Should cyclists obey the same rules as car drivers?

I have thought a little about this over the last few years and especially since a pedestrian kindly pointed out that "it's red for you too" as I glided perfectly safely though a red like. He was, as I was reminded shortly afterwards, correct.

But should cyclists and drivers be expected to follow the same rules? Henry Graber at the Atlantic Cities thinks that we should Never Fine Cyclists. I don't know if 'never' is the right way to think about it but I agree that there is no reason why bikes and cars should be treated equally.

Fines exist for cars because they put other people and property in danger. The fine is higher the more the (perceived) risk of a manoeuvre has been. The average car weighs about 1.5 tonnes in Europe. You can do a lot more damage with that than with a bike that weighs a few kilos. It also takes longer to stop in a car than on a bike and you can go faster. This makes both the likelihood of doing harm and the level of potential harm higher with a car. It is perfectly reasonable to have different standards. Just like the fines are higher for not following gun rules than for not following knife rules.

Then there are moments that happen quite regularly when it is actually safer if cyclists do not obey rules. While this can also be true for cars (speed to get away from a driver weaving all over the lane), it is likely to be less so because the rules were made for car safety, not bike safety. One nice example of this is crossing an empty junction to avoid a line of stressed rush-hour drivers waiting at the light. Getting ahead of them gets you out of their way. This is especially important on one junction on my morning commute, after which cars slip onto a lane to go right. With the bike lane on the right and cars cutting across lanes, this is an accident waiting to happen. I don't mind admitting that I am happy when I have got though that.

If rules were made for cyclists that were more appropriate then we could enforce those. In the last example, it would mean allowing cyclists to cross a junction earlier than cars. This already happens for pedestrians (in DC at least).

There are other reasons to make rules easier for cyclists. When one person chooses to drive, there is a cost for the community. If we favour cyclists, we would encourage people to cycle rather than drive, reducing the social cost. My bicycle pollutes your children's air less than your car does. It takes up less space, is more social, keeps me fitter (reducing medical costs and making me much nicer to look at :)  ), releases less carbon dioxide and looks cooler than your car (yes, seriously). Society should encourage me to ride.

So when those rules for bikes are designed, they should consider the benefits of biking and the lower risks and design the rules accordingly.

Here is a view from The High Line:

And the end of it:

Urbanisation is good for the environment. If you like nature, keep away from it. In Africa it would allow for larger, more efficient farming to replace smallholders. People are increasingly choosing even difficult city life over rural life because it provides far greater opportunity. Some development workers find this difficult to accept, believing, I think, incorrectly, in some idealistic rural life. The fact is that we don't see the difficult part of rural life but we see very easily urban squalor. More efforts have to be made to make cities better places though. One's surroundings impact heavily on mental health, learning, behaviour, and more. Creating nice spaces in cities is important for mental health and therefore productivity. People need green spaces. Developing countries could probably not justify the resources used for The High Line but more effort to create green, clean spaces in urban Africa and elsewhere could prove beneficial for development and health. An article today reports that poor sanitation has negative effects on economic growth.

Space-saving urban parking

I spotted this mini-multistorey parking in NYC. What a great little compact way to save some space on the street. More space can be made for people, bikes, and other things.

It is a good thing to reduce the amount of space cars take up in urban areas.

Why petrol needs taxing more despite a lack of alternative transport

I had an interesting conversation last night about the necessity to tax petrol more. At least, partly conversation, partly me ranting, but that still counts. 

In the past, I have had conversations with a number of people who have expressed the opinion that petrol can only be taxed more when there are viable alternatives. American cities especially have been built based on petrol prices which do not represent its full marginal social cost. Therefore, there are sprawling suburbs and under-resourced and under-utilised public transport networks, which can be difficult to develop anyway in sprawling cities. People have to drive to get to work and to get to the shops because they live so far away and because they have few public transport options. You can't change this situation without a large change in the urban environment and in public transport alternatives. A sudden increase in petrol taxes would hurt dearly and hit productivity as it may prevent some people from being able to work in a place where they are most productive.

This is all true. Or mostly true. Here are a few counters:

1. A lot of journeys currently made by car can actually be made by other means and an increase in petrol prices should make people think twice about which journeys are most important to make and which to make in the car. 

2. I also wouldn't advocate a sudden sharp rise in petrol taxes but even a slower increase would have negative impacts allowing for behavioural and financial adjustments as well as giving time to develop useful public transport. 

3. I also think that increasing petrol prices would create demand for transport alternatives (including electric cars). It is far from obvious to me that creating transport systems first would work because it is not necessarily easy to predict how people or firms might relocate following a petrol price rise or, given this, what transport types would be most useful. Nor, is it obvious to me that we would ever reach this point of 'sufficient public transport infrastructure' to increase petrol taxes. It is a constantly moving target. Therefore, better to increase taxes and let a mixture of the public and private sector respond to the changes more organically.

But here is something stronger: even if people don't abandon their cars, even if there is no improvement in alternative transport, even if there is no shift to electric cars, even if there is no spacial reallocation of firms and households, petrol taxes still have to increase. And here is why:

The private cost of petrol does not equal the full cost to society; somebody, somewhere in the world is already paying. The suburban commuter might have to pay more for petrol but it is not enough to say that he has to have a good alternative right now because at the moment another person is subsidising his lifestyle. The farmer in Africa who loses his crop to flooding due to climate change really had no alternative. The small businesses that can't survive due to flooding or the child who drops out of school or the American state who has to issue debt to pay for water management to ensure people have enough to drink and water crops are already paying for the difference between the private and the public cost of petrol. These people are making a transfer to the suburban commuter now. 

In most of these cases, these are transfers from the poor to the rich. The poor are hit hardest by climate change and the effects of pollution. They have no choice about these transfers. In this respect, the current situation is comparable to plunder at the very least and potentially an act of war. It is a little as if the suburban American commuter is plundering a defenceless farmer's field and then complaining that his life would be difficult if he didn't do this and he cannot afford to do otherwise. And when we say that we need to provide him with better public transport (which might be true), we are validating his continued plunder. This is unacceptable and cowardly. 

Obviously, not all pollution should be banned and humans cannot exist without polluting but there needs to be a compensating mechanism. More money needs to flow from wealthy countries which do most polluting to poorer ones that suffer most. And individual people, including our suburban commuter, must think twice before infringing on others' rights. The best way to make sure that it is really worth it is to pay the full social cost. Taxes on petrol need to begin rising slowly starting now.

(HT: JM)

How biking can save cities billions of dollars in health expenses

Nearly 70 percent of Americans' car trips are less than two miles long. It's a no-brainer that biking instead of driving to take care of these trips is a great way to get exercise while cutting air pollution. While we've always assumed that the cumulative effect of many individuals making that choice would be longer, healthier lives and cleaner air in our cities, a recent scientific study put some rigor to our hypotheses and proved us right.

Read the full article HERE.

HT: MM

The economic and human costs of high urban pollution

"For the past few days, Beijing has been covered by a thick blanket of smog, forcing the closure of several highways and the cancellation of hundreds of flights. The US embassy in the Chinese capital has warned that air quality has reached hazardous levels and, according to media reports, hospital admissions have risen by almost a third."

THIS short BBC report shows a scientist taking his child out of school because he judges pollution levels too dangerous for the child to be outside. There are increases in hospital admissions as a result of the smog and presumably many work and education days lost to illness. The lost human capital and work effort will directly contribute to lower economic growth this year and for many years to come. A nice illustration of the economic of high pollution.

Bike-sharing in Brașov, Romania

You have to leave some form of ID though and return the bike to the same place. A start though.

Environmentally-friendly hot water in Bucharest, Romania

Below is a cityscape photo I took of Bucharest. The building in the foreground has black pipes which absorb the sun and heat the water inside them. Cool :)

Air pollution in Ankara, Turkey

Here is a photo of Ankara taken from my temporary office window. Notice the thick layer of smog over the city. 

I found an article from a Turkish newspaper taking about Ankara's air pollution:

"The large increase in natural gas prices and the distribution of free coal by municipalities prior to local elections has led to an enormous jump in pollution levels in Ankara, reaching 9,350 micrograms per cubic meter in the Sıhhiye district. According to the World Health Organization, or WHO, the acceptable level of pollution is a maximum of 300 micrograms. "This is one of the highest levels in the world’s history. When pollution rose over 4,000 micrograms per cubic meter in London in 1952, approximately 4,000 people died," Dr. Recep Akdur, an expert in public health, said yesterday." (December, 2008)

Air pollution seems to be an issue for Ankara and elsewhere and can have significant negative health impacts - in cities more than elsewhere. A research paper recommends switching away from coal (rather than distributing it free, as has happened in the past in Ankara-before elections, I am told). Given transport is also partly responsible, efforts to switch to electric cars can also have a beneficial impact on urban pollution and hence public health.

Good economics is about wellbeing or happiness (utility), not only about getting rich, although this is obviously an important component. Pollution on these levels reduces life quality, life expectancy and the negative impact on health likely causes lost work days and school, reducing human capital, economic output and wealth. This youtube video shows the true cost of fuel which takes into account these negative side-effects:



High-pollution development models are reaching their limit.

Green car sharing

I was wandering around the streets of our fine European capital the other day and I snapped a photo of these great zencars:

It's a carsharing scheme like zipcar but the cars are all electric. How great is that?! You can see that the cars are plugged in and charging in the photo*. Electric carsharing is coming soon to Paris through Autolib (see also THIS interesting article in the Economist about the man responsible). 

These are all a bit like the bike-sharing schemes like Capital Bikeshare (in DC), Vélib (in Paris), Boris bikes (in London - yes not the official site, but I like this better), and, happily, Mejor en Bici in Buenos Aires.

It would be great if ways to encourage urbanites in polluted developing country cities to use electric cars as an alternative to petrol ones could be found. 

*As an aside, note the bits of Berlin Wall in the background on Place du Luxembourg.

The high-pollution development model

Tehran is sometimes effectively shut down due to the pollution levels and some estimates put the number of deaths caused by pollution there at 3,600 per month.

Iran is heavily energy intensive but with fuel subsidies amounting to a staggering 20% of GDP, it is no surprise that Iranians over-consume it. Unsurprisingly, analyses show that fuel subsidies are bad for the environment and are unsustainable from a development perspective. Thankfully, there have been large recent reductions in Iran.

Nonetheless, Abbas Milani thinks that one of the toughest questions journalists could as President Ahmadinejad is on his government's neglect of some environmental issues:

"Your government has been oblivious to the grave ecological dangers faced by your country. The Zayandeh Rude River in Isfahan has dried up; the drying up of Lake Orumiye will affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iranians living in the area. Why have you, in spite of your much-touted trips around every province, ignored these grave problems?"

Taken from the Wikipedia article on Lake Orumiye, here are satellite images of the rapid shrinking of the lake between 2003 and 2010: