Archive for July, 2011

According to a new survey and report, platinum-level Bicycle Friendly Business (BFB) Quality Bicycle Products (QBP) in Bloomington, Minn, has improved employee health and has helped the company save an estimated $170,000 in three years through its “Health Reward” program. The program credits employees $110 towards QBP products in addition to their generous commuter reward program, which pays out $45,000 annually. Both programs are keeping QBP employees healthy, happy and productive.  According to Jason Gaikowski, QBP Marketing Director, their new report “definitely shows that QBP is healthier – and as a result more productive – than the general population. It also clearly indicates that the commuter population health care claims costs are massively lower than claim costs compared to QBP non-commuters.”  If you need prove that it pays to encourage bicycling in the workplace, look no further.

By encouraging QBP employees to commute by bike through 2007-2011, the company found the following:

• The company experienced a 4.4% reduction in per member per month health care costs associated with an estimated 3-year savings of $170,000
• Approximately 100 commuters incurred an estimated 3-year savings of $600,000

• The business benefitted with an annual savings of $301,136 in employee productivity.

Click here to see the full report.

~Alison Dewey
League Bicycle Friendly America Program Specialist

Ms. Dewey joined the League in 2008. For four years prior to that, Dewey worked for Massachusetts- based Landry’s Bicycles and served on the board of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition. Dewey has a MA in International Relations and Communications from Boston University and is a graduate of St. Olaf College. She spent three years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal.

More people are commuting by bicycle every year, thanks to Bicycle Friendly Communities and other motivators like high gas prices. To ensure that motorists and bicyclists are sharing the road safely and learning about the Rules of the Road, AAA and the League of American Bicyclists have partnered to promote safe cycling. We hope to make the roads safer and more enjoyable for everyone. Andy Clarke, president of the League, joins Rhonda Markos, AAA traffic safety specialist, on AAA Talk Radio to chat about our partnership, bike safety facts and tips for motorists and cyclists alike, and why bicycling is moving up the ranks as one of the most popular modes of transportation. Listen to Clarke and Markos’ interview below.

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) held a full Senate Transportation Committee hearing today on their proposed transportation re-authorization bill. The committee heard testimony from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, the Laborers’ International Union of North America President Terence O’Sullivan, Donald James of Vulcan Materials, AASHTO Director Susan Martinovich, Oklahoma DOT Secretary Gary Ridley, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Transportation Policy Director Deron Lovaas, and Greg Cohen of the American Highway Users Alliance.

Panelists were supportive of the idea of a two year bill at current levels, although no additional specifics were shared. Mayor Villaraigosa spoke favorably of the proposed expansion of TIFIA, a federal infrastructure loan program, and the DOT officials praised the streamlining policy changes in the bill. The Senators on the committee spoke of the need for a bill to pass and seemed supportive of this bill and appreciative of the bi-partisan effort that Boxer, Inhofe, and their colleagues put into it. At the end of the session, each panelist promised to work for its passage.

Few new details emerged. Senator Boxer mentioned in passing — during a question to the Mayor about TIFIA — that Safe Routes to School, “bike paths”, and Recreational Trails are in the bill but did not elaborate. The importance of bicycling was also mentioned by Senator Frank Lautenberg and Deron Lovaas, whose written testimony included more extensive mention of bicycle and pedestrian benefits.

We will continue to monitor events as they progress.

In advance of a hearing on Thursday called “Legislative Issues for Transportation Reauthorization,” the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works has released a three page outline of their transportation reauthorization bill. The outline is light on details — and that’s where the devil is. We hope to learn more on Thursday.

So far, the outline is consistent with what we had heard. Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, as the Sentate version of the bill is known, authorized federal transportation spending for two-years “while maintaining current spending levels.” It will consolidate the core funding programs into seven:

• The National Highway Performance Program
• The Transportation Mobility Program
• National Freight Program
• Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program
• Highway Safety Improvement Program

The words “bicycle and pedestrian” don’t appear anywhere in the outline – we are hoping that they will make it into the fine print and that dedicated funding will appear in the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program at the very least.

Be prepared to take action in the days ahead.

Does your local transportation agency have a strong project that is multi-modal, non-traditional, and hard to fund through traditional channels? If so, federal TIGER 3 funds might be the right source for it.

Secretary LaHood has announced $527 million in Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) funds. This is the third round of these merit-based grants, hence the short-hand, TIGER 3. Today the USDOT held a webinar, “Lessons on How to Compete for a USDOT TIGER Grant,” which featured several of the administration’s top transportation policy officials, including Roy Kientz, Polly Trottenberg, and Beth Osborne.

Bicycle and pedestrian projects have done well in the first two rounds of TIGER grants. Sixty-eight of the 125 successful TIGER grants included bicycle and/or pedestrian components in their project descriptions. Several funded projects were stand-alone bicycle and pedestrian projects, like the Philadelphia Area Bicycle Network and the Indianapolis Bicycle and Pedestrian Network funded in the first round. Several Complete Streets projects were also funded. See here, here, and here for past TIGER projects that include bicycle and pedestrian components.

Highlights today’s panel are below. Most of the advice is fairly general. However, I did have a chance to ask the panel for advice on how to get stand-alone bike/ped projects funded and how to get bicycle and pedestrian components included in larger projects, and for advice on measuring the impact of the project.

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In a press conference this morning, John Mica (R-FL), chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the House, announced his proposal for the next surface transportation re-authorization bill. He said the proposal would cost $230 billion over six years — a reduction of 33 percent from the last 6 year bill. (Update: 22 page outline now online.) That’s fine — the alarming thing is that the proposal eliminates dedicated funding for bicycling and walking, including Transportation Enhancements, Safe Routes to School and the Recreational Trails Program, and discourages states from choosing to spend their dollars on these activities that are “not in the federal interest.”

Meanwhile on the Senate side,  James Inhofe (R-OK), the lead Republican negotiator on the transportation bill, declared that one of his TOP THREE priorities for the transportation bill is to eliminate ‘frivolous spending for bike trails.’

The League and the America Bikes Coalition have launched a critical advocacy alert. Please contact your Members of Congress and tell them to reach out to Senators Inhofe, Boxer, and Congressman Mica to urge them to continue funding for Transportation Enhancements, Safe Routes to School and Recreational Trails.

League President Andy Clarke blasted the draft bill in a press release today saying:

Whether the next transportation bill is $200 billion or $400 billion is frankly less important than what is done with that kind of investment. Mica’s ‘New Direction’ proposal in fact turns the clock back on decades of hard-fought progress towards a truly multi-modal transportation system that offers American’s real choices. Even with a ‘small’ bill, returning to a 1950′s highways-only mentality flies in the face of fiscal responsibility by guaranteeing more single occupant vehicle travel on ever more congested and dangerous highways that we can’t even afford to maintain, let alone build.

The League calls on Chairman Mica to reinstate dedicated funding for bicycling and walking in his bill. We also ask that the Senate resist the efforts of Senator Inhofe eliminate dedicated funding for bicycling and walking. In addition to being healthy activities, bicycling and walking are valid transportation options, with more than four billion bike trips made annually for trips to work, school, and tourism. Furthermore bicycling and walking projects have the potential to create 46 percent more jobs per million dollars spent than auto-only projects; and bicycling and walking are critical generators of economic activity in communities across this country. Now is the time to be investing in these modes, not cutting them off just as 20 years of investment is starting to bear fruit.

Please join us in this effort. Contact your Members of Congress today!

Bike Delaware has scored a major victory. On Friday, the Delaware General Assembly voted to dedicate $5 million in new funding for bicycling in Delaware.  That’s “more money than the state has ever allocated before,” according to Bike Delaware’s announcement.

Bike Delaware launched their campaign to increase state funding for walking and bicycling this winter. “We recognized the desperate need for direct and strategic funding for bikeway infrastructure and we thought we had a chance of success,” Executive Director James Wilson said, “And we weren’t afraid to fail.”

Bike Delaware worked with several groups, including Delaware Greenways, the Delaware Bicycle Council and, especially, Nemours Health and Prevention Services, to generate support for the new funding. The turning point came, Wilson said, when Senator Venables, a senior and influential state legislator, agreed to write and champion the legislation. Then Governor Jack Markell, a bicycling supporter who once spoke at the National Bike Summit, provided crucial support for the bill. “In other words, Bob Venables loaded the bases. And Jack Markell hit a grand slam,” Wilson wrote in an email to Bike Delaware members.

We are thrilled to see that Bike Delaware is now undertaking a campaign to ensure that the $5 million is used as a local match to leverage federal funds. Federal funds typically require a 20 percent match, which means the $5 million provided by the state could mean $25 million for bicycling in Delaware. We at the League and Alliance for Biking and Walking – the Advocacy Advance Team – are excited to support Wilson and Bike Delaware to make this happen. This is a prime example of a savvy state group working aggressively to increase bicycling and walking spending and leverage federal investments.

Yesterday, the Federal Highway Administration informed state Departments of Transportation of another rescission of funds, this time totaling $2.5 billion. A “rescission”, you may recall, is a mechanism by which states return to Washington various unspent amounts of money that they could have spent but haven’t yet done so. The action is taken under the 2011 Full-year Continuing Appropriations Act. This is the FHWA notice, which includes the total amount of funds each state is to send back to Washington. Not the most entertaining piece of prose you’ll ever read, but hidden within the language is another significant threat to the funds that are available to spend on bicycling improvements.

States are given maximum flexibility about the source of the funds that are rescinded – from among a variety of transportation programs. Most critically for bicycling, the transportation enhancements, congestion mitigation, and recreational trails programs are included in the list of programs. Fortunately, the Safe Routes to School program is not included, so those funds are safe.

States have been given a whole week to respond – that’s right, they got the notice yesterday and have to decide what funds to send back by Friday July 8. The memo recommends that “Division Administrators should encourage their State department of transportation officials to reach out to stakeholders in considering how to implement the rescission,” but our experience has been this really doesn’t happen. Or at least, the bicycle community either isn’t considered a stakeholder worth reaching out to or once reached out to, our views are simply ignored.

We say that because Transportation Enhancement and Congestion Mitigation Air Quality funds have consistently been inequitably targeted for rescissions in most states – and this will likely continue unless State DOT’s hear from their customers. In August, 2010 almost $1 billion of CMAQ, TE and Recreational Trails funds were returned to Washington, out of a $2.2 billion rescission. That means that State Departments of Transportation didn’t spend these funds in the first place – even though they could have been using the funds to build better bicycling infrastructure, provide bicyclist education, install bike parking – and now are choosing instead to send the money back to Washington.

Given the complexity of issue, the short turn-around time, and the fact that there’s a Federal holiday of some note on Monday, it’s a challenge to know how to effectively respond and try to influence the outcome of this rescissions process – however, we have set up an action alert here that you can use. Governors often seem to have little influence over their Departments of Transportation and State DOT directors certainly need to know your concerns but will rarely be the person making the actual decision. If you have a statewide advocacy group in your state, they will be a good place to go for any targeted action or inside information on who to contact and how.

Sorry to rain on your July 4th parades…