If you have a few minutes, I urge you to take a look at this Streetsblog video of the McDonald’s Cycle Center in Chicago’s Millennium Park.  This is a great option for people who work in the area that want to bike to their job on a regular basis.

They currently have over 500 members and a waiting list of commuters who want to be able to park their bikes.  The facility makes it very easy to:

• Ride to the garage
• Park your bike in a double-tier rack
• Shower
• Use locker rooms to dress
• Go to work

The bike parking garage cost just over $3 million to build and is proving to be extremely popular.  The roof features solar panels that power the building.  There is also a bike repair shop on site to provide a tune-up while you are at work or emergency repair by their staff mechanics.

Commuters share the facility with the 400 plus members of the lakefront police bike patrol.  This is great base for the police and really provides an extra level of security for bike riders.  The facility also has bikes for rent and guided tours of different parts of the city.

I hope the success of this operation provides inspiration for other cities.  This addresses many of the major concerns of bike commuters including parking, locker room access and security.  Maybe this will become a growing trend and provide commuters everywhere with a very workable option for bike commuting.

photo credit: roland

Last Tuesday was the presidential inauguration and downtown DC braced for a very large crowd.  But a funny thing happened, there was no traffic.  In this story, they examine how over four times the number of daily commuters entered the city on this day.

This proves that if people just work together using mass transit and ride sharing that we can have a dramatic impact on our daily commutes.  On inauguration day, an estimated 1.8 million people got to their destination with more ease than the typical 400,000 daily commuters.  So even with most of the bridges closed to traffic, four and half times as many people entered downtown DC.

On normal workdays in Washington, 40% of the commuters or 160,000 people drive alone.  Single passenger vehicles are the biggest contributor to our nations gridlock problems.  Getting more people to utilize mass transit, group rides, bike and walk would improve everyone’s daily commute.

I know the current thinking is that we need to greatly enhance our nation’s roadways and build more lanes.  While this will help, it is going to cost us billions and billions of dollars as you can see in the stimulus proposal.

Last Tuesday was a historic day in many ways.  In the spirit of cooperation and national unity, we saw a great number of people avoid the nasty traffic that plagues us every single day.  I would like to see this type of togetherness become the rule, instead of the exception.

photo credit: acnatta

The Asbury Park Press (my local paper) had an interesting story today about New Jersey commuters.  According to census figures, we are number one when it comes to spending time in our cars.  In the story, they list some pretty interesting statistics:

Census figures show the average state commute is 29.4 minutes compared to a national average of 25.1 minutes. Commuters from Marlboro in Monmouth County have the second-longest average commute in the nation at 46 minutes.  Many are solo in their vehicles. Nationally, 76.1 percent of commuters drive alone compared with 72.1 percent in New Jersey.

These numbers back up many of the arguments that I have been making here at Pay4Rides.  Both here in New Jersey and nationally, we are spending almost an hour a day in our cars and we are doing it alone.

Remember, they are called passenger vehicles.  The average car can hold 5 people, maybe 4 comfortably.  Vans and SUVs even more, while sports cars and some pick-up trucks less.  The next time you are driving, look around at all the cars on the road.  How many are single driver only?  Think about all that unused capacity in each vehicle and help me figure out how to begin using it.

photo credit: Looking Glass