Mosh Pit 2013-11-13

  • Grand Forks hits up the federal government for street projects: The City Street Beat
    • 42nd Street
    • Multi-use path on Columbia Road
    • Multi-use path on DeMers
    • Speed-minder radar signs
    • Various road work, but interestingly enough the roundabout, Kennedy Bridge, and Washington Street rail overpass are on the list
  • $500,000 price tag on bikeshare in Fargo: InForum
  • Meanwhile, alternatives exist that might be cheaper for Grand Forks: Facebook (if you know any of these folks)
  • Grand Forks Streets was quoted on Streetsblog last year: Streetsblog.net

Public Input Meeting: Long-Range Transportation Plan

The City Street Beat blog is getting better all the time, and I recommend reading and commenting.  Brandi Jewett seems like she’s open to questions and will work to find the answers.

She posts:
“A public input meeting will be held from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Nov.13 [Wednesday] in the Training Room of the East Grand Forks City Hall to discuss updating the cities’ Long Range Transportation Plan.

The meeting will utilize an open house format with a formal presentation at 6 p.m..”

Be Thankful

I started posting here in order to engage people so we could make life better here in Grand Forks.  If some of my recent posts have been negative, I want to stress that most of the time, this isn’t how I feel.  Travel is one of those things that seems to be common ground for people to complain about, and I get sucked into it as much as anyone else.  Although things aren’t perfect here, I am thankful that we don’t see many fatal crashes, that we don’t need ghost bikes, and that there isn’t any “war on cars” rhetoric.

Let’s focus on the good and make it better.

Beating the Light at 5th St and 2nd Ave N

If you’re on a bicycle approaching 5th and 2nd (Central High School) from the west, the light will trip if you spend that last block in the exact middle of the left-turn lane (the one nearest the yellow line).  I don’t know if there is a camera sensor or one in the ground, but this seems to be working for me.  I generally stop in the crosswalk so people in cars can pull up to the stop line and trip things if I haven’t managed to.

Oh, and it’s not just Grand Forks that has this problem.

“Rules of the Road” and People on Bicycles

Motorists of Grand Forks, with all the love in the world:

If I (on a bicycle) am stopped at a stop sign with my foot down, and you are on the cross street with no stop sign, you do not need to stop and wave at me.  I can see you just fine, and I’ll go after you’re out of the intersection.  While you’re waving at me, another car is sneaking around to your right.

If I (on a bicycle) am arriving at a four-way stop and there are other cars already waiting, the other cars get to go first, because they were there first.  You do not need to wave at me, because I know how to wait in line.  You especially do not need to get all huffy when I don’t jump the queue and then stomp on the gas.

Just because I am riding near Central at 7:50 AM does not mean I’m a high school student, and especially doesn’t mean that I am completely ignorant of all traffic laws and common courtesy.  You may think you’re being nice by waving at me, but you’re really just breaking the rules of the road and holding up even more people who are trying to get somewhere.

Officially No Reason for Grand Forks not to have Bike Share

“In its vision statement, Nice Ride says one of its goals is to increase access to bikes and create vibrant town centers in outstate Minnesota. Plans are rolling along to do that next summer in Bemidji, said spokesman Anthony Desnick. Nice Ride picked the northern Minnesota community of 13,400 because of its coffee shops, hotels, and access to regional trails.
“It met the litmus test of being a place where tourists could go for two or three days and not have to use a car to get around,” Desnick said. The hope is that locals then would see how feasible biking is and hop on.”

http://www.startribune.com/local/229475001.html

Public Input Meeting – 42nd Street MUP

http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/275310/group/homepage/

A public input meeting on a new bike and running path on Grand Forks’ South 42nd Street will be held 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday [October 15th] at Century Elementary School, the city said.  The proposed path would extend from 17th Avenue South to 24th Avenue South. City and state representatives will be available to answer questions. 
To submit written comments, send them by Oct. 30 to David Kuharenko, Engineering Department, P.O. Box 5200, Grand Forks, ND 58206 or dkuharenko@grandforksgov.com with “Public Input Meeting” in the subject heading.

I am in favor of a multi-use path if it is 1) wide enough to classify as such, and not a sidewalk, and 2) placed on the side of the road that is least likely to have additional driveways/curbcuts installed as development proceeds along this section.  I think these points are important because multi-use paths are no safer than sidewalks if there are many auto crossings.  See Idaho’s metrics as cited here:

  • >8 crossings per mile, recommend against a multipath in favor of on-street facility
  • 5-8 crossings per mile, proceed with caution and consider on-street facility
  • 1-4 crossings per mile, use special care.
Building wide sidewalks (meaning that they contain many crossings and are not designed for higher-speed bicycle use) and calling them multi-use paths may come off as an attempt to artificially inflate the number of multi-use paths in town.  I don’t think this is the case, but I would rather see on-street bicycle facilities along streets that have more driveways than the block of 42nd Street in question.

Remembering Amy Dombroski

The last few days have been devastating to the American cycling community.  Cyclocross rider Amy Dombroski died after being involved in a crash with a truck while training in Belgium.  There are any number of articles out there already about her and the crash, but it’s not my place to rehash stuff other people have said.

I didn’t know Amy.  I never met her, and although I may follow professional cycling a little more closely than the average American, I can’t say for certain that I would have remembered her name.  What matters, though, is that she mattered to a great many people, not just in cyclocross, but across the American cycling scene. The outpouring of grief and memories over the last few days from people who knew Amy has been overwhelming.  I’ve been affected by it, and have been struggling to figure out exactly why.  If I didn’t know her, if she wasn’t a household name, why does her death strike such a particular chord.

Death waits for us all, as they say, and the chilling part about Amy’s death is how similar my own could be–and how out of the blue.  We both grew up in Vermont, 20 miles away from each other.  She was a few years younger than me, and much more experienced on a bike.  On Wednesday night I was beating myself up in a cyclocross training race; on Thursday an amazingly popular American cyclocross rider was dead.  I cycle commute to work every day, year-round; and I wonder: how much until my time runs out?

It’s inspiring to see the cycling community come together around a loss of one of our own, and I hope we can all learn to continue on–not as different groups, divided by the width of our tires or the speed with which we feel comfortable, but as people who share a love for two wheels under our own power.  Amy, we’ll all miss you.

Amy Dombroski, by Roxanne King on Flickr.