| Re: Buses with racks go a long way
In article <p0oas2pa44267fmk1ro1fr6c95r1p57258@4ax.com>, Joe Fischer wrote:
>On Sat, Wayne Pein <wpein@nc.rr.com> wrote:
>
>>Bill Baka wrote:
>>> No way. The buses are going to run either way, full or empty.
>>
>>If nobody rode busses, there would be no busses. Thus, it is appropriate
>>to allocate an energy/pollution penalty to each user.
>
> Baloney.
>
>>There is no free
>>lunch. You are either a motorist or a non-motorist, and a motorist is
>>either a chauffered passenger or the driver. Further, any bus with a
>>bike rack on it is heavier and thus gets worse gas mileage than one that
>>doesn't whether it gets used for carrying a bike or not. I'm quite
>>certain that the bike racks on any given transit system are used for
>>only a small percentage of the system's trip mileage.
>
> I am not sure, but when reading this thread I
>realized that I haven't seen the bike racks on the
>front of local city buses for a year or more, I need
>check that out.
> It may be because I never saw a bike on
>the racks at any time when I did see buses with
>racks.
>
> Frankly, it is a silly idea in many places.
In Philadelphia, I see these on some buses. Not all, not most, but
some - this appears experimental to me. Often the racks have bikes.
I would advise use of locks that make it hard for a thief to grab your
bike from the rack when your bus runs into a red light or has to
load/unload passengers.
The local transit authority also has prvisions for bringing bikes into
the transit vehicles when space permits. As a result of that, I see the
need for the bus bike racks being limited to cyclists that need to make
use of full buses.
Few of Philadelphia's ghettos are so bad as to be outright barriers to
most commuter cyclists. For example, Broad St goes through "North
Philadelphia", where the murder rate might make Iraq appear not too unsafe
in comparison. However, cyclists passing through during commuting periods
and business hours tend to find their main hazards to be ones typical of
Philadelphia drivers in general as opposed to crime more associated with
"criminal element types" that "North Philadelphia" probably has at least
dozens of busloads of.
Yes, I have been there and done that and made several hundred trips
down and several hundred trips up Broad St from Erie Ave to Center City,
as well as from Philadelphia's "Germantown" area to "Broad & Erie" as a
more northern leg on these trips.
What I see as the best use of bike racks on buses is for getting bike
users through bike-unfriendly bridges, also a few tunnels that I think are
no better for bikes than plenty of bridges!
- Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)
|