'm bored out of my mind with the usual commute routes -- and spend most of the time gritting my teeth and planning my next pass around a walker with headphones and a herd of dogs.

-- Jay Beattie

Yep. Of course a person can't ride a bike on an ordinary road. Many motorists and most bicyclists believe that wholeheartedly. That's why bicycles have never ever been used on roads since the auto was invented.

Learning to deal with traffic? Learning to use the rules of the road to your advantage? Actually taking a course in riding a bike? That's crazy talk! Everybody knows all there is to biking: you gotta balance, and you gotta stay out of the way of cars.

There's this guy I know who used to ride his bike to work all the time, and who did bike tours and day rides on ordinary roads. Still does, in fact, after over 40 years, with no problems. But people like him don't count. He just doesn't realize the "Danger! Danger!"

On Friday, January 29, 2016 at 8:44:33 PM UTC-5, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, January 29, 2016 at 3:07:01 PM UTC-8, AMuzi wrote:
On 1/29/2016 3:53 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, January 29, 2016 at 12:09:32 PM UTC-8, Joerg wrote:
On 2016-01-29 07:53, wrote:
On Thursday, January 28, 2016 at 5:11:35 PM UTC-6, AMuzi wrote:

Don't know if its a bridge to nowhere. The article says it connects
several parks together. Maybe a bit expensive due to the wet ground
you have up there. Down where I live we take old abandoned railroad
beds that used to run in town and out of town and convert them to
paved bike trails. Sort of cheap since the base material is already
there. Just put a coat of asphalt on top and you have a trail. And
use the old abandoned railroad bridges across the rivers, don't build
new bridges. We have hundreds of miles of paved bike trails in and
around town. Used frequently by the biking community. A definite
improvement in town. Many of the trails are connected, like yours
will be with this project, and you can make large loops and get many
places and directions in town. Unfortunately some of the trails are
not connected and some parts of town do not have trails, so those
parts of town and trails are not used much at all by bikes. Trails
only work if they go many places and are connected. An isolated
trail connected to nothing is not useful.


Absolutely. An example how not to do it:

http://www.edctc.org/C/Non-Motorized..._plan/Map1.pdf

They want to pave the whole MTB trail yet it connects to nowhere in the
west. They list a class II bike trail on White Rock Road which is
baloney. There is nothing connecting to the existing MTB trail (El
Dorado Trail), that road is almost suicidal for cyclists. Not even a
tiny shoulder on long stretches. After a few very close calls I quit
riding that, other than in my car.

The problem is that some towns such as Folsom understand cycling and do
an excellent job with bike path. Others like ours (Cameron Park)
understand nothing and then you have large gaping holes in the system.
The result is that hardly anyone rides.

Gasp! White Rock Road is the killing fields! http://tinyurl.com/zlazn6l How does anyone ride on that. The shoulder . . . it's too smooth! Gaaaaaaaa. I need a system!


-- Jay Beattie.


One of my customers was an engineer for the county who had a
study (with actual 2 years testing) done in the early
seventies which showed that paving county road shoulders (as
shown in your image) saved money in two ways. First off,
snowplows could work at faster speeds and secondly herbicide
reduction. He concluded a 4 to 6 year payback without adding
the benefits to cyclists.

That's my first pick -- wide shoulders, and I'm perfectly fine with shoulder bike lanes and use them all the time. After last week, I'm permanently avoiding the SW Moody St. cycletrack -- supposedly the finest bicycle facility in Portland. It's a f***** nightmare killing field that makes White Rock Road look like a nature trail. Only slightly less dangerous is the SW Broadway cycletrack that goes in front of Portland State and is filled with texting students. If those idiots are our future, we're in bad shape.

One thing I really like about two way bicycle traffic (common with separate bike facilities) is that you can enjoy getting blinded by to idiots with the mega-lights pointed in your face. Not that I'm in love with my mood light and StVZO beam cut-off, but riding in a facility, it's a whole lot more neighborly.

And lastly, who has a system of seamless bicycle trails in their city? Most of my riding is on plain old streets.

-- Jay Beattie.

BOOMERS

search 10 best places to retire

then Google Maps or ? for bike paths.

As I posted maps for Fort Myers, Sanibel-Captiva-Cape Coral-Lehigh Acres ( failed Disston project) the paths there run p to 75-100 miles....empty spring summer fall

On 1/30/2016 7:46 AM, jbeattie wrote:

snip

Why are they running big empty buses all over the place?

BTW, there is never a complete system. Look at your trails -- they comprise a few connectors widely disbursed over a large area. http://www.vta.org/sfc/servlet.sheph...68A0000001FcPL It appears that most run along rivers (or former rivers).

Not that there is anything wrong with these MUPs, but most cyclists are undoubtedly riding on roads. Creating parallel infrastructure is impractical and counter-productive in some ways -- fostering the notion that cyclists should be in special, separate facilities. OTOH, parallel facilities make sense when handling a lot of bicycle traffic -- but those facilities have to exclude pedestrians (or have separate facilities for pedestrians) and be designed as bike highways. MUPs may add to the charm and livability of a city, which is a good thing, but I don't regard them as serious alternatives to ordinary surface streets. I take the MUPs when I'm bored out of my mind with the usual commute routes -- and spend most of the time gritting my teeth and planning my next pass around a walker with headphones and a herd of dogs.

I use the Stevens Creek Trail most often. It's much faster than using
roads because the most direct roads are freeways which I can't use
anyway. Now for my wife's office, she could ride on San Tomas
Expressway, but that's very unpleasant. The San Tomas Aquino Creek trail
is much nicer, and more direct.

Maybe we're lucky that so many employment centers are close to these
creek and bay trails. Intel, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Oracle, Symantec,
Netflix, and Cisco are some of the major employers with pretty
convenient MUPs near them.

Sure there are still gaps, but they are slowly being filled in.

The Stevens Creek trail is like a freeway around 5:30-7:00 p.m.. If you
come in from a side path you'd better be sure to yield. And you'd better
have good lights at night.