JP Bikes

You can find us at https://www.facebook.com/JPBikes02130

SPRING IS HERE!
FREE FRIDAY NIGHT BIKE MOVIES AT CURTIS HALL

Get in the mood for the spring biking season! Ferris Wheels Bike Shop and Boston City Councilor John Tobin are bringing movie night to the Curtis Hall Community Center at 20 South St. (first floor meeting room), Jamaica Plain. The four-movie theme is “bicycles on the silver screen,” just in time to inspire residents to get on a bike!

Friday, April 23: Breaking Away (classic fan favorite!)
Friday, April 30: Klunkerz (history of mountain biking)
Friday, May 7: American Flyers (Kevin Costner rides the Rockies!)
Friday, May 14: Quicksilver (Kevin Bacon as a cool messenger)

Free! All movies start at 6:30 pm. Popcorn and soda and juice.
For information call 617-524-BIKE.

Finally, this is the meeting where the planners will show their recommendation for bike accommodations on Centre and South. Please come to the meeting and show your support for increasing increased ridership and safety on Centre and South. Details and the agenda for the meeting are below:

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Centre/South Streetscape and Transportation Action Plan CAC Meeting # 7

Thursday, April 29, 2010
The Agassiz School cafeteria
20 Child Street
*6pm to 8:00pm*

DRAFT AGENDA

Welcome and Schedule Overview 10 min.
Bicycle Facility Opportunities 60 min.
* “State of the Art Practices”
* Local opportunities
Concept Design Areas 40 min.
Monument Square
Stop & Shop/Mozart Park section
Public Comment
Next Steps 10 min.

(From Boston Bikes Directory Nicole Freedman)

Please join us for Mayor Menino’s Bicycling Safety Summit on Wednesday April 21, 2010 from 5:30 – 7:00 PM at BU’s Morse Auditorium, 602 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA.

The Summit will gather area bicyclists and high-ranking city officials to discuss ways of improving safety for everyone who uses Boston’s roadways. The session will feature short speeches followed by a longer, open question and answer session. Our goal is to collectively begin to understand how to make Boston’s roads as safe as possible for all users.

Featured speakers and/or panelists include:
Mayor Thomas M. Menino
Boston Police Commissioner, Ed Davis

Boston Transportation Commissioner, Thomas Tinlin
Boston EMS Chief, James Hooley
State Transportation Secretary, Jeffrey Mullan
MBTA General Manager, Rich Davies
Boston Bikes Director, Nicole Freedman

The Mayor’s announcement of the Summit comes in the wake of a third recent bike accident and ahead of Boston Bike Week next month. For more information, please see: http://www.cityofboston.gov/news/default.aspx?id=4624

Please also remember to register for Boston Bike Week, Bike Fridays and Hub On Wheels at www.bostonbikes.org.

Our next meeting on Centre/South strategy is tomorrow, Thursday March 25th from 7-8:30 at Curtis Hall (20 South St., door is immediately to the right when you go in). The petitions done along the street have shown that a vast majority of people are very enthusiastic about the possibility of bike lanes through JP. However, bike travel is one of many uses of the street, and those uses can and do compete for space. Much of this meeting will be about what we can do to make a compelling case for street allocation that favors bikes and pedestrians over cars. Our intended agenda is below. Hope to see you there!

JP Bikes Meeting 3/25/10 Agenda

1. Introductions (5 min)
2. About JP Bikes – events, website, mailing list (5 min)
3. Update on the Spring Roll (5 min)
4. About the Boston Cyclists Union (5 min)
5. Recap of the Centre/South CAC meeting Tuesday – bike lanes and “nodes” (10 min)
6. Update on our support letters, business support, and petitions so far (10 min)
7. Possibilities and challenges for South Street bike lanes (25 min)
a. Examples from other cities
b. Discuss local studies/data needed to advocate for similar changes here
8. Strategizing/Planning/Organizing to show importance of pedestrians and
bikes to business (25 min)
a. Petitions /I Biked Here cards – petition sign-up
b. Making/getting more I Biked Here Cards
c. Discuss relevant organizations with whom we should share our data and the results of any surveys with

Just got back from a trip to San Francisco and Sacramento, with a short visit to Davis. First time cycling for real in any of these towns.

First, San Francisco. I was somewhat proactive and ordered the bike map published by the SF Bicycle Coalition. It’s a great map that shows all of the routes and what kind they are (off road, bike-lane, shared lanes, in handy color coding). The routes are also numerous enough to actually be numbered on the map and on the street signs so you can follow a route as it changes roads. They even use designations like highway numbers, where even routes go east-west while odd ones go north-south. There are ridiculous hills in SF, so the map shows grades as shading on the map. There’s even the famous “wiggle” which is a zig-zag route (#30-47) that is the only way to get from the Mission to the Haight without climbing any steep hills, of which there are many in SF. It’s so obvious when you’re on it, you don’t have to look for signs any more since all you have to do is follow the bikes, they’re all doing it. It also includes the only bike box I found in the city, which conveniently directs you to a dedicated green-shaded left turn lane on the other side of the intersection. This left lane is needed since the turn is on to a street with multiple lanes of traffic. So nice to be guided along a road where so much thought has been put into what cyclists need. Found only one cycletrack, on a short stretch of Market as it approached the Mission. Prior to that bikes shared a bus lane that had a small barrier to the rest of traffic.

I was impressed by the ability of these things to make me feel welcome, to feel encouraged to explore on a bike. I don’t think these lanes were inherently any safer than those in any other city. There were still largely next to parked cars, and the drivers weren’t necessarily more accommodating. The other riders were following the lanes, and stopping at lights, although they did run the red once it was safe to do so.

Can we do the same thing here? That was on my mind the whole trip. Almost all of SF is on a grid, and the streets are generally wider than ours. Not by a huge amount. Both of these do make it easier to support bike lanes and to put them parallel but not on the main driving routes. The weather is better there, so bikes are out all year. SF is also a fantastic urban city, with tons of urban vitality and neighborhoods that are not too far apart. There are very few highways and since it’s surrounded by water on three sides, it’s not surrounded by suburbs. Boston feels like a compressed suburb with pockets of urban areas.

This is not to say there aren’t cars, there are tons of them. But it is very slow to drive around. We had my 7 year old nephew with us for two days and he does better being driven around. Me, not so much.

I had heard bad things about Sacramento from a few people, and from the locals as well. It’s too bad in a way. It’s very flat, not very big, very much a grid, and has good bike lanes all over. The American River has a smooth bike path on both sides that goes for miles and miles and is quite scenic. The city fails in two ways. First, there are elevated highways that seem to be everywhere. Since it’s so flat, you can see and hear these highways from everywhere. I couldn’t get used to this and can understand why people would move as far away from these as possible, which is difficult. Second, it hasn’t attracted or retained the type of young people to generate some kind of urban vitality. We were there for “second Saturday”, which is supposed to be an arts festival but was really more of a block party for teenagers. It being the seat of government in the state, there aren’t many jobs other than in politics, and California has a budget crisis right now so lots of people are out of work in Sacramento.

Davis won platinum status from the League of American Bicyclists, and as expected, there are lanes, paths, and cyclists everywhere. However, I was left feeling that it’s not a good example of what could be done in other cities. First, the cycling infrastructure was built from the ground up by the University. While they deserve praise for doing this, their “citizenship” are largely students who are already predisposed to cycle more than any other population. Plus, they don’t have much of a say in any of the planning as do the tax paying long-term citizens of a city. And finally, the city is not very big and not very dense, and has plenty of room on the streets for bike lanes. A friend of a friend said that Davis was a bit of an isolated bike-utopia since its bike accommodations stop very abruptly and it turns very car-dominated like much of California.

A bike rotary in Davis. Those little houses are for visiting faculty. They front the bike path and I think they don't have a road frontage. So that's kinda cool.

It took me a little while to realize what I really liked about Davis. At first I was somewhat surprised that so many of the bikes were of low quality and/or badly maintained. To some extent the same was true in San Francisco. But what I gradually realized was that this was just a sign of a larger ideal – when cycling becomes ubiquitous it becomes totally utilitarian and thus loses any sense of status. In Holland it’s the same way – all of their bikes are black, have 1-3 speeds, and their owners think nothing of them. Regrettably, if an when we reach the ideal of lots of people using bikes for all the utilitarian short trips that they currently use their cars for, I’ll be tortured by the sounds of crunchy chains and clicking drivetrains!

Overall, I highly recommend a trip to any city where cycling is a widely accepted means of getting around, and the city has installed the resources to create and maintain that culture.

Please consider going out onto Centre/South St. and getting signatures of people who support bike lanes! Here’s some stuff to use to help you out. All this will also be on www.jpbikes.org. It is super fun and super easy to stand outside for an hour or so talking to your neighbors about biking!

Please contact jpbikes@bostonbiker.org to schedule a time, or with any other questions.

Bring printouts (see below) and clipboards and pens and meet at JP Licks to start.

If none of these times work for you, feel free to just get out there whenever!

Petition blanks for people to sign
https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B2q5lzMZ-FkHZTRmYmZjMjQtNzE1OS00NTUyLTgwZjctNjJhNzhkY2RlZTEw&hl=en
Please ask people to write their name and email clearly. This isn’t a legal document so we aren’t looking for their signature. We will use their email to ask them to attend one or two important meetings with city officials to show lots of support for bike lanes.

Petition Letter
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AcZMmCRDur3hZGhzcHRqNXBfMTJndGhudnRndA&hl=en
This is what people are signing their names in support of!

Back of clipboard, large sign to flag down bikers
https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B2q5lzMZ-FkHZTFlNzIyOWMtNjQwZS00NmY3LWFjOWUtYzg0MDc4N2E5MDk4&hl=en
You can use this sign on the back of your clipboard (or whatever you’re using) and hold it up to flag down passing bikers.

Here are the minutes from the JP Bikes meeting held on Thursday 2/11. This meeting was mainly about organzing to support bike lanes wherever possible along Centre St. in Jamaica Plain.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AcZMmCRDur3hZGhzcHRqNXBfN2M2ZGduczc4&hl=en

JPBikes will host a meeting of those interested in joining the effort to
get bike lanes on Centre and South St in Jamaica Plain. The meeting will
be at the Agassiz School at 7:00pm on Thursday.

The planners and consultants for the Centre/South CAC have said that it is
highly likely that bike lanes can be striped over a significant portion of
this corridor. However, without a strong message of support by the
community, they can not proceed with the detailed design of bicycle
accommodations that encourage safe cycling. Thursday’s meeting will be
focused on getting that public support in advance of the next CAC meeting,
which will be within the next few weeks. The current cycle-friendly
atmosphere in the city government may not last, so the time is now for
getting this done!

Meeting details:
What: JPBikes Meeting to plan efforts to get support for bike lanes on
Centre/South
Where: Aggasiz School, 20 Child St., Jamaica Plain
When: Thursday, Feb. 11, 7 pm

Hey everyone, JPBikes doesn’t have many meetings but this is likely as good of a reason as there ever will be.

Lauren Ockene, a JPBikes member, posted a message to our group about a week ago (see next post below) summarizing the most recent meeting of the Citizen’s Advisory Group for the Centre/South Street Transportation and Streetscape Action Plan. Lauren has been advocating tirelessly for improved bicycle accommodations in the streetscape plan, and as a result the consultants have been working bike-specific improvements (e.g. bike lanes on Centre and South, various traffic calming measures) into their proposals. As exciting as some of these proposals may be, only public support can ensure that they become reality.

JPBikes will host a meeting next Thursday the 11th to discuss a plan for gaining that public support and to train those interested in volunteering towards this effort (time and place TBA). The next Centre/South meeting is expected to within the next few weeks, so time is short.

Expect another email soon with the specific time and place (either Agassiz School or Curtis Hall probably).