Pedestrian and Cyclist Count Project

Thanks to a grant from Active Transportation Alliance, we conducted a simple survey of travel habits to downtown businesses, wrote up a report, and hosted a forum discussion on how businesses would like to see their city streets designed and used.

We hosted seven downtown business owners, representatives from the Batavia Bicycle Commission, MainStreet and Karina Villa’s office for a discussion on the results of the survey and what can be done about. MainStreet USA had recently visited with ESRI Tapestry data providing great insight into the customer market in and around Batavia. We incorporated that data into the discussion from the perspective of how these different market segments used transportation and what accommodations might need to be made to get them to use active transit. You can read the full report here.

After the discussion, we broke the group into three teams and using a street design tool called Streetsketch, we asked them to redesign a block of downtown however they saw fit. We asked them to think about their target customers. We asked them what made them feel comfortable when in the public realm. We were quite impressed with what they came up with!

Each block contained an extra-wide sidewalk with street trees, way-finding signage, and a parklet. Without much hesitation, each eliminated the on-street parking and turn lanes. They dedicated more space to humans, and less to cars.

Batavia Avenue is a Stroad

A stroad is a street/road hybrid - the futon of transportation options.  

We've borrowed the concept of the stroad from Strong Towns and adapted their video explanation for Batavia.  

Riding the bus in Batavia

Pace is suburban Chicago's bus transit provider, servicing over 250 municipalities and 10,000 daily riders.  In Batavia, we have the 802 line, running up and down Batavia Avenue and up Main to service Randall Road.  We also have a Call-and-Ride service, and a shuttle to Fermi from the Geneva Train Station.

Otherwise, there is no service to the east side of Batavia, which is strange given the density of industry (jobs) in our northeast corner.

You can access the full schedule here.

Multi-Modal Trips: Biking to the Bus

But, given the small size of Batavia, a rider could get almost anywhere with a short bike ride.  Did you know you can put a bike on a bus? The first time can be intimidating, but it really is easier than you'd think! Watch our friends get a guided lesson on how to do it.

Neighborhood Design and Mass Transit

How we build neighborhoods greatly impacts the efficiency and attractiveness of public transit. Consider the two building patterns below. The red circle is a little over half a mile radius from the center point, where we are assuming a transit stop would exist.  (Half a mile is about how far we expect the average person to walk to the bus.) But that circle is "as the crow flies", not the path a person would actually walk. The paths a person could take, in half a mile or less, to get to that transit stop is marked in blue. See how traditional a subdivision design can drastically reduce the service area? Cul-de-sacs and highway barriers make it a long trip just to get out of the neighborhood. 

This makes it difficult for a bus to service a large enough population to justify the costs in areas like this, and it makes walking and biking for transit less appealing because of the added distance.

Here are some facts from the American Public Transportation Association

Public Transportation Reduces Greenhouse Gases and Conserves Energy:

The "leverage effect" of public transportation reduces the nation's carbon emissions by 37 million metric tons annually - equivalent to the electricity used by 4.9 million households.

To achieve a similar reduction in carbon emissions, every household in New York City, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Denver and Los Angeles combined would have to completely stop using electricity.

People living in households within one-quarter mile of rail or one-tenth mile from a bus stop drive approximately 4,400 fewer miles annually compared to persons in similar households with no access to public transit.

This equates to an individual household reduction of 223 gallons of gasoline a year.

Public Transportation Reduces Gasoline Consumption:

The "leverage effect" of public transportation, supporting transportation efficient land use patterns, saves 4.2 billion gallons of gasoline - more than three times the amount of gasoline refined from the oil we import from Kuwait.

Public transportation use saves the equivalent of 900,000 automobile fill-ups every day.

The typical public transit rider consumes on average one half of the oil consumed by an automobile rider.