Biking in Boston

I am posting here two pieces of news that would ordinarily go in the "Biking in the Boston burbs" thread, but I'm posting them here because it's news from the innermost "781"/Zone 1A ring of suburbs wanting to be more like and better integrated into bikable/hubway "metro-core" service area:

The Town of Arlington has moved one step closer to picking a bike-share vendor with Hubway being the leading contender. Sorry for no link, I'm working from my phone.

Also in other not quite 617 news, the City of Medford has voted to lower its default speed limit to 25 miles per hour matching Arlington Cambridge Somerville and Boston. The speed limit was lowered by the Medford traffic commission which had been empowered (asked) to adopt the 25 mile per hour limit by the city council.Next up is the city council appropriating money for a full-time traffic engineer to start changing the default geometry of Medford city streets as projects arise.
 
Interesting, I think I remember that the new regional bikeshare RFP wanted to try make it easier for towns like Medford, Newton, Watertown, and Arlington to dip into the program for just a couple docks in the neighborhoods where it makes sense. For Arlington I'd imagine that they want docks at Thorndike, Spy Pond, Lake and Mass, and Arlington Center.
 
See this WickedLocal article: Town [of Arlington] mulls bike-share program, favors Hubway option

In a nutshell, they're being careful to solicit competitive offers (Hubway, Zagster, & municipal), but many feel hubway is inevitable:
The Zagster system [http://www.zagster.com/], which offers lighter-weight and perhaps more comfortable bikes than Hubway, is seen as a good approach by the working group if the town wanted to set up a bike-share system along the Minuteman Bikeway with Bedford and Lexington...[but] it looks like Bedford may no longer be interested in bike-share, making the option less attractive.

The local option, while offering the greatest ability to tailor a system to Arlington's specific needs, did not draw any interest from selectmen primarily because it could not connect to other towns or MBTA transit.

The potential revenue from using Hubway also seemed to tip the scale. The working group projects it would cost $243,000 to purchase five Hubway stations and 50 bikes. Annual operating cost for this infrastructure would be $125,000. But the working group estimates the Hubway stations and bikes could bring in $196,000 in annual revenue between user fees and sponsorships, by far the most revenue of the three options.
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Emphasis mine.
 
As Hubway expands into more outlying neighborhoods,I think they should up the time from 30min to 45min. Even in the first few years, there were some point-to-point rides that were ~35 minutes, possibly 40 in traffic. For instance, Google has Alewife to the WTC in the seaport at 48 minutes biking. For some, that is part of their commute.
 
It is really expensive to rebalance the Hubway system if it is used for whole commutes: Core stations overfill, edge stations empty, and the system can only originate or terminate exactly as many trips as it has bikes and docks.

Or bikes have to be man-handled out of the core as the morning rush-hour progresses and then need to be dragged back into the core in order to supply the evening Rush Hour. It ends up being a bike valet service which is very labor-intensive instead of a bike sharing service which operates on a self-service basis.

Extending the time limit for trips would only make this problem worse because it would really facilitate long one-way trips that are not easily balanced.

If you really want to commute by bike from Arlington to the Seaport either you should buy a personal bike ( and we should make sure that there is a safe weatherproof place to park it in the Seaport,) or you can use Hubway from Arlington Center to Alewife and from South Station to Seaport but take the Red Line in between.

What the system wants is for every trip from Arlington center to Alewife to be balanced buy an errand trip from Alewife back to Arlington center, or at least a commuting trip to Cambridge Park Drive.

And for every trip from South Station to the seaport be balanced by a lunch trip from the Seaport back to South Station. Hubway works best as a Frst Mile & Last Mile system but leaves the Long Middle trips to traditional rail or bus transit.
 
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So, I saw my first zagster bike today at Canal Park (Lechmere), which also happens to be near their First St HQ (or co-HQ with San Francisco)

http://bike.zagster.com/riders/

Can anyone help me understand how/why Zagster & Hubway Exist side by side?

About 3 posts upthread, Zagster was named as a "not leading" option for the Town of Arlington.

Is zagster succeeding at the "workplace" scale even if it can't compete at the "town" scale?
 
Arlington said:
So, I saw my first zagster bike today at Canal Park (Lechmere), which also happens to be near their First St HQ (or co-HQ with San Francisco)

http://bike.zagster.com/riders/

Can anyone help me understand how/why Zagster & Hubway Exist side by side?

About 3 posts upthread, Zagster was named as a "not leading" option for the Town of Arlington.

Is zagster succeeding at the "workplace" scale even if it can't compete at the "town" scale?
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I don't know if they're succeeding, but they certainly seem to have refocused on offering their bike share as an amenity for property managers, resorts, hotels, and campuses. It looks like a scheme that would work well for small self-contained systems.

While Hubway looks incredibly expensive on the surface, there's a big benefit for towns in the region to stick with that system and extend it out a bit beyond the urban core.

Zagster approached Provincetown a year or so ago about doing a bike share out here on Cape Cod, but that discussion didn't go anywhere.
 
If a property manager within a traditional bike share service area is setting up a service like Zagster, they're targeting the out-and-back users running errands or going for a recreational ride. I think the capital costs are cheaper than paying for Hubway to set up a dock and bikes.

Speaking of Hubway competition, I wonder if any of the dockless Chinese bike sharing start ups decide to start serving Boston. Bluegogo is starting service in San Francisco this year and will probably be the first of its kind in America. In China the companies can make a profit off a bike if it can survive for only three months out on the street, and costs for the users is something like a dime per trip.
 
Brookline ruled out having any bike lane treatments on Babcock Street after two years of meetings. The design alternatives over the years included everything from basic painted bike lane to Danish-style separated bike lanes in each direction to a total reimagining of the street that made it one-way for cars and installed a two-way bike lane. After all of those were shot down by neighbors the city went back and looked at even more options, including routing people on bikes off Babcock and onto local side streets.

In the end they picked Option 4, sharrows and raised crosswalks, after a difficult meeting:

Removing parking for bike lanes had been removed previously from the options because of the large turn-out at previous meetings of people opposed to removal of car parking. We were fortunate to have several excellent pro-bike people speaking including Anne Lusk who lives in Brookline.

I was disgusted at the eye rolling and whispering and head shaking by people seated near me at anything that had to do with bikes.They even did that with Anne Lusk who was speaking about her efforts of bringing cycling to elderly communities and her research that biking is a much better exercise for the brain than walking to prevent Alzheimer's. No one is more articulate than Anne Lusk, a renowned researcher.
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^Sad but understandable. It will take another generation of bad traffic before people prefer non-car to car.

Meanwhile, is there any chance of getting more bike facilities to along and from the D branch in Brookline?

I know it is impossible on many stretches along, but are there any possibles left?

And how about to/from?
 
The fact that Brookline, a city where every resident who has a car MUST have an off-street parking space, cannot even remove a few on-street spaces from one street in order to create bike lanes, is totally embarrassing and shows that the politicians' supposed commitment to bike safety is a total farce.
 
^It is a town, not city. Representative government won - the people on Babcock don't want it.

And this is ok. It's not some huge, lamentable tragedy. Babcock is a pretty safe street already and I've never felt it's a priority road for bike infrastructure. It's also not the most critical of urban connections... If the state can force a crossing thru beacon yards, that will change, of course. When they finally repave it, it will increase the speeds, potentially, but I'm glad they're going to put in crosswalks. Yes, it would be nice if bike projects sailed thru every time, but this one wasn't top priority by any means, in my opinion.
 
autonomy said:
This was a surprising find - Christian Herter Park (across the Charles from Mount Auburn Cemetery)
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It makes great sense for every DCR parking lot whernever:
- there's no obvious transit nearby
- there's good bike infrastructure nearby
- it is within biking distance of "bikey" employers (Boston & Cambridge)

There's one at Dilboy Field which is only marginally walkable to the 80/94 Buses on Boston Ave and is far from the 87/88 Busses on Broadway, but has a new paved path along the Alewife Brook Parkway.

I don't see it being well used (OK, I've never seen a bike rack more than 1 car parked there) but at the cost of only a few signs it is a worthy experiment.
 
Arlington said:
It makes great sense for every DCR parking lot whernever:
- there's no obvious transit nearby
- there's good bike infrastructure nearby
- it is within biking distance of "bikey" employers (Boston & Cambridge)

There's one at Dilboy Field which is only marginally walkable to the 80/94 Buses on Boston Ave and is far from the 87/88 Busses on Broadway, but has a new paved path along the Alewife Brook Parkway.

I don't see it being well used (OK, I've never seen a bike rack more than 1 car parked there) but at the cost of only a few signs it is a worthy experiment.
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Map of locations: http://www.parkandpedalmap.org/#/map/
 
The Boston Cyclists Union has a write-up of the four options for Inman Square:

http://bostoncyclistsunion.org/uncategorized/a-better-solution-for-inman-square/

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I think that "Bend Cambridge" does the best job of giving today's cyclists a better trip through Inman. Most bike traffic is on Hampshire Street and that proposal gives them a simple and direct single-light trip through the square.

The Roundabout proposal is really intriguing though. It introduces more complexity for the Hampshire Street cyclists but probably does a better overall job of balancing bike traffic from other directions, and is definitely the best option for people walking.
 
I think all of these are over complicating things.

I think the peanut with stop signs and without the bike lanes would be a great solution. Everyone stops before entering the peanut. Cars and bikes proceed through the peanut in a single lane with a posted speed limit of 15mph. Everyone in the peanut yields to pedestrians in the zebra crossing.

It is easy for anyone to understand even the first time they drive through it and it eliminates to ridiculous conflict of bikes crossing auto traffic without a signal as depicted in the peanut above. The only downsides to anyone are that bikes have to merge with autos, which I actually think is the safest thing in this case, and cars have to go as slow as a bicycle for about 500 feet. I think that is a pretty fair trade off in exchange for a simple, orderly intersection.
 
fattony said:
I think all of these are over complicating things.

I think the peanut with stop signs and without the bike lanes would be a great solution. Everyone stops before entering the peanut. Cars and bikes proceed through the peanut in a single lane with a posted speed limit of 15mph. Everyone in the peanut yields to pedestrians in the zebra crossing.

It is easy for anyone to understand even the first time they drive through it and it eliminates to ridiculous conflict of bikes crossing auto traffic without a signal as depicted in the peanut above. The only downsides to anyone are that bikes have to merge with autos, which I actually think is the safest thing in this case, and cars have to go as slow as a bicycle for about 500 feet. I think that is a pretty fair trade off in exchange for a simple, orderly intersection.
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If you're going to spend a good chunk of money on improvements, then full separation is preferred. Even with cars traveling slowly, parents and their children won't feel safe biking through in a shared lane. That's the main goal here: safety for everyone.
 
The peanut really is a great place making device, especially if they do a good job on the parklet in the middle. Inman right now is ill defined as a square. I'd be for this one, even though it would probably make a traffic disaster here.
 
FK4 said:
The peanut really is a great place making device, especially if they do a good job on the parklet in the middle. Inman right now is ill defined as a square. I'd be for this one, even though it would probably make a traffic disaster here.
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The middle island is not designed to be accessible, so I'd hesitate calling it a parklet. Note the lack of crosswalks to it. The red brick you see is an apron for large trucks to ride on to make the turns that normal cars can do on the regular road only. Regardless, I agree overall that the peanut gives Inman a sense of place that it currently lacks due to the wide expanses of pavement.
 
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