Alternative Uses for Alternative Fuels

Anyone who has found my most popular post knows that I am no fan of alternative-fuel cars. If you keep auto-sprawl and mandatory car ownership, it doesn't matter if the car itself runs on rainbows and unicorn farts-- the infrastructure and built environment that your rainbow-cars would inevitably require would still be a huge environmental catastrophe. Self-driving cars have some more potential for transforming our built environment, mostly by allowing for robo-taxis, but I still think that the Google-car-topia imagined by many is being far oversold. (File under "I need to write that post.)

That doesn't mean, however, that there are no opportunities to be had for our environment in alternative-fuel vehicles. Those opportunities just aren't found in the private car.

I saw a great example earlier this morning, on Market St. in Riverside. (I should really say that I heard it-- whirrrrr.) An electric Red Bull delivery truck rolled by before I could get a photo of it for the blog. Long-haul goods movement is a sector probably best-handled by rail (especially in a post-oil world: no more bomb trains!), but we're a long way removed from the time when every store backed onto a railway spur. And even in a post-oil world, we're going to need to get stuff from warehouse to store and home. Delivery trucks are perfect for electrification, because they make lots of very short trips on a predictable route and schedule, with plenty of downtime for charging. (Delivery bike-trucks are also being used in several places, but I think that that's only going to be practical for the very densest places, where a single cyclist/driver can deliver a truck full of goods on a relatively short route.)

Utility workers, inspectors, salesmen, and other sorts of professionals who travel between several sites for a living are also obvious prospects for electric vehicles. The technician that comes to your house to connect and/or fix your Internet service is likely not going to arrive by bus. It takes a lot of tools and equipment to keep the intertubes from being clogged, and the nature and timing of service calls would make it very difficult to do on a bus. (Once again, cargo-bike service may be an option for the very densest places.)

Driverless vehicles, in particular, are going to be fantastic for transit applications. If you think a driverless car is super-efficient, imagine a driverless bus. In fact, you don't have to imagine-- just look at automated rail transit today. Vancouver has phenomenally frequent rapid transit, all day long-- 75 seconds at the peak, but an astounding 8 minutes until 1:30am. The trains are automated, so the marginal cost of a train is minimal. Apply that to buses, and you have a recipe for rapidly deploying very intense transit service along existing infrastructure, especially in traditionally underserved areas.

Alternative fuels are politically easy, and they sound attractive, but they take up way, way, way too much of the advocacy energy and money sent towards transforming our transportation system. All of these technologies are dead-ends, or stop-gap measures at best, when applied to individual personal mobility. However, these technologies have roles to play in the transportation system of the future, as edge cases-- supported by a network where the bulk of trips are made via transit or active transport.

Not Everything Is About The Commute

As I've written several times before, there is a persistent bias in how we talk about transportation infrastructure in this country-- the bias towards "commuters" and "commuting." Good transportation infrastructure requires a commitment to all-day, daily service-- especially when it comes to public transit-- while a focus on "commuters" tends to lead to anemic peak-only service or overgrown roadway infrstructure.

Now I'm getting comments on my Facebook page about how California HSR should serve "commuters," and lamenting the fact that the poor will not be able to afford the fare to commute from depressed Central Valley cities to coastal urban areas... presumably every day, for work.

That is insane.

High speed rail, both here and abroad, serves intercity travel markets. Intercity travel is sometimes business-related, but it is rarely related to the daily commute. More often, it is the college student returning home to visit their family, or the vacationing couple on their way to somewhere sunny, or the grandparents going to meet their grandson for the first time, or the academic on their way to a conference, or, yes, the salesman on his way to a meeting to snag a new client. Intercity carriers rarely, however, serve the fry cook on his way to a distant burger shack. HSR will be a great opportunity for Central Valley residents, but it will be an opportunity for them because it will create jobs in the Central Valley, first through construction and later through maintenance and operations.

While I'm sure that some well-off coastal workers may decide that they would rather buy a mansion in Fresno than a condo in San Francisco, and who will be enabled in that hope by HSR, they are not the design users of the system. HSR can be completely successful even if there isn't a single person who uses it every day. HSR trips should be an infrequent thing for most people, just as Southwest trips or long drives up I-5 are today.

HSR is both valuable to our transportation system and completely useless at getting people from home to work. It can be both things at once.

Driver Licensing Should Be More Like Pilot's Licensing

So I've been working on my private pilot's license-- one of the many reasons this blog has been relatively quiet-- and there is a marked contrast between the ways that we license cars and the way we license pilots. Our driver licensing system is obviously insufficient, because drivers that don't know how to operate a vehicle clearly keep getting on the roads, and even repeated violations of traffic law are often insufficient to lose one's license-- even egregious lapses of judgement, such as driving under the influence and causing fatal accidents, often result in little or no suspension of driving privilege. Given the sheer amount of carnage on our roads, it is kind of astounding how little scrutiny is applied to motorists and their ability to operate their vehicles.

Consider this: when I earned my driver's license, at age 16, I was required to have four hours of behind-the-wheel professional training, and classroom training that essentially amounted to the instructor reading out of the DMV driver's handbook. My wife had zero hours of professional instruction, and zero hours of classroom instruction, as she was over the age of 18 when she earned her license. I took a simple 20-question multiple-choice exam, which I likely could have passed without any preparation, and I was observed by a DMV examiner for roughly half an hour while driving in light traffic, on surface streets, on a benign day.
And, with that, I was given the privilege to operate anything from a motorcycle with a sidecar to a massive RV, day or night, in good weather and bad, and nobody will ever scrutinize my driving ever again*. At worst, if I engage in a particularly egregious moving violation and actually get pulled over, I might have to attend "traffic school"-- which can now be completed on the Internet in less than an hour, and which will still not result in anyone actually re-testing my skill in operating a motor vehicle.

Contrast that with my pilot's license. In order to take the private pilot's exam, you need a minimum of 40 hours of flight time, of which 20 must be with an instructor and 10 must be carefully-planned solo time. Most pilots actually take 60-70 hours of instruction before being judged competent to take the "checkride"-- aviation slang for the practical exam. The written exam is 70 questions and over an hour long, and actually requires some pretty rigorous study, especially on things like weather and atmospheric conditions, aircraft performance, and flight navigation. The checkride also has a significant theoretical component-- an oral exam often lasting more than an hour, which examines both the applicant's knowledge and their judgement-- and the flight test is often 90 minutes to two hours, requiring demonstration of a wide variety of maneuvers, including simulated emergency procedures.
And after all that, a pilot is only granted the ability to fly relatively light aircraft under reasonably good weather. Flying bigger, faster planes or planes with tailwheels requires additional training. Flying seaplanes, gliders, multi-engine aircraft, flying for hire, or flying in bad weather all require another trip to the FAA examiner, along with their own requirements for flight training and accompanying written exams. And even then, to keep one's flying privilege, pilots have to be recurrently trained every other year, with a minimum of one hour's ground training and an hour's flight time with an instructor.

So, am I saying that a driver's license should be as difficult to get as a pilot's license? No. There are a lot of differences between flying and driving-- the most significant being that, once you're in the air, you can't pull over and get help-- and driving simply isn't subject to the same voluminous amount of theory as flying is. But it should be a hell of a lot more rigorous than it is now. Drivers should be required to get at least some professional instruction before getting their license, and I particularly think that recurrent training ought to be a more significant part of drivers' lives. Perhaps it would help bring down the atrocious traffic fatality rate.

*My driving was re-tested, once, because I got my motorcycle license.

RTA BRT WTF?

In today's RTA Board Meeting agenda, there were some details about the forthcoming Route 1 Limited, the lukewarm successor to the previously-proposed RapidLink project from nearly a decade ago. The Press-Enterprise hinted at the project, noting that RTA snagged a cool $12.3 million for new buses to run the service. But here, we have details:

Service characteristics of the proposed Route 1 Limited-Stop service
include:

• Weekday service only during peak hours between UCR and the Galleria at Tyler during peak hour periods between 5:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. and 2:30p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
• 15-minute frequency
• 15 stops in each direction over approximately 12 one-way miles 1
• Up to 20 percent travel time reduction between terminals
• Maximization of transit signal priority capabilities currently in place
• along the University/Magnolia corridor
• Approximately 17,028 annual revenue service hours

 And they call this phase one of the "BRT" project. Color me underwhelmed. We get no stop improvements, no off-board fare collection, we don't even get all-day service. Signal prioritization is nice and all, but this isn't a BRT service in any way. BRT is supposed to be the backbone of a frequent, all-day, daily transit network. This Route 1 Limited is simply a limited-stop commuter service, which is a far cry from what we desperately need on the University and Magnolia corridors.

Oh, and at the same time, the City is talking about how streetcars are going to make local stops, making them an expensive downgrade from present local bus service. More proof that local leaders don't really understand transit.

The Inevitable Chris Christie post

Okay, so I can't turn on my TV without hearing about Chris Christie and his little tantrum over whatever perceived slight in New Jersey politics set him off. And yes, abuse of power is an awful thing, and calling Christie a smarmy asshole is an insult to the smarmy asshole community. But I can't help thinking about this:

Christie shuts down three car lanes on one bridge into Manhattan, for four days, to punish a B-list local politician, and it becomes a NATIONAL NEWS STORY for A WEEK.

But three years ago, Christie made the decision to cancel a post-groundbreaking, desperately needed transit tunnel to Manhattan, and let's be clear that "cancel" means "forever"-- and I'm pretty sure that's been forgotten about by most people. Even though that decision was on similarly shaky political grounds, and was also probably illegal.

Cripple critically-needed transit infrastructure projects, and get a collective "meh," but fuck with people's cars-- now that's a different story.

Driving as status

Our society, like many others in the capitalist West, tends to view consumption as an indicator of social standing. That new flat-screen, the latest iPhone, the granite countertops in your kitchen, they all indicate that you're winning the rat race-- and it's expected that, if you're winning the rat race, you're also engaging in this status-oriented consumption. For a society that is largely without formal class consciousness-- we're all the middle class, don'tcha know?-- we are all astoundingly sensitive to informal class distinctions. Grocery stores, shopping centers, neighborhoods, cities, these are all divided along the income strata. (Don't believe me? Walk into a Food4Less, then into a Ralph's. Then remember they're the same company.)

And, of course, one of the biggest categories of status consumption and differentiation is the car. Cars are heavily differentiated on status-- even those of us who don't drive are constantly indoctrinated into the relative worth and value of a BMW over a Honda, or even the petty distinctions between, say, the Mercedes C class and E class. Our society constructs cars as an outgrowth of their drivers' identities, and if you're willing to be seen driving around that 5-year-old Civic, you must be a loser. So, of course, if you're not driving anything at all, you must be at the very bottom of that capitalist totem pole.

This status differentiation means that, outside of the very densest cities-- and, often, even within them-- we design public transit to be sensitive to the needs of the poor. Worse, we design public transit to be sensitive to what middle-class, well-educated, mostly-driving public transit planners imagine the needs of the poor to be. This is part of why transit is only active during the day, because the poor need to get to their (wrongly assumed to be 9-5) jobs, but not to the nightlife they can't afford to partake in. It's the reason that buses don't serve all of the schools-- especially in wealthy neighborhoods-- but do serve all of the welfare offices, and make the Woodcrest office of the Social Security Administration into a transfer point.

The status and deference that people expect to accrue to them as drivers is also part of the reason that it's so hard to get what ought to be simple improvements in our cities-- such as market-priced parking, reduced parking minima in the zoning code, meager improvements in transit service, and road diets on overbuilt infrastructure (I'm looking at you, Brockton). Cap'n Transit, a phenomenally snarky New York transit blogger, talks about the fundamental unfairness that stems from recognizing drivers' choice to drive-- even in eminently transit-saturated New York City-- as a reflection of their social standing. The details of the plan he's critiquing-- congestion pricing in Manhattan-- are unique to New York City, but the dynamics of having to throw a bone to the driving classes when trying to improve transit are pretty universal.

The New Factor, or, The Choo-Choo Problem

The recent discussion of the Hyperloop brought up a common criticism that one hears often enough about rail transit of all types: it's based on "19th century technology." The critic will argue that streetcars are relics of the past, best left in the dustbin of history where we tossed them during the rise of motordom, or they will say that high-speed rail is based on technology from a bygone era and that obviously mag-levs or monorails or hyperloops are the future. They may even derisively refer to HSR as a "choo-choo train."

First off, the time that a particular piece of technology has been around does not imply obsolescence. When we human beings find a good idea, that idea doesn't come with a shelf life-- we keep tinkering with it and improving it as long as it makes sense to do so. Door hinges, for example, were invented so long ago in antiquity that we can't even accurately date it. Examples of them appear at least as early as 5,500 years ago, and the basic concepts behind the metal barrel hinge haven't change much since timeless antiquity. The flush toilet has been observed in archaeological excavations of the 26th-century BCE Indus Valley civilization, and recognizable modern examples can be found as early as the 16th century. This sets aside the fact that the electricity that allows these critics to put their words out onto our gloriously modern Internet was most likely generated via steam power, as most modern power plants, even nuclear and solar-thermal ones, are ultimately driven by steam turbine.

Even in the area of transportation, some of the best ideas are rather old. The diamond-frame bicycle, which is the most efficient form of passenger transportation known to man (in the physics sense of efficiency-- energy expended per kilo of payload moved), is unchanged since 1885. And, of course, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that automobiles are also 19th-century technology, their birth dated to the Benz Patent-Motorwagen in 1886. Aircraft are only slightly younger-- a modern pilot would find the controls of the 1909 Curtiss June Bug familiar.

These critics would no doubt argue that automobile technology has advanced significantly since the 19th century-- but then again, so has rail. Nobody who has ever ridden a modern high-speed train would confuse it for a second with a 19th-century model. The advances in technology and engineering to allow a rail vehicle to reach 300km/h are just as impressive as the leaps from early automobiles to the Prius, and a modern streetcar is rather different from its 1920 ancestors. There is a perception of trains as dated, and cars as modern, that likely stems from the advertising efforts of the motor industry in the mid-20th century-- and that has somehow invaded our national consciousness.

But in another sense, the fact that railways are old technology is really relevant. The question is, how can we best organize our cities and our lives, how can we best move people from place to place in a world that is warming and running out of oil? The answer is renewable, electrified public transport, supplemented by active transportation, regardless of when the technology for that transport came about. While research is always nice, we don't need a shiny new tech breakthrough in order to implement these things. The technology is already there-- our problems are political.

Riverside Gets Streetcar Money

InlandEmpire.US, which appears to be an IE PR newswire, is reporting (along with the PE and CBS, but IE.US is running the full press release and everyone else seems to be a little confused) that the City has received $237,500 in state money towards the planning of a streetcar line from UCR to downtown, with the project dubbed "Riverside Reconnects." (Points for alliteration, but hardly inspiring.)

Prior reporting from the PE suggests that the plan will be little more than a novelty, rather than a serious investment in transport infrastructure. The plan is currently split between a single track and two tracks, the latter in mixed traffic. Either way, the plan as it currently exists (which, granted, is a back-of-the-envelope sketch straight from Mayor Rusty's office) would spend a lot of money to make a transport service that is worse than existing high-frequency bus transit along University. I'm hoping that $237,500 is enough to convince the City that this thing either needs dedicated lanes, or it needs to be smothered in its infancy, before we spend $100 million on a useless toy train for City Hall to brag about.

Hyperloop? Seriously?

Okay, so I leave y'all alone for two weeks, and I have to watch as everyone sings the praises of the Hyperloop? I feel obligated to respond.

For those who don't know, the Hyperloop is an idea that Elon Musk, founder of Paypal and Tesla Motors and current CEO of SpaceX, decided to do a bar-napkin sketch of. Similar proposals have existed in science fiction and futurist ramblings for quite some time. (RAND published a report on them in 1972, and Heinlein was writing about "vactubes" as early as 1956. I seem to remember that Niven's Ringworld was ringed with trains that took advantage of the exterior vacuum, although to be fair, these didn't need to run in tubes.) The reason Musk brings this up is that he claims such a system would be a significantly cheaper alternative to the current California High-Speed Rail Project.

This claim is wrong on so many levels that it's hard to address them all, and yet Musk is getting showered with media plaudits and the CA HSR project is getting attacked from all corners.

Okay, so what's wrong with the hyperloop project? First off, anyone serious should understand that Musk's "proposal" is, as I said, basically a sketch on a bar napkin. The cost estimates included sound authoritative, but they are extraordinarily high-level and rest on so many assumptions that the uncertainty involved in them is very high. The reason that the headline cost of the HSR project has basically doubled is that estimates and reality don't often coalesce. FTA wants year-of-expenditure accounting rather than 2010 dollars, NIMBYs fight you in court and you have to hire tons of lawyers, you get more precise estimates of materials and land costs that always seem to end up a little higher than your estimates, etc. etc. etc. Musk's project has the added uncertainty of being something that has never been built before, so the costs involved here are really just wild-ass guesses. (I mean, yeah, steel is a known quantity, but people are saying that he's wildly underestimating the cost of capsule environmental systems, for example.) Not to mention that he doesn't actually include the costs of prototyping and testing in his budget. Oops?

Second, he is woefully naive about the cost of right-of-way acquisition. He assumes that right-of-way is almost a non-issue because such a project could just use the median of I-5, and anyway it would be built on elevated structure so you wouldn't have to acquire so much land. Except that HSR is already planned to be built on elevated structure, and right-of-way acquisition is still a bitch. Oh, and I-5 isn't free, Caltrans will want to take their pound of flesh just like the farmers will. Oh, and that if you run it on I-5, you won't serve any of the towns that I-5 doesn't go to, like Fresno and Bakersfield, which have a million and damned near a million people in their metro areas each. And, of course, this ignores the central problem of ROW acquisition-- the cities.

The California HSR project is not expensive because it's being built over farmland in the middle of nowhere. Land acquisition and construction in the Central Valley, while somewhat contentious, is pretty cheap overall. On the ends of the project, on the San Francisco Peninsula and in urban Los Angeles, where there is no extra room down the middle of the freeway or relatively cheap farmland, and where every few feet of progress must be bought by demolishing a building or digging an expensive tunnel, is where right-of-way costs come in. And they are huge costs. More than the entire cost of Musk's proposal. So how does he avoid them?

Oh, that's the next problem. His proposal doesn't go to LA or San Francisco. It goes from Sylmar to Pleasanton. Funny how they left that out. Add in local transit times to actually get to LA proper, and that 30-minute ride actually becomes closer to a 3 hour ride. Toss in the security "similar to airports" that Musk proposes, and we all know how much that sucks, and you're looking closer to 4 hours. Also known as worse than CA-HSR. He also doesn't budget anything for station buildings, maintenance shops, or the storage areas that would be necessary for the kinds of capsule headways he proposes. Or the parking lots, because a lot of people are going to drive (their Teslas?) to these suburban stations, making Hyperloop a contributor to the problem of urban auto congestion.


And a brief moment again to discuss one of the major limitations of the technology. It's a point-to-point service. If the hyperloop had to accelerate and decelerate into stations en route, it would slow way down and the costs would go way up. You could get from LA to SF, or from SF to LA, but people from San Jose or Fresno or Bakersfield or Palmdale would be good and screwed. That leaves out millions of potential riders and, more importantly, millions of potential political supporters.

There are a lot more problems with Musk's proposal, but I think this is enough to show that the Hyperloop is a futurist fantasy, not a serious alternative to HSR. And therein lies the danger of these kinds of proposals. Now, HSR opponents have a smokescreen they can hide behind. They can say "Oh, I support the idea of having an LA-SF train, but this specific project isn't a good one. Why don't we do this Hyperloop thing that Elon Musk is talking about?" This is, in effect, the same as opposing an LA-SF train. The Hyperloop will never be built, and knowing that, HSR opponents can use it to look reasonable while still getting their desired outcome, which is killing the project.

For the record, I don't think that the Hyperloop as a technology is entirely without merit. I think we're going to see a post-petroleum future, one in which long-distance passenger aviation becomes either economically or ecologically unsustainable. I'm not nearly as sanguine as Musk is about the future of hypersonic transport. Some sort of evacuated tube train may well be the way we cross trans-continental or intercontinental distances in 2075 or 2100, where it'd be impractical to stop frequently anyway. (Either that, or maybe we'll use conventional HSR sleeper trains, much like China presently does on some of their longer HSR lines.)

Nor do I have any sort of personal vendetta against Elon Musk. SpaceX is doing way cool things, especially since NASA kind of gave up on doing a lot of cool things, and despite my feelings about electric cars, I wouldn't mind taking a Tesla for a spin up to Big Bear or Idyllwild (when it's no longer on fire). I just think this is a half-baked idea that will do more to harm the cause of intrastate transportation than help it.

An Open Letter to AAA

I got a letter in my mailbox today from the Automobile Club of Southern California. You can guess that I didn't enclose the requested registration certificate and $49 membership fee. Here's what I sent back instead:

Dear Ms. Sabins:

I received your offer of pre-selected membership in the Automobile Club of Southern California today. I note that you began your letter with "Dear Fellow Driver." I am writing now to inform you that your membership selection process has gone horribly awry. While I am an enthusiastic participant of the United Airlines MileagePlus program, from whom you seem to have gotten my address, I am not, in fact, your fellow driver. Indeed, I do not own an automobile, and I am unlikely to do so in the future. The only vehicle I'm certain to use on any given day is my bicycle, and I like it that way.

Moreover, I was a former member of your organization, and I informed your employees at the time of my reasons for leaving your organization. Collectively, the Automobile Association of America is one of the largest anti-environmental and anti-active-transportation lobbying organizations in the nation, as you are no doubt well aware. AAA has a long history of advocating against progressive transportation policy and for sprawl-inducing freeway construction, road and parking lot expansion, and subsidies for the auto and oil industries. Your organization is one of the principal foes in the fight against the catastrophic specter of global climate change, a bastion of oil-economy cronyism in a world that desperately needs more forward-looking solutions.

I also find your organization's recruiting tactics reprehensible. The average AAA member does not know about the lobbying arm of your organization. Indeed, the letter that you sent me does not speak at all about the disproportionate influence that you wield in Washington. Instead it speaks of all the benefits I will receive from membership in the Club, including gold-plated roadside assistance, maps, travel guides, DMV services, and discounts. Your organization has built itself into a lobbying powerhouse, commanding the "53 MILLION" members you so enthusiastically tout, by lying to them in order to use their membership to inflate your power in Washington. Members join for the towing, and are unknowingly used for the political ends of your organization and the industries who support you.

In conclusion, I will not be returning the enclosed registration card, along with my "bargain" of a $49 payment. Please remove me from any and all mailing lists, customer databases, and lists of "selected" new members immediately and in perpetuity.

Sincerely,

Alethea Nelson, MA

The Problems with Cars

Transit activists are constantly besieged by a long list of wondrous new technologies that are going to change transportation forever, meaning that all this time we're spending on buses and trains and bicycles is just going to be a waste when the electric car / podcars / Google cars save the world and make all of that obsolete. Implicit in this criticism is, of course, the idea that somehow existing transit technologies aren't up to the task of swaying people from their undying love for the automobile, but we'll save that for another post. The trouble is that none of these new technological advancements is going to address the fundamental issues underlying why cars are bad for our society. But, since all of my generally progressive and environmentally-conscious friends are talking about driverless cars lately, maybe it would help if I laid out what those fundamental issues are, and in doing so demonstrated why transit and urbanism is a much better bet than hoping for some new technology to transform our transportation system.

Climate Change
Of course, the biggest danger of our auto-centric transportation system is climate change. Climate change is caused by the release of carbon dioxide (and other, more problematic but less prevalent greenhouse gases) into the atmosphere, usually as a byproduct of combustion energy generation. Cars are a huge source of carbon dioxide emissions, with their gasoline-burning engines, but other types of combustion-based energy generation, such as coal- and gas-fired power plants, are also an issue.

To stop climate change, then, it is not enough to simply switch cars from gasoline to another energy source (like electricity, hydrogen, compressed air, etc.-- which are all electrically-derived, as I cover here). We need to also ensure that the electricity is initially generated from a renewable source as well-- and, since we also need to power everything else in our society from renewables, and they are currently a very minor contribution to our electrical grid, the more energy-efficient our transportation system gets, the more likely it can be carbon-neutral.

This, of course, is where transit excels, and where most of these new technologies fail. Any technology, be it an alternative-fueled car, a personal rapid transit pod, or a driverless taxi, that involves hauling around a metric ton or two of metal per passenger or small group of passengers is inherently energy-inefficient. A small, 1,000kg car with the usual load of 2 passengers in it has to transport 500kg of car for every passenger. For a fully-loaded city bus, that ratio is closer to 150kg of bus per passenger. Rail vehicles, with lighter electric motors, no fuel tanks, minimal suspension, and significantly greater capacity, can obviously be even more efficient. It is therefore a fact of physics that a well-used public transit vehicle (which they all will be, in the glorious car-free utopia) will always be more energy-efficient than a private car. Electric cars, hydrogen cars, and even platooned driverless cars will be more energy-efficient than the present auto fleet, but they won't be efficient enough, and they certainly don't represent the best way to go about transforming our society.

Sprawl
Sprawl is a form of living in which densities are low and places that you'd like to go are far apart from each other. Sprawl is bad for people because it breeds obesity and social isolation; is bad for our society because it requires a lot of infrastructure due to the distances between things, while at the same time not generating enough value through taxation to pay for that infrastructure; and is bad for the environment because we keep paving over wilderness and farmland, among a whole host of other reasons. Sprawl is the ultimate enemy of the urbanist. Sprawl was essentially enabled by the automobile (although streetcar suburbs were a kind of walkable proto-sprawl), and sprawl makes modes other than the automobile impractical. Sprawl is environmentally awful, energy-inefficient, and generally unpleasant for many who live there. It's also dramatically oversupplied-- surveys show that many people, and most young people, would like to live in denser, more walkable, more transit-friendly neighborhoods, but those neighborhoods are incredibly expensive because they are incredibly rare. Sprawl has also woven itself into the fabric of city planning-- zoning codes across this country are written in such a way that they basically preclude the construction of anything but sprawl, even in dense cities.

Cars create and enable sprawl for many reasons. One of them is parking-- the giant parking lots, attached garages, and parking structures that we build in which to store our cars are like spacers inserted in the machinery of the city, spreading things out from one another. They also make walking, cycling and transit-riding harder-- you're a lot less likely to shop by foot or transit if you have to cross a massive and desolate stretch of asphalt, randomly populated by distracted drivers searching for a parking space, in order to get to the store. (I'm looking at you, Victoria Gardens.) Wide roads and freeways have a similar effect-- built to accommodate traffic, they end up encouraging the same. (PRT and some sort of driverless car-taxi system, admittedly, wouldn't depend on huge parking lots at every destination, although the driverless car-taxis would need to be parked somewhere.)

That said, probably the most significant reason that cars promote sprawl is that they are so damned good at their job. The car is a tool that allows its owner to make a trip of essentially indeterminate length, at any time, at astonishingly high speeds. (The two-three days it takes to cross North America in a car may seem agonizing today, compared to the 6 hours it takes in an airplane, but there was a time when that journey took 5 months and included a significant likelihood of death.) The modern automobile transportation system allows those of us who live in the developed world to think of a 100+km daily commute as a normal fact of daily life, and to think little of coming home from that commute only to visit a restaurant three towns over. That sort of mobility allows for sprawl-- if you can travel a dozen kilometers on a whim, everything can be dozens of kilometers apart.

Paradoxically, when we have less mobility, we have more access. In Manhattan, where even the subways run at an average of 28km/h (the expresses manage roughly 40), and the old joke is that driving across the island at rush hour is impossible, the incentive is to pack everything closely together so that you don't need speed to get around. Once everything isn't so spaced out (ie, is denser), a life based on transit and active transport becomes a matter of course. Any form of vehicle that allows nearly infinite mobility at the press of a button, driven or driverless, gasoline or otherwise, will continue to enable and exacerbate sprawl.

Congestion/Urban Space
Closely related to the problem of sprawl is the problem of urban space. In Sprawlsville, land is cheap, so space isn't really an issue, but in dense cities, space is at a premium. We have to decide how to allocate that space, and at present, we allocate a lot of it to cars, making it harder for people there to walk, cycle, or ride transit. The problem of space efficiency is caused by the same thing as that of energy efficiency-- the idea that each person or small party should have their own, dedicated metal box surrounding them. For the same amount of people who all want to go somewhere, transit is the most space-efficient mode to get them there, followed by walking, then cycling, then some sort of platooned individual transit method (like PRT or communicative driverless cars), then automobiles. See, for example, this photo. You can, of course, add the concern of parking space for cars (and, to a lesser extent, bikes). In places where there are a lot of people, all of whom want to travel, and not much space, transit is simply the best way to move them-- and cars are a guaranteed recipe for congestion.

Toss on top of all of that the fact that our infrastructure is already overcrowded, even with providing nearly all of our urban public space to cars. Building new infrastructure in many areas is going to involve tunneling or elevated structure, in many others will involve buying and destroying other properties, and all around will be exceedingly expensive. Driverless cars may alleviate this problem somewhat, if we could get relatively universal adoption and sufficient communication to allow for platoons or very short following distances. PRT is likely to involve its own massive infrastructure project, for minimal benefit.

Problems of Roads
Roads and road vehicles have a bunch of ancillary environmental problems that come with them. They bisect habitat where they are built through rural and wilderness areas. They tend to slough off rainwater, rather than allowing it to percolate into the ground. Road runoff is generally contaminated with tiny rubber particles and various sorts of lubricants and other fluids that leak out of cars-- and that will still be necessary in any new-tech vehicle. If vehicles on them are moving at any appreciable speed, they can be expected to injure or kill pedestrians and cyclists, or at the very least make it hard for folks using active transport to get across. Any car that drives on the roads will have these problems, and driverless cars may even exacerbate some of them (eg. roads may get faster, and therefore even harder to cross as a pedestrian).

Problems of Non-drivers
Any driven car will need to be driven by somebody. That still isolates children, the elderly, the disabled, and likely the poor from mobility. PRT doesn't have this problem. We will need a nearly universal shared driverless car network before they solve this problem for the poor.


Problems of Social Isolation
I believe, based on admittedly scant evidence, that much of our society's lack of compassion is at least contributed to by social isolation, borne of our suburban mode of living. In a walkable, urban environment, or on public transit, one will bump in to people from all social strata, ages, ethnicities, sexual orientations, gender presentations, and yes, states of mental health. When you live in suburbia, and can easily drive from your attached garage to the parking lot at your job, you are effectively insulated from anyone you don't actively choose to associate with. This has to have profound implications on how you perceive the world around you. All of the wondrous transit-obsoleting technologies that I've mentioned still revolve around the idea that we will continue to be able to shut out the outside world while moving through it.

Besides, public transit appears to be the place for spotting that special someone, at least going by Cragislist's "missed connections" section, and at least if you're in the Northeast, Northwest or Chicagoland.

Conclusion
There is no technology that will allow us to continue on as we are now-- in our own private little boxes, sealed up from the world around us, as we make our way between point A and point B in our lives-- that will also allow us to mitigate the profound damage we are inflicting upon our world. There cannot be-- such a technology is a physical and geometric impossibility.  The longer we wait for such a thing, the harder the transition to a new way of moving about our world will become, and the less able we will be to hold on to the high quality of life to which we are accustomed.

As I have said since I started this blog, we have the technology to transform our transportation system. We have had it for a hundred years. It begins with the bicycle, and moves upward through the electric trolleybus and light rail train, through the subway and commuter train, to the long-distance and high-speed rail systems that we are only now thinking about rebuilding. If we can simultaneously build out our nation's renewable energy grid, we can begin to move into a society where we will lose our cars, yes, but we will gain happier, healthier lives.

And if we can't... well, I'm going to miss Miami.

Just a quick thought...

but am I the only transit geek that gets annoyed when people call Metrolink "the metro"? Because it happens ALL THE TIME. You get on the train and someone talking loudly on their cell phone says to their conversational partner "Yeah, I'm on the train... you know, the metro... to LA..."

Metrolink is a thing. Metro is also a thing. They are two totally different things. This is a huge pet peeve of mine, and probably only mine.

Car ownership is still the default assumption

I just wanted to share a quick anecdote. I'm trying to arrange a carpool up to a union meeting in Berkeley this weekend, and one of our organizers mentioned that only one other person would be making the drive, and his wife would be in San Diego with his car. Therefore, I'd "have to be okay with taking [my] car."

This is from a person who always sees me on my bicycle on campus, and who, to my knowledge, has never seen me behind a steering wheel of any sort. It is simply assumed that, being a productive member of society who makes a decent living, I own a car.

I had a similar experience at Altura credit union not too long ago. The woman who helped me open an account told me that her credit card printing machine was down, but that the branch on Central would be happy to help me. When I asked how to get to that branch, she said "Oh, you just get on the 91 and..." This is after we'd had a conversation about the fact that I am car-free, and had arrived on my bicycle. She also seemed rather skeptical of the fact that I could ride a bicycle all the way to the Riverside Plaza.

The point here is that automobiles have woven their way into our psychology. We simply assume that everyone who can afford one has access to one, and will naturally use it during the course of their daily lives. This is an assumption that we need to correct.

3-Foot Law A Step Forward, But...

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know that the State Assembly just passed a three-foot-passing law. (The law has already gained the approval of the Senate.) These laws are the overwhelming standard around the country, and adding one to our vehicle code is a definite improvement. We shouldn't celebrate yet, of course, as Governor Brown vetoed a similar law recently (under heavy pressure from AAA), but this one seems to have been re-written specifically to appease Mr. Brown, so with any luck all will proceed smoothly.

My question is, does anyone actually think this is going to help?

There are many laws on the books today that are intended to protect cyclists. For example, CVC 21200 empowers us to take an entire lane of traffic when safety requires it. That doesn't keep every cyclist I talk to from having a dozen stories about times that they've taken the lane, only to be honked at, shouted at, or passed far too close for comfort. Laws are also on the books making it a crime to block the bicycle lane, but take a cycle through most neighborhoods with bike lanes on trash day and tell me that they make a difference.

Of course, there are plenty of traffic laws on the books that get routinely ignored-- speed limits, laws requiring full stops at stop signs, even (by some) seatbelt and drunk-driving laws. But at least most people on the roads are aware of these laws, as evidenced by the way the freeways slow to a crawl within view of a Highway Patrol car. I am convinced that most drivers have no idea what the law is as it pertains to bicycles-- and, indeed, that they believe that the law is the opposite of what is actually written down, as shown by constant entreaties to "get on the sidewalk" (in contravention of RMC 10.64.330).

I would normally suggest that enforcement is the answer here, but, alas, I have seen several incidents that suggest that our local police are as ignorant of bicycle law as the general driving public.

So, while I applaud the passage of the three-foot-passing law, I don't hold out much hope for it actually *doing* anything to help us out on the roads.

Killing the Gas Tax: Why, Exactly?

Streetsblog DC has a post on Oregon's experimentation with a vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) tax. Oregonian Representative Earl Blumenauer speaks with pride about the fact that Oregon intends to be the first state to rid itself of the gas tax. But is the reasoning behind moving to a VMT tax sound? I'm skeptical.

The stated reason for exploring a VMT tax is the fact that Oregon's state gas tax is insufficient to maintain the state's transportation infrastructure, especially with recent trends in fuel-efficient hybrids and electric vehicles. But the article goes on to say that the VMT tax would "probably never include all vehicles" because "[v]ehicles below the mid-point, about 20 miles per gallon, are already paying a load of gas tax." Wait, what? So what you're saying is that you want to pay to maintain your state's transportation infrastructure by implementing a special tax which would only be applied to fuel-efficient cars? So you want to soak the folks who are conscientious enough to drive more efficient vehicles?

Add to that the fact that there are serious technological, bureaucratic and civil-liberties concerns related to the implementation of a VMT tax. Most implementations will rely on some sort of GPS-based box in the car that would tally up mileage. The Oregon pilot will apparently be handing the tracking function over to a private contractor-- because that's just what we need, a profit-driven company with access to data on our every move. I can't imagine any way that could go wrong.

Finally, it seems to me that this is a solution in search of a problem. We already have a transportation funding mechanism that charges people in proportion to the amount of driving they do, and has the side benefit of making heavier and more inefficient vehicles pay more while rewarding efficiency. It also has no tracking component, and the cost is paid in small amounts bundled into a larger transaction, lessening citizen resentment. It's called the gas tax. It's actually a fantastic funding and incentive mechanism for a society facing climate change-- it's literally a direct carbon tax. You buy carbon to burn, you pay taxes on it. The only problem with the gas tax is that it's presently far too low.*

VMT taxes are a complex and worrying workaround for a problem that has already been solved. The only reason anyone's talking about them is because it's politically unpopular to raise the gas tax. But here's the thing-- fundamentally, what's politically unpopular is making driving expensive, not any particular means of doing so. Tolls, registration fee hikes, congestion charges, parking meter rate raises, and likely VMT will all be unpopular, because our society has become accustomed to super-cheap automobility. Raising the gas tax will likely be less unpopular than charging people more to drive by tracking their daily movements with GPS, and it will do more to push people towards fuel efficiency. VMT is unnecessary, it's complex, and it has worrying implications. Let's stop wasting time on it and get to building the political will to raise the gas tax.

*Gas taxes also won't work for electric vehicles, but truthfully, I don't see too many electric vehicles on the roads right now. Perhaps a simple, odometer-based VMT charge would be the best solution down the road, but right now, let's let the Leaf-driving greenies enjoy the savings. We might also want to consider a small tax on electricity, a portion of which could be dedicated to transportation.

"Urban" is not a marketing buzzword

At Blaine & Iowa, near UCR, a new set of apartments is going up. Sterling Highlander isn't anything that would normally catch my attention. They're pretty standard apartments targeted at undergraduates, with dormitory-like bed-rent policies and shared amenities-- and like most of their ilk, they're pretty expensive. However, the advertising for the community caught my eye while riding down Blaine yesterday.

They advertise the complex as "trendy" and "urban."

Now, I'm not going to try to argue with the "trendy" bit-- they might be right, and I'm certainly no trend-setter myself-- but the word "urban" actually means something, and it means something not satisfied by this apartment complex.

These apartments sit on one corner of two high-speed arterial roads.* The other three corners are occupied by fairly standard suburban strip-mall retail, including several fast-food restaurants, an EZ Lube, and a K-Mart. The apartments around it are pretty standard garden-type apartments. The complex itself is not mixed-use (although another Sterling property on University is), and it will have free parking for all residents.

So what, exactly, makes this apartment complex "urban"?

According to the web site, it's the floorplans.

Now, I'm not saying there's nothing to like about this property from an environmental standpoint. It will be a rather dense project in an already dense area, they will be providing bicycle storage and a bicycle lending program, and the property is adjacent to several transit lines (1, 10, 14, and 51). And, despite the massive parking lots, each of those suburban strip malls is relatively walkable from the property. Furthermore, the mere fact that the company is trying to market their apartments as "urban" shows the level to which young people are seeking dense, walkable urban places.

Still, though, I think it's misleading to call a car-centric project-- especially one that they widened Iowa Ave. for-- in a firmly suburban area, "urban."

* In the Google Maps image, the project area is the dirt lot on the northeast corner of Iowa & Blaine.

Standard of Living vs. Quality of Life

Standard of Living is a commonly tossed-around measure of a country's prosperity. Exceptionalists like to point out that the United States has the highest standard of living in the world, and anti-environmentalists cringe at the thought of environmental regulation reducing our standard of living. A lower standard of living does sound horrible at its face, but there is an important piece of information that is being left out in these discussions.

Standard of living, as it is commonly expressed, is a measure of consumption. It's not a measure of comfort, of health, or of happiness. It's simply a measure of how much stuff is consumed by each person in a society, on average. It's usually expressed in terms of GDP per capita. There are people who use "standard of living" to mean something more useful, but they are not in the majority.

This is different from measures that try to capture "quality of life." Quality of life is a concept that attempts to aggregate both material and intangible components of human well-being. Quality of life measures will include measures of economic health, but also things like access to health care, life expectancy, infant mortality, leisure time, self-reported happiness, equality, etc.

Americans may have the highest standard of living in the world, but we are suffering in the quality of life department. We have shorter lives, filled with less leisure, more economic insecurity, longer work hours and less travel than most of the rest of the civilized world.

Why am I bring this up on an alternative transport blog? Because I think this has profound implications for how we talk about re-organizing our built environment as we move in to the 21st Century. Two of the factors that contributed to our nation's vast accumulation of wealth over the last century-- cheap oil and the suburban boom-- are clearly unsustainable in the future. Much of the throwaway consumer economy is built on top of these things-- that, too, is coming to an end. We are most likely going to see a decline in our standard of living as we move in to the future.

That said, I don't think that a decline in standards of living must necessarily mean a decline in quality of life. For example, a person who takes a pay cut to live within walking distance of work has decreased their standard of living. Maybe they can no longer afford to consume all of the gasoline that they used to during their daily commute. But it's also likely that their quality of life has gone up-- they have more leisure time, they are healthier from including a brisk walk in their daily routine, they are likely happier from alleviating the stress of a long commute. Similarly, somebody who takes a pay cut and has to switch from eating fast food to cooking farmers' market vegetables at home has undergone the same transition-- a decrease in standard of living, but an increase in quality of life.

There is, of course, a reason that we measure standard of living this way. These two concepts are strongly correlated, at low levels of both. In the developing world, an increase in standard of living is often also an increase in quality of life, because it means the difference between starvation and satiety, between a cardboard shack and a modest house. But after a point (which is different for different cultures), additional consumption no longer translates in to additional happiness, and indeed can have the opposite effect.

We are all going to have to find these trade-offs in the coming years. The future will be about downsizing-- owning less, sharing more, living smaller, living closer. All of us are going to suffer a decline in our standard of living. Done properly, however, I think we could see a renaissance in our quality of life.

"No transit" from people who should know better.

I've written before about people who use the words "No public transportation" to mean "No rail service." I saw an example today from people who ought to know better: Rail-Volution, a transit/livable streets conference that will be coming to LA soon. I received their brochure in the mail today. One of their "mobile workshops", on Tuesday, will be held at LAX and will talk about Metro and LAWA's plans to bring rail to the airport.

In the talk's description, the first sentence is "LA has no direct transit connection to LAX."

That's obviously false. I've ridden the FlyAway bus, which travels directly from downtown LA to LAX, several times. It stops at two places: Union Station and the airport terminals. That's as direct as it gets. There is also a shuttle which directly connects the Green Line's Aviation station to the terminals, and a shuttle which connects the LAX City Bus Center to the terminals. The LAX City Bus Center is served by the LA Metro 40, 42, 111, 117, 232, 439, 625, and 715, the Santa Monica 3 and Rapid 3, the Culver City 6 and Rapid 6, the Beach Cities 109 and the Torrance 8. The Green Line Aviation station is served by the Metro Green Line, the MAX 2, 3, and 3x, the Culver City 6 and Rapid 6, the Metro 120, the Beach Cities 109, and the Santa Monica 3 and Rapid 3. By my count, the airport has 20 direct transit connections.

What you meant to say, conference organizers, is that the airport has no direct *rail* connection. However, you can have valuable transit service without rail. Please be more specific.

Choice Riders

Oops! It's been a while since I've posted. Sorry, folks, I'll process refunds right away.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the rhetoric of transit agencies reaching out to "choice riders." You often hear about efforts to entice "choice riders" on to transit systems, by providing special bus service or special amenities that will lure these elusive creatures out of their steel boxes. Quite frankly, I think that this type of thinking is insulting, confusing, and dangerous.

First, it is insulting to the agency's normal rider base. When you separate your ridership in to "choice" riders and everyone else, you're saying that everyone else doesn't have a choice. You're saying that it doesn't really matter what kind of service you provide to those riders, because they'll put up with whatever you give them. This is not only insulting, it isn't true. Even the car-free by circumstance* have choices-- they can choose to walk, to ride a bicycle, to call a friend or family member for a ride, to hitchhike, to call a taxi/Craigslist rideshare person, or (probably most commonly) simply not make that trip at all. And that's the real shame-- transit cuts that impact "no-choice" riders really hurt everyone, because they mean that that person is blocked from participating fully in their community, blocked from perhaps getting or keeping a job, from attending community meetings, from giving their children opportunities for after-school activities and enrichment.

But finally, these "no-choice" riders do have one other choice: they can spend way too much of their meager incomes on an old, unreliable rattle-trap of a car, because your transit service was so bad that it's the only choice they have left to make. That's bad for them, that's bad for the environment, that's bad for society.

Second, it's confusing, because "choice riders" are an ill-defined group. When are these people making their choice? I suppose what I'm really getting at is, am I a choice rider? I'm not wealthy by any means, but I really could afford to own and operate a car. I choose not to, but because of that choice I rely heavily on the local transit system (and Chloe). When you divide the world in to "choice riders" and everyone else, you make the unstated assumption that everyone in your service district either owns a car, or can't afford to own a car. Really, transit agencies should make it a priority to enable the creation and expansion of the middle category: the car-free by choice.

Last, it's dangerous, because it creates two tiers of transit service. Public transit should serve community needs, but it shouldn't do so at the expense of having an integrated network. The idea that there are "choice riders" and everyone else leads to Metrolink Syndrome, where there is a peak-hour peak-direction express transit network (connected to plentiful parking), and a local all-day transit network, and never the twain shall meet. This kind of network planning assumes that, while people might want to ride transit in the city during the work week, they'll always be drivers when they're at home in the suburbs. This is exactly the opposite of what we should be encouraging. I'm all for having park-and-rides as a short-term solution, because the truth is that our transit network isn't yet at the point where it serves everyone's needs effectively (especially in places like Banning and Murrieta, where RTA provides lots of service to park-and-ride lots), but by running express service exclusively to those park-and-ride lots, you send the message that your local transit network and your express network are completely unrelated. Nobody is supposed to take the express bus back from LA and then get on a local bus to go home-- indeed, nobody can.

So let's stop talking about "choice riders" and everybody else, and instead simply focus on providing transit that works for everybody. Good-quality transit will serve the needs of the car-free-by-circumstance, and (if it's good enough) will also entice habitual drivers out of their cars.

*You know who I'm talking about-- the poor, the aged, the disabled, and the young. I refuse to use the word "car-less" on this blog, because I really do think that not having a car is freedom.

Bicycle culture? Not among the police.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a laywer, although I think these bike laws are pretty clear. This version of events is my own, and has not been verified by a court of law.

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time on my bicycle-- much of it with my brothers and sisters of Occupy Riverside, engaged in joyful, peaceful protest on the occasion of May Day. During a demonstration ride up 14th St. to the Community Convergence at Bordwell Park, however, things got a measure less peaceful-- thanks to the intervention of Riverside's finest.

Anyone who's ridden along 14th street from Downtown knows that the travel lanes are jammed in three-abreast, and are reasonably narrow. There is no bicycle lane, and no wide shoulder. So, as is our right under CVC 21202(a), we took the right-hand lane. There were people in the group who hadn't ridden a bike in a while, so we were going pretty slow, and this was obviously pissing off the drivers behind us (even though we never completely blocked the street). So of course, RPD came to their rescue.

Around Sedgwick Ave., an RPD patrol car came up behind us and began ordering us over the loudspeaker to "get on the sidewalk." This shows a lack of understanding of bicycle law on the part of the officers, because not only did we have a right to the road, but they were actually ordering us to do something that's illegal in Riverside. Here's RMC 10.64.330 (warning, PDF link):

Except for authorized police bicycle patrols, no person shall ride a bicycle upon a sidewalk or parkway unless signs are erected permitting use of such sidewalk or parkway by
bicycles. (Ord. 5924 § 1, 1991; Ord. 2940 § 11.9, 1961)

Of course, we had no intention of engaging in illegal conduct while being followed by a police patrol car.

 As I mentioned, we were riding to the Convergence at Bordwell Park-- something like a giant free community picnic/grocery-and-clothing giveaway/party, for those unfamiliar. Bordwell Park is at Kansas and 14th, literally the next major street after Sedgwick. I have no doubt in my mind that the officers in question knew that that was our destination. So what did these fair-minded crusaders for justice think was the appropriate response to this imagined lawbreaking? Did they choose to simply allow us to continue on our way, for one block, and deal with the minor traffic disruption?

Of course not. As we approached Kansas, an officer (who we believe to be officer A. Watkins) pulled his patrol car in front of us in order to block our progress, jumped out of his car with his Tazer drawn, and tackled one of our number off of his bicycle. This was his response to what he thought was a minor traffic violation (and what was not, in fact, a violation of any kind). When we rushed to start filming this brazen act of police brutality, as is necessary to hold our public servants accountable for their actions, roughly 30 more officers converged on the intersection in the span of a minute or so, tangling up traffic far more than a few bicycles ever did. They started pushing the protesters back towards the park, blocking the view of our cameras, and in the ensuing scuffle another of our number was beaten and arrested- I'm not aware of what he was charged with.

To reiterate my point- our ride would have left the roadway on the other side of the intersection where it was forcibly halted. The police knew that, as evidenced by the fact that they had a gaggle of officers standing by within a minute's drive. They knew who we were and where we were going. This officer chose to make an arrest, by force, for a traffic violation-- one that wasn't actually occurring.

Obviously, this is a worrying incident for the relationship between public and the officers sworn to protect them, but I want to talk about the impact it has on cycling in our city. It is no secret that developing a "bicycle culture" in Riverside is a priority of the current Mayor and City government. It is also no secret that our bicycle facilities are somewhat lacking, and taking the lane is a necessary maneuver in many cases. Finally, this is not the first time that I have encountered police officers that are seemingly ignorant of the law they purport to enforce, at least when it comes to bicycles.

What message does this send to people who want to join in the cycling renaissance in our city? "Hey, we'd like you to bike, but idiot drivers who don't know the law aren't your only worry-- you also need to watch out for police officers, who could run you down or Tazer you for following the law." Among the many, many things that we need to fix with respect to cycling in Riverside, some remedial bike law training for the police is pretty high on that list.