Announcing Bike Streets Cone Grants!
We’re excited to announce a new grant program for safe streets demonstration projects. A portion of every Bike Streets subscription will fund short-term projects that use cones, chalk, and temporary signs to show how city streets can be upgraded.
Cone Grants are designed to increase the adoption of demonstration projects as an indispensable tool in the toolkit of urban planners around the country.
How do cones connect to mapmaking and bike routing? Rather than building disconnected bike lanes, cities need to create bike networks. And those bike networks need to start with what’s on the ground today, what we call the Best Available Network. From there, rapid, low-cost upgrades system-wide can make the network dramatically better. And that’s where demonstration projects come in: they are a path to showing folks in communities how much better their streets can be.
Rather than the conventional public meeting process, where people are asked to imagine a future state – and often reflexively assume the worst and protest vociferously – demonstration projects show folks how a street can improve. And folks who might have been opponents, through observation, can become allies.
For planners and engineers, demonstration projects can reveal opportunities for design improvement before they make a permanent change to the streets. In Denver, for example, Shared Streets, made with little more than Type 3 barricades, on residential streets were wildly successful. On mid-size collector streets, they became slalom courses for drivers. We learned what works and what doesn’t.
Demonstration projects aren’t a novel idea. In fact, we encounter them every day in the public right of way — we just call them “construction.”
A major construction project in Denver is the bus rapid transit transformation of Colfax, a major arterial. While construction is happening, Colfax has one driving lane in either direction rather than the normal two. As a result, it’s much quieter and safer.
Colfax even has a de facto diverter, which prevents cut-through traffic at Race Street, a north-south route on the Low-Stress Denver Bike Map.
The most famous demonstration project was in New York City during the Bloomberg administration when transportation director Janette Sadik-Khan and her team reconfigured Times Square using orange barrels. They created a huge, much-loved pedestrian zone that included hundreds of folding chairs and found, empirically, that cross-town bus travel times improved.
Times Square is the most significant intersection in America. If the demonstration project approach can work there, amidst thousands of opinionated New Yorkers, it can work anywhere.
“Had we tried to convince everyone in New York City that the Times Square project would work before we took the first step - answered every cabbie's doubt and refuted every newspaper columnist's armchair analysis - it would have taken five years just to break the ground.”
- Janette Sadik-Khan
Cities are overdue to use construction-like conditions to empirically learn what works with a design and how to improve it, and upgrade the public engagement process, what we call “Experiential Community Engagement.”
That’s what Cone Grants are for.
Ephemeral changes happen on a scale that’s both huge (Colfax) and tiny (quiet residential street X). It’s the latter that we’re looking to fund: small changes on neighborhood streets, low-cost through-traffic diverters, stop signs, and so forth.
Notably, some cities are starting to encourage community members to propose and run their own city-approved demonstration projects. Fayetteville, AR and Indianapolis have formal programs for this. Through Cone Grants, we hope that this will become the norm for groups of neighbors who want to upgrade their streets and city planners alike.
Cone Grant Requirements:
Get approval from the city or jurisdiction in which you live, including date, time, and design. These need to be above the table projects because we want your City bought in on it.
Have some connection to cycling in your city.
Use only temporary materials that are not fastened to the street. Cones are okay. Fixed plastic flex-posts are not.
Establish a clearly observable hypothesis. E.g., if we place a temporary diverter here, it will reduce cut-through traffic by X.
Include a method to collect qualitative feedback from neighbors.
Take photos.
Create a report at the end including quantitative and qualitative observations.
To apply, email the details of your project to info@bikestreets.com with the subject “Demonstration project funding request.”