The Federal Highway Administration has once again ignored bicyclists when determining performance measures for our transportation system. We need you to speak up now.
With passage of the FAST Act signed into law December 2015, Congress just instituted a Complete Streets policy for the National Highway System (which is much more than highways; it includes main streets, arterials and other major roads). Yet despite this FHWA wants to measure performance of the system using a measure for drivers only. Their draft performance measure rules would measure congestion by measuring delay for drivers, conflating performance for all traffic with travel time reliability for motorists only. Speeding up motorists on Main Street doesn’t improve performance for people biking or walking!
[Tweet “I bike on Main Street. I count. #MakeMeCount @USDOT @USDOTFHWA!”]
We need an additional measure that measures performance or reliability for those outside of cars, whose concerns are much more around measures of access, comfort and safety. We know that what we measure, matters. If governments are not directed to measure performance for non-motorized transportation, they have no incentive to invest in improvements.
[Tweet “What we measure MATTERS. @USDOTFHWA needs to count biking/walking. #MakeMeCount”]
Incentivizing states to speed up drivers may result in significant danger to people biking or walking. If these draft rules are implemented, they will hinder the ability of local governments to implement Complete Streets, build protected bike lanes, and improve transportation for all people. We need to speak up now before these rules are adopted as final.
We’ve done it before. With your help we convinced FHWA to include a safety performance measure for biking and walking. We need your help again.
- More about the rule and how it will affect biking
- Comments submitted to FHWA by the League of American Bicyclists.
- Send your own comments here with the League’s action tool.
IRONY ALERT: Adding insult to potential injury, USDOT recently rolled out “Every Place Counts,” a design challenge aimed at undoing highway-building mistakes of the past that tore communities apart and created barriers to safe, active transportation. And USDOT Sec. Anthony Foxx has issued a 30-year plan that explicitly encourages multimodal transportation choices. Yet their own proposed rules would encourage high-speed barriers to active transportation, not discourage them.
