Cars vs Bikes: Drivers Impacting Cyclists in Lansing

Lansing has a really great trail system for recreational biking. However, many people rely on bikes for transportation to work, school and for everyday errands. If you do not live right on the river trail, at some point you are going to need to use the city's other transportation infrastructure. Lansing does not have any protected lanes at this time, which means cyclists and drivers often share the roads. When there are no barriers between cars and bikes, collisions are more likely. 

The Michigan Office of Highway Safety Planning maintains a public site of collisions involving cars. Here is a visualization of where those collisions occur when they involve bikes. This paints a picture of where cyclists need to go but do not have access to safe routes. All of the orange points involve injuries; one at the corner of Miller and Cedar resulted in a cyclist's death.   

The streets are not all the same length, so it's not an equal comparison, however it's easy to notice that Michigan Ave has a high number of impacts for a shorter road. There is a planning commission looking at redesigning Michigan Ave in the future called Michigan's Ave. If you have ideas on how you'd like Michigan to look in the future, they are asking people to fill out their survey.

What patterns do you see? How can we ensure our streets are safe for all Lanstronauts: those walking, wheeling, cycling, and driving?

Edit: follow up by request, here is a similar map of cars vs walkers/wheelchairs:

We Beat Nashville: Downtown Parking in Lansing

Fun little historical note: in 2018, StreetsBlog ran a bracket with cities "competing" for the best/worst/most(?) parking in an area. Downtown Lansing came out on top, closely beating out the second place competition: a railroad station in Hicksville, New York. Our prize? The dubiously named "golden crater". Is this news to you? It's been on public display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused Frandor bathroom with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.

What is our current parking situation? Here is a visualization of all lots and structures downtown that are dedicated to cars, courtesy of the contributors of OpenStreetMap. (Note: this doesn't include all street-side parking.)

This is a lot of real estate to dedicate to asphalt, however not all of these lots are available to all citizens at all times. A number of the structures require passes or payment to enter. Some lots are private, belong to the city or LCC, or are restricted in other ways. I was curious to see how other small cities handle parking in their downtown, and so I pulled data from eight other similar-sized cities (110k-ish people) to do a comparison. 

Parking lots, while providing a convenient place to park, have the unintended consequence of making buildings further apart and areas less walkable. You might notice that in downtown Lansing, we have a narrow walkable corridor of credit unions, restaurants, shops and housing, easily navigable by foot, bike, or wheelchair, but outside that area, it's a hike to get in and out of the city and will require bus or car travel. 

One of the reasons many American cities have such large parking lots is something called "parking minimums"—Lansing requires that all new construction have an amount of off-street parking (ie, lot or structure) based on the amount of usable floor space (including multiple levels), number of inhabitants or employees.

If we wanted to build a clinic in an area, for example, the building site would need to have two spaces per patient room plus one for each room plus parking for office space. As you can imagine, this adds up pretty quickly for new construction, which is why you often see new development (for example the apartments downtown) surrounded by lots. Handy for residents, difficult for walkability.

In celebration of our collective accomplishment, feel free to print this and put it on your fridge as I have done.