Composite Risk Management and Bicycling

Reading through the endless arguments for high-visibility clothing at BikePortland today recalled to me how the Army taught me to use Composite Risk Management. You can follow along with ATP 5-19, the current guidance on the subject. Remember, your tax dollars paid for the development of this tool!

The five steps of Risk Management are:

  1. Identify hazards,
  2. Assess the hazards,
  3. Develop controls and make risk decisions,
  4. Implement controls,
  5. Supervise and evaluate

The Army’s goal is mission accomplishment. Same thing for civilians on a bicycle: we just want to get where we’re going, safely.

So, assuming mission is nighttime bicycling trip, some of the hazards are:

  • Collision with motor vehicles,
  • Poor road conditions (including ice, snowbanks, potholes),
  • Collisions with pedestrians,
  • Mechanical failure of bicycle.

 

The Army has a risk assessment matrix (see page 1-7 in ATP 5-19), with frequency along the x-axis and severity along the y-axis. We evaluate hazards along both axes to determine the risk level for each hazard, and then the highest risk of all hazards is the overall risk level.

Assess hazards:

  • MV collision is occasional and critical, high risk;
  • Poor road conditions are occasional and moderate, medium risk;
  • Collisions with pedestrians are seldom and critical, medium risk;
  • Mechanical failure is seldom and moderate, low risk.

Develop controls:

  • Use off-road paths to avoid MV traffic;
  • Be predictable to MV traffic;
  • Increase visibility to MV traffic by wearing bright clothes and using lights and reflectors (check batteries before trip!);
  • Allow extra travel time (to keep from stressing out and making bad decisions);
  • Avoid arterial roads with speeding MVs.

Maybe that pushes the risk level of an MV collision down to unlikely and critical, or low-risk. The advantage of the matrix is that it helps to clarify the nature of the risk. Collisions with a speeding motor vehicle are of critical severity. Collisions with a slow motor vehicle may only be of moderate severity. Either way, reducing the frequency of the incidence of collisions will reduce the risk level as well.

As for road conditions and collisions with pedestrians, I leave listing the hazards as an exercise for you, the reader. For mechanical failure, ensure that your bicycle is in good working order, with good brakes, batteries in lights, and trued wheels.

So implement your controls, and complete the mission. When you get home, evaluate the controls you used and consider adding other controls. Maybe avoiding left turns in traffic and using Copenhagen (two-step) left turns. Maybe getting a louder bell to warn pedestrians you’re coming. Maybe switching to the bike with disc brakes on really wet days.

From the risk-management perspective, wearing more high-visibility clothes is just one possible control against motor vehicle collisions. There are others. You get to choose which ones you want to employ, because it’s your safety at stake.

 

Poor Infrastructure Is Everywhere

Folks complain about lack of safe bicycling conditions to justify more infrastructure spending. “Ordinary” people (women, not young men) don’t get in the bicycle saddle because it is not perceived as a safe way to get around. So in order to get the bicycle mode-share numbers up, authorities ought to provide safe ways for these people to travel.

But this argument holds true for pretty much all forms of transportation. Generally, infrastructure everywhere, especially in low-income areas, is degraded. Walking conditions are terrible, with poor-quality sidewalks, lack of street trees, lack of crosswalks, lack of amenities along the route, lack of adequate lighting at night, and speeding traffic close at hand. Frequent curb cuts and front parking lots create dangerous mid-block car crossings for people on foot and elongate potentially attractive windows from window-shoppers walking by. I don’t have to mention the depressing number of people on foot killed by vehicles failing to yield while turning into crosswalks. If conditions for people on foot are poor, and pretty much everyone has feet, why should we expect anything better for people on two wheels?

This argument can even be extended to facilities for motor vehicles. What Charles Marohn calls “stroads,” those 45-mph stretches of county roads that traditionally stretch between the town limits and the highway exit, are extremely poorly designed for automobiles, as the only safe way to make necessary left turns is to install a traffic signal that slows all traffic to a stop at the interchange with each strip mall.

Moving on to the question of why in the face of such complete degradation it should be important to get more people into the bicycle saddle, I can assure you that the answer, in perfect sincerity, writes itself. We need the bicycle because a person on a bicycle can maintain the pedestrian perspective that lets cities unwind into endless strands of enriching streetscape while traveling five times faster (therefore further) than the person on foot.

Wasting bicycle advocacy efforts on people who bike

Yet many cities “are investing in the 2 percent who already bike, not the 98 percent who don’t,” said Penalosa, citing trail maps, bike parking, racks on buses and lines on streets. These are all well and good, but the only thing that will attract new riders is making them feel safe on the road.

This quote from Enrique Penalosa suggests that bicycling advocacy is too important to leave to people who actually ride bicycles. Could be so, but I suggest that doing it this way leaves out the most natural constituency for riding bicycles, people who are doing it already.

I don’t think careful readers have failed to notice that many people who are already in the saddle are poor people who are bicycling either as a job or as a cheaper alternative to driving a motor vehicle. I don’t understand why improvements to bicycling conditions aren’t recommended for these particular people already on bicycles, and I don’t understand why improving the conditions of bicycling for those who are already bicycling should take second place to improving bicycling for those who aren’t.

When it came to the Curbee I was against it, as it didn’t actually improve my chances of not getting killed or maimed. But hidden in the last paragraph of that blog post is the notion that authorities should “be looking for interventions that increase bicycling all over the network, not just on specific routes near the interventions.” The Curbee is the Platonic ideal of a site-specific bicycling intervention.

Mr. Penalosa, I suggest that authorities invest in interventions that support bicycling everywhere. The kind of infrastructure that accords with your suggestions is expensive and installed on a “roll-out” model, where not every neighborhood gets it at once. If you feel that bicycling is actually suitable for the 100%, how is a model with such built-in inequality going to get the 98% not yet bicycling into the saddle?

Shortcomings of Bicycle Infrastructure

Here are three things to keep in mind about bicycle infrastructure as it relates to advocacy efforts. I am not complaining about bike lanes and bridge crossings. I am not complaining even about shared lanes and onstreet bike lanes. However I believe that blogs and bicycle news sources, like Streetsblog, are biased toward infrastructure and away from ordinary people. Partly this is because infrastructure is generally publicly funded and has a set of news hooks (meetings, installation, openings) associated with it; partly this is because it is seen as universally applicable and therefore interesting to people who live far away and won’t use it. I fear that news organizations’ natural emphasis on paint and concrete leads people to believe that infrastructure is what will get people on bicycles.

The first thing to remember about infrastructure is that the only group who can install bike infrastructure is the authorities. Ordinary people and advocates for people on bicycles can’t install bike infrastructure. When advocates set infrastructure as their number one priority, that means that their number one priority is to petition the authorities, not to get more people on bicycles. I believe that the most effective way to get people on bicycles is to show them people like themselves on bicycles (this is the reason why Cycle Chic was an effective form of bicycle advocacy; it made bicycling an aspirational activity for a certain group of stylish people).

For someone like me who enjoys bicycling, Adonia Lugo’s report on diversity in bicycle advocacy is so welcome because it shows what individual people are doing to spread the word about bicycling. I appreciate reading about how other enthusiastic people create real opportunities to support people who bike and share their enthusiasm. I confess that my own personal path of bicycle advocacy has wound through many boring community meetings, and that I doubt my effectiveness as an advocate.

Second, infrastructure is expensive to authorities, and therefore its placement is not value-free. Infrastructure–whether bus lines, subways, highways and interchanges, or protected bicycle lanes–comes at a cost. Paid workers have to drive the thermoplast truck or pour the concrete. This means that infrastructure will go where authorities want it, not necessarily where local residents want it. Authorities must comply with larger-scale regulations and goals and can’t just replace automobile parking with a bike lane, or widen an intersection to place a roundabout.

In addition, the fact that bicycle infrastructure costs money means that it is subject to a “rollout” model; each block of protected lane or thermoplast stripe costs additional money. Cash-constrained authorities will put the infrastructure where they think it is best placed, or where there is dedicated funding to pay for it.

Third, what makes the bicycle a remarkable machine is how little infrastructure it needs. People on bicycles don’t need rails on the streets, they don’t need elaborate traffic control systems, they don’t need merge ramps, they don’t need parking structures. They don’t even need elevated ways. What we call bicycle infrastructure is not there to encourage bicycling, it’s there to keep motorists from discouraging bicycling. This insight contradicts the idea that bicycle infrastructure should measure up to some form of “cost-benefit” analysis. The costs of bicycle infrastructure are the costs of allowing motor vehicles to travel without hindrance from bicycles; the benefits go to the same motor vehicles.

Points two and three together remind us that as authorities embrace the concept of requiring bicycles to have their own infrastructure, they will install that infrastructure to reinforce the biases of planners and other shadowy, unaccountable officials. My neighbors and I, though we inhabit a gridded paradise at the northern end of Manhattan, are unable to effect a comprehensive bicycle infrastructure plan that would allow people on bikes to travel easily and conveniently in all cardinal directions and access the bridges to the Bronx and New Jersey without difficulty. Instead, we have a half-hearted implementation of a Bicycle Master Plan that dates back to the 20th century. We get the infrastructure that we are told we should have, an infrastructure which takes for granted the primacy of motor vehicle traffic and is therefore inefficient for bicycles.

I confess that what I hear about the Dutch system of bicycle infrastructure doesn’t make me feel much better. They have a book of standards there that is better suited for bicycling, yes. But in everything I read about how the Dutch authorities implement those standards, there is no discussion of public participation. I enjoy bicycling, yes, and I value the chance to ride my bicycle safely, but I also value the opportunity to discuss my neighborhood and potential improvements to it with my neighbors.

There is no venue for discussion of the relative values of bicycling and motoring for getting around in our dense neighborhood, or of the justice of our neighborhood being the de facto doorstep for people driving to midtown Manhattan or New Jersey. I don’t think there can be such a venue unless groups like the ones Ms. Lugo profiles take root among my neighbors.

Curbee

I see that the “Curbee” bicycle footrest has come to Chicago; credit local bicycle advocate Steven Vance. I guess this shows the global nature of bicycle advocacy, that someone in Chicago can implement a refinement on a Copenhagen idea. Score one for the internet, spreading “best practices” around to people who can implement them.

The Curbee, I suppose, is a welcome to cyclists, a symbol that the city is looking out for them and trying to make their life easier in small ways. What I am looking for, however, in my bicycle ride, is TO NOT BE KILLED OR MAIMED. Got that, New York City? It’s great that Chicago can invest in a sturdy welded sidewalk bunny thing that can be used by pedestrians for hanging dry cleaning while tying shoes. But how does this help me keep from being killed or maimed?

I hate to be so existential about this kind of improvement, and I would like to be more welcoming to gestures made by municipalities toward bicyclists. Generous Me suggests, “Please, add more of these little amenities all over my route.” But as my route takes me every afternoon through the South Bronx, I am comfortable in forecasting that the Curbee will not be coming to the corner of Westchester Ave and Bronx River Ave any time soon.

In that respect, I foresee that New York City would install the Curbee somewhere near the East River bridges, where all the cool people are bicycling. Perhaps on that little stretch of protected bike lane north of Canal Street across from the entrance to the east side bikeway of the Manhattan Bridge. I’m sure that people would use the Curbee, because it seems easy to use and doesn’t require instructions. But for me, it would be useless, as I don’t go there all that often.

We can now look forward to a series of inadequately researched studies on the effect that the Curbee has on bicycling promotion. Freelance writers will soon get to gnaw on the bones of some survey like this one suggesting that people at one particular Curbee-enabled corner are now bicycling more. Of course, it’s possible to increase bicycling on individual routes with interventions such as creation of a protected lane, setting up fans to increase riders’ speed, or laying down big rolls of linoleum to reduce the friction.

What cities should be looking for are interventions that increase bicycling all over the network, not just on specific routes near the interventions. The interventions I’m talking about are ones that keep people on bicycles from GETTING KILLED OR MAIMED.

Why Dutch women cycle more

In this Guardian blog post by Herbie Huff and Kelcie Ralph the authors find perhaps the least persuasive justification for establishing family friendly policies in our polity: it will encourage more women to bike!

Women in Holland, researchers have learned, are able to bicycle more because they have fewer chores. The three reasons why: childcare responsibilities are more evenly shared, work weeks are shorter, and children and elderly don’t need as much chauffeuring around.

So they use this extra free time to bicycle. Yes, the authors contend, “Reducing total work hours and encouraging more flexible schedules for men and women alike could free up the time necessary to get around by bike.” Or, cynics say, it could free up the time necessary to watch more television.

Yes, Holland has a bicycle culture that makes it easy and accepted for everyone to bicycle. But even if the U.S. enacted all those family-friendly policies, we would still be a different country with a different transportation culture.

To this point, read the Motherlode blog post from today, about a woman traveling to Omaha, Nebraska from Washington, DC, a road journey of 1200 miles, with her husband and two children, in order to give birth. The writer talks about how she prefers the outcomes at the Nebraska hospital, but she curiously omits the risk and ennui of driving for three or four days each way, once while nine months pregnant, once with a newborn (can’t nurse in a moving car). I believe Americans have a cultural blind spot where motor vehicle transport is concerned, with the effect that these kinds of behavioral contortions pass without comment.

Americans perceive time in the car as time to ourselves, in our own personal bubble of control. The trip to Nebraska is not a 24-hour endurance test, with all passengers strapped down tightly for their own safety, unable to move, and the pilot solely responsible for the life and death of his family. It is transformed into an unforgettable four days of family time, with songs and banter, bracketing a joyous life event in the family’s collective timeline.

Who is the marginal person on a bike?

Looking through the Dill study on the four types of people and their inclination to get on bicycles, it seems as if the respondents were primed to consider safety above other reasons to bicycle. The question I have is whether perception of risk is the most important factor to determine whether people are cycling or not. According to the estimable Hembrow, “If a city makes cycling pleasant, convenient, attractive and safe then more people will cycle, regardless of difficulties…”

Piling on, I question how useful it is to predict the existence of a statistical group that is large and amorphous enough to comprise more than 50% of the population. Remember, the “Interested but Concerned” group in Portland is larger than the entire population of women in that city. Yes, there is value in portraying bicycling just to get around as a practice appealing to a majority of the population, and not just a fringe group. As bicycle advocates, however, we should already believe this.

And further, the study is not longitudinal, to determine whether participants changed their group affiliations over time. Another more general point is that there was no attempt to use factor analysis to break down affiliations in terms of more basic factors (or responses to particular questions).

My question instead is this: Who is the marginal person on a bicycle? What are some of the characteristics of the person who just got in the saddle today?

Thinking about the question of bicycle mode share from this marginal perspective, it occurred to me that Portland’s bike boom might as well be the result of new residents moving in with the intention of moving to a city where they could ride a bicycle every day. This would serve to increase the mode share. After a couple years, I posit, two follow-on effects happened: Portland became more attractive to bohemians of all stripes (credit Portlandia, not just bicycle lovers, reducing the boost to bicycling numbers from new residents, and the people who moved to Portland to ride bikes regressed back to the population mean in terms of their bicycle behavior, getting nicer houses outside of biking distance, or buying automobiles.

Taking the marginal idea further, it would appear from my Portland theory that the marginal bicyclist was for a time most likely to be a new resident. What are some other groups that could become good sources for marginal bicyclists? Off the top of my head, here are a couple possibilities, of varying likelihood.

Parolees and ex-convicts

Senior-center participants

High schoolers

Community college students

New parents

Residents of particular neighborhoods

Workers at certain employers (or city, state employees)

Unemployed people

Library users

Let’s leave the creation and deployment of a marketing campaign to push bicycling to any of these groups for a later time. I believe that readers can visualize the idea of such a campaign and some of its likely results perfectly easily without actually going to the trouble of creating such a campaign.

Bicycling in the Secret City

To the question of to what degree safety improvements can trigger a rise in bicycling, I would like to add these thoughts based on my experience at the Secret City.

I spent nearly a year among 15,000 other people, mostly servicemembers, in a desert location. I went out every other afternoon to bicycle around the back of the airfield, fighting the north wind constantly. I would race the jets taking off on the runway just a couple hundred meters off to my left. Parking was a dream, with wooden racks placed in front of every destination. I even used a cable lock!

Bicycles were plentiful, mostly department-store mountain-bike models. Private motor vehicles were forbidden. All drivers needed additional layers of certification beyond a traditional US drivers’ license before they could get out on the road. Crashes were investigated thoroughly and those at fault were held accountable. It sounds like an idyllic paradise for bicycling, and in many respects, it was, except for mode share: there were never more than 5% of the people bicycling.

I think this can be largely explained by noncommissioned officers’ reluctance to let servicemembers move around without accountability, and part in the servicemembers’ reluctance to move around without being correctly accounted for. There was no command emphasis on bicycling as an alternative to being driven around in motor vehicles. But in the real world, outside the Secret City, where do the authorities actually promote bicycling instead of other means of transportation?

Bike Counters and Social Justice

Here are several comments to the Echo in the City blog and to Streetsblog, on the subject of bike counters and research methods. Bicycle infrastructure should support bicyclists who are bicycling now. More infrastructure can of course inspire people to bicycle, but we ought to respect people who are using the bicycle to travel already. Changing the population of bicyclists through provision of infrastructure and police crackdowns on helmets or riders is not necessarily a positive act.

The advantage of the bicycle is that it offers mobility to people without requiring a large investment. People who have already figured this out should not be marginalized and penalized for not meeting bicycling standards set by authorities without democratic consent.

Thinking through the Strava data My response:

Can you point me to the part of your argument where you disproved the null hypothesis? The null hypothesis being that for planning purposes, the Strava-user database does not differ from other tools used to assemble data on cyclist behavior?

I agree strongly with the sentiments expressed in the “research-0013.jpg” cartoon, but I can envision a number of different methods that share the same problems. In New York City, the authorities do “screenline” counts, where counters are positioned along certain high-traffic bike routes leading to midtown Manhattan. This is great for finding out how many people are traveling to midtown, but in my opinion it is unlikely to lead to improvements to bicycle infrastructure along routes that do not lead to midtown Manhattan. My point being, the city authorities didn’t need to buy a Strava data pack to get data that would have similar biases. If the goal of cycling promotion is to get people onto bikes, the overall problem with all types of collection of cyclist data trips is that they only measure trips taken by people who are actually cycling during the study period.

My understanding of bicycling promotion market research is that transportation planners devote a great deal of attention to encouraging the “interested but concerned” folks who are not currently riding bikes because they feel it’s not safe. These people’s biking experiences are not going to be reflected in any kind of data collection project because they are not currently biking.

Do We Need Automated Bike Counts My response:

Great post. I like your Venn diagram. Looks to me though that the biggest problem with automated counters is that the level of detail of the information they provide is not likely to be required to prove the hypotheses that are being proposed.

If I tell you that 1531 people are bicycling through the intersection of West 86th St & Columbus Avenue in a southerly direction on an average summer Tuesday, what are you going to do with that information? Would you do something else if I told you the count was 3531? I presume any number greater than 0 could be used to justify some kind of bicycle infrastructure.

And in Streetsblog

Collecting data only on the number of people crossing between from borough to borough, but not counting “local” bicyclists, privileges people who are traveling longer distances, and the bike infrastructure necessary to encourage them, viz. better bridge crossings, greenways, and protected bike lanes along direct, arterial roadways.

Bicycles, however, are used for more than just traveling between areas. It is a canard that many car trips are just a mile or so and can be replaced by bicycle trips without having to confront issues of fatigue or fitness, thus reducing motor vehicle traffic in busy neighborhoods. This is the philosophy behind DOT-supported bike share, and the DOT neighborhood slow zone program, and it is therefore a little surprising that DOT researchers are still using screenline methods to collect data that does not inform the policy initiatives of the organization.

Counting the Uncountable Bicyclist

I agree strongly with the sentiments expressed in this cartoon, but I can envision a number of different counting methods that share the same problems. In New York City, the authorities do “screenline” counts, where counters are positioned along certain high-traffic bike routes leading to midtown Manhattan. This is great for finding out how many people are traveling to midtown, but in my opinion it is unlikely to lead to improvements to bicycle infrastructure along routes that do not lead to midtown Manhattan. My point being, the city authorities didn’t need to buy a Strava data pack to get data that would have similar biases.

If the goal of cycling promotion is to get people onto bikes, the overall problem with all types of collection of cyclist data trips is that they only measure trips taken by people who are actually cycling during the study period.

My understanding of bicycling promotion market research is that transportation planners devote a great deal of attention to encouraging the “interested but concerned” folks who are not currently riding bikes because they feel it’s not safe. These people’s biking experiences are not going to be reflected in any kind of data collection project because they are not currently biking.

It is very hard to measure trips that would be taken “if only.” If only there was a protected lane. If only there was a dedicated bicycle turn signal. If only there was adequate bike parking. In the meantime, we are left with folks standing on corners with clipboards, or Strava, or self-reported trip logs, or folks counting parked bikes. Rich people will always be better documented because they have the time or the inclination or the technology to log their trips in machine-readable ways, and because other rich people will prefer to do their counting in places they are familiar with and that boast a high density of cyclists. I have never seen anyone standing on the corner of Morris Ave and East 167th St counting bikes.

Bearing this bias in mind, let’s consider the contributions made by the (unfairly maligned) strong and youthful cyclist. I am no longer, I’m afraid, one of them. This usually male population is perhaps overlooked by us advocates, who constantly remind each other that what is important is to get women to ride.

But the argument that these riders are not bellwethers for the wave of family bicyclists is an argument for half measures. Lacking fear, they take the most direct route to their destination. If those direct routes were outfitted with bicycle infrastructure, then families on bikes would be using them as well. The platitude usually offered in place of a solution, however, is that families on bikes want scenic, quiet routes, or “true 8-80 facilities (greenways, protected lanes, and neighborhood greenways)”. Leaving aside the question of just how quiet a route you can get between two busy places in the big city, I feel that this stated preference directs family bicyclists along long, meandering routes that do not provide direct trips between point A and point B.

For instance, if I ride to Upper Manhattan from Brush Avenue and the Bruckner Expressway service road along the Hutchinson and Pelham Parkways, I get a five- or six-mile ride without cross traffic, but with unpleasant highway noises and smells, with poor pavement, and with a long detour out to the east to link up with Pelham Parkway. Then there’s the loop north around the Zoo and Botanic Garden (both of which are located in parks). It takes more than 65 minutes to get home, which is about 30 minutes more than it takes along Westchester Avenue, Home Street, and East 167th Street. I don’t have the time to waste on such an out-of-the-way routing.

Similarly, improving greenways and byways with the intent to make them even more attractive to family bicyclists is a project that is doomed to half-successes. Going out of the way will always take more time than traveling directly. The local bike-train leaves at 7:50 am and arrives at 9 downtown; hard cheese for parents who have to drop off their kid at a day care that opens at 8. Fixing the giant sinkhole on the Greenway and adding lights along the way will not make it decently quicker to get downtown.

It seems to me that better, more functional onstreet routes would improve bicycling in New York City. Such a plan would build on the city’s existing grid, which is an excellent design for bicycling access, as it means that bicycle traffic can sift through onto less well-traveled streets instead of being confined to several busy arterials. Small improvements would make grid travel better for bicycles, such as: daylighting at busy corners; bicycle traffic signals and “green waves,” which time traffic lights for a speed that bicycles can handle; creating plazas instead of wyes where streets go diagonally; left-turn restrictions along one-way avenues to keep turning traffic from crossing bicycle lanes; and chicanes and neckdowns to slow through motor traffic.