The full article can bee viewed here.

But we are only part of the way there.  Just going through the application process helped us think about our business and its relationship to bicycles in new ways.  The League of American Cyclists also shared a thoughtful set of ideas on where we could improve our efforts aligned with their 4 E’s of creating Bicycle Friendly Businesses and Communities.  The 4 E’s are Encouragement, Engineering, Education and Evaluation.  And some of the ideas to improve include increasing incentives to our employees to ride throughout the year, supporting a bike share program, improving bike parking for both employees and office guests, and working with local advocacy groups to make the area around our office more bike friendly.  These are just some of the interesting and thought provoking ideas for us to explore.

We look forward to continue on these efforts and improving in the years to come. I would encourage other communities and businesses to look into this valuable and free program. 

Question: Why does that goofy-looking guy look so happy?

A. Because he’s on a bike, and he likes bikes.

B. Because he’s on a bike-share bike, and he likes bike-share bikes.

C. Because he’s on a bike-share bike in Houston.

D. All of the above.

If you answered D, then congratulations – you either really like bikes, or you have a curiously insightful understanding of “goofy.” That’s right, that’s me trying out one of the new bikes that will be part of a bike-share program that is coming soon to our fair city. HARC (the organization promoting bike-sharing in Houston), the City of Houston, and B-Cycle (bike-sharing supplier) teamed up for a demonstration of the bikes at Discovery Green this past Monday.  Next year, Houstonians will be able to subscribe to the bike-sharing program and for a low fee (perhaps even free for short trips) hop on a bike at one of two or three stations planned for downtown to get to their destination. Here’s a mini-version of what those stations could look like:

(picture from Laura Spanjian via swamplot.com; not sure how I failed to get a picture of my own of the station)

Bike-sharing has exploded around the world in recent years. It’s uber-popular in Paris, whose program is called Vélib. Over 1,200 stations and 17,000 bicycles are scattered around Paris, and from my visit there last spring, I can attest to the fact that the bikes are everywhere. You could easily take a bike from one station and park it at any number of other stations a few blocks away in any direction. The bikes maximize the feasibility of moving about Paris without a car. You can get just about anywhere in the city quickly by catching the subway, hopping on a Vélib bike at the station, and then walking the last short stretch to your final destination.

But Paris isn’t Houston. It’s not even America. Why should we believe that bike-sharing would work on this side of the pond, where “French” is often considered a derogatory adjective for our fried potatoes? Because bike-sharing is not just some eurotrash fad – it is also big in several America cities, including San Francisco, Denver, and even our nation’s capital letters DC. Denver uses the same bikes that are proposed for Houston – B-Cycle, made by Trek. I think B-Cycle is particularly cool because they offer a free I-phone and Android app to locate stations with available bikes and places to park. Clicking on any station on the Google Maps interface brings up this handy dandy little screen:

The team involved with introducing bike-sharing to Houston is still trying to decide where the put the initial 2-3 pilot bike stations. Because there will be so few initial stations, the team wants to locate them near each other in an area with a lot of destinations – thus the decision to put them somewhere downtown. Downtown also has the added benefit of having a number of roads that are fairly bike-friendly. HARC hopes that these first few bikes and stations will be just the beginning of what will eventually be a large program that envelopes many more areas, including possibly Hermann Park, the Medical Center, the Museum District, Rice, UH, and TSU.

So, are you ready to try out these admittedly goofy-looking bikes? Do you think a program like this could possibly work in a town as sprawling as ours? Where do you think stations should go? Use the comments as a sounding board – and then make a point of getting downtown to try out bike-sharing next year!

Also another favorite website of mine, WalkScore, is updating its rankings to also provide a transit score for your address as well as a better walking algorithm that uses actual walking distance vs. “crow fly” measurements.  Good stuff and great to see these interesting tools get more refined and more useful to planners and citizens alike.

This GE tool makes me think some other countries are going to have some even more challenging issues in the not too distant future.

 GE Aging Link

What you see in this picture is a bunch of extremely handsome gentlemen, their trusty steeds, and a bunch of extra room on a METRO light rail vehicle at approximately 6:00 AM this past Monday. (Behind the camera: a bunch more gentleman AND ladies with THEIR trusty steeds). Granted, this picture is exceptional for several reasons. Very frequently, there are a lot more people riding these trains, and they would be filling in all those empty spots. Also, several of the people in the picture probably wouldn’t normally be on a light rail train – or awake, for that matter – at 6:00 AM. Most importantly, until very recently you wouldn’t have seen bikes on the trains at that hour at all because they were prohibited for everything but a narrow midday window.

Those days of darkness for transportation alternatives are no more! Those courageous individuals above sacrificed their precious, beloved sleep to celebrate METRO’s new, improved bike-on-train hours: early morning (4:30 – 6:30, for the morning commute), midday (9 AM – 3 PM), and evening (after 6 PM). That’s a substantial improvement, and a lot of people who previously pined for a combined bike/train commute can now experience the metaphysical thrill of being ON a bike ON a train ON a track. The only thing that would be even better (or at least make for a better-selling movie) would be if that track was IN a dream WITHIN a dream. But, my friends, taking your bike onto trains in Houston is definitely no longer a dream.

For more bike-on-transit thrills, check out METRO’s information page: http://www.ridemetro.org/Services/Rail/BikeGuide.aspx

Compare that with some other cities and you can see the real impact.

Wanye County, MI (Detroit)

Cook County (Chicago)

Los Angeles County, CA (LA)

One of the best ways to address this is by providing better feedback to the drivers and now BMW and Audi are sharing their work on the issue in improving feedback directly within the automobile.  The growth of WiFi and networked intersection will continue to make this information more available so it is good to see automakers anticipating the change.

As transportation dollars are harder and harder to come by with tighter budgets for cities and states, using the infrastructure in place more efficiently is one positive step to address out mobility and air quality issues.

I came across this in the Nudge Blog that Rickard Thaler and Cass Sunstein write, building on their book Nudge which you will probably enjoy if you like books along the lines on Gladwell or Freakonomics.  It shows how the City of Gainesville, FL is using signage to share feedback on drivers behavior in the likelihood or yielding for pedestrians in the crosswalk.  It provides a nice reminder that you hope would carry over into future driver behavior.  Apparently the trend is positive in terms of compliance.  Similar trends have been seen in active feedback speed limit signs as well.

Here is the full link as well as another about Bogota and mimes.  Who doesn’t enjoy a good mime story.  Anyone? Bueller?  It is interesting how often their blog touches on transportation related issues but really does make sense given the significant number of decisions that a driver has to make even in the course of a simple trip.

Would be interested in hearing about any other successful transportation nudges you come across.

Nice recent write up by Tom Vanderbilt, author of the book Traffic, in Slate magazine on designing a better stop sign.  It included this link to a great parody video on the development of a new stop sign.  It was not that long ago that stop signs were yellow so maybe we have made some progress.  He also references Gary Lauder’s TED talk which we mentioned previously on this blog.  His article does make some interesting and valid points about the declining effectiveness of excessive signage and the need to think about roundabouts where four way stops exist.