Buffalo Blue Bicycle’s founder Justin Booth
on getting to work and living greener
By Lisa Kane
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Justin Booth and his bikes.
Photo by kc kratt. |
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I usually walk. When I have to be out of the office or have errands, I head out by bicycle, year round. The metro rail is great because bicycles are allowed on the trains. Buses are still a bit problematic because not all of them have bicycle racks, but as the NFTA replaces buses, the new ones have the racks.
How important to you is living in an environmentally friendly way?
It’s part of our family’s philosophy. We recycle everything, compost food waste, and bought and are restoring a historic West Village house to live closer to work and my daughter’s school. For the few times that we need a vehicle, we have a Civic hybrid.
What do you think about WNYers’ transportation choices?
WNYers are following the national trends: they rely too heavily on their personal automobiles. National data indicates that twenty-five percent of all our trips are one mile or less and seventy-five percent of these are made by car. Within the City of Buffalo, just over thirty percent of residents do not own a vehicle, yet we continually have these battles downtown about the need for additional parking, even when some studies have estimated that fifty-two percent of downtown’s land use is for parking personal vehicles.
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Are any major players helping to make the area less car-centric?
I consider Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus a leader. They are developing an environment within the campus to facilitate Active Living by Design, creating an environment that gets walking and cycling into people’s daily routines.
How are things at Buffalo Blue Bicycle?
Buffalo Blue Bicycle is now heading into its third year of bicycle sharing. In 2007, we expanded the number of hubs from six to fourteen and provided fifty-two bicycles, up from twenty-six. Our membership grew last year, and we expanded our ability to accomplish more activities that will lead to a bicycling-friendly city!
Lisa Kane is a freelance writer living in Buffalo.
No car? No problem! by Lisa Kane
I’m happy to live close enough to work to be able to walk to and from our office in nice weather, when it stays light out late. When daylight savings time is over and it gets dark early, I still walk in the morning, then take the bus home at night. I leave the car at home for about a million reasons, and one of them—pretty high up on the list—is the little pat on the back I give myself for not contributing quite so much to global warming, our dependence on oil, and the maddening line of drivers creeping around the Adam Ramp looking for a space.
Across WNY, in spite of lake-effect this or wind-chill that, lots of us are finding car-free ways to get to work that improve our quality of life and are a little easier on the environment. Like Karen Brown Kinsman, who rides her bike on warm, dry days from her house in Allentown to Roswell Park Cancer Institute, where she works as a nurse practitioner. When she doesn’t bike, she walks. Her getting-to-work decisions are made, like mine, in part in an effort to be greener, with other factors weighed in. Kinsman notes, “It’s a huge quality-of-life issue. From a practical standpoint, it’s easier for me to walk than scrape off the car, warm it up, park, etc. I save $450 a year just by not parking, not to mention gas and other expenses. Don’t get me wrong, though, I’d pay that much to be able to walk. Isn’t it great if you can include stress relief, exercise, and being environmentally friendly all in the same act?”
Barbra Kavanaugh just hates driving to work. This downtown lawyer and former City of Buffalo council member prefers taking the bus whenever possible. She says, “Where I live now and where I lived for twenty-plus years before that, I have had virtually door-to-door service between work and home. Downtown is small enough that there’s usually a bus or train stop somewhere nearby.” But Kavanaugh’s commitment to busing wasn’t always easy. As a young mom, each weekday morning she took one bus down Niagara Street, another up Delaware Avenue to her daycare provider, and down Delaware to work. Then in the evening, she’d do the whole thing in reverse—six bus trips per day. “Still,” Kavanaugh says, “I would prefer that to driving.” She adds, “Looking at the costs of gas, the type of public policy that gets driven by our dependence on oil, and the very scary effects of global warning: those are some of the reasons that I avoid driving whenever I can.”
What makes a community conducive to walking and biking to work? According to Dr. Samina Raja, an assistant professor in UB’s School of Architecture and Planning whose research focuses on how the designed environment affects physical activity, several factors are important, namely a compact built environment, a grid-like street network with plenty of intersections, and the presence of sidewalks and bike lanes. Raja cites New York City as a classic example and notes that some areas of Western New York also have these assets, including many neighborhoods around Elmwood and Hertel and in Kenmore and other older suburbs. Raja notes, however, that it takes more than a good physical environment to be conducive to walking and biking to work; there is also the need to feel safe.
In many areas of the city, walking is quite safe during the day, but when you have unpredictable schedules like Nestor and Valerie Rigual do, you may need to get to work in the dark. Like Kinsman, the Riguals also travel from home in Allentown to jobs at Roswell (he as a surgeon, she as an anesthesiologist), and they acknowledge that being a pedestrian at night can be intimidating. One of the Riguals’ solutions is to ride Vespas during the warmer months.
Nestor Rigual, like his wife, sees hope. “The trend of more people moving downtown is making this a more pedestrian and bicycle friendly city. I don’t think it will be long before we reach a critical mass of greener motorists.”
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