To Tunnel Or Not To Tunnel, That Is The Question

Acequia/Rail Trail Tunnel. Santa Fe New Mexican photo

On 25 August, the Santa Fe New Mexican published an article about attacks on pedestrians in and around the pedestrian tunnel crossing St. Francis Drive just north of the St. Francis/Cerrillos intersection. This tunnel provides partial grade-separated connectivity between the segments of Rail Trail on opposite sides of St. Francis Drive and grade separated access to the Acequia Trail from the Railyard. Some commenters responding to the article and at least one Councilor criticized building tunnels due to their seeming to be a magnet for homeless people and the criminal element. So we have a tug of war at play between grade-separated access to the city's bike/ped trail network that reduces car-bike and car-pedestrian conflict vs. designs that sometimes lead to street crime. 

But let's not forget that the criminal activities have been in several locations along the Railyard-Acequia Trails alignment, not just in the tunnel. Crime is a bigger problem than an issue due to a tunnel alone.  I'd like to see an official, SFPD crime map of Santa Fe to see if this area actually stands out in terms of crime frequency as opposed to being magnified beyond actual risk due to a high profile article in the newspaper. We have seen assaults in other parks and Downtown. My suspicion is that the criminal element sees isolated pedestrians as easy targets, regardless of location and that good trails attract pedestrians, aka targets. Perhaps we need some undercover cops dressed looking like easy marks wandering our trails, aka a Detective Belker.

Now, on to some basic multimodal transportation issues. It is well known in the bicycle-pedestrian design and advocacy community that you cannot expect to have your bicycle transportation system enthusiastically utilized by average citizens (as opposed to "serious cyclists") if it has intimidating choke points on it. These have to be circumvented with good designs. Santa Fe is a city sliced in pieces, bicycle design-wise, by major highways ("principal arterials") that were not designed to effectively accomodate pedestrian or bicycle travel. St. Francis, Cerrillos, and St. Michaels are all fast multilane principal arterials currently controlled by the State of New Mexico Dept. of Transportation and are, in my opinion, designed to move as many cars as efficiently as possible rather than optimizing access to all modes of transportation. There are no bike lanes on St. Francis, for example, a design deliberately approved more than a decade ago by the NMDOT against the wishes of the bicycling community. The St. Francis-Cerrillos intersection is further complicated by the diagonal crossing of the Rail Runner track alignment, which can trap the wheel of a cyclist trying to cross as traffic. Indeed, any at-grade crossing of a major highway by a person on foot or bike is somewhat risky, as the fatal crashes at St. Francis and Zia as well as elsewhere demonstrate. That is why grade-separated crossings on busy principal arterials are strongly recommended in spite of their often considerable cost. 

Indeed, at a recent Santa Fe BTAC meeting, a 2018 crash analysis was discussed that pointed out that "... the main contributing factor (to crashes between motorists and bicyclists) is a failure to yield on behalf of both the bicyclist and motor vehicles (33%) and second was driver inattention (19%). Bicycle crashes are predominantly at intersections (64%); incidents are disbursed across town but generally on arterials: Cerrillos Road 45%; Airport Road 17%; St. Francis Dr. 13%; and St. Michael's Dr. 9.4% and primarily on weekdays." Hence the need for safer designs consistent with the Vision Zero concept that one engineers roads to protect against likely human error.

 There is a side benefit to motorists in these separated facilities, as they increase motor vehicle level of service, since there is no requirement for a long red light cycle when pedestrians are crossing wide streets if pedestrians have their own right of way. The Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (2009) estimates a speed of 3.5 to 4 feet per second for pedestrians crossing a street but some recent research suggests that is too fast for almost half of older pedestrians and some younger ones. So on a 130 foot principal arterial such as St. Michael's Drive, a pedestrian walk light can stop busy traffic for approximately 37 seconds and this timing may increase as our population ages.

So to make Santa Fe's network of bike-ped trails functional, we need grade separated crossings on principal arterials and highways. How to do it is the question. Tunnels are protected from the weather to some degree and can be compact, since they need only provide enough headspace for people rather than sometimes huge commercial vehicles. Of course a tunnel provides protection against the elements for everyone, including homeless people looking for refuge. Bridges, by contrast, are exposed during foul weather and winter conditions and would require more maintenance during winter weather to provide year round connectivity if snow and ice are present. Furthermore, they can be massive. The Federal Highway Administration requires a minimum of 14-16 feet of overhead clearance for a bridge over an arterial so that large trucks can pass underneath. Meanwhile, the Americans With Disabilities Act stipulates a gradient on ramps no steeper than 1:12 (one foot of rise for every 12 feet of distance). This results in ramps leading to an overhead crossing that could be more than 200 feet long. In an analysis of building a pedestrian bridge over St.Michael's Drive prepared for the State in 2014 by Souder, Miller, and Associates, approach ramps to the overhead structure were listed as being approximately 350 feet long to provide for a bridge with 16' of clearance over the road. So access to a substantial easement is required.  The bottom line? Nothing is cheap or without costs as well as benefits and sometimes you need a pretty big hammer to make it fit.

Given the planing for a tunnel at the Rail Trail crossing at St. Michael's drive, which is currently an uncontrolled midblock crossing of a multilane, fast arterial, we need to come to some consensus on whether the city will support these or other designs with enforcement, maintenance, and also to assist in providing better shelter to the homeless. Plus, these are not the only tunnels in town. There are several small but critical tunnels along the Chamisa Trail and one near the Zia station for a spur off of the Rail Trail as well.

Given that our arterial system carves up Santa Fe and impedes bike-ped mobility, grade-separated crossings are necessary to make our trail system work. Tunnels provide advantages in cover as well as space but can also attract a criminal element and the homeless. Bridges require a lot of space, which is sometimes an issue. Neither are cheap. As a cyclist and a citizen of this city, I don't want to see these tunnels turn into something the public fears or despises. And as a cyclist and someone concerned with multimodal transportation, something important to public health, urban planning, and environmental protection, we need to make the bikeway system not only efficient but desirable rather than something putting fear into people's heart. We need to solve this problem.

More reading: The Underpass Dilemma.

Yet more reading.

Neighborhoods and Trails: Why Trails?

Prepared by Margaret Alexander for the Santa Fe Conservation Trust January, 2009;
Updated April, 2010

 

At Times Like This, Little Things Matter Quite a Bit

I saddled up the Salsa La Cruz and took a ride out to Eldorado on the Rail Trail yesterday morning. It was still cool out and the air was not too thick with smoke from the various sundry fires yet. Plus, its a weekday so I dare venture out on the trails, which can be pretty busy on weekends. 

 So I headed into town and hopped on the Rail Trail at the Railyard. Heading South, the first thing I noticed was that the city has put in a nice paved sidewalk connector where there is an easement to get from the Rail Trail to neighborhood streets near Baca at Monterey and Santa Rosa and connect through to points north and the River Trail. The easement below used to be a narrow right of way, all dirt or mud and a fence on one side where I occasionally cut my knuckles or hit a handlebar riding through. Now its nice, wide, paved, and good to go regardless of the weather.

I also noticed that all the bridges I crossed on the Rail Trail have received new decking. Some of those bridges were in tough shape a year ago. Now they are all nicely decked. This picture is of the bridge just north of the Zia station.

Between the Covid, the drought, the fires, and the bad national politics, its nice to see those not-so-little touches like this. It puts a smile on my face and probably the faces of a lot of other folks who are trying to retain their sanity in these troubled times by getting some air and exercise on our trails. A tip of the hat to the city of Santa Fe for getting these trails gussied up, even as we scrounge the city coffers for funds.

Be safe, be careful, and stay healthy out there. Practice smart social distancing and don't forget that mask or face covering, as appropriate.

A Suspicious Crash Leaves a Cyclist Severely Injured and Airlifted to a Hospital. The Investigation, So Far, is Wanting

 Lisa Dougherty gave me permission to post this. Note, the BSC is the LANL Bicycle Safety Committee. I've redacted the name of the injured pending clarification on whether the family wants its privacy.

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I am writing this to you, the co-chairs of the BSC, as a concerned cyclist in Los Alamos. This is not specifically a Lab issue, but since this incident took place in Los Alamos on a route frequently ridden by LANL cyclist employees, I believe the BSC should at least be aware of what happened to determine if a communication should be sent out to the LANL cycling community.

This Saturday, my neighbor stopped by our home to tell us about a very serious accident that almost took the life of her husband. She was worried about the safety of local cyclists due to what her family has been coping with for the last few months. Her situation is extremely disturbing to me, and I wanted to bring it up to you and ask for discussion on how best to protect the local cycling community from increasingly aggressive driving that can and has led to cyclist injuries.

On Wednesday, March 27, my neighbor ( ) headed off on a morning ride of the Grand Loop, something he had been doing about 3 days a week back then. He would start around 6:30am and return to his home in Los Alamos around 9am. However, that Wednesday, 9am came and went and he hadn't returned home, so his worried wife started driving the loop the opposite direction he was riding. She encountered the clean-up of an accident just on the White Rock side of the Bandelier entrance (around mile marker 56), and learned that her husband was to be airlifted to Albuquerque due to the severity of injuries sustained in an accident. As events unfolded, she encountered increasingly concerning inconsistencies. The police told her that ( ) had called 911 to get picked up, yet he was unconscious with serious head injuries when they loaded him into the ambulance. ( ) was on an uphill stretch of the road, going about 10mph, yet the police said that he broke about 12 bones on the left side of his body, including his femur, bones in his face, and a number of ribs, and sustained 2 serious contusions in the brain (even though he was wearing a helmet) because he dropped his chain and fell over. ( )'s trauma doctors and primary care physician say that his injuries were much too severe to have been caused by anything but a high speed collision with a large vehicle.

My concerns are two-fold. First, I believe, due to my own experiences as a cyclist with increasing driver aggression on the road during these stressful times, that this was a deliberate act. Even more so, I fear this was an attempted vehicular homicide. ( ) is a very conscientious rider, so he was riding as far to the road edge as he could, and he was wearing a blinking red light on the back of his helmet. Even if this had been an accident or due to distracted driving, the driver did not stop and render aid to ( ) or at least call 911. ( ) was found, unconscious on one side of the road with his bicycle on the other, by other drivers. His route tracking cyclocomputer was and remains missing. Not only does it seem that many drivers, in general, are taking out their frustrations on cyclists, the most vulnerable of all road users, we know that this driver, who struck a cyclist on a popular route near Los Alamos and then deliberately left the scene with the rider incapacitated on the side of the road, has gotten away with a hit and run with injuries.

My other concern is that the local police are not taking this serious risk to cyclists seriously. And I fear that it goes beyond this event. In this case, the police have decided ( )'s crash was due to him dropping his chain, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, and have issued no accident report and are planning to conduct no investigations. They wouldn't even respond to ( )'s wife until she sent a report of all of ( )'s broken bones to them and asked how his injuries could possibly have been cause by a healthy guy falling over on his bicycle onto soft ground on an uphill stretch. In the same way, I was disturbed by the lack of due diligence of the local police when they worked the motorcycle accident that happened during a group ride I was in a little over a week ago. I was following the woman who hit the rail on the uphill slope out of Ancho Canyon, on the way towards White Rock, and vaulted over the rail and down the 60 foot embankment. I was the first on the scene. I was right behind her, but the police never talked to me. They also only directed traffic on one side of the blind curve. For two hours, I directed traffic on other side to prevent oblivious drivers from barreling onto the accident scene and causing another accident. The firemen were awesome at their jobs, extracting my new friend from her perch on the side of the embankment while protecting her injuries, but the single police officer perhaps did not have enough support to sufficiently handle his responsibilities in the situation.

This bicycle accident has me a little freaked out. I've had more and more drivers going into the bicycle lane to buzz me while I'm hugging the curb. I've had more and more drivers yelling obscenities and threats at me while I'm following the laws and riding around town. I haven't been riding the loop much due to health issues, but this accident and the lack of police follow-through is making me wonder if now isn't a good time to ride on open roads. ( )'s wife suggested that we reach out to local cyclists and ask them to, please, wear cameras recording both forward and backward when they ride, but I worry about how much even this would help since ( ) was knocked unconscious and nobody can find his route recorder computer. Can you please speak about this as a committee and let me know your thoughts? I have a list of ( )'s injuries and can get a statement from his physician about the probability of the injuries being due to a collision with a large vehicle, if that helps.

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Hmmm. I've dropped chains more often than I would like to admit and know of others who have as well. Never ended up in a Medivac helicopter.  Be careful out there. And, maybe it is a good idea to get one of those onboard cameras.

Don't Trash Your Neck Gaiters Yet, Based On A Media Frenzy Over A Preliminary Experiment

 

  Seems there has been a bit of a stampede to over-interpret the recent Duke experiment in how to study droplets coming out of masks. Heck, even Dr. Scrase, the Human Services Secretary with Dr. after his name, seems to be jumping to conclusions. But the Duke study was about finding out how to study masks, not a finished product on mask vs gaiter vs other stuff effectiveness. For details, go to the Science News article.

Snippets from the article: "The study tested how to test masks, not which masks are best."

“The headline that neck gaiters can be worse is totally inaccurate,” says Monica Gandhi, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. Publicity like this is worrisome because “it can turn people off of mask wearing, which we know can protect both the individual wearing the mask and those around them,” she says.

Sigh.  I'm sure some masks and coverings are more efficient than others, and the wearer has considerable influence too, as I know from the way individuals were tested to fit HEPA masks when I worked in a rad lab. Seems to me that to make sense in this context, a controlled experiment under the conditions of running or biking is in order. Under high exertion, would a tight fitting N95 type mask merely get pushed away from your face by strong exhalation during extreme exertion, creating an exhaust mechanism for droplets? What happens to the viruses, if present, if big droplets get made into little ones and evaporate faster? Do we test under stationary bike and treadmill conditions? And finally, any study has to be peer reviewed. 

 I think the authors of the study should have known that an uncritical and unscientific press would jump to conclusions and run with this. I'm shaking my head.

 Definitely wear something if you are remotely close to other people, and wear the most protective gear appropriate. Stay tuned for updates on good experiments. Above all, use your brain! 

New York Times article on gaiter effectiveness.

 Thanks to my pen pal Michael Johnson for this link:

Mask Facts, by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

Does "Gravel" Always Mean "Washboard"?

 

One of the smoothest non-paved sections I found!

 I decided to explore some of the dirt and gravel roads north and west of town this week. These roads intersect Bishop's Lodge Road and the various Tano Roads.  So I put a set of Richey 700-32 folding cyclecross tires on the Speed City wheelset, which normally sits on the rafters. I've had these tires for a long time and they are getting old and its gonna be use them or lose them to embrittlement. But they are light and fast.My set of 700-40 Donnelly Xplor MSOs are beasts by comparison.

Of course the Richeys are also 32 mm wide, so not a whole lot of flotation compared to the recent philosophy of more width is better. And as I found out, the gravel roads are also washboard roads. As in bang-bang-bop-bop-ouch-ouch as you ride over the washing machine.

Maybe next time I'll try it with the 700-40 Donnelly Xplor MSOs at a lower pressure than I ran the Richeys. Or maybe stay on the roads and trails? I'm not sure after this week why the gravel craze is such a craze, but to each his or her own. It certainly was different, and it certainly was nice and quiet out there.

The Mask of the Labored Breath

Over the past few weeks I collected several examples of masks to use while bicycling. While all are a pain in the face to wear, I recommend wearing something mask like when around other riders, in an urban area, or anywhere you might get within aerosol-exchanging distance of someone. Whatever that distance may be. I'd rather be out riding with a mask than sitting home sick or under stricter executive orders.

From top to bottom below is a home made mask made by my friend Kate, a three season ear warmer, a Buff neck tube, and a CopperFit neck tube.  Dog toy for scale...

Top to bottom: Kate mask, ear warmer, Buff tube, CopperFit tube.
Oh, and dog toy

As far as being able to breathe, the Kate mask was the only one I didn't pull off in a gasping panic as I climbed the acid test of being able to breathe, the northbound initial steep pitch of Sierra Pinon as you hang a right from Paseo del Sur. If I hit that hill hard, I'm at max heart rate for my age. The Kate Special (I discussed that here) has several losely woven layers so air can get in and out and it did not get sucked onto my face. But like most masks that lash around your head or ears, can be a bit of a struggle to take on and off such as while hitting the water bottles.

The ear warmer worked next best. Its also a rather porous interweave and also fits tightly so I did not tend to suck it into my mouth when breathing hard. Plus, it already was in my collection of three season stuff and is less obvious around my neck when riding.

The Buff tube, recommended by the Mad Dog down in Albuquerque, was OK too but fit loosely and I tended to find myself inhaling it and having to tighten it on hard climbs so it didn't pull into my mouth when taking deep breaths. I found that at REI.

The Copperfit was a little snugger than the Buff but also a tighter weave and a little harder to breathe through and I ended up sucking it into my mouth on Le Climb. Again, better for catching droplets but not for catching your breath. Got that at a local CVS Pharmacy. Comparing the Buff to the Copperfit is interesting in relation to the recently publicized Duke study, which suggests not all masks and tube are created equal. That said, the study has probably been overhyped by clueless people in the press.

All the stuff worked reasonably well under most conditions. The advantage of all the tubelike stuff is its easy to pull up and down on your face when taking a drink of water or needing to pull it up over the nose when you encounter other humans out in the hinterlands. The other advantage of masks is that on fast descents or flats, you don't have to worry about inhaling an insect and having to stop or slow down to hork it out.

Plenty of options out there. Find out what works for you, as I suspect we will be dealing with masks for a while.