Not To Die--Or Kill--For

Some of us have seen bikes "to die for."  When I was a teenager, almost anything with a frame made from Reynolds 531 tubing and Campagnolo components would have been, if not Nirvana, then a ticket to it.

Speaking of which: A year before he offed himself, Kurt Cobain expressed shock at ticket prices for his band's concerts:  $17-18.  In today's dollars, those prices would be double that amount. At the time, other acts charged anywhere from 50 to 75 dollars for the privilege of attending one of their shows.

Anyway, what I said in the first paragraph might, for some of you, beg the question of whether any bike is worth dying for.  Or, to follow this line of thinking, worth killing for.

That is what Bobby Peters asked Tellious Savalas Brown.  Peters, however, was not merely posing a rhetorical question during a casual conversation.  Rather, he was determining the course of 19-year-old Brown's life.

Three years ago, at a Columbus, Georgia bus stop, Brown fatally shot 60-year-old Roy Wilborn to steal his bicycle. Turns out, he'd committed an armed robbery of a restaurant and shot at said restaurant's employees.  Oh, and the car he used to get to the crime scene, and wrecked in fleeing from it, was stolen--hijacked at gunpoint, to be exact.

The hijacking charge and more than a dozen others were dropped in a plea deal.  But, as a penalty for killing a man for his bike, robbing the restaurant and shooting at employees, Judge Peters sentenced Brown to life with the possibility of parole--after 30 years.

"Why do all this?," the judge asked. "All over a bicycle?  This just doesn't make sense."

Bikes Without Brews?

Around 2010, a new kind of business emerged:  the bike cafe.  Some were established bike shops that added counters, stools and even tables and served coffees, teas, snacks, sandwiches and even light meals and craft beers.  Others, though, like Red Lantern in Brooklyn, offered bikes, accessories and repairs along with fuel for the ride (or re-fueling for after it) from the day they opened. 

About five years ago, Red Lantern closed.  According to its owners, Brian and Lena Gluck, the final nail in the shop's coffin was a large rent increase, although they noted that they started to lose business a couple of years earlier when a Starbucks opened two blocks away and the Citibike program rode into full gear. The bikeshare program wasn't the "gateway drug" to a bike purchase, Brian noted. Although Citibikes, like most other share programs' bikes, are heavy and clunky, people weren't interested in getting a nicer bike.  Rather, they liked "compromising between not getting stolen, not having to maintain it, and not having to lug it up four flights of stairs," he explained.  Also, many Citibike users are tourists who aren't going to buy a bicycle during their trip unless it's very different from, or much less expensive than, whatever they can buy at home.

He's not the only one who misses Red Lantern.

The factors Gluck cited upon closing the shop may well have led to other bike shop/cafe establishments ending their runs.  After Red Lantern, I noticed a few other such closures. At the time I thought it had to do with the things that led the Glucks to close their shop and, possibly, that Millenials--who were those establishments' chief patrons and sometimes the proprietors--were simply moving on to other things.

But now I am hearing of, and reading about the end even more such businesses, here in New York and elsewhere.  Still others--like Mello Velo in Syracuse, New York--are getting out of the brew 'n' bagel business.  I have to wonder whether the cafes of  Mello Velo and other such establishments simply never recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.  While bike shops remained open, I can't help but to think that when masking was mandatory early in the pandemic, people didn't stay for coffee when they bought their bikes or had them fixed.  

If that is the case, it's ironic:  While the pandemic was a boon for many shops (though others closed because they couldn't get any more inventory), it was a disaster for almost anything having to do with hospitality--except, of course, for takeout.  

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?