An honest appraisal (with data) of how we're doing for bike friendliness (420th!)

[Ken Clark]

Kind of glad we're no longer involved with the LAB's sham version of bike friendliness rankings.  Here's one at People for Bikes that has a more honest approach:

Ann Arbor Michigan City Rating Page | PeopleForBikes 2024 City Ratings

Ann Arbor Michigan City Rating Page | PeopleForBikes 2024 City Ratings Ann Arbor Michigan Score: (46 out of 100) | City Rank (420 out of 2579 cities). Follow the link to see even more...

We're 46th of the 100 cities they ranked of our size, and 420 out of 2579 total cities ranked.  Check out the heat map!

Why so bad?  Their number one criteria for bike friendliness is the amount of motor vehicle speeding.  We have a serious problem there, that other cities have dealt with.

Ken

[Bruce Geffen]

Stupid question... What's BNA?

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[Ken Clark]

PeopleForBikes 2024 City Ratings | Every ride. Every rider. Join us.

PeopleForBikes 2024 City Ratings | Every ride. Every rider. Join us. The Best Cities for Biking in 2024. We're ranking the best places for biking. See how your city rates.

"City Ratings scores are released annually each summer based on results from our Bicycle Network Analysis (BNA) data analysis software that measures the quality and connectivity of a city's bike network. The BNA assesses six factors captured in the acronym SPRINT:"

Much more at the link.

Ken

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[Adam Goodman]

The peopleforbikes rankings are absolute garbage, IMO. They would have you believe that Chicago is the worst big city in the US for biking, which (I think?) we can all agree is very far from the truth: https://chi.streetsblog.org/2024/06/17/people-for-bikes-explains-why-chicago-is-likely-getting-another-dismal-ranking-in-its-2024-city-ratings

Their scores are useful, maybe, in getting a sense of progress over time within a community, but that's about it. While I appreciate what they're trying to do, there's an important lesson here: the mere fact that they have developed a quantitative method for determining scores does not mean those scores are accurate or unbiased...

- Adam

[Bruce Geffen]

Thank you for the clarification!

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[Bruce Geffen]

💯%!

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[Ken Clark]

"So the cities that are scoring really well in our City Ratings are the ones that have lowered their speeds, not only in through speed limits but through actual design interventions to create slower streets, and places that are filling in gaps in the network to create those complete bike networks."

Which Chicago was failing at.  They deserved their score.  High traffic speeds kill bike friendliness.

What measure do you prefer so I can point out why that's garbage?  :-)

Ken

[Nicholas Adams]

My 2 cents: PFB's ratings dole out too harsh a penalty for a 5 mph difference in posted speed limits. Yes, going from 25 to 30 mph increases likelihood of injury and death, but not by so much that it should take a city from near the top to near the bottom. Further, it doesn't take into account reality. A street may have a posted limit of 30 but be designed in such a way that average vehicle speed is lower, and vice versa. Now, if they wanted to make their standard for "low stress" a posted 20 mph speed limit, which would have a significant impact on injury/death, and therefore rate every city as mostly garbage, then I'd be on board.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127572/#:~:text=The%20chance%20of%20a%20pedestrian,only%205%25%20at%2020%20mph.

CHANCE OF A PEDESTRIAN BEING KILLED OR SEVERELY INJURED IN A CAR ACCIDENT

Speed (mph)	Severe Injury Rate	Mortality Rate	Combined
25	31.9%	4.4%	36.3%
30	36.8%	6.8%	43.6%

Nick Adams

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[Adam Goodman]

I'm not arguing that Chicago should be at the top of the list, and their 30mph speed limit is a big problem, but does anybody really think that it's a worse place to ride a bike than Jacksonville, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Los Angeles?

Here are my specific problems with their methodology:

1. They use OpenStreetMap data to determine cities' bike networks. This is likely the best option available to them (at least, without doing a massive amount of work or paying a massive amount of money), but it's still a problem. OSM mapping information for bike routes is often incomplete, incorrect, or - at best - inconsistently tagged. That last one is really the biggest and most pervasive problem; there are multiple different ways to identify bike routes in OSM and best practices have changed over time. That means that different tools will interpret the same data differently - to see what I mean, check out how differently Ann Arbor renders on cyclosm.org vs opencyclemap.org vs, say, ridewithgps.com. (OpenCycleMap in particular is erroneously interpreting some ordinary sidewalks as high-quality bike routes for reasons that are ... complicated and difficult to unwind). I don't know exactly which types of tagged routes the BNA tool is including, but almost any set of choices will have imperfections.

This past winter, I actually spent some time re-tagging a bunch of OSM bike routes in Ann Arbor to try to make them more consistent with the city's own map (https://a2gov.org/a2Transportation) and my personal experience. I strongly suspect this is actually why our PeopleForBikes score jumped several points between 2023 and 2024...

2. As far as I can tell, they are relying entirely on posted speed limits to determine "high stress" vs" low stress" routes - not actual speeds, or street design, or lane widths, or any of the other good things that they're talking about in interviews. That throws out a ton of context that can make a world of difference as to whether a street is actually a pleasant and safe place to ride a bike. Admittedly again, most of those other factors are ones for which high-quality data (or even like ... medium-quality data) does not consistently exist. That said, one thing I believe they should incorporate is traffic volume data.  Ann Arbor's comprehensive transportation plan considers both speed limit and traffic volume to determine the appropriate intervention for all-ages-and-abilities bike routes, and I believe this approach is correct. And our region, at least, does have fairly comprehensive traffic-volume estimates for everything that's more major than a neighborhood street: https://maps.semcog.org/TrafficVolume/.

Again, I do in some ways appreciate what they're trying to do here. I think the bike network analysis tool they've built (and to their credit, it's open-source: https://github.com/PeopleForBikes/brokenspoke-analyzer) could be genuinely useful for benchmarking local progress and for scenario planning. But I really think it's irresponsible of them to use this approach to generate a total-ordered list of city rankings (with some results that are clearly divorced from people's actual experiences), and blast them out such that they're used to generate endless clickbait stories in the media...

I actually do think the League's "bicycle friendly community" ratings are a somewhat better approach, though certainly not without flaws of their own.

- Adam

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[Ken Clark]

That's fair.  Here's how I'd respond:

1. I don't understand the ranking for Chicago.  I think speed limits are actually fairly irrelevant - it's actual speeds that are important. In contrast, the LAB bike-friendly awards pay no attention at all to traffic speeds. A place that attempts to hold down speeds to those safer for cyclists is a more bike friendly place.  Most of the places I've biked in Europe didn't have bike lanes, boulevards, or anything else, but they did have slow and courteous motorists.  I'd say we make no attempt at all here.  Chicago seems a bit better.

2. I've biked in Chicago.  I have a built-in bias against cities in the south, but they do have advantages in year-round biking conditions.  Having not biked in places like Houston, I think it would be inappropriate for me or anyone else (who hasn't biked there) to say, without some data and analysis, that Chicago is better.

3. I looked at the mapping apps you listed, and immediately spotted flaws.  I think your point is that none of them are perfect, so they're dealing with imperfect data, and that's a reasonable critique, but doesn't necessarily say their results aren't overall reasonable, just could be more accurate.

4. If you do a peer-to-peer comparison, just within Michigan, their rankings seem close.  Traverse City is better than Ann Arbor is better than Grand Rapids, for example.  If you do a mid-size city comparison across the country, it also seems reasonable.  We're 45th on that list. 

5. The number of people biking is a seriously flawed metric (mentioned in the article), but might point to other variables that are valuable.  We have a lot of people biking here now (in the summer) compared to the quality of our environment.  But we're a well-educated, left-leaning university city.

6. Volume is a valuable metric, along with all the others in the bicycle level of service calculations.  BCI's calculation is even better.

But overall, this seems to me a much better attempt than the LAB's awards system, which seemed to turn into a pat communities on the back almost regardless of actual conditions.

Ken

[Ken Clark]

I wanted to say one thing about this.  I agree with this point, except as I said in a different email, I don't think posted speed limits are relevant, except as a fairly poor indicator of actual speeds.  What's important is actual speeds, and SE Michigan has horribly aggressive drivers.  Here, the posted speed may be 25, but the 85th percentile is often 38.  I see this every day of the week on Pontiac, which has a 25mph limit posted from Manor to the railroad tracks.  It has two speed sensors.  They're always flashing (unless it's me going by) and showing a speed 35mph+. 

People for Bikes doesn't claim to be taking into account actual speeds.  I don't recall speeding in Chicago to be any worse than here. 

I've thought for a few decades that the reason people here refuse to use regular bike lanes - which do get used just fine in places like Boulder and Madison - is because of all of the aggressive driving here.  When a posted speed limit of 25mph means people are actually driving 35mph, it's not really surprising people are less willing to bike there.

Ken

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[Kirk Westphal]

Coming late to this discussion, but I really appreciate it!

It relates to a major wish of mine: for the city to install a ton of speed sensors around the city.  They're not expensive, and since speed is the #1 factor in level of injury, WHY CAN'T WE DO THIS?  

Could this be a collaboration between the city and WBW, where the city buys them, and volunteers mount them, download the data, and reinstall?  They'd be able to further identify speed issues on road segments that aren't currently in the high-crash network and possibly inform where they/WBW could do cheap interventions and measure the pre/post driver speeds. 

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[Ken Clark]

It's funny, because the Lowertown Mobility Study called for more of the speed displays, but it didn't result in any changes in their numbers. 

I think city traffic engineers would have several objections to volunteers putting them up, even if they specified how/where they were installed.  Besides, they need solar panels, and they wouldn't trust us to safely put those up either.  

I have a feeling they also don't think we really have a speeding problem.  I've mentioned speeding at many city outreach efforts, and I'm always careful to label it as aggressive driving.  They get to my comments and get this puzzled look on their faces, and categorize the comment as dangerous driving.  But NHTSA and IIHS both make it clear that speeding *is* aggressive driving.  I think staff mostly thinks everyone speeds (most of staff doesn't live in Ann Arbor, and they probably personally speed as well), so it can't really be aggressive driving.  

Here's something I've floated to council.  You can make, with an arduino, a data logger, and a small doppler radar module, your own speed sensor/recorder.  Something like this:DIY radar speed sign looks and works like the real thing | Arduino Blog

DIY radar speed sign looks and works like the real thing | Arduino Blog Arduino Team John McNelly decided to build a replica of a roadside speed sign using an Arduino Nano and an HB100 Doppler rada...

But I wouldn't include the sign.  I'd put it in a box like these:

USA small Black Plastic Project Box Enclosure case 2.25 x 1.5 x .785 mount tabs | eBay

USA small Black Plastic Project Box Enclosure case 2.25 x 1.5 x .785 mou... Another possible way to use this enclosure is to use it to enclose a project you have made on a circuit board. T...

I'd include a small battery in there to keep it going for a month.  It would cost about $30 in parts.  You could put them on signs all over the city, calibrated with the city's own speed sensors.  Then you'd periodically open it back up, pull the SD card, download the speed data (timestamped) and alert the police to exactly when and where people were speeding by how much.  For a bit more money, you could put a cellular module in there and do nearly real-time telemetry of speeding.

I started to put one together, but realized no one would want it.  I mentioned them to council several times,and they seem utterly uninterested.  I suspect speeding is something *we* are very interested in, but a lot of the public not so much.  And out-of-town-commuters not at all.  Council is interested in safer conditions for biking and walking - kind of - but not really in dealing with speeders. 

It's too bad you're not on council any more!  I'm sure Erica gets it, but she's only one.

Ken

[Kirk Westphal]

Thanks for the reply and the kind words, Ken.  To be fair, I do think many — if not all — folks on council appreciate the road violence crisis.  (For example, I don't know of many other cities that have made as aggressive a commitment to fix the scourge of multilane roads... at least in writing.) 

My observation is that there's insufficient leadership on staff (at best, resistance at worst) for doing what urgently needs to be done.  That means council needs to 1) be even more specific in directing staff to make our roads safer and reach Vision Zero by next year as planned, and 2) remind the city administrator that the Vision Zero is real, not aspirational, and that his evaluation will suffer if he doesn't enact improvements immediately.  (This is one example of a more general problem with council's lack of stated goals, timelines, and accountability, which I wrote about last year.)

As for the speed recording boxes, this is awesome!  I fear this may be getting too specific for the larger group email list here (I actually typed out and deleted from my last message a short history of my and Alex Lowe's attempts — well, 99% Alex — to craft a Pi speed recorder and video camera module, which was fun but unreliable.)  I know of at least one other person who wants to push this DIY angle.  I will send a note to you all and try to meet if interested.  If anyone else is interested in a speed measuring project, pls shoot me a note and I'll get us all in a room/bar!  I think it would be extremely valuable.

Kirk

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