If you would like to see more Federal money spent on local projects to promote and make safer more bicycling and walking, call your Congressional Representative and ask him or her to be a co-sponsor on H.R. 4722, the Active Community Transportation Act. It is important to make the call this week, in support of the National Bike Summit.

Perhaps it is ironic that I follow an angry post about generationally-irresponsible recovery spending with a call to borrow more money against the future, but there is a big difference between investing to leave something for the next generation vs spending money to help the current generation cover the mistakes of the present.

The Active Community Transportation Act would make grant money available to communities for investments in infrastructure that promote walking and biking.

I want to keep this post positive, but I cannot ignore the sense that many people feel biking and walking are recreational activities and should therefore be lower priority. But in fact, because the impact of small investments here can be so large, they should be a higher priority.

The types of projects grant money like this could support could include components as small as improved crosswalks. For about $10,000, we could install a solar-powered pushbutton-activated flashing light and repaint a crosswalk so that dozens of kids and their parents would feel safe walking to school. We could deploy several of these across a busy, wide stretch of road that serves to divide part of our community and effectively "knit" the town together and reduce reliance on car trips. We could make it easier for people to choose to ride the commuter rail and walk to church by bringing the focus down to the sidewalks and streets and investing is small things that pull our communities together.

The benefits are not just aesthetic. We have a childhood obesity epidemic to combat. We have a national health crisis that, regardless of what insurance companies may or may not be doing, is driving the cost of health care higher and higher. We have recurring cycles of foreign oil dependency and occasional bouts of awareness with global warming, carbon emissions, and general sustainability. Do more than buy a Prius. Thank about ways to change the way we live to be more sustainable and more responsible to the future and then ask what stands in the way?

Active Transportation is a path through the obstacles. It's a part of the solution that, unlike many government projects, is more efficient and has "externality benefits" rather than costs.

It's efficient because this kind of grant program encourages community-based action. Our local advisory committee would gather information, talk to our neighbors, participate in the grant application process and assist in project managing and monitoring the implementation. The overall grants will be designed to support networks of improvements costing $5 to 15 million each.

"Externality benefits" are the intangible things like improving the strength of a community. It would be impossible to measure the economic impact on house prices down to such a micro level, but I would bet that over time, the increase in walking and perception of safety across a divisive roadway would translate into higher home values. I know we moved from one house because the street was busy and didn't make an offer an another because it was "on the other side" of the road that we'd have to cross to get to school. Not everyone will share these valuations...but when small projects like these are happening all over the country, the sum effect has to be a net gain.

Will there be boondoggles and "bike paths to nowhwere?" Perhaps. But at least then we can start talking about the best way to do things. How many bike paths could have been built with the money that was used to make it possible for me to drive to the airport in 30 minutes instead of 45? I'm guessing a few hundred thousand.

I'm excited that our Pedestrian and Bike Safety Committee was able to work with our town to secure almost $3700 in reimbursement funding to buy bike racks. And our monthly meetings are defintitely raising awareness about Pedestrian and Bike Safety issues and beginning to build a coalition of people in town who share a desire to make improvements. But it is really inspiring to read this story of how a group in California, over the course of a year, obtained $800,000 in grant money to improve sidewalks in their neighborhood.

It can happen, even in difficult economic times. We confront a budget crisis here and the likelihood of multiple property tax override campaigns next year. Despite recent good news about the fact that state aid for school funding will not be cut, even "level-funding" of Town departments has become the best we can hope for. The question is not what will be cut, but how much will be cut. Many people are going to oppose those overrides because times are hard for everyone and it's a reasonable case to say, why can't the town just "tighten their belts" like the rest of us...and postpone new expensive projects?

In such an environment, talk of sidewalks and other improvements that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, faces an impossibility argument--but only if we assume the money has to come from the existing budget. When people are truly behind an idea, they can make it happen.

Tomorrow, our town of Westwood is dedicating a Veterans Memorial park that has been in the works for many years. Originally, Town Meeting approved $25,000 for the park, but it took the efforts of many people over the years to make the project happen. Then, when it became clear that $25,000 was not going to cover the project, the town conducted a brick sale--selling memorial bricks to residents to honor Veterans. Within a few weeks, hundreds of bricks were sold and in total, the Town raised over $45,000 of additional private money.

Figure out what needs to be done first. Get true consensus and involve as many people as possible so the idea is not just a good idea, but something many people want to happen and believe in. Then, find the money and make it so.

It's easy to get sidetracked by negativity. Did you see how $9 million of Federal stimulus funding is being used to construct a footbridge to connect parking lots to Gillete Stadium? That is NOT my idea of walkability--to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize private development of a project nobody asked for? Meanwhile, we need this bridge fixed so people can walk under it from one side of town to the other and not be killed:

Instead of griping about things though, let's think of the question in a more optimistic manner...if Robert Kraft can get $9 million for a parking lot bridge, why CAN'T we get this bridge improved? What can I do to make it happen? Shall I go back to that bridge with a stroller and videotape what it is like to push a baby carriage along under that bridge? Shall we form a neighborhood group to advocate for fixing the bridge? How do we make this thing "shovel ready?" I don't think it would be that hard to light a fire around this issue, but we need other people to step up and a relentless focus on positive solutions...then, we will find the will to make it happen, the consensus to do something that is supported by the entire neighborhood, and the funding to accomplish the impossible.

Here is a short video of some serious critical cycling mass in Copenhagen, Denmark...

I'm wrapping up a final list of bike racks for our town to obtain through the Metropolitan Area Planning Council's (MAPC) Regional Bike Parking Program. Today is the deadline to order bike racks which are then reimbursed by this program. Our town administrator and school officials are excited to get the racks and hopefully, this will be another small step towards increased biking and walking in Westwood.

Here's one of the racks we hope to replace/improve:

The popular understanding of the origin of street design in Boston goes back to the original wisdom of cows pastured on the common and commuting home to farms. Although this is more folklore than fact, it does reflect the liklihood that streets were developed piecemeal in response to short-term needs and not as a part of an organized plan.

Such is always the case, unless a community has a blank canvas upon which to write...and millions of dollars of funding...and popular support for centralized design and planning of an urban utopia. Expect that confluence of opportunity sometime in the next century. In the meantime, improvements are opportunistic: a bike lane here, an updated intersection there...a new development bringing potentially more problems but at least some cash to manage solutions. When those micro-opportunties happen...advocates need to be ready to propose improvements, but these improvements should be seen NOT as accomodations for interest groups, but as opportunities to develop "complete streets" - recognizing that...

The streets of our cities and towns are an important part of the livability of our communities. They ought to be for everyone, whether young or old, motorist or bicyclist, walker or wheelchair user, bus rider or shopkeeper. But too many of our streets are designed only for speeding cars, or worse, creeping traffic jams.--National Complete Streets Coalition

Increasingly, communities are adopting policies to incorporate this new kind of paradigm. Even as they do so, however, they are not immune to the misunderstandings of those who view these measures as expensive luxuries that detract from "fixing potholes." What opponents fail to realize is that today's potholes were yesterday's bogs and other "cow obstacles."

Complete Streets is not about a master plan to impose a new design on cities, but an effort to develop a shared use strategy that recognizes how our needs are changing. We need safer ways for active transportation to be supported in our communities. Partly, it is "aspirational"--we do want to encourage more walking and biking--but successful change looks for real needs: where are people currently trying to walk and bike? It can never be about "build it and they will come," it has to be "thank goodness they finally did something about that bridge!"

Adopting a Complete Streets strategy means coming together as a community to adopt a policy that commits to a vision of the future where the needs of all users are considered. It provides a reference point for "why do we want to do this?" and "why are we doing this?" so that changes/improvements are not seen as accommodations or concessions to appease a minority of outlier users, but as necessary steps towards ensuring a better future for all.

A few Halloweens ago, I picked up a barrel of "Halloween Pretzels" from Costco--mini-pretzels in orange and black bags in a big plastic container. About the ONLY one happy about that choice was our dog who got into the "treats" when the untouched bowl was left on the floor inadvertently. I believe we finally choked down the last remnant sometime in the following spring. Having learned my lesson, I am happy to see a giant bag full of candy in the kitchen now awaiting Saturday night.

Thousands of empty calories await as we prepare to march our children around the neighborhood in this annual ritual of excess. Given the explosion of childhood obesity in America, am I worried? Not really.

I've been following a number of stories in the past few weeks connecting the obesity crisis in America to health care. CBS's Sunday Morning devoted an entire show to "Size Matters." A radio program on NPR last week devoted an hour to a discussion of Overweight America. The radio show considered, in particular the question of how we advocate for weight loss without "blaming" overweight people.

We focus far too much on symptoms of a problem that has much deeper roots than can be addressed directly. For solutions, we leap to radical and drastic methods like surgery or the search for medications that will fix us. We guilt each other into diets or pursuing unpleasant exercise routines we hate...and then we watch the food we eat selectively--seizing on the most minute reports of the bad or goodness of a particular food, while oblivious to a landscape of excess that surrounds us.

But I digress. The folks at Zillow, where you can look up the value of your neighbor's house, have created a Trick or Treat Housing Index for Seattle (their company location) neighborhoods. It's basically a list of affluent, walkable neighborhoods--big surprise--but what I find interesting is the walkable connection.

A 30-minute walk once a year with your kids is not going to compensate for eating thousands of calories in a glorious choco-fest of indulgence this weekend, but perhaps living in a place where this traditional activity is easy will. 20-minutes of walking to a train and from the station to work everyday does make a difference. Deciding, several times per week, that it would be enjoyable to go for a walk around the neighborhood adds up to many miles of exercise. Hopping on a bike with a kid in the bike seat to go to the library occasionally...it all adds up to an active lifestyle that is foreign to many Americans who have become isolated in car-dependent housing developments.

So I look forward to enjoying Halloween and the "fruits of our labor," so to speak, with no guilt or worry. We will eat crap and be happy. We will join our neighbors in this annual tradition that fills our side streets with parents and children walking from door to door, meeting each other, and collecting candy. It's a great American tradition, but what is great about it is not just getting the candy but the whole experience that is fundamentally-rooted in an active, community-engaged lifestyle that reminds us of how simple, safe--and relatively healthy--our lives were before we over-thought and over-did everthing.

Every horrific death of a cyclist leads to rounds of recriminations and a brief "coming together" of the cyclist community to draw attention to how, in the battle between car and bike, bike (and biker) always loses. In Toronto this summer, a prominent politician (former Attorny General of Ontario, Michael Bryant) engaged in an altercation with a cyclist--the end resulting being the cyclist clinging to his car and eventually being dragged under the rear wheels and killed. The cyclist, a 33-year old father of 3, was a bike courier.

The Toronto Cyclists Union, after some initial reaction and anger and protest, is adopting a very different and positive campaign to attempt to get drivers to notice and respect cyclists--described in the YouTube video below:

The Cyclists Paving the Way campaign aims to "flip" the negativity and emphasize positive driver behavior by encouraging bike riders to hand out little "Thank You" cards to drivers who do "small" actions that acknowledge and respect cyclists...little things like looking before opening a car door or clearly checking for a cyclist when turning.

I like the idea and although I'm not sure about the logistics of handing out cards in busy traffic, I know that I've observed--even in Boston--some standout behavior from people driving cars that should have been thanked. I was shocked one day, at the Mass. Ave and Columbus Ave intersection, to observe a driver asking a guy on a bike about whether or not he (the driver) was OK to be using a lane with a bike drawn on it for his right turn. (Yes, the bike lanes convert to "sharrows" at major intersections.) I've also noted a number of times when I could feel cars patiently waiting for me to "clear" an intersection as they approached from behind to make a right turn...and many times when cars at 4-way stops waved me through as I slowed to pause...

We tend to remember the negative 10 times more than the positive, it seems. The story of the person in a car who buzzed me or yelled at me for no reason--that sticks in my mind for weeks or months, but really, most of the time, most people in cars are actually trying to co-exist. When I have crashed a few times over the years, I've had people jump out of their cars and offer to drive me somewhere--I was embarassed, actually--it was no big deal--but we tend to forget or cynically refuse to believe that actually, most people out there are kind and considerate. If they were not--you wouldn't be able to get a mile down the road without being killed as the opportunities for mayhem are so great...and, as I said in the beginning, in a conflict between car and bike, the car always wins.

I hope the Toronto experiment works. It's not always going to be practical and presumably a cyclist motivated to be this kind of "goodwill ambassador" will be safety-conscious enough to give out these little cards without creating a distraction. But it would be great to see those kind of interactions happening--with less emphasis on the demands for enforcement, penalty and road justice that color most discussions of how bikes and cars get along.

Yesterday, the League of American Bicyclists announced their updated list of Bicycle Friendly Communities. The closest town to Boston is Brunswick, Maine...and, in the past, Burlington, Vermont has been a winner. Both communities won the Bronze designation.

Despite some recent improvements, the City of Boston is not on the list yet. I would argue that their recent efforts make them a strong candidate, but the reality is cycling in Boston is still perceived as a life-and-death adventure and an award, at this point in time, would stretch the credibility of the League.

To win designation as a Bike Friendly Community, a community of any size (award winners range from Chicago and New York City down to Sitka, Alaska and Oxford, Mississippi) submits an application to report what has been done to make their community more bike friendly. It can be both a recognition of efforts and a promotion to encourage more residents to consider cycling.

The 28-page application is, itself, something of a roadmap for change. As communities review the application, they will quickly self-select whether or not they should be applying yet--and gather ideas for steps to take towards making an application credible.

We should be putting Massachusetts on this map. If Sitka and Oxford can be bike-friendly, then, with a bit of work, so can Westwood. Other towns like Brookline, Newton, Milton, Concord and Lexington are probably farther along, but all share significant cycling and cycling advocate populations and official town advisory boards. I would love to see one of these signs posted at the entrance to our town...of course, I'd love to see some bike lanes first!

Of course it would not be fair to just post signs without having made things any safer or friendlier. But as we deploy bike racks, involve our advisory committee in the repaving of roads (a small project next week on Gay Street is taking into account our committee's recommendations), promote our schools participation in Safe Routes to Schools, and look for more and more ways to support and encourage cycling, I believe we should make these efforts as visible as possible--not to "claim credit" but to send a message that bicycles are a welcome part of our community.

A few weeks ago, I set up an IdeaScale web site to gather suggestions for ways to improve Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety in Westwood. It has turned out to be an effective, easy way to collect ideas and our challenge now is to do something about those ideas.

The site is simple to use--that is its principal virtue. I have experimented with other online tools to help improve communication and/or organize things before, with mixed results:

• The WestwoodWiki went nowhere--I think mainly because it requires a great deal of participation, awareness, and faith that one's investment of time will be meaningful. A wiki is a website anyone can edit--allowing group collaboration in drafting documents, etc.--and although I believe it can be a great tool to foster civic engagement, and there are great examples of this in larger cities like Melbourne, Australia or Davis, California, it is hard to get the ball rolling, so to speak.
• WestwoodBlog has been successful, but inconsistent. It totally depends on my effort to stir up news and events and is most valuable when there are "hot" issues in town. If I post something about Westwood Station--the controversial development project that is now stalled due to the economic slowdown--it generates a ton of activity. If I encourage and solicit candidates for Town Election to post their ideas, this generates some commentary. And the topic I created for Walkable Westwood, has been a good place for me to publicize our efforts on Ped/Bike Safety...but the blog is a very general purpose, news-oriented site that many read, but few contribute.

The IdeaScale Site has generated 44 ideas and included several hundred people participating by voting those ideas up or down.

• I seeded the site with many of the ideas our group had already been talking about. This gave us a place to document and discuss those ideas. We had talked about circulating spreadsheets and drafting a group report, but I found publishing the ideas moved us forward more effectively.
• The site was relatively easy to use. I had a few reports of difficulty...and very few people went to the trouble of creating a login account--but as anonymous, guest users, they were able to quickly submit ideas and comments (60-plus comments so far).
• The "discussion" has stayed on track. On the blog, things can go off on tangents since there is no overall purpose, but on the IdeaScale site, it is so focused on a single purpose, I think this has avoided some of the community management problems that could result from just posting a blog item and asking for feedback.

The big question is "what next?" I believe our committee has had great discussions so far and is building an increased awareness of active transporation issues in Town, but I want us to start creating some "small victories"--little accomplishments that demonstrate we are putting ideas to work.

At our last meeting, we began to work through the ideas submitted. I exported the ideas into an Excel spreadsheet and, based on suggestions from other members of the group, created scoring columns for urgency, population impact, and relative effort--summing a 3-point scale so that when addedd together, each idea received a score ranging from 3 to 9. Then, we can sort the ideas and identify the most urgent (immediate safety issues) ideas affecting the largest number of people with the fewest obstacles to implementation as projects we should form subcommittees or working groups to address.

We began by sorting the ideas by their IdeaScale vote score and then working down through the list. The process of discussion itself was valuable--given this framework for approaching it. I projected the spreadsheet on a wall from my laptop and edited it in real-time. For each idea, I clicked on the hyperlink from the spreadsheet to a web browser that allowed us to read the full idea submitted and see the comments. In another browser window, we used google maps to view satellite imagery of the specific locations involved.

As a group, we then reached a consensus on the 3 ratings for each item. Unfortunately, our meeting was already running very late, so we only managed to review the first ten ideas--but along the way we have already begun to identify some projects and priorities and talk about solutions with people in the room who can make a difference--e.g. the Town Engineer, Safety Officer, Town Planner, Planning Board members, PTA representatives, DPW representatives, and other interested people. At our previous meetings, we have had a lot of discussion, but I believe this more structured approach is leading us towards a more methodical review of ideas.

It's early. This was just one meeting and as it approached 10pm, I was torn between the desire to get things done versus the reality that everyone needed to get home to their families. It was not a simple, "that's a 1, this is a 3," kind of discussion as people have many perspectives on each idea and it is incredibly valuable to hear that input as a group. But we began to get into a rhythm of discussion and then a conclusion that, ok, that sounds like it affects the whole town...or, ok that will require work, but it is not impossible..."

I'll report more as we progress.

Last Wednesday, Westwood schools postponed their participation in International Walk to School day due to a torrential downpour. This morning, we await the dawn to melt the first frost of the season, as the thermometer at my house reads 34 degrees and the Norwood airport reports 28. But clear skies should make this a spectacular fall day.

Meanwhile, the concerned parents and bureacrats in Saratoga have eeked at bit closer to permitting kids to ride bikes to school at Maple Avenue Middle School. The Board of Education did in fact strike down the 1994 policy forbidding bike riding, but transferred authority to the local school principal to determine whether it was safe or not. Advocates for change aren't thrilled--it simply transfers the issue to the local school where administrators may continue to say it is not safe, nothing has changed, etc. But I think this is a victory as it opens the door to a local discussion and changes the conversation from "bike riding will not be tolerated" to "how can we make this school safe?"

The reality is that the perception of bike riding as an unsafe activity persists no matter what official policy is adopted. Parents are not going to encourage/allow their kids to ride bikes if they feel it is unsafe. Adults will not bike commute to work if they fear for their lives. Those who extol the virtues of active transportation must find solutions to real and perceived dangers through a combination of what are described as the 4 E's of planning: Education, Engineering, Enforcement, and Encouragement. Additionally, a 5th E, Evaluation, is critical to success of Safe Routes to Schools programs as it "closes the loop" on making sure great ideas, as they are implemented, actually work.

These success stories from communities that have improved their walkability illustrate the key theme of inclusion. Change must "bottom up," it cannot be imposed from above or simply "fixed" by changing a law or building a sidewalk. How we get there is vitally important to success.