April 29, June 3 & 4: Your Chance to Feel Confident Riding a Bike in Traffic!

Cycling Savvy courses offered in Maine for riders of all abilities are NOT to be missed! Here are more on offerings this spring and early summer. The initial classroom session, Truths & Techniques of Traffic Riding, is scheduled for Saturday April 29, from 9 AM to Noon. The full course (all 3 sessions) is also scheduled for Saturday, June 3 and Sunday afternoon June 4. Register now.

Here’s more perspective on the 3-part course from the fabulous John Brooking:

Do you like the idea of biking more for transportation, but are scared of traffic? You’re not alone!

Many people would like to ride more, but cite traffic as their #1 concern. How can riding in traffic be safe?

CyclingSavvy is a course designed to help cyclists understand how to make safe riding possible. Through knowledge and guided practice, we can turn anyone who knows how to stay upright on a bike into a savvy bicyclist who can operate in any traffic situation with confidence.

Our classroom session includes:

• The foundational principles of traffic movement
• What the law allows and doesn’t allow for bicyclists
• Common crash types and how to avoid them
• Strategies for common and less common situations

All this in just 3 hours of classroom instruction, costing $45. No bike required.

Are your bike handling skills a little shaky?

Next, we progress to a parking-lot based session, where you can practice such skills as using your brakes and gears, “training your bike” to give you more confidence in its physical operation. This is a useful session even if you are only interesting in riding on off-road paths. You may take this session whether or not you’ve already taken the classroom.

This session is also 3 hours and $45.

Putting It All Together

Once you have taken both the classroom and skills sessions, we put everything together in a group bike Tour of Portland. You get to practice what you’ve learned in a series of real-world locations, with your instructor’s guidance, and your new friends cheering you on. It is not a test, there are no grades; just you proving to yourself that you got this!

If you sign up for all 3 sessions together — classroom, skills, and Tour — you get everything for $95, $40 savings from 3 individual sessions.

Questions? Send them to johnbrooking4@gmail.com. Register here.

Thanks to Maine Cyclist for Feature on Family Bicycling Sabbatical

Many thanks to Frank Gallagher and the Bicycle Coalition of Maine crew for featuring our family cross-country bicycling sabbatical in the Spring 2017 edition of  Maine Cyclist magazine. Hard to believe we were just starting out this month a year ago! Actually, it still feels a bit surreal that we did it.

Just as the article shares, I still have such gratitude for the gift of those months on the bike. Physically imprinting our country’s landscapes and having the time to meet and talk with (and have our family cared for by) so many different people. Such a breadth of life and place in our country…

Southern Maine Transit Tracker seeking feedback on its tracking system

Originally published as monthly Treading Lightly column in the Maine Sunday Telegram’s Source section.

As a transportation professional, I’ve long understood the benefit of giving people access to real time bus arrival information. But until this past year, little did I know firsthand what a joy it would be for me, a regular bus rider, to use such a system myself.

Not quite one year into the launch of the new system in the Greater Portland area (the Southern Maine Transit Tracker (SMTT) got its start last June) I checked in with other riders as well as transportation officials about how they like it.

I actually got to test the system before its official launch, first trying it one icy morning a year ago. Forget the printed schedule. What a treat, instead, to stand at a stop, pull up the website on my smartphone – and see my bus was on approach!

The white and purple sign attached below this Metro bus stop sign gives the stop number and more info to access the Southern Maine Transit Tracker.

Waiting in a state of uncertainty, frustrated or anxious about when a bus is ever going to arrive, is hard on regular riders and can keep others from trying the bus altogether. Bus-tracking technology like the Transit Tracker, which uses GPS to accurately predict when a bus is coming, reduces that critical “time cost” for riders. In larger cities with frequent public transportation service, this information is less important because another bus or train is likely coming along in just a few minutes. In places like Maine, however, where the bus may only come every half-hour or even hour, the technology is especially important to support ridership.

“I love seeing if I have time to pop in a store before heading to catch the bus,” Metro rider Jeanine Bischoff said, “but mostly, it’s just nice to know where the bus is and when it will arrive when I’m standing there at a stop,” Bischoff, a Portland resident who rides the bus to work at the Sierra Club every day, checks the SMTT website from her phone.

Ben Donahue, who lives in South Portland, shares a car with his wife so he occasionally takes the Route 21 bus to his job at Portland law firm Hallett, Zerillo & Whipple. “I use the texting option to see how close the bus is before I head out,” he reported. “Overall, it works well for me. Sometimes the bus comes a couple minutes after the texted time, but that’s much better than too early.”

Donna Tippett, a transportation planner who helped start the program and still consults on the system for South Portland and Casco Bay Lines, reminds riders that it isn’t perfect. “You still should get to your stop 3 to 5 minutes before the predicted arrival time,” she said. “Given the ebb and flow of traffic and delays in data transmission, the system can never be 100 percent accurate.”

The tracker system isn’t just for riders. It’s also useful for staff. And for the most part, employees at South Portland and Metro are, like the riders I talked with, pleased. They point to its benefits for day-to-day operations and for improving efficiency.

“I use it all the time to keep tabs on our buses and make changes or add a bus when needed, even from home,” said Art Handman, director of the South Portland Bus Service. “It was sleeting this morning, and I checked at 5:30 to make sure there were no delays. Sure enough, there was the 24A, right on schedule.”

Naturally, there have been a few bumps in the road. For instance, the two new buses South Portland bought for its fleet this winter lacked a connector that allows them to link with transit tracker hardware. Until the manufacturer could send a technician to South Portland to install and test the equipment, the bus service used those vehicles only as a last resort. Also, although Casco Bay Lines are part of the network, the system for ferries has required additional tweaks so won’t officially launch for riders until early this summer.

The Portland area is not the first to introduce transit-tracking technology in Maine. The oldest – and the state standout – is Downeast Transportation’s Island Explorer bus service that serves Acadia National Park and the surrounding communities. The Explorer’s Tracking system was introduced a full 15 years ago and is actually just one part of a robust set of coordinated applications that use radio, landline and cellular technologies. For example, operators can also track electronically the number of passengers boarding at different locations in order to add buses to a route if needed.

“Good system design, quality service and convincing folks that transit is a better alternative than their car have been such a success over the years that we’ve more than tripled the number of our buses and quadrupled the number of riders,” said Paul Murphy, general manager of the Island Explorer. “We carried almost 600,000 passengers this past year.”

Still, it’s the Southern Maine Transit Tracker that public transportation officials across Maine are watching, with an eye to what they may want to do – and can afford – in their own regions. Bangor’s Community Connector is soon to put out what’s known in government lingo as an RFP, or Request for Proposals, for an assortment of GPS technology options. The idea is to roll out the system gradually, over several years, based on rider priorities and funding. In the meantime, providers like the Connector and Lewiston-Auburn’s CityLink diligently update their Twitter feeds with any bus delays.

Personally, I was thrilled to check my computer just now and see I had time to start a load of laundry before running out to catch my bus.

GET STARTED WITH THE TRANSIT TRACKER

• If you regularly ride a particular route at a particular time, create an account with Southern Maine Transit Tracker (SMTT) to receive service or route arrival updates.

• Experiment with the Estimated Arrivals and Real Time Map, which shows where the buses actually are.

• When out and about, text SMTT (look for the stop ID on the bus stop sign) 41411 for live-time information or pull up the SMTT website on your smart phone.

• Download and use one of three third-party apps – Transit App, Moovit or Google Maps (iOS or Android). Metro, South Portland and Casco Bay Lines all offer open access to their data in order to encourage innovation.

• Check the SMTT monitor posted at Portland’s Metro Pulse; monitors are scheduled to be installed soon for the South Portland Hub and the Casco Bay Ferry Terminal, as well.