FABB Blog

The business, which started in 2016, grew out of Fionnula’s earlier advocacy work with FABB and her desire to engage people and help them understand general aspects of multimodal transportation design before public meetings on specific projects are held. BGR projects include real-life design and safety principles and highlight the role of STEM professionals. 

The activities advance ideas through telling stories and simple design projects and often include presentation on the history of the original Good Roads Movement in the United States between the late 1870s and 1920s. These stories and activities highlight the importance of public involvement in getting streets built that meet community needs. 

In addition to classes and workshops, BGR leads walks in the region that talk about the history of the design of specific streets and discuss future ideas for evolving infrastructure. Upcoming walks are scheduled for 1 April in Downtown DC and Anacostia and for 4 May in Reston.   

Fionnuala Quinn is a licensed civil engineer with a background in bicycle and pedestrian planning and advocacy. Through her recently launched organization, The Bureau of Good Roads, she is working to spark interest in how students can influence the design and operation of public streets and the built environment. She hopes her work can inspire young people to play a role in designing streets to better serve the needs of all members of the community.

Why did you launch the Bureau of Good Roads?

I launched The Bureau of Good Roads for several reason. First, through my work as a bicycle and pedestrian engineer and advocate, I recognized a need to engage and educate local communities about the public realm (of which streets are a large part). Often times, I witnessed community members get involved with infrastructure projects only when the projects directly affected them, rather than taking a broader community view of the public realm.

Second, I have worked to promote STEM and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) education for over 10 years starting initially with a weekly girls engineering program at a local elementary school. Walking, bicycling, and school-zone infrastructure are a perfect way to relate STEAM principles to everyday life. Finally, my historical interest in the development of streets led me to a career in engineering and planning and this new way to use my career directly benefits the next generation of leaders.

What resources does the Bureau of Good Roads offer?

The Bureau of Good Roads holds workshops, leads educational programming, and publishes free lesson guides and materials online aimed at students ages 7-13. Our workshops aim to educate and engage students. For example, the Good Roads Rangers Club is a weekday camp program focused on building places and cities for people of all ages and abilities. The Sidewalk Superintendents is a field workshop investigating how infrastructure, design, and safety relate. The lessons guides cover topics such as sidewalk closures, street festivals, street connectivity, street signs, and more. Lessons typically utilize recyclables or low-cost materials to help ensure lessons are accessible.

What projects are you currently working on?

The Good Roads Rangers Club learning about the built environment via the hands-on Complete Streets kit.

We are currently working with an established program in Middleburg (Team Saturday) to create complete streets toolkits. Students are developing these toolkits, which will be presented to town officials in February, in order for Middleburg to help explain different traffic calming techniques to local residents. Middleburg has been great to work with and Town Administrator, Martha Semmes, joined the students to discuss the impacts of a local traffic calming project.

What materials are you currently developing?

I want all of the materials to be easily accessible and help improve understanding of our transportation systems. I am developing a set of basic design principles which will represent the key complete street principles. These principles highlight that the world around us is designed for our use, design is an iterative process, the built environment can be altered, infrastructure is a connected network, and change is normal for example. If students, parents, and community members understand these principles, then the quality of the built environment should improve.

How can VA SRTS Coordinators contact you?

For more information about The Bureau of Good Roads and to access free materials, please visit www.goodroadsmovement.com or www.facebook.com/GoodRoadsMovement. If you would like to partner with the Bureau of Good Roads, please contact Fionnuala at info@goodroadsmovement.com. Join The Bureau of Good Roads Newsletter!

Update: Fionnuala will participate in the FABB Advocacy Training on Feb. 4. Details and registration info coming soon. She will also be the featured speaker at the March 15 FABB meeting in Vienna where she'll discuss her work with the Bureau of Good Roads.

FABB members interested in a fresh take on the reasons why cycling enriches and strengthens their mind, body, and spirit should plan on attending a book launch party on Wednesday, May 18, at One More Page Books. At the event, FABB member and Northern Virginia community leader Jenifer Joy Madden will be discussing her new book How to Be a Durable Human: Revive and Thrive in the Digital Age through the Power of Self-Design. 

In what is described as a handbook for being a human in the 21st century, readers learn to refresh in themselves what has been inadvertently trammeled by their close association with smart phones and other devices of personal technology. Jenifer describes how a cycling crash on the W&OD trail prompted her to think about distractions in her life and then develop simple ways to reduce time spent with gadgets and add more activity to each day to promote better health and sleep, especially for children. Among the stories in her book, Jenifer explores FABB President Jeff Anderson’s efforts to start a bike train for children biking to school and highlights the suburban multi-modal transportation advocacy of local cycling mover and shaker Finnouala Quinn.

Jenifer is a multi-media journalist, digital media professor, and parent of three who lives in the Tysons, Virginia, area, and – as an appointed county transportation commissioner – she literally and figuratively builds bridges to greater well-being. 

Everyone is welcome. One More Page Books is easily accessible by bike and is just off the W&OD Trail at 2200 N Westmoreland Street near the East Falls Church Metro. 

Thanks to everyone who came to the 4th Virginia Get-Together on a snowy day when practically everything else in DC had shut down. Despite conditions, we gathered a great group of about 35 bike advocates, officials, summit scholarship winners, bike coordinators, and others from MORE, Arlington, Fairfax, Prince William, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, Blacksburg, Richmond, Charlottesville, Harrisonburg and elsewhere. We missed several people who had originally planned to join us because of the local weather.

After some lively socializing, we took a break for short presentations from:

“We’re highlighting the fact that the Tysons transportation network is really going to experience a profound, dramatic change,” said Fionnuala Quinn, a volunteer board member with FABB. “It will open up all sorts of new travel options for people. Right now, many people have no choice but to drive.”

While Tysons Corner’s many motorists and few pedestrians are familiar with the area’s substantial hills, Tysons also has tree-lined routes that are ideal for cyclists, she said.
A new grid of streets in Tysons will allow cyclists to skirt the area’s two major thoroughfares, Routes 7 and 123, said Bruce Wright, chairman of Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling.

“Route 7 is probably the biggest challenge in Tysons, and so far we’ve lost that battle, I think, in making it a bicycle-friendly place,” he said.
The Board of Supervisors is encouraging development around all transit locations and Tysons Corner will serve as an ideal proving ground for initiatives that promote bicycling, Wright said.

“The things that we get right in Tysons will apply to those areas of growth in the future in Fairfax,” he said.

Fairfax DOT Chief Tom Biesiadny at 2012 Fairfax Bike Summit

Bike use is relatively low in Fairfax County, but anecdotal evidence suggests it’s increasing, Quinn said. She disputed some people’s perceptions that bicyclists do not obey traffic laws, and said FABB leaders encourage cyclists to follow safety rules.
“People on bicycles are vulnerable and don’t usually take their lives into their hands,” she said.

Wright concurred, adding that motorists might become more accommodating toward cyclists if they shared the roads with more of them.

“I’ve found through my travels that when bicyclists are given good, safe facilities and respect, they generally behave better,” he said.

Getting safe cycling into school system education, getting transportation departments to build safe roads — that’s all important. But it often requires a lot of time, patience and the cooperation of large groups to accomplish. So what difference can one person make? Ms. Quinn had the answer for that question, distributing a flier that suggested actions that individuals can take to grow cycling. I'd thought — and written — about a lot of these ideas, but it was fantastic to see them all distilled into one sheet of paper.

• Be a role model by biking to the store/work/school
• Be a bike buddy to a family member, neighbor, co-worker
• Organize an informal ride group
• Pay attention to local planning and transportation decisions
• Submit bike parking suggestions in local business comment boxes
• Attend public meetings & speak up
• Support your local, regional and national bike advocacy organizations
• Let elected officials know that you care about bike infrastructure
• Let schools know that you care about safe biking & bike education
• Learn local biking rules and regulations
• Especially support teens in your life to stick with biking
• Expect good design and give thoughtful input on the built world
• Be a self-appointed Fairfax Bike Ambassador

Riding my bike to a meeting the other day, I suddenly realized how happy I felt. Being so close to nature was wonderful, amid crimson cardinals darting through the underbrush and the sound of rushing creeks, but there was more to it than that. I had an exhilarating sense of freedom.

Apparently, that’s not a new feeling for women who bike. In fact, we have enjoyed that special kind of autonomy since the late 1800s, when the bicycle was introduced in America. As suffragette Susan B. Anthony put it, having the ability to ride away from the protective atmosphere of the home “changed women.”

Those and other fascinating tidbits from the history of women and bikes were provided by Sue Macy, author of the book Wheels of Change and keynote speaker at the first-ever National Women Cycling Forum, held this week in Washington, D.C.

My mother recalls the great honor of being brought by her father on the donkey and cart into Boyle for her first new bicycle. She rode nine miles back on the bicycle that was purchased for the huge sum of ten pounds specifically so she could bypass the local national school and attend the better school further away.

A generation earlier, a bicycle had been similarly bought for her mother so that she too could have access to better schooling. Those Raleigh and Royal Enfield bicycles allowed them to travel the Roscommon roads widely, riding between the hedgerows and small fields that hadn’t changed for hundreds of years. My mother talks of happy times riding with her sisters and collecting other girls en route to school in Elphin five miles away. Before the bicycle, the women and girls of rural Ireland had never had this freedom of travel and the options that brought with it.

Attend this free webinar if you want to learn how to increase the number of women cycling for transportation in your community. Five speakers offer compelling insights about cycling projects run by inspiring women, illuminate what women told APBP they want in a cycling environment, and suggest best practices to help you make a difference in your community. Don't miss the stories of some of the wonderful women leading the cycling movement, and results of APBP's 2010 survey on Women Cycling. APBP encourages individuals to gather colleagues and friends together to watch the webinar and discuss and plan afterwards. Build your team.
Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/852395306
Presenters:
Andrea Garland, Alta Planning + Design, presents women's viewpoints on three of the open-ended questions from the 2010 Women Cycling survey: "What would cause you to start or increase your cycling?”, "What reaction do you get when cycling for transportation?” and "Why do you use your bicycle for trips?”
Kristin Gavin founded the Gearing Up program in Philadelphia (http://www.gearing-up.org/), a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide women in transition from drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, and/or homelessness with the skills, equipment, and guidance to safely ride a bicycle for exercise, transportation and personal growth.
Fionnuala Quinn, PE, Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling, offers up a brief history of APBP's Women Cycling Project which she helped to inspire, points to resources we can use, and suggests next steps for the project.
Anna Sibley, Masters in Public Health candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, summaries the results of the 2010 APBP Women Cycling Project and survey.
Carolyn Szczepanski, Communications Coordinator, Alliance for Biking & Walking, and columnist for Bicycling Times magazine, profiles some of the women leading the bicycling movement. Her talk is inspired by http://blog.publicbikes.com/2011/03/fifteen-women-who-rule-the-biking-world/

In an early scene, children walk along an unpaved West Ox Road to the original Navy schoolhouse, scraping their boots before entering. Later, the teacher encourages the students to enter the Good Roads essay contest. The Good Roads movement was sweeping the country at the time and the contest drew over a quarter of a million entries annually. One of the students wins and heads to Washington to be presented with a college scholarship by President Calvin Coolidge. The student goes on to study highway engineering, eventually returning home as the local County Engineer. Finally, we see children happily walking together on the newly paved road to the Navy schoolhouse. One pair of students drive a pony and cart to the school.

That one-room schoolhouse has long since been replaced with an eight-hundred student facility while West Ox Road is a four-lane divided highway. Today, many children living short distances from the school cannot easily walk there. Sidewalks are missing in many locations and vehicles speed by the school on three sides. While in the past getting to school had fostered great independence, now many children are not encouraged to walk or bike there. This change in children's behavior came about in large part because of how we designed and constructed the surrounding neighborhoods and streets.

Times have changed and we have realized some of what was lost in all those "improvements" that we built. Meanwhile, we can actually go back and restore some of the missing links through the VDOT Safe Routes to School Program. With SRTS funds, we can fix the non-continuous sidewalks, provide safety education and allow some more choices in how children can get to school. While we may not see many students arriving by pony and cart, it would be nice if a few more could safely walk and bike to their local elementary school.

Certificate of Recognition presented to Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling for its consultation with the Virginia Department of Transportation and the Fairfax County Department of Transportation to develop, prepare, and promote the Guide for Reviewing Public Road Design and Bicycling Accommodations for Virginia Bicycling Advocates to outline ways bicycling enthusiasts can provide input into the process to design, approve, build, and retrofit roads to ensure accommodations for cylcists.

Guide for reviewing bicycling facilities in road projects in Virginia now available

Reston, VA, July 14, 2010 - Virginia bicycling advocates have a new resource to help them review and comment on public road projects. The new guide, prepared by Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling (FABB) in consultation with the Virginia (VDOT) and Fairfax County departments of transportation, outlines ways bicycling proponents can get involved in the process of designing, approving, building, and retrofitting roads to ensure that bicycling accommodations are integrated into the plans where needed. Although geared for Virginia, many of the ideas contained in the report could be applied to other locations as well.

As described in the guide, planning, approving, and constructing road projects is a long process that presents many opportunities for bicycling advocates to provide input into the final outcome. Readers will find helpful tips for speaking at public hearings and meeting with engineers. The easy to read booklet covers the basics of understanding engineering plans and also outlines various roadway features (such as intersections, roundabouts, wide curb lanes, and bike lanes) that could be shown in the plans. Design standards and guidelines, design and safety issues, and a checklist for each of these features help advocates review and comment on road design plans.

"As far as we know, no one has compiled material like this before," said Fionnuala Quinn, primary author of the guide. "I wanted to use my background in civil engineering to help demystify the road design process and to help people take advantage of occasions to incorporate bike facilities whenever roads projects are being designed. A crucial point to remember is that the earlier you provide input to the road design, the better your chances of having an effect on the final design. Besides the printed version of the report, we also plan to have an online version on the FABB web site that contains links to additional information."

Funding for the report came from an Advocacy Advance Grant from the Alliance for Biking & Walking. Funding for the grant was provided by SRAM, Planet Bike, Bikes Belong Coalition, and 42BELOW. Additional funding was received from the IEEE.

The report "Guide for Reviewing Public Road Design and Bicycling Accommodations for Virginia Bicycle Advocates," by Fionnuala Quinn and Bruce Wright, will be provided to major bicycle organizations in Virginia and to the Alliance for Biking & Walking. Copies are available free of charge upon request to finnbike [at] gmail.com or can be downloaded from www.fabb-bikes.org.

For more information on the guide, contact Fionnuala Quinn, finnbike@gmail.com, or Bruce Wright, chairman [at] fabb-bikes.org, 703-328-9619. FABB is a grassroots initiative in Fairfax County, VA, affiliated with the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA), aiming to make bicycling an integral part of Fairfax County's transportation network. Visit us on the web at www.fabb-bikes.org.