A Culture War--Over A Bike Lane?

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.

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."

How Many "Drips" Will It Take To Wash Away A Stroad?

Charles Marohn's book is called The Confessions of a Recovering Engineer.  In it, the former road designer and transportation planner describes how conventional American traffic engineering makes people and communities less safe, destroys the fabric of communities, bankrupts towns and cities and exacerbates the very problems--like congestion--engineers like himself were trying to solve.

His greatest disdain is for what he calls "stroads."  I mentioned them in an August post. Think of them as Franken-lanes:  They are supposed to be streets in cities and towns but in reality are highways with multiple lanes of high-speed traffic.  (Even if the speed limit is more like that of an urban or residential street--say, 30 mph (50 kph), drivers are often sprinting at twice that between lights.) They are usually lined with big-box stores and other businesses that provide a steady stream of cars and trucks pulling in and out of the lanes.

Examples of "stroads" in my area are the Hempstead Turnpike, which I wrote about in an earlier post, West Street (a.k.a. Route 9A) in Manhattan and, even closer to home, Northern and Queens Boulevards.  A particularly egregious example of a "stroad" is US 19 on Florida's Gulf Coast.  

In some places, particularly in the southern and western US states, cyclists use "stroads" because there are few or no alternative routes.  Even if a cyclist is not riding along the route itself, he or she probably will need to cross it because, as Mahron points out, they often divide downtown areas, leaving, say, a store somebody frequents on one side and a doctor or other service provider on the other.  Or said cyclist might live on one side of the stroad and want to go to a park or movie theatre--or need to get to school or work--on the other side.

Michael Weilert discovered this danger the hard way.  He was crossing, with his bicycle, one such stroad--Pacific Avenue (a.k.a. State Route 7) in Tacoma, Washington--when he was struck and killed in a crosswalk.  Last week, a hundred people gathered for a silent ride at the site where Michael's life ended after only 13 years.

Photo by Carla Gramlich for Strong Towns

While such tragedies motivate the families, friends and immediate communities of victims, they don't lead to fundamental change because of what Marohn calls the "drip, drip, drip" effect.  When hundreds of people are killed, say, in a plane crash or building collapse, it gets the attention of planners, policy-makers and, sometimes, politicians.  On the other hand, incidents like the one that claimed young Michael Weilert usually claim one, or a few victims, so they receive less notice.

How many more "drips" will it take before those in authority see a tidal wave?

 

Why Don't They Include Bicycles?

One of the more interesting (to me, anyway) ironies of my life is that I often ride in or through Flushing Meadow-Corona Park, the site of the 1964-65 World's Fair. 

My now-vague memories of having attended with my parents and younger siblings (whose memories are probably even vaguer than mine, if they have any at all!) include visions of flying cars and sidewalks that weren't because, well, people didn't walk:  They were conveyed on belts to their destinations.

It was a time when progress was depicted as inevitable, limitless and always aided and abetted by technologies that made our daily lives less arduous--and took ever-greater quantities of resources.  Nuclear energy would be the power source of the future because advances in its technology would render it "too cheap to meter." In those days, "sustainable" was not part of planners' vocabularies.

Sometimes I wonder just how much we've moved on from such thinking.  In his article for Next City, Nicolas Collignon points out that even as cities like New York  Paris Milan and Bogota invest in bike lanes and other incentives to trade four wheels and one pedal for two wheels and two pedals, too much of today's planning is based on such innovations as self-driving cars and flying delivery drones. At the same time, according to Collignon, too many planners neglect the role bicycles can play in making cities more livable, sustainable and affordable.

So why do planners have such a blind spot for our favorite means of transportation and, well, just having fun?  Well, since you, dear readers, are smart people, you probably have the answer:  money.  Specifically, where the money comes from:  automotive and high-tech companies, which have much deeper pockets than any in the bicycle industry.  

Photo by Francois Mori

Of course, those auto and tech companies--even the ones that tout themselves as "green"--have ties to the fossil fuel and military (given our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I cannot call it "defense") industries.  That may be a reason why those planners have similar blind spots to the effects clean-looking technologies and "cleaner" automobiles actually have--or why they bought Uber and Lyft's sales pitch that their services would reduce traffic.  If you live in almost any major city, you can see how much that prophecy has come to pass. 

I also can't help but to think that those companies--and, sometimes, the urban planners themselves--are, openly or covertly, stoking drivers' resentments toward cyclists.

Next On The Journey--Or: Where Is This Going?

After writing yesterday's post, I noticed something interesting, at least to me.  

I began this blog twelve years ago.  You might say that I spun it off from an earlier blog, Transwoman Times.  I started that blog a year before my gender-affirmation surgery and continued it for several years after.  About a year after my surgery, I--and at least one reader--noticed that I was also writing about my rides and bikes, and cycling in general.  I didn't think bikes or cycling were out of place in TT:  After all, they--and the fact that I couldn't ride for a few months after my surgery--were an important part of my gender affirmation process, as they have been in my life. 

After I started this blog, I wrote less about cycling-related stuff on TT.  So, perhaps not surprisingly, I found myself posting less on that site as I had less and less to say about my gender affirmation.  That is to say, rather than a process of affirmation, my gender identity became a fact of my life.

But now I find that I'm writing more about, if not gender-related topics, then political, social and cultural issues, on this blog.  Those subjects are, of course, related to cycling, especially if it's your primary or a major means of transportation.  You know that from my rants about bicycle "infrastructure" planned, designed and built by people who haven't been on a bicycle since the day they got their driver's licenses. 

I also, however, see that gender-related issues are "creeping" into this blog.  In one way it seems ironic, or at least odd:  Am I coming full-circle (or cycle)?, I wonder.  Then again, this shift in focus, if indeed this blog is moving in that direction, is a fulfillment of what I say in my masthead:  I am--as always--a woman on a bicycle--and something else I say in my profile--this is a blog by a transgender woman.

While I haven't posted on Transwoman Times in a while, I have no plans to let this blog lie fallow.  I just hope that the twists and turns of this blog, and my journey, continue to interest you, and others.  But I must warn you:  I won't stop being "political."  I can't.

A Bike Lane Network: The Community Wants It. Can The City Get It Right?

Sometimes, when I don't have all day, or even morning or afternoon, to ride, I'll take a spin out to the eastern Queens, the New York City borough where I live (in its western end).  The routes between my Astoria apartment and Fort Totten or Alley Pond include some charming residential streets, cute shops and some lovely parks.  

But as the urban-but-not-claustrophobic character of my neighborhood also gives way to more spacious yards, the neighborhoods also become more suburban--and auto-centric.  While some residents of those areas ride for fitness or simply fun, they ride to and in parks and cycling isn't seen as a means of transportation.  Also, the city's mass transit lines don't reach into those neighborhoods.  So, for most people, going to work, school or shop means driving or being driven.

That is why on at least some of the area's streets, cycling can be just as hazardous as it is in more densely-populated neighborhoods.  Too often, drivers simply aren't accustomed to seeing cyclists on the streets.  Or, they have been inculcated with the notion that the drivers rule and cyclists, pedestrians and everyone else are supposed to get out of their way. Thus, so-called "shared" roadways--which consist of nothing more than lines and bike symbols painted on pavement--do nothing to promote safety.

Also, eastern Queens is laced and ringed with major highways.  The off-ramps from those by-ways merge into the neighborhood's main streets like Northern Boulevard.  One problem with the bike lane on the Boulevard is the difficulty in crossing one of those exit ramps, where there is no traffic light or even a "stop," "slow" or "yield" sign.

The problems I mentioned were cited by members of Community Board 11 when they sent back a proposal the City's Department of Transportation presented to them.  The proposal called for a series of bike lanes in a five square-mile area.  While the Board is in favor of establishing a network of lanes, the DoT's initial proposal called for fewer miles of them, none of which would have been protected.  Worst of all, at least in my view, this "network" would have the same problem I've encountered in too many bike lane "networks":  It's not a network.  Lanes weren't connected to each other; they are the "bike lanes to nowhere" I've complained about in other posts.  One board member pointed out that the lack of connection between segments actually puts cyclists in more danger than simply riding on the road.

As I often ride out that way, I am interested to see what the DoT does in response.  I am just happy that in an auto-centric area, community board members see the value in having a network of protected bike lanes. I hope the DoT gets it right. 

A "Walk Audit" In Tulsa

Yesterday I decried, as I often do, the sorry state of bike lanes here in New York City and much of the US.  It seems that bike and pedestrian lanes are, too often, conceived and designed by people who never have actually set foot, let alone walked or ridden a bike, where the lanes are built.  The result is lanes that actually put bicyclists and pedestrians in more danger than they'd experience without it and that don't offer safe and practical routes to and from wherever people live, work, go to school or shop.

Well, it seems that some folks in Tulsa, Oklahoma are reading this blog--or they have great minds that think like mine. ;=)  They are doing at least part of what I think anyone planning a bike or pedestrian lane should  do.  What's more, they plan to continue the practice for at least a year.

The other day, some of the city's business owners, neighborhood association members, city councilors and other citizens took the first "walk audit" of an area with crash areas. More such "walk audits" will be conducted through the coming year.  The purpose is to determine what needs to be changed in order to make those areas safer for walking, cycling and using public transportation.

 

Photo by Josh New, for Oklahoma Magazine

It sounds like a good idea, although I'd also like to see "bike audits":  Much, but not all, of what will make walking safer will also help cyclists.  As an example, the audit identified a lack of sidewalks in one area which, of course, forces pedestrians to walk in the street.  While I certainly favor installing a sidewalk, it generates this question:  Will cyclists and other wheeled (but non-motorized) vehicles be permitted on it?  In some places, like some areas of Florida I've ridden, bike lanes double as sidewalks (or vice versa, depending on your point of view).  That works out as long as there isn't a high volume of pedestrian or bicycle traffic, which seems to go against the purpose of having safe bike and pedestrian routes.

So, I think the good folks of Tulsa have begun to move in the right direction.  Now I'd like to see whether they expand their efforts, and whether they can export them--or whether they will be imported by--cities like the one in which I live.