These struck me as very large increases in such a short period of time. The last census report on biking to work was published in May 2019 and only includes data up to 2017. It indicated that only 0.6 percent of U.S. workers commute to work by bike. In Kansas City, the 2017 census data indicated that the number was 0.3 percent in the city and only 0.2 percent in the broader metro area. Where is the data that bike commuting has jumped 130 percent since 2016?

After Rogers stated those percentages, Shanin asked him what the numbers of commuters were [starts 3:39]. Rogers declined to answer, suggesting instead that viewers could do the math on their own. But they can’t from what Rogers provided; a percentage increase does not indicate the actual numbers. In fact, the high percentage increases may be a function of low actual bike commuting numbers. If two people in Kansas City biked to work in 2016, and three more joined them in 2018, that would represent a 150 percent increase—but it’s still hardly impressive.

Rogers has yet to respond to several requests for the data underlying his claim.

Incidentally, Rogers still has a blog post on BikeWalkKC that makes demonstrably false claims. In an April 1 (!) post titled, New Bike Plan Will Save Lives and Boost the Local Economy, he writes, “Economic Impact Analysis shows new bike master plan will save 36 lives every year, add $500 million to the regional economy, and create 12,000 jobs.” My colleague Kelvey Vander Hart addressed the claim about saving lives earlier this year.

But the jobs claim is just flatly wrong. The summary of findings upon which the Bike KC Master Plan claims are based states on page 6 that “this increase in economic activity leads to 12,600 additional jobs (measured in job years) over the period.” The period is 30 years, 2020 through 2050. Dividing 12,600 “job years” by 30 years gets 420 actual jobs. (Frankly even that seems high, but it’s not 12,600!)

Contorting data to justify dubious claims about job creation doesn’t help anyone. It only gives Kansas Citians even more reason to be skeptical as advocates ask taxpayers to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for something in which some neighborhoods see little value.

The post Bike Walk KC’s Fuzzy Math and Incorrect Claims appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

RideKC is the regional transit group responsible for the Kansas City streetcar. RideKC’s initiatives are largely funded by city taxpayers, and this latest venture is no exception. The cities of Kansas City, MO and North Kansas City, MO are both listed as public funders of the scooter project.

Eric Vaughan, bike share director for local advocacy group BikeWalkKC, commented on the scooter project:

RideKC is the only transit authority in the country that’s now integrating scooters as part of the regional transit network, which really goes to show how progressive our team here in Kansas City has been with their approach.

This raises an obvious question: If private companies are already putting electric scooters on the streets, why is taxpayer money being used so that the Kansas City transit authority can enter the market?

Bird is a company that consistently has scooters on the streets in Kansas City. Lime has had scooters in the area as well, and a company owned by Ford called SPIN will be placing scooters in Kansas City later this year. Scooters are widely available, and the companies’ use of private chargers and mechanics ensures that scooters are in good shape and located in well-trafficked areas. Lime’s 2018 year-end report claimed that 31,000 Kansas Citians used Lime scooters in a three month period.

The scooter market in Kansas City seems to be doing just fine without government help. If private companies are already providing services, why is our government spending taxpayer dollars on those services as well?

The post Why Is RideKC Entering The Electric Scooter Market? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The increase from 7 to 44 people on bikes might not seem like much, but it’s still early days and Armour is a short corridor that does not yet connect to any other bike lanes or trails. Upcoming projects like Charlotte/Holmes and The Paseo will start to create a network out of isolated pieces of infrastructure.

BikeWalkKC boasts that this is a 600% increase in daily cyclists on Armour. That is true but underwhelming. We’re talking about 44 cyclists in a metropolitan area with more than two million people.

How do we know 44 people a day are now using the Armour bike lanes? The post didn’t say. I followed up with an employee from Kansas City Public Works, who confirmed that BikeWalkKC was using data from its one-time departmental bike counts. No one knows if 44 riders is a one-time phenomenon or a daily occurrence.  

Bike advocates claim that building infrastructure will create demand. Patrick Tuohey talked about this assertion in an earlier blog post, citing the demand analysis BikeWalkKC published to support this project. The analysis was performed without any current cyclist counts. A demand analysis that doesn’t bother trying to measure current demand to help gauge future demand seems more like guesswork than rigorous assessment.

Building bike lanes and hoping that demand will follow is not sound public policy. Data actually shows a downward trend of bike commuters in the United States. Only about 0.1 percent of Kansas City’s metro population commuted by cycling in 2014, and recent data from Public Works suggests that number has dropped even lower.

“If you build it, he will come” was an effective line for a movie, but that idea doesn’t translate to municipal policy. Kansas City has more pressing needs, and better ways to spend taxpayer dollars.

The post Building Bike Lanes to Encourage Cycling Is Not Sound Policy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• The plan will likely not save 36 lives a year, as claimed.
• The plan will likely not create 12,600 jobs, as claimed. In fact, the as yet unfinished paper on which they base this claim doesn’t even make that claim itself.

If the plan won’t deliver on those prominent promises, will it even increase cycling?

According to traffic counts conducted by the Kansas City Public Works Department, cyclists constitute a negligible amount of street traffic. One-day traffic counts at a few intersections along Armour Blvd. in 2016 show that cyclists account for between zero to 0.06 percent of road traffic. Counts at similar intersections along Armour in 2018 and 2019 show the percentage of cyclists ranging between 0.02 percent to 0.16 percent of traffic.

Nationwide, the percentage of people who bike to work fell over 3 percent from 2016 to 2017. In Kansas City it was never high to start with. In 2014, 0.1 percent of Kansas Citians in the metro area commuted to work by cycling, and these recent Public Works numbers suggest it is even lower than that today.

The director of community planning for BikeWalkKC indicated by email that the organization conducted manual bike traffic counts in October 2016, but lost them. The traffic counts must not have been impressive, because BikeWalkKC chose not to include them in the Bicycle Network Demand Analysis they published the very next month. In fact, despite the promise of the title, there was no analysis of bicycle demand in the report at all. Quite the contrary, the report argues on page 8 that traffic accounts aren’t valuable anyway:

Observations of where cyclists are riding today can provide valuable insight, but cyclists counts cannot be a direct proxy for latent demand because they have already internalized all of the physical barriers and constraints that impact a cylist’s [sic] decisions.

The following bicycie [sic] infrastructure demand analysis is not intended to be a trip projection like those described above. The goal of this analysis is to determine where people would ride bicycles if facilities made it convenient and comfortable to do so. Therefore, latent demand is considered separately from the barriers and constraints of the physical environment.

In other words, don’t bother conducting an assessment of demand, just build it and they will come. The bike activists just assign scores to routes they think people would travel if there were bike lanes.

Certainly cities should ensure the safety of cyclists and motorists alike, and be supportive of growth in new types of travel. But biking to work in Kansas City is not a significant form of commuting and does not appear to be growing. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars because a few people hope it may help increase cycling is not sound public policy—not when Kansas City has so many other more significant needs.

The post Cycling Down the Rabbit Hole appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It is important to realize that this marketing campaign, even though it uses biker-oriented talking points, is not talking about 36 cyclist lives—the latest annual data from 2017 showed zero cyclist fatalities. Instead, it estimates:

• 15 lives saved by increased physical activity
• 6 lives saved by improved air quality
• 15 lives saved by a reduction in fatal car crashes (not crashes that occur because a cyclist was involved—any fatal car accident counts)

Only the physical activity category is directly connected to bikers who would use the lanes.

There are problems with these estimates. Physical activity benefits, while hard to measure, are dependent upon more Kansas Citians choosing to bike instead of drive. Only 0.3 percent of commuters used bikes in 2018, and a survey noted that fewer than 50 percent of respondents were interested in biking more. More bike lanes could mean an increased number of bikers—but it’s just a projection, and there’s no way to know how many more bikers we’ll see with expanded bike lanes, let alone what the actual health benefits will be.

Six lives saved by improved air quality also seems a stretch. The number was achieved by expanding data from research in New Zealand. Even if this study was properly applied to Kansas City, the boasted number is the highest estimate possible. An economic summary of the Bike KC Master Plan read:

Assuming 1 death due to air quality for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled and 1 per 40 million vehicle starts (trips), the bike plan could reduce Kansas City air pollution fatalities anywhere from 1-6 deaths per year . . . [emphasis added]

The most puzzling estimate is that of fatal crash reduction. The economic summary of the bike plan noted that 228 fatal car crashes occurred within the city limits of Kansas City from 2015-2017, and that 94 of these occurred along the route of the proposed bike lanes. While the summary boasts a 47 percent reduction in these crashes due to the way bike lanes will change the flow of traffic, no crash data was included.

Upon reaching out to the authors of the economic summary for more information, I was told that they did not have any data on the cause of these car accidents: 

The dataset provided by the Mid-America Regional Council did not provide any context on the causes of the crash. There has been some analysis of the contributing factors in fatal crashes . . . but our FHWA source on road diets does not differentiate by crash cause or even crash severity. It is simply an empirical measure on the impact of road-dieted streets on total crash volume. These benefits accrue to all users, regardless of mode or how many people take up bicycling.

How can a 47 percent reduction in fatal crashes be a realistic estimate when there is no available data on what caused the crashes? If the reduction is due to fewer cars traveling the roads with the bike lanes, does that simply mean the crashes occur on the alternative routes these cars travel? Stating the number of crashes occurring within city limits and presenting some traffic flow statistics from other areas does not seem compelling. If BikeWalkKC wants to claim 15 fewer lives taken annually by fatal car accidents as a result of expanded bike lanes, shouldn’t there be more data to back that claim up?

By portraying the Bike KC Master Plan as a strategy that will save 36 lives per year, BikeWalkKC is not avoiding the real problem at hand: this project will cost hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, money that could be better spent elsewhere. As my colleague Patrick Tuohey noted,

Kansas City has significant needs, significant transit needs. They are not biking. It is infrastructure. It is infrastructure repairs. It’s getting those steel plates off our streets.

The use of questionable statistics will not help develop solid city policy. If the city has millions of dollars to toss around and is concerned about saving lives, a better idea would be hiring more police officers, not building more bike lanes.

The post Would Kansas City Bike Lanes Actually Save 36 Lives per Year? Probably Not appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The three-mile route opened in August, running along Armour Boulevard in Midtown. Advocated for by groups such as BikeWalkKC, the $700,000 project was highly praised by both city officials and the media. However, the lack of foresight in planning these lanes quickly became evident.

Protected bike lanes, where bikers ride in between the curb and a row of parked cars, have the potential to help keep riders safer than they would be if they were in the main traffic lane, side-by-side with moving cars. According to a story from KSHB news, some residents have complained of extremely limited visibility when turning out of cross streets onto Armour Boulevard. But the same story noted that the Kansas City Police Department had not seen an increase in accidents along the road where the bike lanes were added, so cyclists and drivers seem to have been fortunate so far.

The onset of winter, however, has revealed another problem, as the lanes have been obstructed—first by large piles of leaves, and later by snow and ice, rendering them unsafe and almost unusable. Many bikers are using the popular neighborhood site Nextdoor to vent their frustration:

“I had to be in the middle of the street on Armour on my daily morning bike commute, which completely defeats the purpose of the bike lanes…Everyone seems to have a problem with these new bike lanes, myself included, and I’m a cyclist!”

The need to keep the new bike lanes cleared should hardly be a surprise. People continue to bike, whether to work or for fun, year-round – not just during the warm months. It takes only common sense to recognize that bike lanes, just like streets for motor vehicles, need maintenance and upkeep if they are to remain usable in bad weather. But as the picture above shows, there’s little evidence that bike lane got any attention after the snowfall earlier this month. (And yes, that snow-covered area just to the right of the row of cars really is the bike lane.)

No one wants to see cyclists put at risk, whether by motor-vehicle traffic or by treacherous bike paths. But spending over half a million dollars on a bike path—especially one that is rendered useless by bad weather—is hard to justify. According to a 2016 report from the League of American Bicyclists, only 0.4 percent of Kansas City commuters ride their bikes to work. I don’t know what fraction of those riders take this specific stretch of Armour Boulevard, but we aren’t talking about a large number of riders.

I hope that in the future, city leaders will think carefully about the benefits and costs, and the future obligations, that come with projects like the Armour Boulevard bike lanes.

The post There’s a Bike Lane Around Here Somewhere appeared first on Show-Me Institute.