Academia Giving Cities Lots of Ideas to Improve Traffic

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Exciting academic research is happening and city planners need to use it in practice rather than placing it into 20-year vision plans.

It’s a really good thing that some of the very best academic institutions in the world are moving to influence business and government.

Take the anecdotal of my voyage to attend and speak at this week’s 2015 Disrupting Mobility Summit: I Uber-ed from home for the first-mile to the D.C. Metro, which took me right to National Airport. A breeze.

On the other end, in Boston, I took a free airport shuttle to the T subway up to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The T got me woefully not-that-close to my hotel. I walked with two bags through a light rain for what was supposed to be a 20-minute walk. Because my phone died before I looked at where I was actually going, my roundabout walk turned into about 45 minutes (the Citymapper app was doing a tremendous job of getting me to where I was until the point when my phone died … don’t ask).

Granted, I stopped for a lunch in Chinatown in downtown Boston, but my commute should not have taken from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. to get from my home in D.C. to my hotel in Boston. Clearly the Uber part of my trip was more reliable and enjoyable than the transit and walking elements, which, it should be noted, were both actually very enjoyable but slow-going.

With the likes of the University of California at Berkeley, MIT, and the London School of Economics so heavily researching the on-demand economy, travel of the non-driving variety – for ride-hailing and transit options like buses, trains, and bikesharing – will no doubt make our transportation networks more efficient and less frustrating in the near future.

Just a sampling of the exciting academic research being done to “disrupt mobility” includes:

• Bikeshare is gaining wildly in terms of both sheer number of systems across the U.S. and the basic idea that people are beginning to envision more utilitarian uses of bicycling. But there’s a huge opportunity to get less wealthy people to use bikeshare; they currently tend to be some of the most frequent users of bicycles, but not bikeshare. Governments don’t have the resources for a lot of things, but this is one they could actually embrace. Connecting poorer communities by bikeshare and adding better bike infrastructure are the kinds of affordable projects  that make sense for the cash-strapped public sector. Groups like UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center have already illuminated the problem, now it’s up to governments (hopefully with collaboration from the private sector) to figure out solutions.
• Kent Larson of MIT’s City Science Initiative was quoted by NPR that he’s seen “estimates that in New York City up to 40 percent of the energy consumed by automobiles is by people circling the block looking for a parking space.” So engineers at MIT have gone through a series of prototypes of the perfect pod cars that could essentially be like bikeshare, in which people could pick up one-person pod cars all over the place to rent for one-way trips. Since so many more people are willing to drive than bike, it certainly seems like the prototype that inspires people will be the one to catch on.
• The London School of Economics Cities Research Center has created fingerprints of cities in order to better understand how to integrate transportation options into the way places have been planned. And it has also researched how sprawl costs the U.S. more than $1 trillion annually. That number alone would seem to cause at least some planners and city officials to take notice that we’ve got to put great academic ideas and research into real practice now, and not within some 20-year-plan that will be obsolete in five years.

What are some of the other best ideas to help reshape places around people rather than cars that have been backed up by convincing university research?

This article was originally published by Mobility Lab.

How Transportation Funding Fails to Work the Way Anyone Intended

This article was originally published by Mobility Lab, with my co-author Howard Jennings.

This is the first of a two-part Mobility Lab series. Part 1 looks at the big-picture history of transportation funding in the United States. Part 2 will examine ways we can fund transportation in a future of flat federal funding.

OPTIONS OPPORTUNITIES

Even with a bleak outlook for federal funding, state and local leaders can use historical arguments to change the mindset towards transportation projects.

As the Senate and House are finalizing touches on the first new transportation authorization bill in more than 10 years, everyone agrees there are major problems with our transportation systems in the U.S. But nobody agrees on how to fund the necessary improvements.

The new six-year bill will provide some welcome certainty, but it is not expected to provide adequate funding to meet the needs for new capacity in any modes, and there will likely be few incentives for innovation.

The bottom line is that we must improve transportation as a path to better health, better places to live, a more robust economy, and ease of personal mobility. In reaching these goals, however, it seems clear that states and localities will have to be inventive in finding funding sources to supplement what will be available from the federal government.

A majority of the interstate highway system is well beyond its 50-year design life-span. And even the new authorization bill, with no real increase in funding, will not come close to covering the need for maintenance and replacement of crumbling roads, bridges and transit systems.

In fact, it is fair to say that the U.S. transportation system has been in a state of crisis since at least 2008, when Congress had to begin transferring funds from the General Fund to the Transportation Trust Fund just to meet operating obligations. Plus, funding has been authorized on a year-to-year – or sometimes month-to-month – basis since the last long-term authorization law, SAFETEA-LU, expired in 2009. Disagreement over how to fund transportation and at what level have stymied Congress ever since.

The 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax was first devoted entirely to transportation by creating the Highway Trust Fund in 1956 to fund the interstate highway system. In 1982, the Mass Transit Fund was created within the Highway Trust Fund. There were gas-tax increases by presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, but the tax has not kept pace with inflation since 2005, and the revenue it brings in isn’t enough to cover current highway and transit needs, let along provide expansion.

Since 2000, the balance in the Highway Trust Fund has declined dramatically and since 2008, both the Highway and Mass Transit funds have been within a month of running out of funds numerous times, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Congress has responded in an ad-hoc manner year after year, authorizing transfers from the General Fund as stop gap measures. In all, Congress has authorized a total of $65 billion in transfers from the General Fund since 2008, and the CBO estimates the average annual shortfall to be on the order of $15 billion per year at least through 2020.

Voters in various surveys support a gas tax hike, but California voters recently opposed one, reflecting the fact that the tax is tough for politicians and a conflicted public to deal with. Moreover, the gas tax is not a viable long-term solution because it will produce less and less net revenue in the coming years.

States also tend to use a tax on gasoline to support highway and transit projects, supplemented by revenues from tolls sales taxes, other local taxes, and general local and state revenues. Their sources are typically not keeping pace with inflation or overall needs either.

So where should more reliable funds come from? Growing congestion, lessening mobility, slower goods movement, and higher citizen frustration are going to be in our future unless we figure out better approaches.

There is nearly unanimous agreement that the gas tax has basic structural problems as a long-term revenue source. Vehicles today are getting better and better gas mileage, and the total mileage that Americans drive is no longer rapidly increasing as it once did. So the tax produces less and less revenue each year relative to the need. But no other funding mechanism has emerged to take its place.

A variety of other sources of funding have been debated for years, including tolling, Joan Lowy of the Associated Press put it well recently:

To help fund new construction, the Obama administration has proposed letting states toll federal interstates. That’s been prohibited since the interstate system was launched in 1956, except for a few exceptions, including highways that already had tolls. Congress would have to approve the change.

One way to make existing highways more efficient is “high occupancy toll” (or HOT) lanes. The idea often involves converting carpool lanes that may be relatively car free into lanes that solo drivers can pay to use. Carpoolers typically travel for free. Hundreds of miles of toll lanes already are operating in or around Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Miami, Washington, D.C., and other cities.

We’ve gotten to this point because most of our transportation system and land-development patterns make us dependent on the car. Even in places where we do have other options, most of us simply don’t consider how else we could travel and haven’t researched our transportation options, which leaves us chained to our cars.

The irony of all this is that roads were federally funded in the first place because a bunch of lawyers wanted to be able to ride their bikes on them. In 1880, the League of American Wheelmen, led by a Civil War veteran and leading bicycle manufacturer, requested that roads fall under a federal mandate, which was pushed through as the National Highway Act in 1896 and later provided a means for getting cars on the roads by the burgeoning auto industry.

Meanwhile, transportation should truly be one of those issues that is non-partisan. Reagan, the Republican standard bearer, raised taxes during a recession to fund increased infrastructure investment. As former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, himself a Republican, said at a Mobility Lab forum, “There are no Republican roads or Democratic bridges.” And Arizona’s former Democratic Representative Stewart Udall once noted that “a rational transportation policy should seek a balance between individual convenience, the efficient use of limited resources, and urban-living values that protect spaciousness, natural beauty, and human-scale mobility.”

Despite all those warm words, the new authorization law will be keeping the gas tax as the only politically feasible funding mechanism for now. And what do we do in the face of all these shortfalls and limitations?

The exciting thing about the times we live in today is that there are lower-cost solutions like:

• improving bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure
• an on-demand economy that has opportunities to improve traffic flow
• automated vehicles that also might do the same
• an uptick in private-funding possibilities, and
• a growing focus on user-based road fees to help hobbling public investment.

And fortunately, we – Republicans, Democrats, and everyone else – can still all agree that sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic is something worth fixing.

Part 2 of this series will examine some of the alternative and innovative transportation solutions that are being employed and that local leaders can use to supplement traditional projects and funding sources. 

Photo: Tops, rush hour traffic on LA’s 101 freeway (Eric Demarqc, Flickr, Creative Commons). Bottom, HOT lanes on a state road in Washington (Washington State DOT, Flickr, Creative Commons). 

Easton, Pennsylvania: Beautiful and Great for Kids and Hopelessness

Easton, Pennsylvania is not the first place a family typically picks to visit for an overnight vacation, but it provided a fun little getaway this week when Jackson had Monday off of school.

We left on Sunday to get there (about 3.5 hours from Washington D.C. and not far from New York and Philadelphia, in the Lehigh Valley) in time to check in to an amazing 2-bedroom suite that we way underpaid for downtown at the Grand Eastonian Hotel and Suites. Our massive layout on the eighth floor overlooked the confluence of the Lehigh and Delaware rivers and out across to New Jersey. Then we had a swim in the pool to ourselves before going to sleep to get ready for the Crayola Experience on Monday.

Crayola is actually based in nearby Forks Township, but the Experience (which features some elements of the making of the colorful toys but mostly provides interactive activities for kids to get even more enamored of crayons) gives the town a real boost. It's oddly located in the middle of downtown, which is only odd because downtown is filled mostly with cigarette stores and a vape bar, and almost everybody walking around looks strung out on meth or general hopelessness. Walk out of the Experience and you're enveloped in cigarette smoke.

That said, the walkway a few blocks down back past our hotel and along the river was gorgeous. We spent the morning playing at the playgrounds and Rachel took a run.

There's also a sushi restaurant that the family enjoyed, on the other side of Easton, called KOJA Cuisine. Halfway through our meal, the sushi chef came over and asked us if we wanted anything else. He proceeded to make us a special roll that wasn't on the menu and topped an unexpectedly perfect meal.

Easton, it should be noted, is the hometown of boxer Larry Holmes, Sally Jessy Raphael, and actor Daniel Dae Kim of Lost fame.

To Take Back Our Streets, Remember How We Lost Them to Cars

OPTION OPPORTUNITIES

Storytelling and public relations can take back the real story of American streets that was hoodwinked by auto-industry groups long ago.

This article originally appeared at Mobility Lab.

Children may again someday walk or bike to their schools and their friends’ houses, but to get to that point historian and author Peter Norton says we’ll have to unlearn much of what the auto industry has taught us over the past century.

“Children’s mobility has been neglected. We have seen the future GM and Ford fed us in the 1950s. To change the future, we have to recover versions of the past we have forgotten,” he told an audience this week at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia.

Norton presented some of the stories from his long-admired book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City to illustrate just how brainwashed we’ve become in regards to how we want to design and move through our public spaces.

“People are pretty smart about how to share space optimally,” he said, noting how pedestrians originally became irritated with cars encroaching on their streets in the 1910s.

In that era, the public blamed drivers for all the child pedestrian deaths, whereas now Norton says we would blame the parents. Even as early as the 1920s, the messages began changing to “keep the kiddies off the streets.” Before autos and the notion of speed were common, kids, pedestrians, horses, bicycles, and others jostled through the streets just fine.

“Democracy, free markets, and American culture did not decree the motor-age city,” Norton said. “Before [auto-industry groups] could build the motor-age city, they had to redefine the city.”

And Norton says they did a tremendous job of it. Streets are now thoroughly car-centric, and the idea of people-centered streets remains a difficult concept for most people to grasp. These groups recognized they needed to shift the perceived cause of collisions away from drivers and onto pedestrians. Under the name Motordom, the interest groups were quoted in a 1922 edition of Engineering News-Record that they would lead the effort in a “revision of our concept of what a city street is for.”

A major part of this effort was to make walking in the street unacceptable, essentially inventing the idea of “jaywalking.” Centrally coordinated from Detroit, Motordom would enlist Boy Scouts there and in other cities to hand out cards to pedestrians to “quit jaywalking” and would hire jaywalking clowns to look like they were hit by a Model T.

Other parts of the successful effort included producing coloring books for kids, complete with language about how streets were designated for cars, and opening a new program at Harvard: teaching the first generation of traffic engineers to prioritize traffic lights for faster driving and more difficult walking.

Ultimately, Norton uses a Wizard of Oz analogy to describe the public’s perception:

“The Emerald City doesn’t solve Dorothy’s problems. It was a bogus utopia. In the book [but not the movie], it was an illusion created by green glasses that Dorothy had to wear to make the city look like emeralds. It was really made of paper mache or something. ‘There’s no place like home,’ and we have to go back to understanding our multimodal past.”

Decades later, we have never gotten the city of easy parking and effortless thoroughfares that the auto industry and its interest groups have promised us again and again, notably at the 1939 Futurama Exhibit of the World’s Fair (pictured at the top). And, Norton adds, while driverless cars would be spatially efficient, would eliminate the process of parking, and could be shared vehicles, we should be cautious in viewing them as providing a promised utopia.

Norton believes storytelling and public relations are the keys to building a future that more accurately incorporates what we have learned from our past. He said a possible blueprint is to make sure messages like “biking is normal,” “walkability,” and “good transportation choices” become better understood and more widely accepted over the next decade.

Top: Ford Motor’s “Road of Tomorrow” from the 1939 World Fair

D.C. Metro Officials Would Be Wise to Encourage Bikeshare Connections to Their Service

I'm quoted throughout an article published today in The Washingtonian Magazine. It's a good article and highlights how the leaders of D.C.'s Metrorail and Metrobus are struggling to understand how they fit into the fast-changing transportation network of the city. If they think this way about Capital Bikeshare, what must they think about Uber and Lyft?

Here's the full article, and here are a few of my quotes:

Metro Can Blame Bikeshare for Lost Passengers, but Bikeshare Is Just Going to Get Bigger

“You’re going to start seeing Bikeshare in places where Bikeshare stations were too far apart,” says Paul Mackie, the spokesman for Mobility Lab, the Arlington-based transportation think tank. “There are going to be stations every three or four blocks.”

That kind of Bikeshare concentration, along with additional bike infrastructure like marked lanes or protected cycle tracks, could actually put a big dent in Metro’s ridership. But instead of pushing back on bikes, Metro should working with Bikeshare to attract people who might actually rely on both modes of transportation for their commutes.

“They have got to allow Bikeshare stations on all their property,” Mackie says. “It would make bike-riding so much better, it would make riding Metro so much better.”

----------

Deficit or no, though, Bikeshare is not going to back off just because it’ll make things easier for a struggling mass-transit system, and Mackie says Metro discourages Bikeshare membership at its peril.

“For Metro to be discouraging any kinds of trips to its stations is real backward thinking,” he says. “That should be common sense.”

Jennifer Egan's Goon Squad Rocks, Until It Stumbles to a Close

I loved Jennifer Egan's The Keep and wrote about it back in 2010. It's amazing how the same strengths and weaknesses of that novel are repeated in her recent Pulitzer winner A Visit From the Goon Squad.

The strengths are that it involves a storyline that really interests me. The Keep was a dark gothic tale, in the style of Poe about a mysterious castle. The Goon Squad is about a bunch of people mixed up somehow or another in the music and publicity businesses.

The weaknesses are that my favorite characters get really established and then go away for long periods in favor of less-interesting players and storylines. It bugs me a lot more in this book because it had happened before.

In fact, I'm beginning to think Egan's short stories, which have been some of the best pieces in the past decade in The New Yorker, represent a much better path for readers.

Regardless, the story starts strong with the relationship between music executive Bennie Salazar and his young assistant and petty-thief Sasha. The part of their story that takes place on safari in Kenya, and was featured as an excerpt in The New Yorker, is intriguing, as are a lot of the early scenes in New York. But detours to Naples and with the story of a kid obsessed with the pauses in rock 'n' roll songs are missteps that never resolve themselves or reveal why they are there in the first place.

We never really find out what happens to most of the characters. We're left to assume that the pursuit of fame and living in what Egan portrays as a toxic industry simply swallows up people like Scotty (who finally and kind of inexplicably becomes a successful musician when he gets old), Stephanie (Benny's first wife, who likes to play tennis at the country club), Dolly and Lulu (a failed publicist and her daughter, who eventually replaces Sasha as Bennie's assistant), and Alex and his whole family (Alex is apparently haunted by a one-night stand with Sasha that he had initially forgotten for many years).

I just don't know what this all adds up to. Much of it doesn't seem to mean anything or provide morals to the story. The Goon Squad is no doubt a page turner up until about the page-250 mark, but the last 100 pages are a letdown and even make it puzzling why the Pulitzer committee made this choice (other than they simply picked the book for the fiction prize because it uses some interesting techniques, notably in those last 100 pages).

***1/2 out of ***** stars

Carsharing Growing Around the World with More User-Friendly Options

This article was originally published at Mobility Lab.

OPTION OPPORTUNITIES

Leaders can reach green initiatives and improve traffic if they find ways to promote how carsharing services are becoming more attractive.

Carsharing, which is projected in a new report to grow globally by about sixfold by 2024, is beginning to look like a reliable transportation option in places like the Washington D.C. region and beyond.

“The U.S. has fewer cities than Europe with comprehensive public transit services, which is usually – but not always – a condition for successful carsharing,” said Lisa Jerram, a co-author of Navigant Research’s latest global market analysis and forecast for carsharing.

Why is carsharing growing?

As the cost of a private car, along with the societal costs of endless traffic jams and smog-filled cities, continue to mount, there are new factors that carsharing companies could capitalize on to take even fuller advantage of greater paths to revenue and profitablility, including:

• Making carsharing more like one-way services that have already succeeded, such as ride-hailers Uber and Lyft and bikesharing. In Paris, Autolib’ gained 200,000 members in just three years. And Daimler’s car2go and BMW’s DriveNow have adopted the one-way model.
• Auto companies like Daimler and BMW are helping the carsharing industry in a big way, as their members make up about 1.3 million of the 2.4 million total global carsharing members. They are succeeding because they have deep pockets, which is needed to build comprehensive and reliable coverage and, in turn, membership.
• The rise in plug-in electric vehicles presents a way for carsharing services to differentiate themselves from competitors, allowing the companies to secure tax breaks in the form of zero-emission vehicle credits and helping city officials promote green initiatives like low-emission zones.

Jerram, who co-wrote Navigant’s report with John Gartner, said carsharing “needs visionary city mayors that see the benefits of all these types of new mobility offerings and work to bring them to their cities.”

The authors project that North America will have about 1.78 million carshare members at the end of 2015, Europe will have 1.77 million, and the Asia-Pacific region 1.15 million.

Why would people use carsharing?

There are increasingly more options in the Washington D.C. region, for instance, for people who, in the past, might have asked how they could possibly benefit from carsharing. For example:

• Car2go has hundreds of gas and electric smart cars around the city and was just recently introduced in neighboring Arlington, Virginia. Perhaps the biggest attraction is that car2go vehicles don’t need to pay for parking in metered spaces.
• Zipcar spots are easy to find everywhere either by simply looking into the street or using their mobile app or website. Gas, insurance, and roadside assistance are all taken care of by the company, so using the vehicles is a breeze.
• Enterprise Carshare has a wide variety of models within its fleet and several plans available for infrequent to regular customers.
• Hertz 24/7 appeals to the techies in the crowd, with NeverLost GPS systems and its use of Bluetooth. They allow one-way rentals and even offer truck and van rentals at all Lowe’s home improvement stores.

How are people using carsharing around the world?

From the Navigant report’s executive summary:

“Carsharing as a service has been around since the 1980s, and it began to become a big business roughly 15 years ago. As of 2014, there were well over 40 carsharing companies throughout the world with more than 2.4 million members.

“Global carsharing services revenue is expected to reach $1.1 billion in 2015. The two largest markets will be North America and Europe, which are projected to constitute 83 percent of this revenue. Japan and South Korea constitute a large portion of the Asia Pacific market today and are anticipated to see continued growth. Yet, China is projected to be the largest Asia Pacific market by 2024, driven by concerns over heavy congestion and pollution in urban areas.

“Total global revenue for carsharing services is forecast to reach $6.5 billion by 2024, with the Asia Pacific region taking the largest share at 34 percent. Europe will continue to be a very strong market with an estimated 32 percent of the total. Carsharing services revenue in North America is expected to drop to just 23 percent of the global total by 2024. Latin America and the Middle East and Africa will continue to lag behind in this industry.”

So do these findings mean that people in the U.S. are less thirsty than people in other countries for multiple on-demand transportation options?

Jerram said, “The U.S. has been a good market for carsharing and is a very strong market for ride-hailing services. But I do see Europe and Asia Pacific increasing carshare membership more rapidly than North America through 2024.” She added, “Europe is ahead of the U.S. in adopting a range of smart mobility solutions to minimize pollution and congestion in urban centers and to address climate change.

“The Asia Pacific market simply has more room for growth, especially in China. Although that market is not yet fully embracing this new, on-demand mobility concept, I think it will do so more over time as congestion and pollution problems worsen.”

Jerram did, however, praise the U.S. for doing well already in adopting carsharing and vehicle-sharing overall, “so there is real potential for this market to keep growing.”

This week, the Shared-Use Moblity Center and North American Bikeshare Association are hosting the Shared Use Mobility Summit in Chicago, where policy leaders are discussing these and other new developments in shared transportation options. Check out the hashtag #MoveTogether on Twitter to follow along.

Photo credit: car2go in Seattle, by Flickr user Atomic Taco, Creative Commons

Will Ferrell Has Not Hit the Ball Out of the Park in a Long Time

Will Ferrell stretches the limits of comedy just a little bit with Ferrell Takes the Field, currently airing on HBO. 

It's a mockumentary that succeeds on some levels but is not very good on most. The premise of Farrell taking his legendary comedic talents to the baseball field is pretty original, as he gets traded and plays for a bunch of different teams in the Arizona cactus league before the 2015 season. 

The tone, however, is off, with Farrell over-acting the supposed seriousness of his endeavor. He did the same thing recently in his role as disillusioned Eric Jonrosh in The Spoils of Babylon, which was equally bad (even if Ferrell's bit parts were the best thing about it). 

Farrell is no doubt slipping (ala Sandler) since his heyday with Saturday Night Live. In fact, he hasn't been in anything really compelling at all since his run of Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, and Step Brothers back in 2007-2008. 

I'm not sure if he'll ever recover any past glory at this point. And even if Farrell Takes the Field is far from his worst work, it's just not worth wasting your time with when there's so much other great stuff out there to be watched these days. 

Even the fact that this is thankfully raising funds for cancer doesn't redeem it as entertainment worth watching. 

**1/2 out of ***** stars 

Bonus: In longing for better days, Ferrell's best movies are: 

6. Wedding Crashers
5. Elf
4. Zoolander
3. Old School
2. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
1. Austin Powers: International man of Mystery (even though it's Farrell's first move and he just plays a bit part in Mike Myers' masterpiece) 

Bicycling in Cleveland is Easy, Fun, and Something Everyone Should Try

What do General Motors, Samsung, and Duke and Ohio State universities all have in common?

They have each launched bikeshare systems in the past year brought to them by Zagster, a private, venture-funded startup that launched as CityRyde back in 2007 in Philadelphia.

Visiting Cleveland, Ohio this week for the Content Marketing World conference, I got my first taste of Zagster, which opened last summer in the city. I knew nothing about this company or that Cleveland had a bikesharing network. I simply stumbled upon a small stand of white bikes as I wandered around the city’s Warehouse District to the west of downtown, where my hotel and the conference are happening.

It couldn’t have been easier to download the app and sign up for Zagster on my phone. I didn’t even know if there were any other stations than the one I had seen, but it seemed worth the minor effort.

(I had planned to rent from The Bike Rack, which is also a very cool effort from the Downtown Cleveland Alliance. It welcomes downtown bicycling “with the convenience of secure bicycle parking and fulfilling everyday commuting needs with individual shower/changing facilities, lockers, bicycle rentals, and minor bicycle repairs.” And the rental prices are great at $5 per hour or $25 per day. But frankly, it is tough to compete with Zagster’s price of $3 an hour.)

Turns out there aren’t that many stations yet in Cleveland (according to the app, it looks like there are eight total). In fact, I didn’t see any other ones on my two-hour ride, but I wasn’t actively looking for them.

I wanted to know whether Cleveland is a bikeable city. And what I found, which is what I find everywhere, is that people should get over their irrational fears of this amazing form of travel. Cleveland is highly bikeable, even though it lacks much of any kind of truly progressive bike infrastructure.

The wind was in my hair. The sun was on my arms and face. The roads and sidewalks are ridiculously large through most of downtown, which makes riding feel spacious and extremely safe. (On the other hand, more importantly, the spaciousness makes the over-paved city ripe for the construction of protected bike lanes, sharrows, cycle tracks, and other bike infrastructure.)

In two hours on a bike, I saw a handful of sites it would take two days for others to explore. My route out of the Warehouse District took me through Tower City-Public Square east along Euclid Avenue through the Playhouse Square theater district and Cleveland State University’s campus, then back west through Erie Street Cemetary and around the baseball Indians’ Progressive Field and basketball Cavaliers’ Quicken Loans Arena.

The Bob Hope Memorial Bridge has wide bike and walk access and beautiful views of the city and Cuyahoga River below. After biking through the Tremont neighborhood, I had lunch at Town Hall, a very popular and tasty restaurant on West 25th Street near the West Side Market.

In Washington D.C., there are so many Capital Bikeshare stations that riders always quickly return the bikes to a station before having lunch or going to their meetings. But here, I simply opened my Zagster’s lockbox to get the key for the U-lock that comes with each rental. I locked the bike to a parking meter in front of Town Hall and ate my lunch.

I finished my ride by biking north on 25^th, which has the nicest bike lane (although not protected) that I witnessed anywhere in the city, and east across the Detroit-Superior Bridge back into the Warehouse District. Upon returning where I had started, there were only four bikes at the station. One had a bad flat tire and another was not locked.

Time will tell if Zagster will be a success in Cleveland. But there is no doubt that this system is about as easy as it gets for anyone to use. In the brave new world of on-demand-shared transportation, Cleveland and Zagster appear to be working out the kinks in what appears to be a major can’t-lose societal trend.

Cleveland Conference Week Begins With Rock Hall City

"In my waxed up hair and my painted shoes," in the words of The Replacements, who remain a major glaring omission from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and whom I proudly sported on my shirt, I was ready for my Labor Day visit to the museum here near my Westin hotel in Cleveland.

I knew the three-hour opening-night reception at Content Marketing World, the conference I'm here to attend (featuring John Cleese, Nick Offerman, and Barenaked Ladies, I might add), would not be enough time to tour what is pretty much my ultimate museum. And I was right. I spent six hours there, mostly on the bottom floor and also watching films about American Bandstand, the Hall's inductees, and how "video killed the radio star."

The tour begins with odds and ends like Joan Jett's first car (a sweet black Jaguar), the Fender bass of Mike Mills of R.E.M., and Alex Van Halen's ridiculous mega-bass drums.

I think I realized that music from the Midwest might actually be my favorite rock geography. I stood in awe viewing a collage of Replacements flyers, a contract to play CBGB's under the band name Gary and the Boners, a bill for damages they caused at a 1985 UC-Davis gig, and penned lyrics to "Bastards of Young" and "Here Comes a Regular."

The reason a case could be made for the Midwest (despite my obvious bias, being from St. Louis): along with the Mats in this exhibit are Soul Asylum, Husker Du, the Jayhawks, Prince, Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, Son Volt, Violent Femmes, Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins, Cheap Trick, Afghan Whigs, and Guided By Voices (criminally absent from even having a piece in the museum unlike all these bands that are not inducted but at least represented).

The facility gives plenty of space to Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles.

Run D.M.C.'s Adidas, Madonna's trend-setting jewelry, the school-boy suit of AC/DC's Angus Young, Elvis' military jacket, Stevie Wonder's sunglasses, Joey Ramone's leather jacket, Kurt Cobain's guitar, a piece of Pink Floyd's Wall, and Michael Jackson's glove are just some of the iconic artifacts not to be missed.

Also, I found the note from Charles Manson to Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner offering interview material in exchange for a jailhouse subscription to be charming.

If you love rock music as much as I do, buy yourself a ticket to Cleveland. I can't believe the place has been open here on the shore of Lake Erie since 1986 and this was my maiden landing.