- Bicycle Resource Guide
-
The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission (SCCRTC) bike
committee is preparing
a Resource Reference Guide for bike-related organizations and
conditions in Santa Cruz County. This guide may be on paper, on the
web, or both.
Work to be done includes collecting existing material, writing new
material, and organizing the whole into a coherent web site or
publication.
Many of the papers done in this class should be suitable for inclusion
in the guide.
The SCCRTC staff would also like a web form set up for submitting
information on events or organizations.
- Bike Bibliography
- Compose an annotated bibliography of books, articles, and videos
on bicycle planning and activism. Identify local libraries,
government agencies, bookstores, bikes organizations, and (maybe)
individuals who have copies of the pieces. (Like many of the other
projects, this one would be most useful if put on the worldwide web.)
- Jahva House Parking
- For several years there has been a bike parking problem on Union
Street, with bikes parked blocking the narrow sidewalk or restricting
fire exits from the buildings. Various proposals have been made by
People Power, by City staff, by the Downtown Commission, and by the
owner of the building that Jahva House is located in. These proposals
are all in direct conflict, and several of them would not solve the problem.
No action has ever been taken.
Prepare a report on the history of the parking problem, analyzing the
proposed solutions, and suggesting a course of action for City Council
to resolve the problem. Be sure to consider the positions of all
stakeholders, not just the property owner or the bicyclists.
- Bike parking devices
- There are many bike parking devices on the market, some of which
are in use at UCSC and around the county. There have also been
guidelines written about how to choose and install bike parking.
Write a report that gathers much of this information into one place
(preferably on the web), adding commentary about the suitability of
different designs for different parking needs.
- Santa Cruz bike accident statistics
- The various jurisdictions in Santa Cruz County all keep records
of bike accidents (with varying degrees of detail and ease of access).
Analyze a fairly comprehensive set (perhaps use methods like those of
the Cross study) to identify what types of accidents are the biggest
hazards and what the primary causes are.
- Java applet
- If there is a hot-shot programmer in the class, it might be fun
to write a Java applet to do plots of speed vs. power, slope, drag, or
other parameters with an interactive control on the web. The user
would specify what variables he or she wishes plotted and what values
to use for the other values. Menus of some sort can be provided for
typical values. The formulas are quite simple, and typical values are
available for most of the parameters---everything here is user interface.
It might be a good idea for whoever picks this project to first use a
standard tool (like mathematica, maple, or gnuplot) to play with the
formulas. Other formulas (like cross-slope, design speed, and radius
of curvature for turns) could also be implemented.
- Inventory a corridor
- Pick an important bike commute corridor, such as Soquel between
Santa Cruz and Aptos or El Rancho and Glen Canyon between Santa Cruz
and Scotts Valley, and examine it carefully for hazards. Report all
hazards with suggested improvements (some may be cheap, others may be
outrageously expensive) in a detailed project proposal. If carefully
done, this may serve as the basis for a funding proposal for doing the
improvements!
The SCCRTC bike committee is building an inventory of all
publically-owned bike facilities in existence or planned throughout
the county.
This inventory should include detailed information about the facility,
including utility, lane widths, hazards, funding, and other information.
(Note: I use "facility" rather than "bikeway", since this should
eventually include bike parking facilities as well.)
The SCCRTC staff has set up the database and interns have begun filling in
information, but there is a lot of information that can only be
obtained by cycling the routes repeatedly, making frequent stops to
take notes and make measurements.
Photgraphs of hazards might also be useful to have.
- Bikes on transit
- Prepare a report on the various approaches
(successful and not) to bikes on transit.
To aid the research on this, I have a
voluminous file of e-mail correspondence (almost half a megabyte),
plus
pointers to other sources.
- City of Santa Cruz bike ordinances
- Put the City of Santa Cruz ordinances relevant to bicyclists
on-line. Prepare commentary on them, comparing them to better and
worse ordinances elsewhere. Suggest specific changes that would
improve bike transportation in santa Cruz. (Similar projects could be
done for other local jurisdictions, including the county, and the
cities of Scotts Valley, Capitola, and Watsonville.
- Bicycle education for children
- Work with local schools and the Community Traffic Safety
Coalition to teach proper cycling to children. Prepare a report on
some of the approaches that work and some of the difficulties encountered.
Resources include Jeanne LePage's locally produced videos (in English
and Spanish) and the Kids I Effective Cycling (TM) program.
- Effective Cycling Instructor Certification
- Get certified to teach Effective Cycling (TM) courses, and
prepare some teaching materials for other Effective Cycling
Instructors to use.
- Prepare a grant application: close-call hotline
- Prepare a
grant application to try to get funding for a close-call
hotline, that is, a number cyclists can call to report
near-accidents. There are a lot of incidents of right-hooks, failure
to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, passing too close, being forced
off the road, and other life-endangering close calls, but the police
generally won't take a report unless there is actual contact between
the motorist and the cyclist. By creating a place to document these
incidents, we can raise awareness of them within the government
bureaucracy, and possibly get better engineering or enforcement of
traffic laws in particularly hazardous areas.
The idea has supposedly been tried in Boulder, CO, and it might be
worth reporting on their experience, before attempting something
similar here.
- Bike map in yellow pages
- In the San Francisco Bay Area, bike maps have been put in the
yellow pages of the phone book. It might be an interesting project
to try to get the county bike map into the local phone books.
- Proposal for signs for cyclists
- Various informal proposals have been made for providing more
information to cyclists, without adding to the motorist sign clutter.
These include ideas like putting maps on the backs of signs for
motorists, putting a "tourist welcome" kiosk at the city limits on
Highway 1 from the North, with bike maps and other information useful
to bike tourists, adding some directional information saying where
bike lanes and paths lead (like the path to Harvey West), ...
A more detailed formal proposal that could be used as a grant
application would be useful.
Here are a bunch of possible topics provided by Rick Hyman, a local
bicycle advocate with a Masters degree in city and regional planning.
He has volunteered to advise students who choose one of the projects
he is interested in.