In last night’s Tucson-Pima County Bicycle Advisory Committee meeting more details emerged about the city’s plan to work on the bicycle parking code update after the council voted to return the bicycle parking code to the Land Use Code Committee.
Adam Smith, from the city’s planning and development services department, attended the meeting and requested four BAC members participate in a meeting early next week to revise the proposed bike-parking code. The goal is to make the code something all parties can agree on and return it to the council for approval at their meeting on March 22.
Bicycle and pedestrian program managers Matt Zoll, of Pima County and Tom Thivener from the City of Tucson will also participate in the meeting.
BAC wants to be involved in selection of new transportation director
The committee unanimously passed a motion requesting the city management include a BAC member be involved in the selection process for the city’s new transportation director. Jim Glock, the city’s current transportation director, will be retiring at the end of the year.
BAC member Ian Johnson said it is clear that a pro-bicycling transportation director can make a huge impact on what gets accomplished, so it is important to have a hand in who is hired.
Police enforcement around region
Both the Tucson Police Department and Pima County Sheriff’s department are performing targeted enforcement around the region.
The Sheriff’s department is focusing on the Gates Pass area because they have received complaints from people in the area. Deputy Ryan Roher said he spent Tuesday morning in the area and followed three cyclists in an unmarked car. The cyclists were dropped from the Tuesday morning Fairwheel ride. He said within a reasonable amount of time they moved from three abreast to single file and waved him though.
Tucson Police Department Sergeant Jerry Skeenes said motorcycle officers would deploy on March 18 and begin searching for locations around Tucson to deploy regularly looking for bicycle riders who violate traffic laws.
Skeenes has said in past meetings that the officers will not focus as much in the downtown and university areas.
Let’s be realistic. A movie theater is never going to be big enough to require 150 bike parking spaces. Really the only uses I could see requiring that many spaces would be a retail development the size of a mall or a new sporting arena.
But let’s look at the numbers a little closer before saying that the proposed bike ratios are too aggressive, as CM Koz mentioned.
If Tucson Mall was developed today, going by the new reduced code for cars and bikes parking, that 1 million square feet of retail would require 3,333 car parking spaces (down from 5,000 in the current code = huge savings on land costs!). For bikes, only 193 spaces would be required with the new code- 143 short term and 50 long term (down from 400 total in the current code!)
Nobody is going to miss all the extra car parking stalls in the future. It truly is a waste of space, contributes to auto dependency, contributes to the heat island effect, and is detracts currently from Tucson’s quality of life.
I have never heard anyone say that bike parking detracts from a communities quality of life. We will be shooting our selves in the foot on this quality of life improvement if we adopt a code that a) lessens the amount of bike parking too much, b) creates too much flexibility on how far the bike parking can be from an entrance, or c) puts unneeded caps on the amount of bike parking a large development has, which is written in the draft code for bike parking, but not for car parking.
The development community is a big winner with this code. Why must they also take down bike parking with their victory against expansive parking lots?
Just curious, will TPD be publishing the locations in which they’re engaging in this targeted cyclist enforcement the same way they publish where their vehicular speed traps will be?
Probably not. But even if they do, deception and misinformation by law enforcement is generally allowed by courts.
From the perspective of officer productivity (and promotion and mindless resume-building), one would think TPD’s Jerry Skeenes would deploy based on:
http://cms3.tucsonaz.gov/sites/default/files/bicycle/BicycleCommutersRegionalPercentbyBG2.pdf
The simple solution? Don’t cycle or do your Idaho stops on Tom Thivener’s bike routes.
In other words, stay a block or two away from it. The game. It’s a rare, very rare Skeenes/TPD officer that can see that far or much cares, don’t worry about them and their agenda.
And the pavement is better.
Oh, I wish they would target enforce graffiti-ers. “Targeting tonight, the Alvernon drainage on the Avaition bikepath!”. Gee, but that would require working at night…and a foot chase might be involved….then they’d have to make an arrest….no ticket revenue to be had and the Graffiti Advisory Committee would raise a stink. Oh, well.
We cyclists are low hanging fruit…ouch, think about that while you’re riding.
Yeah, why not targeting taggers and graffiti-ers ? Agree with ZZ ! They might have to work at night !