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A lot of bikes on Columbus Avenue these days

With the 22 bus just not coming, as he stood there at Columbus Ave. and Cedar Street, Jonas Prang counted bicycles - more than 100 in 22 minutes:

... I'm surprised that there is that much bicycle traffic. I'd noticed that the bicycle traffic in the SW Corridor was much greater than in previous years, but I never expected to count that many bicycles, even at rush hour.

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Of the pedestrians about half were walking on the path marked for bicycles and the other half the sidewalk marked for pedestrians. Were I to regularly walk this route, I too, would be on the bicycle path, for it is farther away from the smelly traffic sewer of Columbus Avenue. I'm sure that would be inconvenient for the righteous bicycle commuters, but I'd still chose to walk as far away from the motorized vehicular traffic as I could.

Crap like this irks the hell out of me. I'm sure you have no problem with the rogue bicyclists that use the sidewalk, as I'm sure they would prefer to be away from smelly, and potentially dangerous, motor vehicles. Right?

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I too was annoyed by his statement regarding walkers mixing into the bike trail. There was a time when it wasn't such a big deal, but given the large and quickly growing number of cyclists (in both directions), pedestrians on the Lalemont trail are becoming a somewhat significant safety issue. There are many sections, especially near 'T stations that require me to continuously weave in and out of pedestrian groups. They do not hear my bell, they do not hear my shout of "bike passing," and they do not walk in a straight line. I find myself almost always riding in packs at this point, and lots of bikes shifting around pedestrians and each other is a recipe for disaster. The walkers need to suck it up and use their own designated path in my opinion. And Mr. Prang can call me righteous if he'd like.

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Gentleman, you might read my response to an Anonymous comment on my site. (Also, I don't know anything about the Lalemont trail.)

Jonas Prang

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is the SW Corridor Park, named in honor of the inventor of the bicycle. Apparently, the dude
lived his last days in Boston, not far from the current location of the path.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Lallement

Jonas, I'm sure you can understand why I took umbrage with that statement. Read any post about
bikes on UH, the comments section on boston.com, etc... there's a lot of anti-bicycle sentiments
out there. Some of it is just, I see dickheads on bikes pulling some very stupid stunts.

The SW Corridor is one of the few spots in the area with a path solely dedicated to bikes, the only other
one I can think of now is the Olmstead park in Brookline. More times than not, there are more people walking
in the "bike" path. One time, I got scolded by a righteous pedestrian for biking in the ped path. He was the
only person walking in that path, where the bike path was packed with baby carriages, rollerbladers, small children. It's really frustrating to try to pass a walker/jogger who is unable to hear your cries of "On your left!" because their iPod is up to 11.

So, I apologize for lashing out. I just hope that if you decide to continue walking on the bike path, you'll stay to the far right, and keep the earbuds to a dull roar.

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The Pierre Lallemont Bike Path! Who knew it had a name? Thanks.

No umbrage taken, The Beer Guy. The good news is that the historical inertia is now solidly on the side of sensible transportation. The bicycle and mass transit can only increase in dense city environments, while the wretched automobile can only decrease.

Now before I tell those kids to get off my lawn, let me say that I always walk to share the road with bicycles and I never have had a bud of any kind in my ear.

Jonas Prang

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The walker/rollerblader/pedestrian (with or without baby carriage)/bicycle mix is becoming increasingly dangerous in several areas. I took an (ill-advised) bicycle trip on the Minuteman "Commuter" Bikeway this weekend - it would have been much safer for me to be riding on Mass. Ave. The congestion on the path, all moving at greatly varying speeds (or not at all - who the hell stops in the middle of a bikeway?!?) made for a very dangerous situation (I realize that this was on a nice holiday weekend, but still).

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In the comments thread, the blogger clarifies:

I know it is tough discerning meaning in a cultural slough of irony, but please take my words at face value. When I described the bicyclists as "righteous," I meant exactly that, that their behavior is morally upright. When presented with the opportunity to slag bicyclists, I may write "sanctimonious" or "self-righteous," but this is not that occasion.

I wasn't on Columbus today, but I was part of a great big pack of cyclists during my commute along Hampshire/Beacon through Cambridge and Somerville. It was totally righteous!

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I often see more cyclists on that run than I do cars. That was true before they formalized the lanes, but now it can get pretty packed. One day it got really crowded at an odd late time - and it turned out that a bunch of folks got tweets about the Red Line being messed up and grabbed their bikes instead.

If you ever want evidence of why bike lanes are getting popular with urban planners, check out rush hour on this stretch. Bikes take up much less space than cars, and so much less space per person that even back-ups at the lights dissolve quickly because more cyclists can physically fit through their lane space than drivers can fit through in cars. Thus the cars jam up, while a similar number of cyclists keep moving.

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You're right. The bike lane was packed this during my commute, and the so-called car lane was sparsely populated. But once when I took the lane to pass a bicycle, a car came racing up behind me and started laying on the horn. People like that make me wish our roads looked more like this.

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Interesting! I bet the average passenger count of any one Orange Line train running nearby isn't much higher than that.

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A single Orange Line car has 58 seats, so a six-car train has 348 seats. In a 22-minute period within the 5:18 to 5:44 PM range, at least four trains are scheduled in each direction, that would be 1392 seats in each direction.
My experience at that time of day is the Orange Line is not "half-empty", at least heading southbound through Roxbury Crossing at 5 PM.

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The capacity of an Orange Line train car is much higher than the seat number. I can't find the numbers now, but I recall a six car Red Line train with 63 seats per car can carry around 1000 people.

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Northbound rush hour, we are talking no personal space whatsoever.

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Hey, I was talking about the average train, and I even did the math.

There are about 150 trains a day in each direction on the Orange Line. That totals a little over 300 trains. The T estimates about 130,000 daily riders according to the Wikipedia article on the Orange Line. But most riders don't go the entire route. Probably the average rider goes about 1/4 of the entire route, or 5 stops. So, take 130,000 riders, divided by 300 trains, and figure about 1/4 of them are on the average train at any average point, and you've got an average passenger load of a little over 100 people.

That kind of math is frustrating for transit planners, but it's reality. Sure, you can't find a seat on the 5:15 train from Downtown Crossing to Forest Hills, but you'll find nearly empty cars going in the other direction from Forest Hills to Ruggles.

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But the bike observation of 100 over 22 minutes was during the rush-hour, so shouldn't the train comparison be? Just as an Orange Line train at 10 PM probably has a lot fewer on board than 5 PM, the number of bikes per hour going along the Southwest Corridor at 10 PM is probably a lot lower than at 5 PM.

Wikipedia is also a little off, Orange Line ridership was 182,071 in 2008 per the stats on the MBTA web site

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Most of us don't like to bike during rush hour. I can think of at least half a dozen reasons why.

Also: for people who work weird hours, bikes are more appealing. Why? Well, if you commute during non-rushhour times, you're probably going to wait twice (or more) as long for a train or bus; in my case, I can bike from work to home in as much time as I would spend simply waiting for the bus outside peak schedule. Or the busses/trains might not be running at all when you get out. Both true for lots of hospital, janitorial, and 'hospitality' staff.

So, the only way you're going to compare them accurately is to do a whole-day survey, and you'll have to do it several times because bike commuting numbers are influenced by season and weather; public transit much less so.

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There are some bikeway counts on line, but many of them look to be focusing on rush-hour, at least within rush-hours, bikeway usage patterns seem to spike at the same key times as road or rail.

http://bostonmpo.org/apps/bike_ped/bike_ped_query.cfm

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Thanks for that link. Here is the link to Southwest Corridor data from 13-MAY-2009. There seems to be some errors, for there are three tallies for bicycles.

It is rank foolishness to draw conclusions from these data and my recent count, but that doesn't stop me.

In a 90 minute span (7:30 am to 9 am, in 15 min intervals: 37, 32, 30, 41, 39, 46), the BostonMPO data show 225 bicycles, on a sunny 65°F day.

IANAS, but in trying to make an hourly figure from that, I get 150/hr. Doing the same for my count gives 227/hr.

Morning commute hours are more compressed than evening commute hours (i.e., per-hour counts are higher), so I'm guessing this shows a significant increase in ridership from 2009 to 2010.

Jonas Prang

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I'm guessing this shows a significant increase in ridership from 2009 to 2010

My day to day riding observations agree. There has been a significant increase over the past two years, probably five-fold at least, so I'm not at all surprised by your data compared to the MPO data.

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I don't dispute that there would be a peak, but I do say that for bikes, traffic is probably much more spread out than other transit methods.

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I just wanted to provide an interesting perspective to the bike count. It's kind of cool to think about the bike traffic being close to an average subway train, but I never meant to suggest that there were as many bicyclists as there are subway riders in the Southwest Corridor, or anywhere else except maybe Beijing. (And probably not there anymore - bicycling in China has dropped way off in recent years.)

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I have noticed an uptick in bike numbers between Packard's Corner and the BU Bridge these days too. I haven't tried to count, but on any given day I probably pass about 10-12 in a 3-5 minute time frame...so if you multiply that by 5-6, you'd end up with about 50-70 bikes in a 22 minute time frame. A few head over the BU Bridge and others go further into the city (even before the new bike lanes were added from Kenmore in).

I don't notice a great number on Comm Ave west of Packard's Corner, so I'm guessing that most come from Allston and are done dealing with the 57/Green Line connection. This also doesn't include any bikes that choose to first cross over Storrow and use the bike/jog path along the river to get downtown instead either.

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I am shocked that an increase in bike lanes has led to an increase in cyclists. SHOCKED.

Could anyone have predicted this?

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