What Do We Know? We Just Ride Bikes!

I am going to rant.  You have been forewarned.

Nothing angers me more than someone in a position of authority who schedules a meeting or gives you a few minutes to "state your case" when they've already made up their mind. Someone who is deemed an "experts," has a fancy title and is given unilateral decision-making power seems to be particularly prone to such behavior.  

What bothers me about such a person is not that they make the wrong decisions or simply ones that I disagree with.  Rather, it's their pretense of considering what  you have to say, when, deep down, they have no interest in learning anything more than they already know and are convinced that they can't learn it from you--a mere prole or rube, in their eyes.

I've seen many such people in the academic world. Because they have advanced degrees to go with their fancy titles, they know more or better than you, or so they think.  They're even worse after they've taken a workshop or seminar on something like race or gender identity or discrimination:  They are absolutely convinced that they already know what they need to know and would never consider hearing from somene who has actually experienced what those workshops and seminars supposedly taught them.

There is, of course, a parallel in the world of urban and transportation planning, especially when it comes to bicycling.  The planners may not have ridden bikes since they were kids--or, possibly worse, they ride on a path in a park while on vacation and think of themselves as "bike riders."  They plan and develop bike lanes that go from nowhere to nowhere and have turns, stops and signals that actually endanger cyclists more than riding in a traffic lane ever would.  And they hold hearings in which they invite representatives of bike advocacy groups to "get input" about the "bicycle infrastructure" they want to build.

I thought about my experiences in the academic world and bicycle and transportation advocacy when I came across an article about the Reno's pilot program that seeks to make "infrastructure improvements"  for bicycles, scooters and other "micromobility solutions." In a typically clueless statement, the Nevada city's assistant director of public works, Kerri Koski, said "We'll take and collect the data that we get, we'll analyze that and take a look at what makes the most sense."

Truckee Meadows Bicycle Alliance President Ky Plakson said that while area cyclists may welcome whatever the city ultimately does, they were not apprised of the study or the pilot program.  "We're told at the last minute that something's happened; we're brought into the conversation after the decision has been made," he said.  That sounds unfortunately familiar.  And he echoed something I said before, and after, any number of "bicycle infrastructure" projects were initiated--including the bike lane that lines the street where I live:  "If you're going to build a bike path, talk to people who ride bikes."

Do they teach that in graduate programs for urban planning?