Tag: Bicycles
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Floyd, a Street Cyclists Can Call their Own
by James A. Bacon The City of Richmond doesn’t have many tangible results to show for its bicycle-friendly policies so far. Painting white bicycle symbols on a few streets to designate sharrows — lanes where cars should be on the look-out for bicycles — contributes only marginally to making streets safer for cyclists. But the…
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What Virginians Can Learn from Bicycle Nirvana
Americans, it is commonly said, have had a love affair with the automobile. By the same token, it is fair to say that the Dutch have had a love affair with the bicycle. A 1938 newspaper article declared the bicycle to be “the most Dutch of all vehicles.” Some 32 years later, when some friends…
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No Excuses Left!
Now that Governor Bob McDonnell and the General Assembly have restructured transportation taxes away from a user-pays system to an everybody-pays system, they have (perhaps unwittingly) undermined the justification for short-changing funding for bicycle routes. Cycling advocates Tom Bowden and Champe Burnley drive home the point in a Times-Dispatch op-ed today. Now our streets and…
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Time to Get Real about Quality of Richmond’s Bicycle Infrastructure
The Richmond region has a long way to go before it can truly be considered a bicycle-friendly town. The entire region has only 18.25 miles of paved bike lanes — “sharrow” lanes marked with bicycle icons don’t count — and those lanes are fragmented, unconnected to a broader network. In 2015, hundreds of thousands of…
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Damned with Faint Praise: Virginia Ranks Tops in South for Bicycle Friendliness
Virginia ranks 16th nationally in the just-published League of American Bicyclists’ “Bicycle Friendly States” ranking, and No. 1 in the South. The state of Washington took the top spot, with Colorado nailing down No. 2. Colorado cycling has come on strong in recent years as the business community has mobilized around the goal of making…
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Dealing with “Dead Bikes”
It’s one thing to say you want to create a bicycle-friendly community, it’s quite another to pull it off. In the abstract, it sounds pretty easy. The devil is in the details. A case in point: Richmond City Council is pondering an ordinance to authorize police to attach a bicycle, motorcycle or moped to a…
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Bicycles and Economic Development
by James A. Bacon Richmond is gaining traction as a bicycle-friendly region but it is a slow and arduous process. Public and private investment in biking infrastructure remain limited, almost non-existent outside the City of Richmond. It is commonly said among cycling enthusiasts that if you build the biking amenities, the cyclists will come. The…
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Fixing Broken Streams and Broken Dreams
The Bellemeade Walkable Watershed project aims to reclaim a damaged creek, create a route for kids to walk to school, and boost community spirit in a gritty, inner-city Richmond neighborhood.
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An Ignorant Vote on a Good Bicycle Bill
What’s with General Assembly Republicans? They’re willing to raise taxes to fund automobile and mass-transit projects but they’re not willing to support a bill that would make bicycling safer without costing the state a dime. The House version of a bill submitted by Sen. Chap Peterson, D-Fairfax, was defeated yesterday in a tie vote in…
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Wealth-Destroying Streets
Dan Burden, executive director of the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute, looks like an aging hippie — long white hair, a broomstick of a moustache, a twinkle in his eye — and, for all I know, he is one. But his presentation Friday at the New Partners for Smarter Growth focused on wealth creation. No,…
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New Rules of the Road: Following Too Closely
Here’s another bill I like: HB 1950. Introduced by Alfonso Lopez, D-Arlington, this bill brings bikes under the protection of the no-tailgating law by deleting one word from existing legislation: “The driver of a motor vehicle shall not follow another motor vehicle, trailer, or semitrailer more closely than is reasonable and prudent…” In this case,…
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All Hail the Creeper Trail
The Virginia Creeper Trail is arguably the most beloved bicycle trail in Virginia. But it wasn’t always so. As Bill Lohmann reminds us in the Times-Dispatch, many landowners along the trail, which was built upon an abandoned railroad bed, opposed its development in the 1980s. Writes Lohmann: One group filed a lawsuit. Others placed logs…
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Retaking Roads from Cars
Speaking of bicycles… Sen. Chap Peterson, D-Fairfax, has introduced SB736, which would forbid drivers and passengers to open car doors on the side adjacent to moving traffic “until is is reasonably safe to do so.” Violators would be fined by up to $100. On his Ox Road South blog, Peterson defends the bill as a…
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Beware Drug Peddlers on Pedals
by James A. Bacon It is hard for me to imagine, but not everybody is thrilled about the idea of having a bicycle trail run near their home. D. Gareth Embrose Jr., of eastern Henrico County, says he would rather have a road cut through his property than the Virginia Capital Trail bicycle trail. At…
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Making the Public-Health Case for Bicycles
Last month Bacon’s Rebellion hosted an “idea jam” on the topic of bicycles and public health. Our goal was to build a case for making the Richmond region more bicycle-friendly in terms that fiscally conservative political, business and civic leaders would find compelling. We decided to focus on two topics: public health and economic development.…