My first time renting a bike. Terms of use, where do I hit "OK"?
There's something I want to show you. And on two wheels is the best way to do it.
If I can figure out this app.
It just keeps saying "station not found."
If I go get in my car, I can go up speedway... And try a different bike rack that might work.
Permit parking only. Well, that's not going to work.
I don't know. I just want to ride a bike.
University of Arizona — Warren.
[beep]
Green! Alright. Wow.
And the only flaw, is that I can rent the bike, but I can't rent the helmet.
Tucson has a really good network of bike pathways and dedicated streets called "bike boulevards."
When we think about cars and going fast,
we think about freeways. So, if bicycles need to
go fast... same thing, right? We need to build a bicycle freeway!
But a bike boulevard has nothing in common with a freeway. It's a
quiet neighborhood street that parallels another major street, but far fewer cars.
And much more pleasant than using a bike lane...
[wimpy screaming]
...along the big street's shoulder.
I don't want to be here. Cars don't want me here. It's a lose-lose situation for everybody.
Neighborhoods are just better for bikes. A nice, long, straight,
relatively flat neighborhood street
that just gets me where I want to go. But even bike boulevards have to cross
busy streets. And a regular stoplight might cause bicyclists more harm than good.
[show open] [Note: Raw footage filmed August 2021].
Third Street is one of Tucson's major east-west routes for people on their bikes.
It runs straight into the University of Arizona.
(Nassi:) "It's about 30,000 bikes a week. 5,000-6,000 a day during the winter."
Richard Nassi is Tucson's former transportation administrator.
He says Third Street is a major bicycle thoroughfare.
But it's also a quiet neighborhood street. And so trying to figure out how
to get bicyclists across the street is not quite as easy as it seems.
My gut instinct would say, well, put in a traffic light.
But if you do that, you're also making it easier for cars to go across this major road here.
Think about what makes big streets into big streets. They're long,
they're straight, and stoplights help cars cross all the major cross streets.
One after another after another. Great for through streets.
But we can accidentally do this to a neighborhood street.
If we take our long, straight bicycle boulevard and put in stoplights to help bikes cross the
street— One after another after another. Now we've helped out cars too, and we've
accidentally recreated the formula for a wonderful street for people to drive down.
[honking by people with crushing car payments]
The street fills up with car traffic, and then it's not a bike boulevard anymore.
So Tucson had to look at other ways to help bicyclists cross Country Club Road.
In 1990, the city considered digging a tunnel.
(Nassi:) "This was going to be an underpass."
One just for people walking and biking,
which would keep Third Street undesirable for people wanting to cut through in their car.
(Nassi:) "Grade separation was going to be in the millions, like three or four million dollars."
Bridges and tunnels are never cheap.
The tunnel needs to be tall enough that a bicyclist can go under the road without
bonking his or her head. And in order to do that,
you have to have these long horizontal ramps, so it's not too steep.
As you can imagine in the middle of a neighborhood. That's kind of ugly.
(Nassi:) "The neighbors were a little bit concerned,
and they were lot angry about the underpass."
There's certainly a perception that tunnels invite crime.
(Purseless:) "Hey, that's mine."
Drug deals going down in the tunnel, see more graffiti,
see more gang violence. One of the concerned property owners were the good sisters who live
right behind me here. The... ...let me get it right...
Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration Sanctuary.
(Nassi:) "When we met in the Benedictine chapel, the nuns were extremely helpful.
They brought the neighborhood together with the city government."
The tunnel was dead.
But working together, they adapted a European signal system that was perfect and cheaper.
This, TOUCAN signal, the first of its kind here in Tucson,
was the answer engineers, the community, and the good sisters were looking for.
(Nassi:) "We had to have a better name for it to match all the other bird names."
And this one is a bit of a homophone... TOUCAN... meaning bicyclists and pedestrians
CAN cross the street. Everybody in their car needs to turn right.
There's a button that activates a regular crosswalk for people
with two feet on the ground. But it also works for people with two feet on pedals.
A cyclist presses the button and it activates a unique crossing signal head just for bikes.
(Nassi:) "Bicycle signals weren't approved, so we had to get
permission from Federal Highway [Administration] to make bike signals. And
we had to make special lenses here in our shops for the bike signals."
The magic comes from all the curbs.
So if we swap out the TOUCAN for a regular intersection here for just a second, look at how
many ways a car can hit a bicyclist or pedestrian. Eight possible "death traps" for each.
A TOUCAN removes through traffic,
puts bikes in the middle, and those restrictions also keep cars off the bike boulevard.
And those conflict-point "death traps" drop down to just four or five.
Who would have thought the middle of the street was safer?
Even the car is making right turns can't run you over.
Unless they're doing something really, really wrong.
(Nassi:) "We don't allow the traffic to continue
all the way through. You can see all traffic that comes up here must make a right turn."
One of the right turning drivers was this guy.
(Keith:) "My name is Keith. Yeah,
I drove by like three times because I wasn't sure if it was you or not."
I was, you know, those pedestrian crossings that have like two red
lights and then like one yellow in the middle. You know what that's called?
(Keith:) "I do not."
That's called a HAWK beacon. Guess where it was invented?
(Keith:) "Where? Canada?"
Tucson!
(Keith:) "Tucson? We're known for stuff!"
A TOUCAN is still fairly expensive. So in other places where pedestrians need to cross the street,
the city installs one of these.
When a pedestrian pushes the button, these act like a red
light and all the drivers come to a stop. But then the beacon starts flashing.
Allowing drivers to safely resume as soon as the crosswalk is clear.
This efficiency means HAWK beacons can go in places which would normally not qualify.
If you want to learn more and check out my longer
video on pedestrian HAWK beacons by clicking the link below or above.
These work well for pedestrians, but what about bicycles?
(Nassi:) "We started watching the cyclists and how they behaved.
And we found that they would come up to the HAWK crossing.
"Kind of move over, get their bike onto the sidewalk, cozied up to the button on
the corner to push the pedestrian button. "They'd wait for the hawk light to come on,
and then they'd ride off the curb and cross. "So we said we can make that easier for them."
Intentionally push the bikes into a two way contraflow strip.
Wrong side of the road. That's true.
But these are bike boulevards, and there's not a lot of cars.
(Nassi:) "So then we put the green crossing right next to it,
where they didn't have to get off the bike. They could just reach over and push the button."
Button sticking out in the road enough that you can press them without getting off your bike.
Part of what makes a Bike-HAWK a Bike-HAWK is that it has two buttons for people to press.
One for bikes and one for pedestrians. Then marking a green path next to the
pedestrian path, so people on foot don't get run over by people on two wheels.
And then signs reminding bicyclists to return back to the right hand side of the road.
These few little add-ons turn a regular HAWK beacon into a Bike-HAWK beacon.
What's great? All of these changes use signs that are already approved in the Manual for
Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), the big book that governs road signs.
If you want to learn more about by Bike-HAWKs, the University of North Carolina and the Federal
Highway Administration have put this website together. I'll put a link in the description.
Engineers calculate pedestrians walk at about three-and-a-half feet per second.
So you take the width of the street, and divide it by 3.5,
and you have the duration of the walk signal with all the white blinking red hand and everything.
Could you make the time on the pedestrian
one a little bit longer and make this one for the bicyclists a little bit shorter?
The professionals tell me: Not so fast.
(Thum:) "Sometimes a pedestrian will hit the
button that's intended for cyclists and vice versa."
The last thing you want is a confused grandma thinking, "this is the button to cross the
street," but she's only getting half the time, and now she's stuck in the middle of the road.
[sad]
So Tucson decided to just set the buttons to do the exact same thing.
No crossing is perfect, but these two are proving themselves to be quite safe,
especially the bike-HAWKs.
(Nassi:) "And we've been monitoring the crash rates here at these locations.
So what are we in 2021? That's nine years. "And zero crashes, zero fatalities, zero injuries.
Knock on wood. You never know what's going to happen tomorrow, but so far, so good."
[captioning made possible by Patreon supporters]