I was considering doing an impressionistic, Copenhagen-inspired post about how urban bicycling in the United States has a kind of “daredevil” quality to it that tends to leave it a male-dominated pursuit versus what you see in Copenhagen or Denmark where it’s common to see mom lugging a kid along at a modest pace in a very safe lane:

Then I sort of thought the better of it since I didn’t have any data and it’s usually best not to just rely on crude stereotypes. Fortunately, Scientific American came to the rescue with a better-supported investigation of this question:

“If you want to know if an urban environment supports cycling, you can forget about all the detailed ‘bikeability indexes’–just measure the proportion of cyclists who are female,” says Jan Garrard, a senior lecturer at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and author of several studies on biking and gender differences.

There we go! That’s via Courtney at Feministing who comments:

Women, generally-speaking, are less likely to utilize bike lanes set in high-traffic areas, but in parks, low-traffic roadways, and the like, they are nearly 50% of riders. The enduring gender role differences also play a role here. Women who need to strap on some kids, groceries, or other precious cargo, need urban infrastructure that makes that easier (who wants to be carting a toddler around in the middle of honking, dangerous traffic?). European cities, many of which are more consciously planned around safe, cargo-laden biking, have much higher raters of women riders.

Of course, I also know some NYC-based badass women bicyclists (Christy Thornton!), who are neither risk-averse, nor lugging babes, so I wonder how they would feel about assumptions like these. Your thoughts?

Obviously many women don’t have babies. But it’s equally clear that there are a lot of babies in the world and the responsibility for caring for them does, in practice, primarily fall on women. And differential risk-assessment (whatever its origin) is probably the element of gendered psychology that’s most clearly supported by real research. So the causal hypothesis makes sense,.

Lord knows I love seizing bits of the roadway away from motorists but this creation of a separate left-hand turn lane for cyclists strikes even me as overkill:

Not that I mind or anything, but this kind of seems like a solution in search of a problem.

As I’ve noted before, the evidence suggests that as the number of cyclists in a city increases, the level of safety-per-cyclist increases so quickly that more bike riders leads to fewer bike accidents:

Saturday after having spent all week being jealous of the German bike lanes and the large number of German urban cyclists, I finally got the chance to rent a bike and ride around Berlin. You can really experience the safety in numbers phenomenon first hand:

The crux of the matter is that on any busy street there are always cyclists. In many circumstances, this is dealt with through the provision of good bicycle lanes, often physically separated from auto traffic. But where that’s not the case the bikes are in the street and the cars are well-aware that there are bikes in the street and conduct themselves accordingly.

At the same time, German cyclists seem to me to go slower. In part, it’s a matter if the bikes. People typically seem to have hybrid or mountain tires rather than road tires (necessary for going over cobblestones or streetcar tracks) and often their bikes are configured in a European-style upright posture, both of which lead to slower speeds.

Dresden and Freiberg had some bicycling infrastructure that a DC bike commuter can’t help but be jealous of. From the looks of it, Frankfurt is also quite bike-friendly but I haven’t really been outside much. Here’s a very convenient separated lane:

And here’s some nice red striping that extends through the intersection and improves visibility:

And here we have a lane separated out from the sidewalk:

For whatever reason in Northern Europe bicycles seems to be the predominant alternative to cars whereas in Southern Europe you see more scooters and mopeds and such. I’d sort of like to come up with a theory as to why that it (it’s flatter in the north?) but no obvious one is coming to mind. I note that relative to the United States, you see cyclists in Germany (like in the Netherlands) from more walks of life—more older people, more people with carseat attachments for kids and such.

A couple of days ago, Cato’s Tad DeHaven took aim at a new bicycle storage facility being built at Union Station in Washington, DC. I remarked ” I look forward to the day when the Cato Institute does a blog post denouncing each and every publicly financed parking lot or garage in the United States of America.” To which DeHaven responded yesterday:

I denounce each and every federally financed parking lot or garage in the United States of America on non-federal property. I’m one of those quaint individuals who recognizes that the Constitution grants the federal government specific enumerated powers. Using federal tax dollars to finance local parking garages, lots, bike centers and racks is not one of the powers granted to the federal government. So let me rephrase my statement from yesterday: Look, I harbor no animosity against [car drivers], but under what authority — legal or moral — does the federal government tax me in order to build [parking garages or lots] for parochial, special interests?

To be honest, rather than addressing my concern I think this response highlights the hypocrisy I was pointing out. I have no doubt that on some abstract level DeHaven is opposed to all kinds of federal funding of local transportation projects (though I note that a facility relating to a train station in the national capital seems like a plausible area of federal concern) but in practice he denounces a specific bicycle parking project as an example of unconstitutional waste while not in practice complaining about car facilities.

But I fired up the old Google and found plenty of specific examples of federally-funded parking garage projects. This one in Fairfax County cost $28.8 million. Here’s a story about “an application for $130 million in federal grant funds to help pay for a parking garage complex in downtown Bartow.” Here’s an account of a $9 million parking garage in Vermont “Partially funded with federal transportation money.”

And, look, I’m not kidding about this: I really do look forward to the day when the Cato Institute starts specifically denouncing all of this stuff and really going after it. As a supporter of bicycle initiatives, I think it’s nice to see the federal government kick some bucks into a bicycle facility. But as you can see that money is dwarfed by what’s spent on public (and, yes, federal) subsidies for automobile parking facilities. I would gladly equalize federal funding for car parking and bike parking at $0 per year. But I get annoyed when friends of limited government pick on the crumbs handed to cyclists while completely ignoring the loafs going to cars.

CalTrain station, Menlo Park, CA (cc photo by Richard Masoner)

Elana Schor reports on failed efforts to strip funding for bicycle and pedestrian safety in the Senate:

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Jim Webb (D-VA) voted with Coburn to allow states to opt out of a current mandate to spend 10 percent of federal transportation aid on bike and pedestrian paths, bike-ped safety education, and other programs.

Coburn’s amendment fell short by a vote of 39-59, with three other Democrats, Sens. Russ Feingold (WI), Evan Bayh (IN), and Claire McCaskill (MO), also aligning with the majority of Republicans in favor of the opt-out.

Shame on everyone. Small amounts of money to promote walking and cycling are good for the environment and for public health.

On a related note, I look forward to the day when the Cato Institute does a blog post denouncing each and every publicly financed parking lot or garage in the United States of America. Somehow I think that if we equalized public funding for car park and bike parking at $0 that would on net work to the advantage of non-drivers.

Despite the recent increase in popularity of bicycling as a mode of urban transportation, American cycling is still predominantly viewed as a kind of sport. Consequently, the vast majority of bikes you see here are either mountain bikes (for mountains), road bikes (for racing), or hybrid bikes (a blend of the two). In Europe, by contrast, it’s more common to see bikes that are specifically designed for use as urban commuter vehicles. Seth Stevenson explains the basic elements of the urban bike:

1) Upright posture. You sit with your back perpendicular to the ground instead of hunched forward over the handlebars. It’s a far more comfortable and relaxed position. Because your head is up high, it’s easier to see over car roofs in traffic. It’s also easier for the cars to see you.

2) Fenders. These semicircular arcs hover just above the tops of the bike’s tires. They prevent any up-splash when you ride through puddles and also lend the bike a rather dignified appearance.

3) Fully covered chains. Greasy metal links are hidden far out of sight, behind a chain case, meaning you can ride to work in a suit without schmutzing your trouser cuffs.

Jamis Commuter 3.0

He then goes on to discuss several different brands of actual Dutch bicycles. But they’re all very expensive. I paid much less money than that for a “Dutch-style” American bike, the Jamis Commuter 3.0. I’ve never actually owned any other bike, but I like it quite a lot and it definitely delivers on the main virtues of European-style cycling—less speed, more comfort and convenience—something to use to get around town faster than you could on foot, but not actually race with.

The times I’ve driven in a Prius, I’ve been totally impressed by the spooky silence of the hybrid engine. But apparently there’s some concern that hybrids are dangerously quiet and could strike people unawares. In Japan, it seems there’s going to be a panel to consider the issue of whether regulators should mandate a noise-making device be incorporated into the cars. Thinking about it, it’s definitely true that as a cyclist I wouldn’t be thrilled about the idea of lots of cars silently sneaking up past me from behind.

Eric Cantor (R-VA)

CNN reports on House Republicans’ efforts to get serious about cutting the budget:

The House Republican leadership upped the ante Thursday in the ongoing debate over the size and scope of the federal budget, unveiling a proposal to cut spending by $375 billion over the next five years. [...] President Barack Obama “challenged us to come up with budget savings, and today House Republicans encourage him to not only look over our proposed … common-sense taxpayer savings, but to join our effort,” House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, said in a statement.

It turns out, however, that there’s no real proposal here. Instead, “The bulk of the GOP’s proposed savings would come from capping non-defense discretionary spending at the level of inflation.”

A blanket cap in spending is not a good idea. For one thing, it’s incredibly indiscriminate. For another thing, it’s oddly un-inclusive. If we’re just going to reduce outlays in an arbitrary, across-the-board way, why should defense and Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid be left off the table? Well, presumably they don’t want to cut the defense budget because they think it’s important. But isn’t the FBI important? Prisons? If Medicare’s important, isn’t the CDC important? What would be helped by slashing Pell Grants? When the Obama administration proposed $17 billion in federal spending cuts, the announcement was generally met with mild derision at what a small share of the overall pie that is. But the point is that they found $17 billion dollars worth of cuts that there are actual reasons to believe are worth making. It’s easy to generate a high headline number by being arbitrary. But it’s also easy to do devastating damage to the country.

A much better AP story gets that there are only about $5 billion a year in actual cuts here. And just to piss me off personally, one of the the specific items they want to cut is federal support for bicycle routes. I’ll be the first to admit that not that many people use a bicycle as their primary means of conveyance, but there are about fourty times more of us than George Will realizes, and we’re using a commuting method that’s good for the environment and helps reduce traffic congestion for everyone else. Conservatives seem to have decided that bicycles are funny and un-American, like Puerto Rican food and volcano monitoring, but I don’t really see what their reasoning is.