DCNR Forming Next Gen Advisory Council
Transportation-Burdened Households Both Urban & Rural
DIY Webinar: Introducing NotJustBikes
BikeLeague Report: "Reconnecting to the New Majority"
What's In a Word? Micro-mobility
Infrastructure Insights From the Interwebs
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DCNR is looking for people to take part in a “Next Gen Advisory Council” to help inform the agency’s work, advance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and create lasting change and necessary conditions to ensure Pennsylvanians of all backgrounds and zip codes feel welcome on public lands. Input from the Council will be used to identify new approaches to DCNR’s programs, facilities, and other opportunities in order to help the agency find effective ways to engage in its mission and to provide an ongoing communication channel between DCNR and the broad range of current and potential DCNR customers.
There is no age limit proposed for the Council; the agency is hoping that the public will help to identify young (or young at heart) people who feel that they can represent the next generation in conservation and recreation. Interested people can apply at the link below. Once selected, the group will work with DCNR staff and a professional facilitator. DCNR looks forward to working with and learning from Pennsylvania’s next generation of conservation and recreation enthusiasts and leaders. The deadline to apply is January 16. Please share this link with your networks!
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In the United States, the more money you make, the lower a percentage of your income you spend on transportation. And conversely, the less you make, the greater the percentage of your income that goes to moving around. We tend to focus on the economic burden of housing for people with limited resources and consider rules of thumb suggesting one aim to devote no more than 25 to 30% of income toward that, but for people in the lowest two income quintiles in the US, they are spending on average from 22 to 30% of their income on transportation! Given how averages work, this means a subset is spending even more than that!
While recommendations to address housing burden with alternative housing arrangements and rent subsidies are commonplace, we tend to simply assume that transportation costs are fixed. And, in effect, given the infrastructure we have, they often are. People are locked into trying to obtain a car or struggling without access to one in large parts of the country. This is not, however, the only way it could work. A different fee and tax structure for driving makes for greater equity, with no one being disproportionately burdened. These costs hit people at the low end of the income spectrum hard no matter where they live: in urban, suburban, and rural areas.
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At the beginning of the year, you may note a slight lag in transportation world webinars. It is not your imagination. This week, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) hosts their annual convening and thousands of transpo professionals converge on DC. This means they are presenting papers and holding meetings amongst themselves and not offering webinars for the rest of us.
This makes for a great opportunity to devote a little time to exploring either past webinars you didn’t get around to watching or, if you’re up for something new, I will recommend a YouTube channel right up the Active Transportation alley. Introducing Not Just Bikes! This is an extremely well-done video channel offered by a Canadian living in the Netherlands looking at infrastructure in detail. He does a great job of providing excellent footage (often comparing different places in North America, like his hometown of London, CA, and different parts of Amsterdam). He is not an urban planner or transportation professional by training, but that actually seems to make his communication skills all the better. He has a lot of material available and we all should be wary of just letting the algorithm guide us, so instead I’m sharing here two separate pieces that have the most relevance for us here in Pennsylvania. In one he talks about how the Netherlands, while it is known as a bicycle wonderland, is ALSO the best place to drive a car. And in the other, he talks about how the direct routes for people and indirect routes for cars that are a key feature of woonerfs work.
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In 2021 the League of American Bicyclists released a new report called “Reconnecting to the New Majority.” It is a follow-up to a joint report they issued in 2013 with the Sierra Club entitled “The New Majority: Pedaling Towards Equity.”
On the bikeleague.org website, they note that “People of all races, incomes, and ages want safer bicycling — that comes across clearly in the League’s research and data analysis conducted for the report. New and continued investments are critical to making bicycling safe, comfortable, and accessible to all, particularly in BIPOC communities where underinvestment has inhibited the development of a transportation system that serves all people. Other select findings in the report include: 1) Demographic shifts in who bikes, including an increase in Latinx and Hispanic ridership and a decline in the number of Black people bicycling; 2) We have seen significant increases in bicyclist deaths due to drivers of motor vehicles between 2013 and 2019 — and as documented in 2013, the people who are experiencing traffic violence continue to be disproportionately people of color; 3) People across all demographic groups believe their community would be a better place to live if bicycling were safer and more comfortable; and 4) People in most demographic groups believe better bicycling infrastructure, like bike lanes and trails, will lead to them biking more often but bike lanes and trails alone are not enough to encourage all people to bike more often." (But wait; there's more...)
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If your community has not yet experienced dockless bikeshare or the arrival of e-scooters, you may think micro-mobility is a new concept. On the one hand, it is new enough that we are still contesting exactly what it refers to, and in the case of the aforementioned e-scooters, deciding whether or not to declare them street legal per the PA Motor Vehicle Code. At the same time, though, it is actually a new term to refer to a broad category of in many cases long-extant things.
According to Wikipedia, “micro-mobility refers to a range of small, lightweight vehicles operating at speeds typically below 15 mph and driven by users personally. Micromobility devices include bicycles, e-bikes, electric scooters, electric skateboards, shared bicycles, [wheelchairs] and electric pedal-assisted bicycles. Initial definitions [indicated] a gross vehicle weight of less than 1,100 lbs. However, the definition has evolved to exclude devices with internal combustion engines and those with top speeds above 28 mph.” The wiki entry includes a list of types, though it does not get into the growing subset of cargo bicycles, including pedal-powered delivery vehicles. No doubt those will be suitable fodder for a future newsletter entry.
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What's an early January email update without a reference to New Year's Resolutions? |
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Personal Health
The Guardian offers a list of 100 easy resolutions to incorporate into your life. We particularly like #37, shown here. (*US stat: 50% of trips under 3 miles.)
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Community Health
This writer invited people to revisit his pre-pandemic list of civic resolutions, a third of which are directly active-transportation-related. Holds up!
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Safe travels near and far!
Sam Pearson
M: 781.366.0726
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