Because I’m avoiding yet another resurgence of the @alt debate in HTML 5, here’s an article from the Wall Street Journal about how one San Francisco citizen is attempting to halt improvements to the city’s bike infrastructure: (emphasis mine)
New York is wooing cyclists with chartreuse bike lanes. Chicago is spending nearly $1 million for double-decker bicycle parking. San Francisco can’t even install new bike racks.
Yikes. Thankfully, Seattle has a healthy bicycling community AND government support to continue to improve the lives of those who commute by bike (documented in the Seattle Bicycle Master Plan.) Long time residents of Seattle (those who commute by bicycle) may complain about the state of various parts of the bicycle system but recent transplants from the East Coast, like ourselves, are stupid happy. I’ve been to most of the major cities on the eastern seaboard of the United States and none of them have the bicycling resources that Seattle has. Bicycling conditions are so good here it is how how both my wife and I get to work.
At a time when most other cities are encouraging biking as green transport, the 65-year-old local gadfly has stymied cycling-support efforts here by arguing that urban bicycle boosting could actually be bad for the environment. That’s put the brakes on everything from new bike lanes to bike racks while the city works on an environmental-impact report.
Later…
Cars always will vastly outnumber bikes, (Anderson) reasons, so allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution.
This has me stunned because I live in the hippie capital of the world (Seattle). We have a reputation for considering the environmental impact on everything (according to NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, this includes composting are own dead bodies) and I’ve never heard a hypothesis such as Rob Anderson has put forth. Sadly the WSJ article doesn’t cite any of the studies that led Rob to his conclusion.
Rob does have a blog and while he’s currently tracking the glorious praise of his article, I’m hoping he actually starts a conversation with his fellow citizens about his position. He does have an older post from 2006 where he describe what he calls “BikeThink” and characterize bicyclist as fundamentalist and elitist. It doesn’t describe any of the cyclist I know or speak to in my community but I don’t really attend any bicycle clubs or similar group meetings. Perhaps because my wife and I are of the opinion that Seattle’s Critical Mass group isn’t as family friendly as their website claims to be. and so we’ve avoided this crowd altogether. The cyclist I run into everyday are just commuting from home to work, usually with a bus leg in the middle due to the fact that you easily can’t get from North Seattle to Bellevue without going severely out of your way. Most complain about the bus leg over SR-520 but in general enjoy taking advantage of the major trails, like the Burke-Gilman. I’ve found that utilizing a bike for a even a fraction of my trip can eliminate one of the three buses I’m required to take to get to my office and saves me an additional 10 minutes in total trip time (sometimes more if I would have missed one of my scheduled connections.)
Anyway, the article is an interesting look at another city is reacting to higher gas prices with improvements (or lack there of) for bicycle commuters. If you like this sorta thing, there was an article in the NYTimes earlier this summer that focused on bicycle commuters heading into Manhattan.
