One Street News
July 2012
Vol. 5, Issue 6
Uganda Trip Momentum
It’s taken some time to raise the funds, but we recently passed the mark to make this next trip a sure a thing. Thanks to all of our trip supporters for your invaluable donations as well as your patience as we watched the budget creep toward the green light!
The trip is now planned for January 2013 when our executive director, Sue Knaup will return to Bwindi in southwest Uganda to offer the leaders of Ride 4 a Woman (R4W) next level training in bicycle repair, organization development and train-the-trainer concepts so they can teach their women members how to ride and repair bicycles. This upcoming trip will build on the success of Sue’s first trip back in January 2011. Read all about it on our One Street to Uganda webpage.
We are still about $2,000 short of our ideal fundraising target, but passing this fundraising mark that covers Sue’s travel costs and basic supplies for R4W allowed us to send out a press release in July inviting more supporters to help. Every additional dollar we receive toward the trip will now go into the purchase of bicycles and/or the construction of R4W’s bicycle repair workshop at their Women’s Community Centre.
Since the press release went out, we have received a few small donations that will go toward the purchase of one bicycle for R4W’s programs. Each bicycle costs about $100. The workshop construction will cost about $1,000.
All of us at One Street and Ride 4 a Woman will be exceedingly grateful for all donations, large or small, between now and the end of the year to ensure that Sue’s trip can also include the purchase of these precious additions. Find all the steps for donating here. Be sure to note “Uganda trip” with your donation to ensure we direct it to these important purchases.
If you know of other people who would be interested in helping, please forward the link to the One Street to Uganda webpage. Thanks to all of you for your help and ongoing support!
Resources – Backyard Metal Casting
This month we’re straying a bit away from bicycle-specific resources to offer you one of our favorite discoveries as we develop our bicycle shift lever. Regular readers will recall that we are in the midst of designing this simple shift lever that will be reparable by anyone using common parts. The design is now down to six total parts including two that will be cast out of scrap aluminum – the lever and the base that sits on the handlebar. Beyond the design, we are also solving the step-by-step process for melting scrap aluminum and the casting process that anyone can set up in their backyard.
Appropriately, Backyard Metal Casting is a site we return to frequently as we work through this wondrous journey. If you have the slightest curiosity about metal casting and how crafts people all over the world continue the primitive methods of melting and forming metal, we’re sure you will enjoy their site.
Hot Topics – Centerline Removal
By: Tom Bertulis, PE
As biking and walking become more popular, an exciting new type of road design feature is catching momentum around the world. It’s called “centerline removal” and it has myriad benefits. It is a difficult concept for many to grasp as centerlines came on the scene 100 years ago as a safety measure. The idea is that they keep drivers in their lane and allow drivers to keep their speeds up. It turns out that centerlines do three things:
- increase speeds,
- decrease separation between motor vehicles, and
- decrease peripheral acuity.
Consequently, they decrease safety for road users on the periphery, which is where we find cyclists and pedestrians. As we enter this era of prioritizing non-motorized users, we are finding less need for centerlines for two lane roads in built up urban areas.
Further study is needed, but preliminary research shows that removing centerlines even improves safety for motorists. A four-year study on a dozen roads in Wiltshire County, England showed a 35% reduction in crashes by removing centerlines. The “uncertainty” of knowing where their vehicle belongs on the road can actually make motorists drive more cautiously.
Another benefit to removing centerlines is the ability to install advisory bike lanes. Advisory bike lanes simply have dashed lines instead of solid and the bi-directional motor vehicle space in the center of the road is less than the width of two standard travel lanes. Motorists only enter the bike zone when there are no cyclists present. The sense of comfort is increased for cyclists as they are given their own space on the road.
Centerline removal and advisory bike lanes are common and even ubiquitous in many European cities, but they are only now starting to catch on in the United States. There are several U.S. examples. Traffic guidelines in Pasadena, California, now recommend removing centerlines for certain low traffic roads. Berkeley, California has a policy to never stripe centerlines on bicycle boulevards. There is a proposal for a centerline removal in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. Portland, Oregon, has included advisory bike lanes in their new design guide.
In August 2011, Minneapolis became the first U.S. city to follow European precedent by installing six foot wide advisory bicycle lanes with only 14 feet in the center of the roadway for two directions of car travel. After the success of this centerline removal and installation of advisory bicycle lanes in Minneapolis, two nearby suburbs have elected to try advisory lanes as well.
Most stunning is that the state’s transportation department, MinnDOT, rejected five foot wide bike lanes squeezed between seven foot parking and ten foot travel lanes. But once the centerline removal concept was suggested, they were happy to install six foot wide advisory bike lanes next to an 18 foot bi-directional travelway for motor vehicles without a centerline. A new frontier has opened …
Read more about it and find photos of these treatments on the Street Design page on One Street’s website. Scroll to the bottom to find the section on centerline removal.
Editor’s note: Tom is a traffic engineer specializing in state-of-the-art street designs that improve the safety of bicyclists and pedestrians. Centerline removal is a key component of many of these designs. If you know of more successful examples than are noted here, please email sue{at}onestreet.org and we will forward your information on to Tom for his further research.