When people talk about "culture wars," they're usually referring to contentious debates about issues like LGBTQ, racial or gender equality, what should be taught in schools or what place, if any, religious expression has in public life.
For some time, i have suspected that arguments about bike lanes have been devolving from discussions about sustainable living to battles delineated by generational, class and other kinds of divides. A woman in Berkeley, California has recently said as much.
She was referring to a plan to re-design Hopkins Street, a thoroughfare lined with shops and restaurants in an affluent part of the city, to accommodate a protected bike lane. In some ways, the debate echoes ones I hear in my hometown of New York, and hear about in other cities.
Business owners fear that the loss of parking spaces in front of their stores, restaurants and other enterprises will hurt them. And car-dependent people, who include the city's fast-growing population of senior citizens, worry that they will lose access to goods and services they need and enjoy. On the other hand, cyclists, pedestrians and advocates for mass transportation argue that the very things that attract people to the city cannot be sustained without reducing the number of private automobiles on the city's streets.
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| A driver parks in front of a shop on Hopkins Street during a rally in support of a bike lane. Photo by Ximena Natera for Berkeleyside. |
The discussion, according to Donna Didiemar, has been drifting away from one "about bike lanes" and instead is "turning into a culture war." She and others are, in essence, saying that the debate is one over what kind of city Berkeley will become. Bike lane proponents tend to be younger and, in the eyes of opponents, more "privileged," while opponents are seen as adherents to an old and unsustainable way of thinking.
It won't surprise you to know that I am, mostly, in the camp of bike lane builders and those who advocate for pedestrians and mass transit. But opponents of the bike lane have made a couple of valid points. One is that the lane won't necessarily make cycling safer. That is true if the lane crosses in front of driveways, as too many bike lanes do. Also, cars may need to pull into the bike lane to get out of the way of emergency vehicles: something I've encountered while riding.
One irony is that some of the entrepreneurs and residents of the street are artisans or people who were simply attracted by the very things that make an area a candidate for sustainability: shops and other amenities close to residential buildings. Another is that planners, including those who want to build the bike lane, still seem to be operating from a set of assumptions about what cycling and walking are and aren't. That, I think, is a reason why a discussion about a vision for the city (and not simply a bike lane) may well be turning into a "culture war."
