Mayor Menino Unveils City's First, er... Fourth Bike Lanes

Mayor Thomas Menino held a press conference outside Boston University's College of Communication on Commonwealth Avenue to announce: the near-completion of Boston's first bike lanes; progress on the installation of 250 bicycle racks around the city; and that the city is now calling for a bike sharing program like the one in Paris, France.

"I'm proud to announce the first bike lane in Boston," said Mayor Menino. It is part of a "program to make Boston a world-class bicycling city," he continued.

Grumbling from city bike advocates said that the Comm Ave stripes are actually the city's third or fourth set of bike lanes, not their first. I'm not sure why they were grumbling, since the others, I believe, were also created during Menino's tenure as Mayor.

Grumbling from UniversalHub and the Boston Phoenix is that Councilor-At-Large John Connolly is being snubbed ("wifi-ed") on the bike sharing idea -- another example, according to David Bernstein, of Mayor Menino adopting other people's ideas as his own. Hats off to Bernstein who predicted on July 15th that Mayor Menino would do just that with the bike sharing concept.


New Bicycle Lanes

The new bike lanes are being rolled out ten months after Mayor Menino announced his new initiative to improve bicycling infrastructure in Boston. The Mayor had announced plans for these lanes in his State-of-the-City speech in February 2008. The lanes have been designed and laid out as part of the Comm Ave rebuild project, while painting of the lanes is incomplete but in progress.

At least a couple of bicyclists at the press conference took interest in the Mayor's wheels: he arrived on four, not two, in his black Chevy Tahoe hybrid suburban assault vehicle.

At right is a all-to-common image for those of us who use Cambridge's bike lanes: a car parked in them. (Look behind all the yellow bicycle police.) Only this time it's the Mayor's vehicle in the bike lane.

The other bike lanes in Boston are apparently (I haven't visited all of them):

1. Ruggles Street near Northeastern University (see comments);
2. Dorchester, near the South Bay Shopping Center (only around a half-block long!); and
   
3. Perkins Street in Jamaica Plain [see Google Street View image at right].

According to one bike advocate, the Perkins Street lanes were installed on a state-owned street with city input into the design.

The latest lanes, however, are a significant and substantial addition to Commonwealth Avenue, a major thoroughfare, where it passes alongside Boston University.

Much credit was bestowed on the Livable Streets Alliance (nee Boston Bicycle Coalition) for their advocacy of this particular project. Phil Goff, a member of the Board of Directors, noted that this project came with a price. "The City of Boston did something unheard of: remove a lane of traffic" to make way for a bike lane. He looks forward to "one day seeing people of all kinds riding on the bike lanes" from Chestnut Hill to downtown.


More Lanes Coming Soon

Vineet Gupta, Director of Planning at the Boston Transportation Department, said that the city is currently working on several additional bike lane projects. Lanes on the American Legion Highway in Roslindale are likely to be rolled out next, and design work is underway for lanes on Boylston Street in the Fenway and Columbus Road in the South End. It sounds to me like a couple of miles per year might be the rate of bike lane rollout.

A reader comment at the "Boston Biker" blog said that a Northeastern University civil engineering student design has been created to extend bike lanes to continue from the public garden all the way to Allston. If those lanes would be installed, they would represent a major accomplishment.

Gupta further acknowledged that, in the past few years, there has been a "sea change in the way we think about roadway design" regarding bicycles, accompanied by a "cultural" shift in the way the public views the importance of such lanes. Mayor Menino told the assembled crowd that when he goes around the city, he hears about cycling issues more than most any other issue.


Bicycle Rack Installation In Progress

Mayor Menino also announced that the city was in the process of installing 250 new bicycle racks across the city. According the his office's press release: notes that the location of the racks were chosen "per resident recommendations" and by working with "several City departments and local business owners."

In Allston-Brighton there appears to be one that will be installed near the D-14 police station, two in Union Square in Allston, one in Allston Village, one near Boston University, one near the Weeks Memorial Footbridge, and two near the Brighton Mills shopping area. (I couldn't determine exact locations due to the limited resolution of the map.)


Overheard, Or Not

Last summer, the Mayor himself took up the sport of bicycling. He challenged today's crowd to see who was the first one to ride their bike this morning. Answer: he was, at 5:00 am, while everyone else was still trying to "get sand out of their ears."

Nicole Freedman, Director of Bicycle Programs for the City of Boston, took the oneupsmanship one step further, challenging the Boston Police Department bicycle cops assembled behind her to a bike race. Their stone faces told everyone they weren't about to accept the former Olympian's challenge.

No word on whether or not Brighton will get a bicycle lift installed on Parsons Street.

Playing the Prison Card at BC

Residents, local elected officials, and Mayor Thomas Menino have all argued for increased undergraduate housing on BC's main campus, while BC has argued for locating new dormitories on the former St. John's Seminary land -- and converting their recently-purchased apartment building at 2000 Commonwealth Avenue into a dorm -- based on the argument that any increased housing would make the main campus too dense.

Now BC's director of public affairs, Jack Dunn, increased his rhetoric again by saying Tuesday night that the housing on part of their Chestnut Hill campus is so dense that to find denser housing "you would have to go to a prison."

Dunn's prison remark was met by a series of moans -- "aaaawwwwwwww" -- from the crowd. They weren't buying it at all.

Dunn's prison argument against housing density, as it turns out, rests on analysis of a gerrymandered map of BC's Chestnut Hill campus. A fairer comparison without using a gerrymandered map shows that BU has a substantially higher housing density on their campus than BC has on their Chestnut Hill campus.


Gerrymandering at BC

Dunn's argument relies on a peculiarly-drawn map of BC's Chestnut Hill campus -- a feat of gerrymandering that would make former Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas Finneran proud. [See red dotted lines in figure at right from BC's presentation to the June 14, 2008 meeting of the BC Task Force.]

By drawing the lines in such a way, Dunn makes the argument that BC's proposed housing plan places 4700 students in 40 acres comprising part of their "lower" Chestnut Hill campus.

In fact, by drawing the lines this way, Dunn and other BC officials have actually mixed up the boundary between lower and middle campus in their diagram -- including some parts of the middle campus (those that have dorms) while excluding some parts of the lower campus (those that don't have dorms).

The 6/14/08 presentation commits the misrepresentation to writing by referring to the map above as part of "lower campus area studies," when in reality the area enclosed by red -- and the statistics drawn from it -- includes buildings from the middle campus. In particular, the dorms Gabelli, Ignacio, Rubenstein, and Voute Halls, and 66 Comm Ave, are all identified as middle campus dorms in their DPIR (Table 6-1), yet are strangely included in the "lower campus area studies" diagram.

Draw the lines differently, say, to reflect better the underlying geography and you would get a different answer in terms of student beds per acre.

One thing is for sure: gerrymander the area studied and you'll always get the answer you want.


Comparing Housing Density at BC to BU

In making his case for a campus prison, Dunn was, in effect, implying that Boston University ought to be renamed Boston Prison University, because its undergraduate housing density is substantially higher than BC.

Just compare the housing density in BC's entire main campus at Chestnut Hill to BU's entire campus in the Kenmore neighborhood. No gerrymandering required.

BC currently houses 6455 students (DPIR Table 6-1) in their 118-acre Chestnut Hill campus (DPIR page 1-5), corresponding to 54.7 beds of housing per acre. BU currently houses 10,617 students on their 133-acre campus, corresponding to 79.8 beds of housing per acre -- 46% more dense than BC's campus.

These numbers will not surprise anyone who has seen the tall dormitories that BU has built in order to house their students: BU has a higher housing density than BC. Just stating the obvious.

And I don't think anybody would call BU a prison.


Spokesman Bats 0-For-2

Spokesman Dunn continued to try to make his density argument against new, main campus dormitories by pointing out the usage of all the other facilities there. "It's other functions in that part of campus" that contribute to the density issues, such as the Rec Plex (or its proposed successor, the Recreation Center). He estimates around 8000 students use the student center daily, and around 4000 students per day use the Rec Plex.

The problem is: by adding more students into the calculation, the addition of 500 beds of undergraduate housing to the lower campus becomes even more diluted, weakening his argument.

Adding 500 beds of housing to 4700 is around a 10% increase in the number. But adding 500 beds to 4700 beds plus 8000 students using the student center plus 4000 students using the Rec Center, and the increase is number of people is only 3%. (Yes, his argument does suffer from substantial double- or triple-counting, since many of the same students live on-site, use the student center, and then use the Rec Plex all in the same day.)

By adding all the extra users of the student center and Rec Plex, those 500 more student beds appear to have a more minimal impact. Probably not the conclusion he was shooting for.

A little piece of advice: stick to the housing argument sans Rec Center.


UPDATE: The Allston-Brighton TAB reports that Dunn is backpedaling on his prison comment:

Following the meeting, a college spokesman had to repeatedly defend words he thought may have offended the community...

“You’d have to go to a prison to find that kind of density,” said Dunn. Dunn later told the TAB that he was worried the statement came out wrong and might be misconstrued. “The point I was making, 4,700 students within the 40 acres is equivalent to the density of a prison. It was meant to be a comparative point, and not meant to offend anyone.”

Bike Lanes at Kenmore Square and Cleveland Circle

While Commonwealth Avenue between Kenmore Square and the BU Bridge lies outside of Allston-Brighton, improvements to it will impact transportation for Allston-Brighton residents.

In his State of the City speech Tuesday, Mayor Thomas Menino proposed to put bike lanes along that stretch of roadway alongside Boston University. The Mayor himself took up cycling last year. Harry Mattison has the story about the State of the City speech, and some of the things that are in it, over at the Allston-Brighton Community Blog.

Bicycle lanes on streets within A-B have been discussed seriously during the last year in a number of different venues. Harvard University's expansion proposals into North Allston have included bicycle access in various ways. The Allston-Brighton Neighborhood Planning Initiative sponsored by the Boston Redevelopment Authority included discussion of improvements for access to and from the Charles River, as well as possible lanes on several A-B streets like Cambridge Street, Washington Street, and Beacon Street.

And as recently as last Wednesday night's meeting of the BC Task Force (on traffic, transportation, and parking in BC's institutional master plan), several people raised the issue of striping bike lanes on Beacon Street west of Cleveland Circle in order to create connectivity between the new bike lanes on Beacon Street east of the intersection and bike lanes being planned further west in Newton proper. Putting bicycle lanes along that stretch of roadway is likely to be a relatively easy project: the road is wide, which means that it would probably require little more than striping itself.

Several members of MassBike made the pitch, while also noting that bike lines need to be designed carefully and intelligently so that they do not actually make the streets more dangerous for cyclists.

It is unclear how such proposals for bike lanes would become an element of BC's IMP. Some possibilities are that they would be: part of mitigation for traffic and transportation demands from the increase in 454 workers (100 faculty, 12 staff, 342 graduate students) at BC in the 10-year IMP; part of an improved Transportation Demand Management program in order to reduce the use of cars for commuting to and from the campus; or part of the community benefits package as spelled out in the zoning code's Article 80 process. Alternatively, it could just be something that the city does on its own.

The Mayor likes to talk about private-public partnerships. Beacon Street bike lanes could be one.

Boston Globe: Obsession With Fitness on University Campuses

"Despite an alarming rise in childhood obesity - and the fabled 'freshman 15' - the current generation of college students appears to be more fit than ever, with students working out several hours a week, and many able to cite their body mass index along with their height and weight."

This front-page story in today's Boston Globe describes an obsession with fitness among what appears to be a growing number of students on university campuses. Whether the obsession is healthy or unhealthy is a major focus of the story; it presents an interesting read on the subject.

Students who show up at the recreation centers more than once in a day are apparently being monitored to ensure that they are not engaged in obsessive numbers of fitness workouts. This is an odd criterion to use, however, because triathletes -- those who participate in combined swim, bike, and run training and competitive events -- routinely engage in two workouts per day, typically 10 or more workouts per week. Sure, many triathletes are obsessive about working out, but identifying them as engaging in a potentially unhealthy obsession via the multiple workouts criterion seems overly-broad. If the universities are concerned about unhealthy over-exercising, then why not instead just require everyone to have periodic clearance from a doctor in order to use the facilities?


Building New "Informal" Athletics Facilities

The Globe story focuses on students at Boston College and Boston University as its local examples, but the pattern of increasing focus on fitness appears to apply to a wide-range of universities.

The choice of these two examples, however, was clearly not random. Boston University recently built a large, new student athletics center, nicknamed the "Fit," at a cost of nearly $100 million. Boston College has proposed building one of their own (chapter 3) as part of their December 2007 institutional master plan, although its proposed size is somewhat smaller (200,000 vs. 272,000 square feet).

The conventional wisdom used to be that 1 square foot of workout space per student was sufficient, but that's no longer enough. Tom St. Laurent, BC's fitness director, says colleges are having to build bigger gyms to keep up with the students' interest.

(Laurent must be referring to a very small sub-category of "workout space", since 9000 students would only correspond to 9000 square feet of workout space -- far smaller than the overall 200,000 square feet proposed by BC.)

The site for BC's proposed Recreation Center is where Edmonds Hall, a 790-bed student dormitory, now sits on their main Chestnut Hill campus. Photographs accompanying the print version of the Globe article show the indoor Rec Plex (Flynn Recreation Center) at BC that would be torn down when a new center is built. Some additional indoor recreation facilities are proposed to be sited within the below-grade athletic support facility in the Brighton Campus (the former St. John's Seminary land), including indoor tennis courts and an indoor track.

While much discussion among the Brighton neighborhood, city officials, and BC have focused on the proposal to build a baseball stadium in the Brighton Campus, a large fraction, if not most, of the athletics facilities in BC's proposed master plan are primarily designed for "informal" athletic usage by students not part of varsity sports teams -- i.e., for individual exercise, exercise classes, club sports, or intramural sports.

Approximately 2000 BC undergraduates are involved in intramural sports each year, according to Jack Dunn, Director of Public Affairs at BC, which is around 22% of the undergraduate student body.*** Many students use the Rec Plex on a daily basis (although I could not find a number). (In the Boston Globe article, approximately 5000 students at Boston University -- i.e., 30% of their undergraduate enrollment of around 16,500 -- use their FitRec on a daily basis.) By comparison, only 780 undergraduates at BC were involved in varsity sports, according to BC's Fact Book. These numbers indicate the high level of involvement among undergraduate students in non-varsity, fitness-related activity.

Why did BU build an expensive, new recreation center in 2004, and why is BC proposing to do the same? In the case of BU, the answer was previously reported in a Globe story titled, "Campus officials hope $90m athletic center will lure top students":

BU's $90 million Fitness and Recreation Center, slated to open April 1, marks the newest entry in the college gym wars, a feverish race among schools to lure prospective students and faculty to campus and keep them happy once they arrive.

BC's proposed recreation center would be the latest addition to this trend among local and national universities to attract students, what the Globe calls the "gym wars." The print version of today's Globe story also has a photograph of the inside of the RecPlex, showing its age, heavy use, and crowded accomodations -- other reasons for wanting a new complex.

Harvard University seems to have been avoided in today's Globe story because its "informal" athletics facilities seem to, at least in part, buck the trend of the other universities. Harvard submitted a proposed institutional master plan in January 2007 for its North Allston campus which included substantial reconfiguration of its athletic facilities there, but only called for construction of around 50,000 square feet of (indoor) athletics buildings. The Malkin Athletic Center in Harvard Square is closest to the largest number of Harvard undergraduate students, but, despite repeated and significant interior renovations, it is, by comparison to BU's new center and BC's proposed one, an old and modest facility.

Harvard does not appear to be pushing for a flashy new undergraduate recreation center to attract students as part of their North Allston proposals. Harvard plans to resubmit their proposed institutional master plan in the Fall of 2008; their previous IMP proposal has been on hold while the science complex was considered.


Odd Choice for a Photo Subject

The print version of the story includes a photograph of a BC freshman woman working out, ostensibly providing an example of someone who is fit but may be questionably too thin:

Liz Kulze, a freshman from Charleston, S.C., is a former high school track and cross country runner. At 5-foot-9 and 118 pounds, she knows she's thin: It's in her genes, she says, and it's a healthy weight for her. She has heard that BC has "body image issues." But she still thinks the school's fit culture is a positive.

"At home, you never worked out unless you were an athlete," she says. "Here, everyone works out."

I think that the photo subject was not necessarily the best one to illustrate the story. If she is (or at least was until recently) a competitive track and cross-country runner, then her physique is actually appropriate for success at those activities. According to "The Competitive Runner's Handbook," by Bob Glover and Shelly-Lynn Florence Glover, the performance target weight for a female runner who is 5'9" is 129 pounds, with the weight range being 116-142 pounds. Kluze falls at the low end, but still within the range for competitive runners. Elite distance runners routinely fall at the low end of such target weight ranges -- just watch the lead pack at the Boston Marathon or this summer's Olympics.

The Globe would have done better at illustrating their story by picking out a student not connected to competitive sports whose successfull performance is associated with lean body-types.



*** Involvement in intramural sports is tabulated in BC's annual Fact Book, but the method of tabulation includes substantial double-counting of students involved in multiple intramural sports. Dunn provided the number of 2000 students that does not double-count.

University PILOT Payments Detailed

The Boston Globe ran another story about university PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes) to Boston and surrounding cities.  (BTW:  I carefully avoid repeating that repetitious phrase of redundancy, "PILOT payments.")  The story hook was a recent study by Newton's Blue Ribbon Commission on the Municipal Budget. 

A summary:

Berklee School of Music:  $175 thousand to Boston
Boston College:  $215 thousand to Boston; $100 thousand to Newton
Boston University:  $3.20 million to Boston
Harvard University:  $1.77 million to Cambridge; $1.75 million to Watertown; $1.60 million to Boston
MIT:  $1.22 million to Cambridge
Northeastern:  $137 thousand to Boston

How much is brought in by each city?

Boston:  $23 million per year (as of 2003)
Cambridge:  $3.6 million
Newton:  $100 thousand (apparently BC is the only university/college contributing)
Watertown:  $1.75 million (I'm not sure if there are any PILOTs other than Harvard)

The point put forward by Newton's Blue Ribbon Commission is that, for example, Boston College owns property in Newton with a combined, assessed value of $355 million -- one-third of the value of all the tax-exempt property owned within Newton -- and yet Newton only receives a very small PILOT.  (The remainder of the tax-exempt properties?  Roughly $300 million in governmental and religious institutional property.  Also, "Newton-Wellesley Hospital...  reported $392 million in net assets to the IRS in 2005," although assets are not the same as property holdings.)  BC's property value holdings are substantial, and their PILOTs appear disproportionately small by comparison to the other institutions listed here.

North Brookline Worried About Student Parties Making Them the Next Allston-Brighton

The Brookline TAB ran a story this week about residents complaining about loud student party houses. In North Brookline, not in Allston-Brighton.

Police said the complaints have mounted in recent years.

“We’ve always had loud party complaints, but it has seemed to increase, particularly in [North Brookline] in the past four or five years,” said Police Capt. John O’Leary. “We do not want, from the Police Department’s perspective, to see this get out of control.”

But as O’Leary cautioned that courts are often reluctant to prosecute these cases, many agreed the most effective way to curb partiers would be for the town, colleges and property management companies to issue fines.

Maureen Kieley, who works in student affairs at Boston University, agreed.

“Once it hits them in the pocketbook one or two times, it spreads like wildfire,” Kieley said. “Once we get a police report, we take them through the adjudication system.”

Her advice to neighbors: “Call the police, call the police, call the police.”

They also give tips on what to do. The tips don't exactly parallel instructions for Allston-Brighton -- we as a community ought to generate the equivalent version for A-B. In particular, we're supposed to call 911 for everything.