David Mack's comics

Local artist David Mack makes comics about Athens, published weekly in Flagpole.

Check out his site here.

A few of his bike-related pieces are below. Enjoy!

Greenways as transportation

Flagpole discusses.

Welcome to Athens

Welcome to Athens, new UGA students! And welcome back, all who summered elsewhere.

Check out bikeathens.com or this blog for everything you need to know about transit, walking, and cycling in Athens. If you like to volunteer, we have plenty of opportunities! You can always check out the great local weekly, Flagpole, for transportation news and event announcements as well.

In its orientation-to-Athens issue, Flagpole generously mentions BikeAthens quite a few times...

* BikeAthens Co-Chair Amy Johnson is quoted in a story on the Long Range Transportation Plan.

Don't forget to come by Trappeze at 7 pm tonight! We'll be discussing the LRTP and finalizing BikeAthens' formal comment on the plan. If you can't make it, be sure to submit comment on the plan. If you haven't read it, don't worry! While we strongly advise you to read the plan, you can submit any comment you like on the future of transportation in Athens. It will all be considered. You can email comments to macorts@co.clarke.ga.us until August 18th. Or, stay tuned for our soon-to-be-live online comment form, where you can tailor your comments on the LRTP and submit them from a single web page.

* Also, City Dope talks sidewalks, Athens Rising covers downtown and parking decks, and a feature for new arrivals points folks to our free Bike Map.

* Finally, the events calendar reminds the volunteer-minded to consider our ongoing Bike Recycling Program.

BikeAthens encourages you to walk, ride a bike, or take transit whenever possible. It's easier than you think to get around without a car! It will save you money, keep you healthier, and reduce traffic all around.

When you do drive, watch for pedestrians and cyclists, and give them the right-of-way. It's not just neighborly, it's the law!

And when you bike or walk, just remember:

• Be aware of your surroundings
• Be visible
• Ride legally & predictably
• Wear a helmet
• Share the road with all users

Enjoy yourself, and take advantage of all that Athens offers. We hope you'll get involved with BikeAthens!

Rail in GA

Flagpole's editor discusses our missed chances and potential opportunities for rail in Georgia.

Meanwhile, Kevan Williams delves into the role of maps and images in communicating development project proposals.

500K follow-up

Flagpole provides further coverage of the $500K available for bike/ped/bus projects.

Tell us what you want: poll to your right -->

Ped mall variations

Flagpole's "Athens Rising" columnist, Kevan Williams, explores the oft-discussed downtown pedestrian mall concept, pointing out that such a pedestrian space need not be linear or limited to "College Square."

He says, "These pedestrian plazas ought to be little gems in the city...We’ll never know how this thing would work until we try it, but trying it out doesn’t require a multi-million dollar streetscaping project. This spring, the city could put out some traffic barricades, roll out the AstroTurf, and take back the street for a week to see what happens."

A year for new approaches?

Flagpole covers the intersection of TSPLOST, state and local government, and Athens Transit.

Flagpole: downtown ped mall, GDOT, and more

Along with cover art by a former BikeAthens' Board member, this week's Flagpole features stories on possibly converting College Square to a pedestrian plaza and the budgetary tribulations at GDOT.

Athens commissioners talk transit with state officials

From the Flagpole:

Four Athens-area state legislators met with Athens-Clarke County (ACC) Commissioners Nov. 11 to hear the commission’s wish list for items of local interest they’d like the legislature to act on.
...
All the legislators seemed sympathetic to the county’s desire for a sales tax (subject to voter approval) to fund public transportation, and Mayor Davison said she expects the Legislature to approve some such option this year.
...
[State Representative Bob] Smith also seemed to have gotten religion about passenger rail. “We created the rail in America, and now we’re lagging in it,” he said, citing “bullet trains” that run in Europe and Japan. A “Brain Train” to Atlanta that runs only 55 miles per hour? “It’d be nice,” Smith said, “but 210’s nicer.”

How to emulate Portland

This week, Flagpole columnist Kevan Williams describes a number of ways Athens could follow the lead of Portland, OR in improving pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. New Commission, take note!

For the rest of us, let's make a concerted effort to tell MACORTS about our desire for this kind of sustainable transportation equality.

Excerpts:

In Portland, drivers stop at crosswalks, even without flashing lights and neon bollards. ... It would take a lot of enforcement to ingrain that pedestrians always have the right-of-way here in the South, but the payoff is worth it: it slows everyone down, and puts drivers in a situation where they ought to be looking for pedestrians, instead of driving through and idling in crosswalks while trying to turn.

Certain routes within Portland are designated as bike routes, regardless of the infrastructure in place. Even if there are no bike lanes or “sharrows,” a flat side street could be made an official bike route. Imagine if BikeAthens’ bike map were adopted by the city, and those routes which were good for bicycling were then signed by the city to guide bicyclists.

In Portland, what we would call greenway trails are considered an important transportation network, just like rail and roads. There is a comprehensive system of off-street bicycle trails, in some cases extending miles without crossing a street. These don’t just follow the rivers, but also rail lines, transmission lines, highways and other easements where access is already limited. Most importantly, these routes actually go places, and are fed by on-street bicycle routes in a logical manner.

Bringing It Home: Portland is a city that’s a lot like Athens; it’s not a metropolis of especially tall buildings, and its greatest strength lies in its walkable neighborhoods. Basic services in Portland can be reached by bicycle on a neighborhood scale just as easily as can thousands of workplaces downtown on a citywide scale. The neat thing is that most of it isn’t done through huge infrastructure and park projects; there seems to be a commitment to a bottom-up approach, which focuses on making neighborhoods and side streets safe to walk first, and then builds up into an entire city of cyclists. After all, if people don’t feel safe crossing the street at the end of their block, they won’t be biking across town on a greenway.

Full article here.

Bus ridership sky high

As a result of the hurricane-sponsored gas drought, many more Athenians turned to the bus last month. Flagpole reports:

According to Athens Transit Director Butch McDuffie, last month’s ridership figures are up 20 percent over September of last year, and up 15 percent over August of this year. The bus system logged almost 195,000 individual rides this September. Over 30-plus years, “It’s the highest recorded ridership in any one-month period that Athens Transit has ever experienced,” McDuffie says.
...
“I would hope and anticipate that after this gas crunch goes away, that we will maintain 50 percent of that increase - because people will see that the bus does work,” McDuffie says. “Now that they’ve figured out that, ’Wow, it works,’ I think they’re going to stay.”

Let's hope so, and let's hope the Commission formally approves the ads-on-buses revenue program, that the state legislature moves quickly on allowing a transit-focused TSPLOST program, and that the federal government pulls us out of our exploits for dwindling resources and puts a fraction of that money toward rebuilding our nation's paltry public transit systems.

Transportation news a-plenty in Flagpole

The Flagpole that hit the streets today is chock full of transportation-related articles: get up to speed on downtown parking rates, the Pulaski Creek Greenway, and plans for a downtown parking deck next to the Georgia Theatre.

There's also a humbly submitted comment piece by yours truly on sharing the streets. Enjoy!

Bus news

Flagpole's got a couple of bus-related stories this week in "City Pages."

Go here, then scroll to the 2nd and 3rd articles, about night service and more art shelters, respectively.

Funding Athens Transit: to ad or not to ad?

See the 3rd article down in this week's Flagpole, "How to Get The Bus More Money?," which covers recent discussions between Athens Transit, ACC staff, and the mayor & commission about whether or not to allow banner ads on the side of city buses as a revenue generator for transit services.

Sounds like a lot of money, but it also sounds like a slippery slope of marketing & branding our visible public space. Thoughts on this?

Transportation news roundup

In today's ABH, a piece on the undeniable growth of scooter & moped use in Athens.

FYI: "Moped drivers who scoot along in bike lanes will be ticketed."

Another article in the ABH discusses plans to ease traffic on Mitchell Bridge Rd by moving cars to Athens West Pkwy.

And from last week's Flagpole, coverage of delays with UGA's Alternative Transportation Program:

With the start of UGA's fall semester this month, perhaps no section of the University's staff is more anxious - or busier - than Parking Services. August has typically been "a zoo," in the words of Parking Services chief Don Walter. After getting parking permits sold and distributed to faculty, staff and students for the year, Walter's staff then has to enforce regulations, assist confused customers and otherwise try to keep the campus's parking system - which has been in a process of refinement through great effort over the past several years - working smoothly.

As of the first week of August, though, Walter could already begin his tally of aggravated individuals: at least a couple of users of Parking Services' Alternative Transportation Program, or ATP, who were told that the program will not exist in the month of August this year.

Don't forget our Annual Meeting is tomorrow at Cine, 7 pm- Come for the food, friends, films, and our first Art Bike Auction!

Moving drunks around

In a piece in today's Flagpole, outlining the stricter stance the ACC Solicitor is taking toward underage drinking, editor Ben Emanuel notes some possible transportation solutions to the motorcade of drunkards leaving downtown every night between 10 and 3:00 a.m.:

Also at the meeting, bar owners heard from Athens Transit Director Butch McDuffie, who noted that late-night bus service for downtown hasn’t been discussed much since a brief attempt foundered a few years ago. In a sign of the good that might yet come out of the revived HRP, though, the newly-assembled group was unanimous in its enthusiasm to renew planning discussions for late-night transit service to get downtown-goers home safely.

The group heard, too, from Matt Presnell, who with his brother started a local outfit of the company Zingo this spring. Zingo, now operating in eight cities across the country according to its website, offers customers an insured, sober driver with a fold-up mini-motor-scooter that fits in a car’s trunk for the ride home, giving the hired driver a way back downtown after getting the car and its occupants home safely.

Corridor study , MACORTS and BikeAthens

Flagpole reports the following:

With county planning staffers pleading they have a full plate already, Athens-Clarke County Commissioners backed away last week from broadening a county “corridor management” study to include detailed design specs for crosswalks and bike lanes, and perhaps policies on signs, speed limits, overhead utility wires and bus access. But county staff and Planning Director Brad Griffin insisted the $42,000, consultant-produced study was never intended to be a design manual.

The slick 35-page study suggests a dozen categories for county streets: “urban institutional” streets like Lumpkin, for example, should have street trees, patterned crosswalks and landscaped “pedestrian refuge islands” at midblock crosswalks, it suggests. “Suburban commercial” streets (like Barnett Shoals Road) should have wide sidewalks separated from the road by a grass strip, and driveway entrances should be limited to one per business, it recommends.

...

Commissioners had bounced the study back to staffers for further work, but planning director Griffin told them last week he would need “a rather extensive timeline” and perhaps an outside consultant to revisit the study. That won’t happen soon; instead, Commissioners appear likely to approve the present study - now over a year old - as the basis for the future “complete streets” study they’d rather see. (“Complete streets” refers to street designs that accommodate all users, not just drivers.)

Other upcoming discussions may include updating the county’s Bicycle Master Plan (which designates plans for bike lanes) and whether to replace the planning commission (perhaps by BikeAthens, which has requested it) as the citizens’ voice on the MACORTS board. (MACORTS is the multi-county board that requests local transportation projects from the state DOT.)

We've long argued that we deserve a place at the table for discussions regarding transportation planning in Athens. Every recommendation BikeAthens has ever made (expanding transit service, installing more cross- and sidewalks, slowing traffic, and developing a connected network of bike facilities) would increase the safety and accessibility of Athens' transportation system. We look forward to a supportive vote and participating on the MACORTS board!

Transportation news from Flagpole

Lots of useful news for BikeAthens supporters in this week's Flagpole.

More on the potential for 3-laning Cedar Shoals Drive and North Avenue:

County staffers are not making any recommendation “at this point” on whether to three-lane either street, traffic engineer Steve Decker says. “We are studying all the streets, taking regular traffic data… we don’t even plan to make a recommendation at the meeting; we want to hear what the people have to say,” he says. Without having traffic counts at hand, Decker guesses volumes on both streets to be under the 20,000 cars per day that is considered to be a practical maximum for three-lane streets.

Plus, discussion of GDOT's current budget crunch and new Director:

GDOT has sometimes frustrated local citizens and elected officials in picking which projects to fund, and typically favors expensive road-building and road-widening projects over cheaper sidewalk or bicycle facilities. Adding trees or crosswalks along a state- or federally-numbered road (like Prince or Milledge avenues) usually involves a tug-of-war with the agency, which sees roadside trees as a safety hazard and doesn’t like to see traffic slowed down along the routes that it maintains.
But ... constant local pressure on GDOT, from elected officials and county staffers, has helped to change the agency.

See the link above for both articles in their entirety.
Thanks to reporter John Huie and Flagpole for covering these issues!