 webinar on planning complete low stress bike networks. I just want to take a few minutes to allow participants to join on. So in about a minute or two we'll start our webinar and begin presenting. Please be aware as well that there is a question and answers box that participants can use to send us questions and we'll be able to take those at the end after presenting the materials and if we don't have time to get to your question we will also be posting this webinar to our YouTube channel and sending out to participants some of the materials as well as answering some of those questions that we weren't able to get to during this webinar. So I'm still going to take a moment and in about a minute or two we'll begin. All right also we're gonna begin now I see that there is a good number of participants and we have a critical mass so to speak and so welcome to our webinar. So a quick overview so I'm going to introduce our amazing panelists today who are going to talk about the newest technologies and strategies for complete low stress network planning for different scenarios as well as having the different work that their organizations doing to implement these tools as well as how CalBike is using some of the advances in bike network planning for some of our work in the Central Valley. So my name is Forrest Barnes I am a active transportation planner at CalBike and so we're especially interested in promoting bike network planning not complete low stress bike network planning around the state not just through our advocacy but also through our planning work which includes some of our work in the Central Valley along the stations in Merced Fresno and Baker Sild that will be future high-speed rail stations and making sure that everywhere in the Central Valley cities you should be able to get around the bike shed on a complete low stress network and so included in some of that planning is some work with tool design which you'll hear from one of our panelists soon about some of the work they do and using some of the tools developed with people for bikes and some of these tools are open source and some are paid and it really depends on your own situation but so I'm gonna actually have Rebecca Davies take over from people from bikes to talk about what actually are the basics and importance of complete low stress bike network planning and what are some of the tools that people for bikes has used so Rebecca I'm going to let you take that great yeah thank you for us I'll go ahead and share my screen oh sorry were you gonna nope that's fine that's great just take a second here yeah thanks so much I'm happy to be here to tell you all today about the main thing I think about in my work which is bicycle networks just again yeah you got a brief introduction but again my name is Rebecca Davies I'm the bicycle network data manager here at People for Bikes so one of my my primary duties is managing our bicycle network analysis tool and that's what I'm going to just give you a brief overview about today and if you want more information later on about the sort of nitty gritty details I'd be happy to talk to you about that so at first I wanted to start off by just making sure we're all on the same page in terms of the definition of what is the bicycle network and what is a bicycle network analysis in general so the way we hear at People for Bikes think about bicycle network is all the streets paths and crossings that bicyclists could use in a given area so we define that as any roadway that a car might use in addition to any other paths designated for bicyclists so this would not include things like hiking trails that don't allow bicyclists but we do count any any roadway that allows cars as part of the potential bicycle network in a given area whether that's a city or a neighborhood or some other region so what is a bicycle network analysis then it's a measurement of the safety and comfort of the bicycle network and how well it connects people to the places that they want to go using a safe and comfortable route and we wanted to be able to measure the quality of bicycle network in cities across the country so that's why we partner with tool design a couple years back and built the bicycle network analysis tool essentially it is a piece of software that lowers the barriers to conducting a bicycle network analysis in a given city or neighborhood by automating the network analysis process and I just put the link to the results from that analysis on our website bna.peopleforbikes.org and we have a bunch of network analysis results for cities across the US and plus a few outside of the US for comparison and I'm just going to walk you through an example for one of the cities that's in the BNA in California so I'm going to use the city of Lompoc as an example we do have 55 cities in the BNA for California so you can check and see if the city that that you're involved with or that you live in is in the BNA and and if it's not you can get in touch with me and we can talk about adding it but Lompoc is in there and this is just a map showing the the city boundary that we have for the city of Lompoc so when we run Lompoc through the bicycle network analysis first the bicycle network analysis rate every single pathway or road in the bike network so as I said that's every street usable by cars plus designated bike paths and you can see here there are blue streets and red streets these are low stress and blue and high stress and red and this is based on a series of criteria I won't go in-depth on that now but essentially factors like what is the speed limit how many lanes of travel are there is their bike infrastructure what type of bike infrastructure is it separated or not doctors like that are included in analyzing every single segment of every street that you see here and then rated as low or high stress based on those factors you've got you may have seen other reading systems that have multiple steps for instance sometimes there's a scale of one to four to show kind of an intermediary level of stress but in the BNA there's only high and low stress so it's a bit of a simplified measurement system you can see here for Lompoc there's a lot of streets that are low stress but they tend to be divided by these high stress roadways often those are kind of major roads usually they have more lanes of traffic higher speeds things like that so you can see that those kind of run right through the city and can cut people off from traveled through different directions for safety so that's the first output when the from the bicycle network analysis in addition the network analysis produces a math of all the infrastructure in the city all the bicycle infrastructure in the city based on the data that it uses so we can see here there are these purple lines on some the streets and green lines the purple lines indicate conventional bike lanes so this is just a painted bike lane on the street but there's no suffer or separation that would look like this street right conventional bike lane we're familiar with that we also see some of these green lanes or sorry green lines on the map those are off-street paths so those are completely separated pathways again something like this so the BNA identifies those types of infrastructure it also identifies if there are protected bike lanes on the street so something with a barrier between the bicyclists and cars or buffered lanes where there's a you know painted differentiation but there aren't either of those types of infrastructure here in this map of Long Park just to give you an idea here's a couple of pictures of that those kinds of infrastructure in other California cities so the buffered lane protected lane so you'll find out where all of that kind of infrastructure is based on the maps from the BNA and then also the BNA produces this heat map that I'm showing now so this is a heat map based on a scale of zero to 100 where 100 indicates perfect connectivity and that's the sort of bright blue color you see that's kind of more towards the center of the map zero indicates very poor connectivity which you can see around some of the edges of Long Park and then there's a lot of areas that are kind of in between the purpleish color so what this is showing is if you start in a particular part of the city so you live there and what how good is your connectivity using only those blue routes only those low stress bike ways to get to destinations within a very moderate biking distance say a 10 minute bike ride so if you live towards the center of Long Park and you live within a 10 minute bike ride of a grocery store you might have a good chance of being able to bike there using only those low stress streets but if you live in one of these areas kind of on the fringe that has poor connectivity you might not have a lot of options for biking to that destination near you maybe that's because you're blocked off by a high stress road or there's a lack of faith crossing across busy streets things like that that would prevent your journey using only low stress routes so that's what this map is telling you is in enabling you to see which parts of the city have better experience better connectivity on the network and which parts of the city experience poor connectivity and you could use this data and combine it with other kinds of data that you might have about place for instance you could combine it with income data or race and ethnicity data or age or any other kind of demographic information you're interested in you could layer those maps and see how well the bike network serves different kinds of communities based on based on the T map and you could get a sense for maybe certain populations that aren't served as well as others you can also look at the map to understand and use the data to understand how well you can access different kinds of destinations so the BNA categorizes destinations into certain certain types such as schools basic services jobs things like that this is at the point on this map show parks around Long Park so you can assess how well the bike network is serving different parks throughout the city or how well residents can access parks based on where they live and then on top of that you receive a lot of numbers and these are this is the actual score for the city of Lompoc and this is all related to the map I just showed you so you can see there's a top level score which is a 58 that's on that same 0 to 100 scale but it's a score for the whole the city as a whole a 58 for on the scale of US cities is pretty good not a lot of cities score over 50 in the BNA a lot of US cities are kind of in the 10 to 30 range so 58 is pretty good I think the highest score in California in the BNA currently is Davis which has about a 71 but you know we can see year to year how these scores change and you can also see how these scores apply to the different destination categories I was talking about for instance the people category which is a couple couple levels below the the overall score that is assesses how well people can access other people based on starting from where they live and where they can bike to where can I bike to areas of high population density for my house using only low stress networks that's kind of what that's showing and I won't go through every single destination category but you can see things like grocery, hospitals, parks, higher education all sorts of scores and and they can range which indicates whether those types of destinations are more or less accessible to the overall population the zeros don't necessarily mean that the destination is inaccessible it might reflect a lack of that type of destination in the city so we have to look go back to the maps and look at that to understand exactly the zero scores but all of these scores are combined and weighted to get the overall score so I'm just a reminder of the different kinds of outputs from the map and you can combine these two to see well for instance if we look at the southeast area of the map where it's a little bit more purple compared to the center of Lomphock well then you can go back to the network map and see that there are some major roadways that are high stress and that might be blocking off that southeastern area from the rest of the city and so you can use the maps in those ways to identify where specific kinds of infrastructure or the absence thereof are preventing people from being able to have greater bike access throughout the city and so a lot of the map map data is really applicable for these detailed analyses of you know what kind of infrastructure do we need or how are we going to improve access for different populations throughout the city so going between those maps you can make those kinds of decisions based on the data and first I want to make add a few more notes on the bicycle network analysis from people for bikes in relation to what you might know about or hear about related to network analysis more generally and what we'll hear in the subsequent presentations in this webinar so as a as a software tool the bicycle network analysis advantage is that it's automated it has national data coverage for the u.s because it uses open street map which is an open source data source which means that anybody can use that data and anybody can contribute to it it also means that we can create consistent comparative ratings between places we can compare Lomphock to other cities throughout california or the u.s because we're using the same network analysis rating system and because it is automated and because it can produce network analysis in a fairly short amount of time for instance i could run the city of lomphock in the dna in you know an hour or less because of all those things the network analysis the bicycle network analysis is lowering the barriers network analysis the trade-off is that it's not as customized as a really in-depth network analysis might be for a city that's providing all of it all the data that the city uses for planning purposes that could create a really customized analysis whereas this is an automated version using open street map data using census data and enabling people to compare across places so that's where this tool really fits in in the spectrum of different kind of network analysis options is is it lowers the barrier so that more cities and groups and community group can have access to network analysis results without having to undertake the often sort of intensive process of using a lot of data sources and connecting the analysis more manually so that's where we really see this tool fitting in and helping people access network analysis results more readily so that's all i've got for you today i've just repeated the website the bicycle network analysis here and also my email feel free to follow up i can give you lots of information about all the details of this analysis i'm happy to do that and like i said happy to talk to you if you are interested in getting results from the bna for a city that's not already on the website yeah so thank you so much rebecca i am really grateful for your explanation of this and actually use the bna in my work and it's a really helpful utilization tool and now i'm going to have brook take over and present on rapid rapid network implementation i do want to really remind the audience that there is the ability to ask questions throughout and that we will be answering those at the end within a given time and i will also be sharing all of the resources that rebecca had mentioned websites etc to you all as well so brook i'd like to hear from you next fantastic can you hear me yes great awesome um well thank you so much for thin cow bike for the opportunity to talk with you all today this is one of my absolute favorite topics rapid implementation of low stress bike networks and i'm going to share about 20 slides with a group today to really share all the direct work that we've been doing around the u.s some best practices and and things that we have learned along the way partnering with people for bikes and other groups and then also sharing some international examples as well um you gave a nice introduction but for those of you who don't know me uh i'm brook the bows i'm a regional director for total design and i've been doing actor transportation work in the bay area in new york city for about 15 years now i have the best job in the world so um want to kind of dive in here so over the last five years you all probably know there's been a pretty major shift in the ways that cities have really approached uh implementing bike infrastructure right where the emphasis is much more on building low stress bikeways and looking back for more than 20 years we had taken a more conventional approach by installing a lot of bike lanes a lot of shared routes i'm sure that that many of you on this call were pretty instrumental in getting a lot of those bike facilities in the ground but what we found is that um that more traditional approach really didn't move the needle much in terms of mode share getting people on bikes and it certainly really didn't address a lot of the the safety issues for bicyclists on the road and so i know i'm putting to the choir here i'm sure many of you are really excited about protected bike lanes and all the new tools that we have in our toolbox today and now we're we're looking at getting a lot of these facilities on the street I'm working with the city of San Jose right now where we're producing a proposed bike network of 400 miles of protected bike lanes and so now the the big question is how on earth do we get that all done so i want to start and just kind of put some context here this cartoon could be for any project that we work on um related to you know transportation and urban environment and it really shows the tension that typically cause when a bike lane project uh is is proposed and i'm not sure are you showing my slides okay if you can go ahead another slide great thank you um so you know for me this this this picture really depicts how we as humans react to change we are incredibly scared of it and we are our minds tend to go to the worst possible outcome but the beauty of rapid implementation is that it really directly helps communicate what the vision is head on it's no longer an ambiguous idea that gets rolled out over a 10-year process and you can really see results on the ground very quickly rapid implementation also combats a very common issue that that kind of plagues the traditional delivery or transportation projects and that they just take forever to come to life and we in the past have gone out to a community and asked them for their ideas along the way over multiple years and by the time the project actually gets built many of those community members have moved on there's other stakeholders involved that feel like they were never asked about the process and we're still getting stalled out and so rapid implementation really gets around a lot of those issues next slide please so i want to share exactly a definition of what rapid implementation is and it's really a pretty new approach that focuses resources from funding city staff consultants around engagement the advocacy community is key in this it's really to deliver a full and complete connected network of high comfort bikeways very quickly the network typically starts with a central district or a downtown and i'll connect feeder routes to other parts of the city or urban area rapid implementation or quick build projects use materials that are fairly low cost and are meant to be in the ground for just a few years at a time so that we can kind of make adjustments on the ground i want to be clear that they can be pilot programs so you can really test out an idea that they're not the same as pop-up events which are typically you know happen over a weekend or a day and are really just sort of a demonstration these are that meant to last in the ground for several years and ideally iterate over time with more permanent materials next slide so let's rewind and if you can click ahead yeah perfect really to where this idea started and we have to jump across the Atlantic for that to Seville Spain in 2006 Seville had about seven miles of pretty disconnected bikeway network segments and you can see that on the left and i think that that's what a lot of our bike networks across the US and North America look like today is that we go for the opportunities where they're easy and rather than really thinking about a more connected network so the mayor came in 2006 and decided to really develop a comprehensive citywide bike network that was largely composed of separated bike lanes and they added 40 miles of bike network over a single year and that investment created a connected network that reached almost all the neighborhoods in the city and really transformed Seville luckily there was a lot of attention given to measuring these effects on ridership and safety in the before and after implementation and i want to share the results here now so if you can go to the next slide and click again so this chart shows the mileage of the cycle track network in green bicycle ridership in blue and the crash risk in orange and starting in 2006 Seville increased their bicycling use by over 400 percent and at the same time they also decreased their crash risk for bicyclists by over 60 percent now Seville went on to expand their network in subsequent years and their networks about 100 miles now but what we're really seeing is that big jump in bicycling ridership and safety improvements in that first year and that's really what has brought a lot of great ideas to folks like people for bikes and their big jump project in many cities around North America and I think that that's a really critical point to rest on for just a minute is that if they had tried to build a system one mile at a time they had a lot of political resistance just like we do here in the US and in Canada but by getting it all down in one year and they were able to see results very quickly next slide so catalyzed by the success that we've seen in Seville and also in other cities in Canada than elsewhere a lot of cities in North America jumping on the bandwagon and here are just a few examples up on the screen I know that there's a lot of other cities and communities that are moving forward with rapid implementation projects and a lot of different iterations but I will say that people for bikes has been integral to this movement really helping with their big jump cities New Orleans Providence and elsewhere we've been working with the Sea of San Jose where they got a grant from NACTO and the Knight Foundation and then other cities like Fremont in the Bay Area are just going that alone and really moving forward with the political support that they have next slide so I want to take the rest of my presentation to really share what we have learned by working with cities throughout North America it's been a great learning process we've had some belly flops we've had some successes and really want to focus on what is going to be important for you to try rapid implementation networks in your own communities next slide so the first element is really making sure that you don't let perfect be the enemy of good and I think that when a lot of communities are trying innovative facilities out for the first time they want to make sure that they're getting it perfect the first time around and that that iteration can really spend a lot of time in wheel spinning so what we recommend instead is that you get your design to about 90 percent get it in the ground and iterate when it's on the ground and the City of San Jose did this with their better bikeways project in the past year where I think that they made you know dozens and dozens of adjustments once they saw how buses and motorists and bicyclists were navigating the new area next slide I'd say that make sure that that you don't let fear of change really lead these projects it's really striking this is a 311 calls from the City of Calgary after they had installed their cycle track network project in their city center the red bars facing down are the negative calls the yellow or neutral and the green or positive and as you can see in the first few days and weeks they did get a number of negative calls really from people trying to navigate the system and then those died off very quickly and they started to get some really positive calls and so the lesson for here and what the mayor really took to heart is don't let the initial blowback or questions really drive what your next steps are stay the course and and and see you know where people can go with that next slide the other piece is that results don't have to take forever to get into the ground so with Edmonton's central city bikeway network they were able to see nearly doubling and in bike trips in their first month there so that's really important data and information to share the successes with next slide keep going obviously limited funding is a critical issue for every community around the world right and the beauty of rapid implementation networks is that they can be implemented with much fewer resources there's sort of two reasons for that first is the the time that you're taking to plan design constructs these facilities is much shorter and so just the costs are minimized through that the second piece is that the materials are just much lower costs because they're meant to be temporary you're not pouring curbs you're not changing journeyage all those major issues so in the examples that i'm sharing today the cost of these rapid implementation networks really range between i'd say two to twenty million dollars and twenty million dollars as the example from Sibyl that i shared um Tiana Jose with their first phase of their better bikeways network um has just spent two million dollars and they've had a lot of really great success next slide um so planning the network is really really important this is an example from New Orleans where we're working with people for bikes in the city there to implement 75 miles of rapid implementation bikeway network work which is really exciting so we're starting in their downtown using equity indicators in adjacent neighborhoods to really think about where to build a network from there on out so you know keep in mind the idea is that you start in a very focused neighborhood with a very dense and connected bikeway network and then you radiate out from there so for New Orleans really leaving with equity to make sure that underserved neighborhoods are connecting to their downtown has been critical next slide selecting that the right bikeway type is is critical for these networks we're really only talking about low stress facilities so that all people of all ages and all abilities can use these facilities and there's a very simple formula that we use to determine what those facility types are next slide that what we're showing up here is what federal highways is using now and I'll be in the forthcoming astral bike guide that we're currently writing and really what it means is that the higher the vehicle volumes and the higher the vehicle speeds the more protection and separation we provide for bicyclists and so this is a formula that we iterate for all of all of the network and I'd say that one thing that's really important to keep in mind is that there's always going to be places where you're going to be constrained in terms of right away or there's going to be a bus route that you need to prioritize and it's very important that you keep the integrity of that low stress connection because if one intersection becomes high stress then the whole network kind of falls apart and so better to have a really narrow facility rather than something that's downgraded next slide design and operations working together is so critical because the operations folks are the ones that are going to be maintaining these facilities they have a lot of really good ideas about how to design the facilities so that maintenance and operations can be successful further down the line and so making sure that all those staff are working together at the very beginning of the project to inform the process is really critical next slide and then the question becomes who makes the decisions around this work it's a very interdisciplinary and collaborative process throughout agencies and with elected officials and key stakeholders in the community but ultimately you do need someone within the city or jurisdiction to drive the process and make decisions as you go down the lines and we find that to be incredibly important otherwise things start to stall out and some of the harder decisions that that need to be made don't end up getting made at key touchpoints next slide engaging the public i'm sure you all know the importance of community engagement i think that the key thing around rapid implementation bike networks is that you're really selling the network as a whole you're not selling project by project block by block by really selling people in the concept of a complete network you're not going to have to go out to kind of fight that battle block by block with with various different stakeholders once you have sort of gotten the public's buy-in and understanding that this is an entire network is is a bundle project then you can start to have the conversations with merchants around you know effects to parking or traveling changes and those kinds of things next slide engagement doesn't stop with opening day and i'm sure that many of you're familiar the innovative bike facilities can be kind of new and unfamiliar to all roadway users and so making sure that people are understanding the changes to the roadway how to use them and also communicating the successes very early on of what you're seeing those successes don't have to be just for bicyclists they can also talk about improvements for pedestrians and transit times and all kinds of elements so to really share the successes of those investments in your in your communities next slide so i just want to recap some of the key ingredients for success and if you can continue sliding forward so that they're all populated that would be great i can't stand animations but one of the most important things is that it's so critical to have champions in your community for rapid implementation it's a very new idea for for many communities so making sure that you have someone in your council or a board of supervisors or mayor who's really going to champion the idea given the political support and coverage that they need so that agency staff can move forward and get this good work done is is absolutely critical again emphasizing the network rather than each street segment in the public engagement process and selling that as a whole bundled project is very important ensuring that all of the facilities within your network are high comfort and never settle for a lower comfort facility or any gaps in that network especially at the intersections and interchanges where the most friction occurs focus on projects that show results quickly so that you can celebrate them and demonstrate that these are great investments to make and then really bring all of your collaborators together into a single team designers operators your public engagement specialists all of those folks ADA experts everybody really needs to be at the table to make this a success and then remember that the initial network is only the beginning so with the example of cities San Jose they have built their their rapid implementation network in their downtown and through their better bike plan they're planning to iterate and build on that rapid implementation network in all the surrounding neighborhoods to connect in so lots of great work to be done really excited to see where this goes in the coming years and that's it for me awesome thank you so much brook for going over this and also more of the political implications of bike network planning and the successes in the u.s. and other cities so next we're going to hear from torsha batachira from the rails to trails conservancy about one of the tools that they've developed for bike network planning and as you can see both the tools work together to sort of allow advocates to tell the story as well of the need for a complete network and so i'm going to hand it over to torsha now so hello can you see me can you hear me and see my screen yes and you can see my part one or not yet and in the meantime i'd like to also remind the audience to ask any questions that you might have to any of the panelists or overall and then i had some in my email that i will bring up can you see my screen now or yes okay perfect so hello everybody uh and thank you for joining in the webinar and thank you for hosting this for us and cal bikes i'm torsha batachira i'm the director of research over at rails to trails conservancy and a little bit about our organization we started in 1986 and since then we have been working to build trails and build stronger communities across the country we have about 23 000 months of rail trails already on the ground with 8 000 more along the way and initially when rtc started our focus was to get the low hanging fruit to connect those gaps but now over the years we have moved our focus or increased our focus to include not just filling in the gaps but completing networks of trails and we have these projects all across the us and we call them trail nation projects and one in california is called the bay area trails collaborative which is a 2700 miles of connected trail networks for the people to be connected to each other and to the destinations that are important to them so today i'm going to talk about bikeable it's the super awesome tool that we have it basically is a gis based tool it's a routing tool and if you google bikeable and rail through trails it should bring up the web page but i've also included the web address at the bottom of this slide basically what the tool does is it routes origins that you can select to select the destinations through a network of street trails bike lanes and any and all types of bike facilities so what i'm going to walk you through today is what how we have worked or applied bikeable in two different situations in our work so far the first one that bikeable does this deals with the transportation component and as we know transportation and land use is interrelated i'll then talk also about the how we bring in the lounges part of it so for the transportation component what it does is that the whole network or the street network is divided into high stress to low stress infrastructure and i feel i'm again once again preaching to the core you all are might be very aware of where and how some streets or transportation networks are super high stress as experienced by cyclists and then there are other networks like trails which are separated physically separated from motor vehicles and therefore have the lowest stress among all of the facilities that we consider so just a rule of thumb that the wider the road the faster the cars the more stressful a bicyclist would feel and the flip side of it is the narrower the roads more separation from direct traffic and slower speed limits would make people feel safer now this concept of low stress is not new we all know that it's been several decades old has been applied in several places in europe the concept moved to the all of these bike mechas that we have in around us but it's recently catching steam with where we see the dangerous by design or the leagues or rtc's report highlighting the lack of connected safe facilities for bicyclists to actually achieve this mode shift actually achieve the environmental impacts that we think that it will then more and more people move towards a greener mode of infrastructure so what we do is if you see in the middle the initial picture that he showed you has changed and the roadway network is now colored into yellow red and green stripes basically what we have done here is just assigned level of traffic stress to every single segment as well as intersections within a town or a region that we are applying the tool to so now we can use this model to tell us which of the residences or if you're taking residences as your origins which of the those are connected by low stress routes to specific destinations and then on flip side which are the residences that are not connected to where they need to go and whether there's a pattern there and just to be clear bikeable as a tool is you can customize it super customizable so you can use the standard version that's included in the gis package toolbox but also when we work with a city or a community we make sure we are talking to them and finding out what their destinations is where the posted speed limit might be 25 miles per hour but drivers are zooming down at 45 then we move the stress levels from green to yellow or red so we are always working with communities to customize the tool to reflect the realities on the ground and that depends on the amount of data that's available and it's always differs from communities to community now so most of the time we are trying to route for not the strong and fearless where these bicyclists are open to riding with high speed alongside cars but we are mostly planning for the ones that are not as confident so they're interested but the concerned group of cyclists with growing amount of information that we have with GPS tracking tools with health and fitness fitness tools nowadays we get a lot of real-time data available to us but for this tool we actually use proxies like width of streets speed limits infrastructure slope things that are readily available to proxy what kind of stress a bicyclist might be experiencing so this one on your screen what you see here is the stress network for the city of Milwaukee that's one of the cities that we worked with and every single road and bike network facility has been categorized depending on what the width is what its speed is what kind of topography exists within the city and then are there any stress reducing interventions that are available at these crossings so what we see here the pattern is the lot of small neighborhood streets here they're creating the islands of green space around here and then once you move out there are these orange streets that are medium stress level and then they're almost cut off by these red ones that are super high stress so these are not necessarily connectors but we consider them more to be barriers to connectivity and these are mostly either main arterials or highways so now that we talked a little bit about the land use component i'm going to move on to i mean the transportation component i'm going to move on quickly to the land use one so again going back to the Milwaukee example what we see here is the distribution the pink dots are the origins or the parcels in Milwaukee and then the blue dots all around the city are the destinations again incredibly detailed and zoomed out but again you can zoom in on or out depending on your focus areas we're hundreds of categories of destinations from the NAICS code that we pull you can pull from google places or business analysts now the next step for us is to what the tool does is combines the transportation stress network with the land use origin and destination that information that we just found out and then gives us the connectivity results here so as you can see on the screen here the bluish region are the regions of high connectivity we're almost a majority of the population residing in this area can connect to destinations the select destinations whereas in the outskirts what you can see is orange and red areas these are the zones that very few of the residents can actually access destinations using low stress bike network now we also have to remember one thing is that because this is a transportation and land use problem there could be high connectivity without having a very good network like in downtown areas where people might be living close to tons of destinations or it could be that this is not available and the land use is not as appropriate so therefore out in the suburbs you might have an excellent bike network but there are no destinations that you could go to so what we did was once we looked at the trend in a bike network connectivity we wanted to make sure that there was no disparity as such that came up now milwaukee is similar to many american cities it has a significant population that do not get the minimum recommended minimum recommended daily exercise and so we wanted to know if people in there have proper access to trails or not and we wanted to focus on the traditionally underserved population in there to in order to do that we looked at since a census defined variables like poverty levels minority population distribution zero car households that gave us our subset of origins and for our destinations so that this one shows you what our subset of our study area is and then we moved on to looking at destinations not just as places of like grocery stores which you could if you're looking at food deserts or something similar but we what we did here was selecting destinations that were trail access points so to see if people had access proper access to trails the slide here shows you the green access points are existing trails and the red and the blue line is the newer or planned trails what the tool found out was that eight percent of the residents in the existing condition could access trails safely using a bicycle facility those trails bicycle facility but once you add those future trails in there the north south and the east west connections 66% of the residents boom it just increases by a lot so visually this is a very powerful tool when you're trying to make the case for active transportation networks in your city or region if you're not if you're still not impressed with how awesome the tool is i'll show you a little bit more of what else bikeable can do and this is a recent example of just a corridor analysis that we did and the previous one was a network analysis we recently ran a east bay bay greenway connectivity analysis and this is in our bay area trails collaborative footprint we looked at east bay greenway planned improvements divided the area into three sections of from oakland to san liandro and hayward and then ran the tool in three different parts with and without the future improvements and as you can see for each of the existing and future conditions there was significant change in bicycle connectivity so the results of the analysis it showed us for the entire corridor there was a 16% increase in bike connectivity if it would be that would be the case if the eastway greenway were to be implemented and that helps a lot of the city people to make the case for trails to get increased funding for active transportation networks so i guess to just sum up my presentation there are many different ideas and ends that bikeable can allow you to achieve some of them are conducting low stress connectivity analysis in your region it can also be broken down into smaller corridor level analysis if you are a business looking to site your business in a specific city and you want to attract a bicyclist or pedestrians to your business you might also be able to use this tool to determine where to set up your business as a city if you're looking for a quantitative tool to prioritize non-motorized investments this tool will also give you a list of the type of investments that will allow you to gain the greatest connectivity so for example if you have 30 different projects what are the five that will get you the most connectivity and then you can start implementing them one after the other and of course what type of improvement is it a protected bike network is it a trail system that you want to implement depending on that your solutions will be different and your increase in network connectivity low stress network connectivity would be vastly different so i will stop here and if you have any questions or would like to talk to me about the tool my number my email address is right on there and i'll be happy to answer any questions thank you so much thank you so much torsha and we have a few minutes left for q&a and so i'm going to just take some that i've seen in the questions typed and also ones that were emailed to me and i also want to remind all panelists that this webinar is being recorded and it's going to go on cal bikes youtube channel so is our website and all of the resources and links that the panelists have shared today will also be posted as well so you can access those and so i really want to thank all of our panelists today for really you know sharing their expertise with us and the different tools and strategies that you know we can really take into our advocacy and planning work so i guess one of the questions that i had for you all was how much experience do you have to have already using gis or other tools geospatial tools to um be able to use these so that's probably more directed at torsha and rebecca sure so hi this is torsha i can answer that so for us we can do it in two ways we work with the city of Cleveland to train their city staff in how to use gis but then gis tool but then the the staff that were learning it had to have some basic understanding of how to use this true gis tool but if you just want to use the the tool to run an analysis a one-time thing we will run it for you and uh thereby you'll not have access to the true tool but you'd still have access to the analysis in that case you don't really need any gis skills but just interpretation of that okay and i have used the bna myself um for some of the work i think um it perhaps requires a little more experience using um other related tools but is on the other hand an open source tool and we can link um some of the resources there and so another question that we had um was i guess if rebecca you could answer how often is the bna updated yeah so generally it can you hear me just want to make sure uh yeah now we can okay great um so we update the bna um we update all the cities in the bna once per year uh we just actually went through that um process in in february we've got a couple couple cities um lingering to update but almost all of them have been very recently updated so so typically um typically once a year um and kind of tied into the last question if folks want to run it themselves there are there is some kind of technical knowledge required but i'm happy to talk to them about what that is and and how to do that um and we are hoping to we're working on actually developing a um uh slightly easier version of the bna um it will still require some technical knowledge to run but um that will enable more folks to run it on their own so that they can get those results um more frequently um but um yeah yeah so if somebody uh i know since we just updated it a year from now it seems like a long way to way so if someone is interested in results sooner than that i'm happy to chat with them and um so my last question since it is 12 o'clock um and i know our our both our panelists and our participants go um so there was a question that um we had and broke had mentioned this about um measuring stress at the intersections um and to not you know drop the low stress you know infrastructure at intersections and so i was wondering if um you know you all could speak to that if if tools um if the tools measure intersection stress at all or if that's forthcoming or difficult to do and maybe broke about um you know some advice on that and we'll also provide some resources like nactos you know don't give up at the intersection um some design guidance as well but i guess brooke um do you have any um thoughts on measuring stress at intersections and how to make sure to not drop at the intersection yeah absolutely um so the the level of traffic stress tools that we have um can measure stress at intersections and um that's really the most critical piece of where you provide really good infrastructure because that's where we see you know the conflicts happening most with turning movements um the other place obviously is at at driveways um but in terms of the infrastructure a lot of that has to do with how large your intersection is and what types of movements and um that you really need to support there as well so there are a lot of really great tools for separating signal movements i think that the mass dot guide for separative bike lanes is probably the most up-to-date guidance on that along with the nacto don't give up the intersection um that really provides some good resources about how you handle the design of those intersections um but i'd say that it's it's pretty easy to provide a low stress segment um from from vehicle traffic it's a lot harder to design at the intersection and so that's really where we see a lot of communities kind of get stumbled on um and let's not not forget as well about freeway interchanges which are a whole another beast um and the tools around really managing speed and um the the kind of the mixing areas and in those places needs to be thought through very carefully um thank you so much brook uh we're actually um gonna wrap this up right now and all of the questions that we received via um either in the question and answer box in the chat or that were emailed to me we'll do our best to share those questions with panelists and answer those when we submit the resources um and also post the webinar thanks again so much especially to our panelists who are doing amazing work and i think really explained these tools and concepts extremely well um and you'll be able to reference back to this in the future so thanks all again and uh we will alert you when this is posted thanks again thank you thank you