Encouraging Active Transportation in Tucson By: Loran Shamis Mentor: Arlie Adkins, PhD. Sbe 498 Fall 2015 Table of Contents
Figure 15: Lester St and Mountain Ave (Google Street View) Figure 16: Lester Ave and Mountain Ave (Google Street View)
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Figure 15: Lester St and Mountain Ave (Google Street View) Figure 16: Lester Ave and Mountain Ave (Google Street View) Figure 17: Lester St and 4th Ave (Google Street View) Figure 18: Lester St and 4th Ave (Google Street View) Investment Balance Case Study: Portland, ORThe 2014 Regional Active Transportation Plan for Portland, Oregon states that $10 million per year is dedicated to active transportation. This funding would improve and expand bicycle and pedestrian networks. The study also recommends tripling this figure in the future to $30 million per year in order to achieve infrastructure and ridership targets and goals in a timelier manner. Declaring a minimum annual amount towards improving the active transportation system demonstrates Portland’s dedication and thus declaring the balance in the transportation network as a whole. Currently, the Portland Bureau of Transportation has twenty-three neighborhood greenway projects. These greenways, also known as bike boulevards, are designed in order to give priority over to pedestrians, bicyclists and neighbors. They serve low volumes of vehicular traffic at lower speeds of 20 mph. By designing these Greenways to prioritize bicyclists and pedestrians, these neighborhoods see less than 1,500 automobiles a day. These greenways stretch across the city into different sections of Portland. Presently, Portland has about 80 miles of Neighborhood Greenways. In Oregon’s 20 14 Regional Active Transportation Plan, it has been decided that simply equally weighing the priority of each mode of transportation can help to approach the issues more holistically. Creating one integrated plan can help to focus on the system as a whole and not as competing entities.
The Minneapolis Bicycle Program has also reported that bicycle commuting work trips have doubled from about 2 percent in 2000 to nearly 4 percent in 2009, a time period when over $50 million was invested in increasing the mileage of bicycle facilities (Minneapolis Bicycle Master Plan, 2011). In the 2011 Minneapolis Bicycle Master Plan at least $284 million has been dedicated to bicycle projects with an additional $3 million dedicated to non-infrastructure. This equates to about $10 million per year in order to achieve goals within a 30-year timeframe (Minneapolis Bicycle Master Plan, 2011). This plan also identifies how much will be required to be spent annually in order to operate, maintain and implement non-infrastructure initiatives. The Martin Olav Sabo Bridge is also a great example of the priority Minneapolis provides to active commuters. Many citizens opposed the $5 million that were invested in a bridge only to be used by cyclists and pedestrians. Adding bike lanes and traffic signals to the Hiawatha Avenue (the road residing below the bridge) or investing that money into another transportation project that would benefit motorists would have muted all the opposition; however, the city saw the opportunity to encourage more residents to commute actively and now the bridge provides infrastructure to thousands of riders daily. Another tactic to prioritize active commuters in Minneapolis and costs relatively no money is reversing stop signs. In areas where more bike riders move through intersections, city engineers thought it was be beneficial to active commuters to reverse stop signs. Stopping and going on a bike takes a copious amount of effort and energy, so commuting, uninterrupted, would encourage more people to switch from driving to biking. Also, by requiring frequent stops for vehicles is a traffic calming strategy, which discourages motorized through traffic in areas with high volumes of active commuters. Investment Balance Case Study: Austin, TXOne of the strategies Austin has implemented in order to prioritize and, therefore, encourage more citizens to commute actively is by improving the infrastructure they already invested and making the infrastructyre function more efficiently. For instance, Austin installed a pedestrian and bicycle bridge over Little Walnut Creek, costing about $1.2 million for solely the bridge (Anderson, 2014). However, the streets leading up to the bridge were viewed as unsafe resulting in few actually utilizing the bridge. Rather than accepting the bridge as a failure and forfeiting the efforts to making the system more efficient, the city invested another $20,000 in order to install protected bike lanes (Anderson, 2014). The bridge now successfully connects an elementary school to a neighborhood north of the creek, allowing many young children to arrive safely to school without the use of a vehicle. This is an excellent example of how prioritizing bicyclists and pedestrians does not demand on large sums of monetary investment but can occur from improving infrastructure allowing it to function at its full potential. 
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