Tearing down urban freeways to make room for a new bicycle economy
by Elly Blue <http://www.grist.org/member/386213>
Grist Magazine 14 Mar 2011 9:31 AM
[
http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-14-tearing-down-urban-freeways-to-make…
]
*This is the second column in a series focusing on the economics of
bicycling. Part 1 was "How bicycling will save the economy (if we let
it)<http://www.grist.org/article/2011-02-28-how-bicycling-will-save-the-economy>."
*
[image: bikenomics]Here's one way to fund bicycle infrastructure: Stop
building freeways in cities.
Better yet, tear down the ones we already have.
Cities are starting to catch on that becoming bicycle friendly is one of the
best investments they can
make**<http://www.grist.org/article/2010-09-27-why-an-additional-road-tax-for-bicy…>
.
Cities are also starting to realize that removing freeways makes more
economic sense than maintaining or expanding them. In the last year, with
the help of federal and state funding, cities like Baltimore and New Haven have
been demolishing<http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0302/Downtown-need-a-makeover-More-cities…>the
"highways to nowhere" that have divided their neighborhoods, drained
their populations<http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2009/09/the-cost-of-urban-freeways/>,
and damaged their
economies<http://www.azdot.gov/Highways/valley_freeways/Loop_202/South_Mountain/artic…>and
their children's
health<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/26/AR200701260…>since
the 1970s.
**
Finding room for safe bicycle infrastructure in already strained and
contested budgets can be difficult. That's especially true in places where
bicycling has no historical place in the transportation budget, and is still
seen as either a whim of the elite or last resort of the poor.
But the economic benefits of freeway removal make anything seem possible.
Our freeway system is crumbling. Freeways in cities are vastly expensive,
disastrous for public health and safety, and destructive of community. The
damages disproportionately affect the
poor<http://www.baltimorebrew.com/2010/09/24/highway-to-nowhere-coming-down-not-…>
.
Urban freeways are also ineffective as transportation solutions. Caught in
the vicious feedback loop of induced
demand<http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/2011/03/puncturing-myth-more-r…>,
they cannot be expanded fast enough to keep up with increasing traffic --
yet each expansion lures yet more drivers who create yet more congestion and
demand more lanes, ad infinitum. The maintenance and expansion of these
roadways gobble up transportation funds that could create and maintain less
costly and destructive alternatives.
The numbers at play are almost too large to comprehend, but comparison is
enlightening.
Bike lanes cost anywhere from $5,000 to $60,000 per
mile<http://issuu.com/bikeleague/docs/economic_benefits_bicycle_infrastructure_r…>to
add to an existing road. That includes everything from engineering and
design to paint and concrete to traffic signals.
Does that seem like a lot? Well, let's compare.
Freeway construction in Michigan's countryside clocks in at $8 million per
mile <http://www.michigan.gov/mdot/0,1607,7-151-14011-28076--F,00.html>. In
the state's cities, with their need for overpasses, underpasses, exits and
entrances, and mitigation of construction impacts on health and commerce,
the cost jumps to an average of $39 million per mile.
And that's a bargain-basement rate compared to many parts of the country. On
the other end of the spectrum, Boston has the most expensive urban freeway
systems in the country, costing over $1 billion per
mile<http://www-pam.usc.edu/volume2/v2i1a3s2.html>
.
In Portland, Ore., a single mile of urban freeway costs on average $65
million per mile to build; that's about the same dollar figure as the entire
amount as the city spent in 20 years on the bicycle infrastructure that made
it one of the most famous bicycle cities in the
world<http://www.planetizen.com/node/42773>,
with a bicycle economy worth far more than that amount every
year<http://bikeportland.org/2008/09/11/report-bike-related-economy-worth-90-mil…>
.* *For further perspective, it was just announced that $100 million has
already been spent on planning for a contentious $4 to $10 billion freeway
expansion project here that may never be
built<http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/02/a_misfire_in_design_nee…>
.
Those sums don't include maintenance, which can cost nearly as much as
building new miles of freeway, and which, thanks to our interstate system
being largely built in a short period of time, is all starting to crumble at
once<http://rightdemocrat.blogspot.com/2010/05/us-pirg-report-calls-for-fixing.h…>in
the last decade -- just as federal transportation funding is running
out fast<http://www.landlinemag.com/todays_news/Daily/2011/Mar11/031111/031111-03.sh…>
.* *(Remember that bridge in
Minnesota<http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-02-minneapolis-bridge_N.htm>
?)* *As early as 2000, the amount of spending needed for basic, safe
maintenance of our national freeways and bridges was 20 percent
higher<http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/2002cpr/ch24.htm>than the $30
billion that was spent that year.
By contrast, according to a 2009 report by the League of American
Bicyclists, for the $75 million spent repaving three miles of urban
interstate, California could have
installed<http://issuu.com/bikeleague/docs/economic_benefits_bicycle_infrastructure_r…>1,250
miles of some of the country's most expensive bike lanes.
Cities that have chosen (or been forced by citizen
groups<http://www.streetfilms.org/lessons-from-portland/>)
to stop building or to remove freeways have been rewarded tremendously, and not
just economically<http://www.infrastructurist.com/2009/07/06/huh-4-cases-of-how-tearing-down-…>
.
[image: Woman on bike in
SF.]<http://www.flickr.com/photos/martindavidsson/154575832/>The
scene today on San Francisco's Embarcadero, where a freeway once loomed.Photo:
Martin Davidsson <http://www.flickr.com/photos/martindavidsson/154575832/>Talk
of removing San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway began almost as soon as it
was built. When it was taken out of commission by the 1989 Loma Prieta
earthquake, it quickly became clear that the predicted traffic snarls
weren't happening; it was demolished and replaced with an arterial street
and a now beloved linear
park<http://www.streetfilms.org/lessons-from-san-francisco/>along the
water.
When the city of Milwaukee, Wisc. removed a contested, never-finished
freeway spur in 2002, the estimated cost for needed safety repairs was $100
million. Removal cost $25 million, and the 26 acres of land freed up for
redevelopment attracted over $300 million in
investments<http://www.preservenet.com/freeways/FreewaysParkEast.html>.
Mayor John Norquist, overseeing the project, famously said, "Highways don't
belong in cities. Period."
President Eisenhower, the father of the U.S. interstate system, agreed. He
reportedly only discovered that freeways were being built in cities, rather
than between them, in 1959. He wanted them to be
eliminated<http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/faq.htm#question23a>,
but the march of progress had already left him behind.
He was right: We don't need freeways in cities. And we can't afford them.
Not every city has gotten that message. Right now in Seattle, the
earthquake-damaged Alaskan Way Viaduct seems destined to be replaced by a
costly freeway tunnel<http://www.grist.org/article/2010-12-15-seattle-car-centric-mega-tunnel-car…>along
the city's waterfront -- despite the wishes of voters. In San Diego
County, the $2.6 billion proposed for
spending<http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/feb/25/bicycles-big-part-future-tra…>on
bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure over the next 40 years has
attracted more scrutiny than the $82 billion slated for
roads<http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/dec/17/sandag-approves-40-year-transportation…>in
the same plan, including at least one highly contested freeway
expansion
project. In Portland, planning is underway for a new, widened freeway bridge
that will bring more congestion into the center of the city. The ultimate
cost of that project is estimated to be between $4 and $10 billion.
There's a lot of criticism of the cost of bicycle infrastructure. But look
at it this way: the simple act of choosing not to build one mile of urban
freeway can buy you a world-class bicycle city with a thriving local
economy.
We can tear down these freeways and make sure that green spaces, equitable
new development, and quality walking and bicycling infrastructure take their
place. Soon, we may have no other choice.
*Two weeks from today, we'll take on the health care crisis. With bikes, of
course. *
Elly Blue is a writer and bicycle activist living in Portland, Oregon.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Haynes <activetransportation(a)rogers.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 10:21 AM
Subject: Active Transportation - Canada: March 14, 2011
Dear Listserv Members:
Ten (10) new items have been posted on the Active Transportation-Canada
Website, and for something different, all are from our neighbours to the
south, the US and Mexico. There are some fascinating an surprisingly
developments taking place in these countries, and as advocates of Active
Transportation it might be helpful to be aware of a few of them.
A complete list of titles may be found in the "Blog Archive" box, located on
the right margin of the Website. some highlights in this collection include:
- San Diego - Billions proposed for bike lanes, pedestrian-friendly
streets
- Los Angeles plans 1600 mile cycle lane network
- New York - Battle of the Bike Lanes
Active Transportation Canada URL:
http://activetransportation-canada.blogspot.com
A "Search" function is available on the site. You will find this at the
bottom of the page. With more than 1,000 items posted on Active
Transportation - Canada, there are links available to dozens of studies and
hundreds of news items from communities across Canada and the world.
If anyone has a problem reading this message, please let me know. I welcome
suggestions for posts, so if you have news items featuring your community,
please share them with the many subscribers to Active
Transportation-Canada.
Thank you.
Michael Haynes
Director
TransActive Solutions
Hello!
Please find attached an event coordinator posting for Bike to Work Day
Winnipeg, which takes place this year on Friday, June 24th.
It would be greatly appreciated if you could circulate it within your
networks or forward to individuals who you think might be a good fit.
thanks,
Beth
Bike to Work Day Winnipeg Event Coordinator
Want to coordinate an exciting city wide event that celebrates cycling
culture?
The Bike to Work Day Winnipeg planning team is looking for an event
coordinator to assist with Bike to Work Day Winnipeg 2011 (June 24, 2011).
New ideas and approaches will be welcomed. In general, the individual will
be responsible for:
* Attending meetings of and reporting to the planning committee
* Updating a sponsorship package and soliciting donations from previous
and new sponsors
* Assisting with the development and coordination of promotional
materials, and liaising with the planning team, graphic designer and web
developer
* Assisting with overall coordination of pancake breakfast and
coordinating rides from established Oases in the city, including the
coordination of volunteers
* Communicating with media and developing partnerships with other
related community organizations
* Preparing a report of the event and recommendations for events in
future years
* Performing other coordination duties as needed
Required skills and experience
* Creativity in event planning and promotion
* Exceptional organizational and communication skills
* Able to deliver commitments under pressure
* Comfortable working with a volunteer-run planning team
* Development of sponsorship packages and soliciting sponsors
* Event coordination and promotion
* Community engagement
* Media relations
* Volunteer coordination
* Report writing
This is approximately a 3-month contract, beginning April 4th until
submission of a final report, for $7500 - $10 000 depending on experience
and details of the final contract. The independent contractor will be
responsible to provide their own office, office supplies and equipment.
The successful applicant will be accountable to the volunteer planning
committee.
Interested candidates should forward a résumé, covering letter and
references to relevant experience to mike.tutthill(a)biketoworkdaywinnipeg.org
by March 28, 2011.
Mike Tutthill
Information & Access Coordinator
HEALTH in COMMON
100-6 Donald Street
Winnipeg, MB R3L 0K6
tel: 204.949.2002
1.800.731.1792
fax: 204.284.2404
email: <mailto:mtutthill@healthincommon.ca> mtutthill(a)healthincommon.ca
web: <http://www.healthincommon.ca> www.healthincommon.ca
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
April E-Newsletter deadline is March 18.
<http://www.facebook.com/pages/Health-in-Common/120069149875> Health in
Common on Facebook
* Please consider the environment before printing this email.
Coming to Health in Common?
By bicycle: Bicycle parking is located behind the building.
By Winnipeg transit: Routes 62, 65, 66, 68, 70
By car: Two visitor parking spaces are available at the back of the
building. Street parking (restrictions): Bell Avenue (1hr 9h00 17h30),
Clarke Street (none); Lewis (none); Cauchon (none); River (none west of
Clarke).
Great story from:
http://www.torontocranks.com/?p=2363<http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/03/anonymous-gifts-say-thank-you-for-c…>(can
we hold out hope for a Winnipeg benefactor?) -cheers, Beth
Thank you for cycling!
March 2nd, 2011
I was riding along the College Street bike lane heading east and was coming
up to the red light at University Ave. and an older woman stepped out to the
edge of the sidewalk and handed me an envelope saying “Thank You for cycling
today”! I thought it might be a flyer or something so I stuck it into my
pocket and started through the now green light. On the other side of the
intersection another cyclist passed me and turned to say ” how much do you
think is inside” as he waved his envelope, I said I don’t know maybe its a
coffee coupon.
A bit further ahead I thought I’d make a U-turn and go back and see who she
worked for, but she was gone.
When I got home I looked at the envelope. It’s hand lettered “Thank You ($
gift inside).”
I opened it and inside was a letter and a new $5.00 bill. Wow!
So I took the $5.00 and bought 2 lottery tickets for tonights 6/49 draw!
You don’t think she works for Rob Ford’s office??
Tom Polarbear
Hi everyone,
I’m part of a student group at the University of Winnipeg called the Ice
Riders, and we are a non-profit organization there to help people have
better access to the resources they need to bike all year round. We’re in
the process of building a bike lab on the Downtown campus, which should be
completed this spring, and it will be a base for anyone with a bike to come
by for repairs, advice, or even to build a bike. Myself and close to fifty
other students and non students are committed to volunteering our time to
make this a success, but a real issue is funding.
The link below takes you to a video which was created by a few members and
friends and submitted to the TD Go Green Challenge, where the successful
candidates will receive $100,000.00 to go towards implementing their
project. TD is doing a people’s choice award of $2,500.00, which is where
your vote counts for this. Take a look if you’d like, and if you are so
inclined please vote for them. Any vote helps, and so far we’re ahead of the
pack!
Regards,
Michael Chiasson
PS please feel free to pass it on to anyone you like!
http://www.tdgogreenchallenge.com/video/id/86/playid/86#
Share the road rage Why do people in cars hate people on bikes so much?
by Sarah Goodyear <http://www.grist.org/member/376533>
24 Feb 2011 4:10 PM
[
http://www.grist.org/article/2011-02-24-why-do-people-in-cars-hate-people-o…
]
If you've ever been behind the wheel of a car, you've felt it: The dead
certainty that everyone around you is a complete idiot who should get the
hell out of your way.
If you've spent much time riding a bicycle, you have been the target of that
wrath. And without the protective metal-and-glass bubble that shields
drivers (mostly) from each other's anger, it's easy to feel the hate. A horn
honked in your ear by someone zooming past, an insult shouted out a window,
the grit kicked up in your face by someone passing too close -- just to make
a point. It's scary.
The expression "road rage" apparently originated in America in the
1980s<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_rage>,
and the concept was absorbed into our national DNA a long time ago. It's
part of how we see ourselves, a danger so familiar it's become mundane, a
cultural cliché.
Driving a car does something strange to you. Tom Vanderbilt, author of the
book *Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About
Us<http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780307277190?&PID=25450>
*), has explained
it<http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/tom-vanderbilt/>this way:
What happens to most of us, in most driving conditions, is that we're losing
some of the key attributes that facilitate human cooperation and, in a
larger sense, society.
Eye contact, for example, has been shown in any number of experiments to
increase the chance of gaining cooperation - that's why when drivers give
you what was called on *Seinfeld* the "stare-ahead," your chances that
they'll let you merge in ahead of them are greatly reduced.
Then there's the anonymity in traffic - there's no one to spread rumors or
gossip about you about how bad your behavior was -- not to mention the lack
of consequences for acting like an idiot. It's all strikingly similar to the
way we act on the internet, in what's called the "online disinhibition
effect."
Now Vanderbilt has written a terrific article in
*Outside<http://outsideonline.com/adventure/travel-ga-201103-new-york-bike-commuting…>
* about the way that people driving cars and people riding bicycles interact
with each other -- and the psychology behind the "bikelash" that's taken
hold as bicycles have become increasingly popular as a mode of
transportation as well as recreation.
People on bikes, of course, are not equal players in the battle for road
space. They don't have a metal shell to protect them. Maybe that's why they
are easy targets for road rage: Because they look a lot more human than
people in cars do, and because they rely on eye contact and hand signals to
express their intentions, rather than on blinking lights and sheer metallic
muscle. Because they are more vulnerable.
Vanderbilt writes about how the idea that "cyclists" are a group unto
themselves, an "other," creates some of the problem:
This dynamic appears on the road in all kinds of ways. "We know that merely
perceiving someone as an outsider is enough to provoke a whole range of
things," says Ian Walker, a researcher at the University of Bath who
specializes in traffic psychology. "All the time, you hear drivers saying
things like 'Cyclists, they're all running red lights, they're all riding on
sidewalks,' while completely overlooking the fact that the group they
identify with regularly engages in a whole host of negative behaviors as
well." This social categorization is subtle but dominant, he points out.
When people are given a piece of paper and asked to describe themselves,
"men never write, 'I'm a man.' Whereas women will write 'woman' because
being male is the 'default' status in society."
And so it is with cyclists. In a country like the Netherlands, which has
more bikes than people and where virtually the entire population cycles at
one time or another, the word cyclist isn't meaningful. But in the U.S., the
term often implies something more, in both a good and a bad sense.
There's also a not-so-subtle class element in play:
Yes, cultural politics are getting weird, which may also explain some of the
tension, as Brian Ladd, author of the 2008 book *Autophobia*, argues. "Most
Americans," he wrote in a December post on the urban-planning Web site
Planetizen.com <http://www.planetizen.com/>, "know one thing about the
bicyclists they see on the roads: they are losers, and you thank God you're
not one of them." But wait, he says, noting the fashionability of cycling:
Who's doing the sneering here? "It's harder to dismiss cyclists as beneath
contempt," he says, "when you suspect that they might just be contemptuous
of you."
You should read Vanderbilt's article in full [note: pasted below], because
it's packed with great stuff (he rides along with one guy who commutes 50
miles each way by bike twice a week, and talks with another who documents
his interactions with angry drivers on video). Unlike a lot of the writing
on this topic, it is well-reasoned and well-researched. In the end,
Vanderbilt comes to a pretty simple conclusion:
In thinking about how to improve driver-cyclist relations in America, the
easiest thing is to simply get more people on bikes.
Because that way, it won't be us vs. them. It'll just be us.
--
[Warning: The next article is lengthy but well worth reading.]
Outside Magazine, March
2011<http://outsideonline.com/travel/travel-ta-201103/table-of-contents/travel-t…>
http://outsideonline.com/adventure/travel-ga-201103-new-york-bike-commuting…
Rage Against Your Machine
What is it about cyclists that can turn sane, law-abiding drivers into
shrieking maniacs? The author ponders the eternal conflict with help from
bike supercommuter Joe Simonetti, who each week survives the hostile,
traffic-clogged rat race between the New York exurbs and Midtown Manhattan.
By *Tom Vanderbilt
*
THE U.S. CENSUS BUREAU DEFINES AN "EXTREME COMMUTER" AS SOMEONE WHO SPENDS
MORE THAN THREE HOURS GETTING TO AND FROM WORK.
This is usually understood to be by car. It's not clear, then, how the
Census would categorize Joe Simonetti, a 57-year-old psychotherapist who
lives with his wife in Pound Ridge, New York. His commute takes him from the
northern reaches of exurban Westchester County to his office just south of
Central Park.
It's about three and a half hours each way.
By bike.
When I heard about Simonetti's commute—some 50-odd road miles as Google Maps
flies—I was vaguely stupefied. It may or may not be the longest bike commute
in America, but it's certainly the most improbable. In my mind's eye, there
was the dense clamor of New York City, then a netherland of train yards and
traffic-clogged overpasses, then an outer belt of big-box retail, and then
you were suddenly in the land of golf courses and five-acre zoning—where
middle managers crowd the bar car on Metro-North and hedge-fund analysts
cruise in 7 Series BMWs down I-95.
The idea that this landscape could be traversed on a bike struck me as
fantastic. This is America, where 65 percent of trips under one mile are
made by car. But at 7 A.M. on a mid-November Thursday—among the last of the
year on which Simonetti was going to ride—I packed my bike into the back of
a hired minivan and headed for Pound Ridge, noting with subtle alarm the
ticking off of miles as we pushed north.
Simonetti obviously isn't the typical bike commuter. For one thing, he does
it only twice a week, weather permitting. For another, he doesn't ride home
the same day; he has a crash pad in the city where he can shower and sleep.
But in following this supercommuter, I wanted to open a window into what it
means to be a cyclist in a country where the bicycle struggles for the
barest acceptance as a means of transportation.
Over the years and the miles, Simonetti has experienced just about
everything a cyclist can on the roads today: honked horns, cramped bike
lanes, close calls with cars, and even a few crashes—the last one landing
him in the hospital. I was curious to ride with him for the sheer novelty of
it, and also to get a handle on what seemed to be an increasingly prevalent
culture war between cyclists and drivers, one that was claiming actual
lives. At least for one beautiful morning, I wanted to move beyond the
alarming headlines and toxic chat rooms and into the real world, to get a
sense of how, why—and if—things had gotten so bad.
My interest isn't because I'm a cyclist, though I am, in the loose
recreational sense. Rather, the issue was forced upon me by the publication
of my 2008 book *Traffic*, which looked at the oft-peculiar psychology of
drivers. Cyclists were among the book's most devoted readers, although I'm
still not sure if it's because they found my dissection of drivers' foibles
educational or cathartic. After all, the little things that drivers think
are excusable—forgetting a turn signal, weaving a bit as they fumble for
their Big Gulps—can range from frustrating to life-threatening for a
cyclist.
Simonetti's house, a cozy ranch that he jokes is the smallest in Pound
Ridge, sits on a twisting country lane. The walkability-measuring Web site
Walkscore.org <http://www.walkscore.org/> gives his address a rating of
zero, meaning, basically, that you can't get around without a car. Tall and
trim, with a professorial salt-and-pepper beard, Simonetti is waiting with
his LeMond Buenos Aires, a 50th-birthday gift that, he jokes, makes him look
"like a real cyclist." Clad in a helmet, gloves, and a blue cycling jacket,
he fills our bikes' bottles with a mixture of juice and water, checks that
his back pouch has spare tubes (I've forgotten mine), and clicks his shoes
into his pedals.
On a still-brisk morning—it's 8:30, and Simonetti's first appointment is at
noon—we push off onto a route that Simonetti has refined over the years. It
was, in fact, a bike ride that brought him here from the city. After a ride
across America for charity in 1998, he returned to New York feeling "a bit
midlifey." His daughter was already a teenager, and he craved nature. He and
his wife, Carol Goldman, a social worker, were searching for a house that
"felt country" but was still within cycling reach of Manhattan. "I never
want to commute five days a week by train," he says. He is surely the only
person in the history of Westchester County to arrive for a house showing by
bike from Manhattan. "They thought I was pretty weird," he says of the
realtors. He stresses that he is purely a "functional" cyclist: he rides
when he needs to get somewhere, be it the hardware store or Midtown.
Our route snakes through preternaturally quiet daytime suburbs whose streets
seem plied primarily by women in SUVs and tradesmen in pickups. A Latino
landscaping crew smiles at us as we ride through the leaf storm they've
blown up in Greenwich, Connecticut. We don't see any other cyclists until
New Rochelle, and even then it's two young girls riding on the sidewalk. In
the town of Rye Brook, a little after 10 A.M., we pause at a deli for
Simonetti's traditional pit-stop fare: an egg-white omelet with Swiss on a
whole-wheat bagel. They all know him here, and a clipping from a local paper
detailing his commute is stuck on the wall, behind a picture of the clerk's
daughter.
Here, Simonetti is not some "Lycra lout," some "Lance wannabe," or any of
the other epithets often hurled at cyclists. He's simply Joe. He's the guy
who rides his bike to work. And, thanks to me and my questions and my
questionable pace, he's late.
SOMEWHERE SOUTH of Pelham, Simonetti tells me of a crash last summer, in the
Bronx, that left him with a broken collarbone. It was a "right hook," one of
the most common crash types for cyclists: a driver, traveling in Simonetti's
lane ahead of him, suddenly turned right—without signaling—directly into
Simonetti's path. An ambulance responded quickly, but the police did not.
The paramedics told Simonetti the police would deal with the driver when
they arrived, he says. "But the guy left. I don't blame him." When the
police, investigating what was now a hit-and-run, came to the hospital, they
asked him if he'd gotten the license-plate number. "I was laid out on the
ground," he laughs. The driver was never found.
Judging by recent headlines, it's not hard to believe that riding a bike has
become a little like entering a war zone. No story blew up more than that of
Steven Milo, a prominent New York anesthesiologist who was struck near Vail,
Colorado, last July 3 by Martin Erzinger, a Denver money manager who
specializes in "ultra-high-net-worth individuals." After veering off the
road and hitting Milo from behind, throwing him off his bike, Erzinger drove
to a Pizza Hut parking lot and called Mercedes roadside assistance. Milo,
meanwhile, sustained spinal injuries, lacerations, and, according to court
documents quoted by the *Vail Daily*, "bleeding from the brain." When the
district attorney, citing "job implications" for Erzinger should he be
convicted of a felony, downgraded the hit-and-run charges to a misdemeanor,
the cycling blogosphere went off like a supernova. Erzinger had told police
that he'd never seen Milo; among the more outlandish of his lawyer's later
defenses was that "new-car smell" had impaired his client. Ultimately, the
judge accepted the prosecutor's misdemeanor plea deal and sentenced Erzinger
to probation, a suspended jail term, and community service.
Last September, in Maryland, Natasha Pettigrew, a Green Party candidate for
U.S. Senate, was training at dawn for a triathlon when she was fatally
struck by a Cadillac Escalade. No charges have yet been filed against the
driver, who said that she thought she'd hit an animal until she got home and
found Pettigrew's bike lodged under her car. In Florida, the country's
deadliest state for cyclists—119 deaths in 2007, ten more than California
despite having half the population—two riders participating in last year's
annual Memorial Day ride were stabbed by a driver after words were exchanged
on the road.
In 2009, the last year for which records are available, 630 cyclists were
killed by cars in the U.S. (compared with 4,092 pedestrians). That's
arguably a big improvement over the 1,003 cyclist fatalities that occurred
in 1975, when, as Census data hint, far fewer people were commuting by bike
and still fewer wore helmets. And yet, even if things have gotten safer, at
least in terms of absolute deaths (which are easier to measure than where or
how much people are actually cycling), a sense of hostility—and sometimes
outright violence—seems to be on the rise.
When accidents do happen, they can generate as much vitriol as concern, as
drivers circle their station wagons and trot out now familiar arguments:
that the roads are meant for cars, or that cyclists don't pay for the
roads—a particularly unwarranted charge, given that local streets are paid
for primarily by sales and property taxes. There's a feeling among many
drivers that cyclists, either by their ignorance of the law or by their
blatant disregard for it, are asking for trouble. "If the door opens into a
bicycle rider," opined Rush Limbaugh on his radio show in 2009, "I won't
care."
In one sense, the so-called bikelash has little to do with transportation
modes. In the late 1960s, a pair of British psychologists set out to
understand the ways in which we humans tend to split ourselves into opposing
factions. They divided a group of teenage schoolboys, who all knew each
other, into two groups and asked them to perform a number of "trivial
tasks." The boys were then asked to give money to fellow subjects, who were
anonymous save for their group affiliation. As it turned out, the schoolboys
consistently gave more money to members of their own group, even though
these groups had just formed and were essentially meaningless.
"The mere division into groups," wrote the psychologists, Henri Tajfel and
Michael Billig, of the University of Bristol, "might have been sufficient to
have produced discriminatory behavior." Though not exactly *Lord of the
Flies*, the experiment was a demonstration of the power of what's called
"social categorization"—and the penalties inflicted on the "out-group."
This dynamic appears on the road in all kinds of ways. "We know that merely
perceiving someone as an outsider is enough to provoke a whole range of
things," says Ian Walker, a researcher at the University of Bath who
specializes in traffic psychology. "All the time, you hear drivers saying
things like 'Cyclists, they're all running red lights, they're all riding on
sidewalks,' while completely overlooking the fact that the group they
identify with regularly engages in a whole host of negative behaviors as
well." This social categorization is subtle but dominant, he points out.
When people are given a piece of paper and asked to describe themselves,
"men never write, 'I'm a man.' Whereas women will write 'woman' because
being male is the 'default' status in society."
And so it is with cyclists. In a country like the Netherlands, which has
more bikes than people and where virtually the entire population cycles at
one time or another, the word cyclist isn't meaningful. But in the U.S., the
term often implies something more, in both a good and a bad sense.
On the one hand, cyclists have a strong group affiliation, with clubs, group
rides, and a flourishing network of bike blogs. And yet the oft-invoked idea
of "bike culture" itself betrays cycling's marginal status in America,
observes Eben Weiss, creator of the blog Bike Snob NYC, in his book *Bike
Snob: Systematically and Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling*. "The
truth is," he writes, "real cultures rarely call themselves cultures, just
like famous things rarely call *themselves* famous."
The dark side of the "cyclist" label is that it becomes a shortcut to social
categorization. Suddenly, that messenger who cut in front of you becomes the
face of an entire population. And the next time you have an unpleasant
encounter with a cyclist, it isn't just a matter of his (or your)
carelessness: it seems intentional. Simonetti sees this type of reaction all
the time, on the road and in his practice.
"As a couples therapist, I tell people that we take things so personally,"
he says as we near the Whitestone Bridge, on the first dedicated bike path
we've seen in more than two hours. It's easy, when a car edges too close or
cuts him off, to "go to that paranoid place where they're just trying to
fuck with me. We're so worried that someone else can steal our sense of self
that we fight for it at every turn." But it could have been just that the
driver didn't see him. Under the spell of what's called "inattentional
blindness," people have been known to miss obvious things simply because
they're not looking for them. Either that or what seems inconsequential in a
car—passing by within a foot or two—can be terrifying to someone on a bike.
One way to find out what drivers are thinking, of course, is to actually
stop and ask them, which is precisely what one Wisconsin cyclist has been
doing, with interesting results, for the past few years.
THE FIRST THING Jeff Frings wants you to know is that he's not out to get
drivers. (He is one, after all.) The second thing is that he doesn't have a
persecution complex.
"The majority of drivers go out of their way to give me room, and are decent
and good drivers around cyclists," says Frings, a news cameraman and avid
rider who lives in the suburbs of Milwaukee. "The problem is, it only takes
one mistake to end your life or put you in a wheelchair."
A few years ago, Frings found out what happens when you encounter someone
who isn't a good and decent driver. Out on a weekday ride, he was nearly
sideswiped. Heated words followed. The driver accelerated away, then
screeched on his brakes right in front of him. "I said, 'This is out of
control,'" says Frings. "I called 911." This wasn't the only time. A similar
incident ended not with a reprimand of the driver but with a threat by the
responding officer to book Frings for disorderly conduct. Rattled by these
experiences and dismayed by the lack of evidence, Frings mounted two small
video cameras: one on his helmet, one rear-facing on the handlebars.
Frings started filming every one of the 100 to 250 miles he rides in a week,
to provide proof against the claims of drivers, who are typically the only
ones left standing after a serious bike-car crash. He posts the worst
encounters on his Web site,
bikesafer.blogspot.com<http://www.bikesafer.blogspot.com/>,
which could provide grist for a reality show: *America's Douchiest Drivers*.
The incidents tend to follow a pattern:
1. Driver cuts him off or nearly runs him off the road.
2. Frings catches up to driver at red light.
3. Frings points out error of driver's ways.
4. Driver says something like "Get on the sidewalk where you belong,
jag-off!"
5. Thus ensues what Frings calls "the Conversation," in which he notes
(sometimes to police officers) that it's in fact illegal for him to ride on
the sidewalk, and that while the law dictates that he be "as far to the
right as practicable," that doesn't mean the shoulder, and so forth.
Typically, this goes about as well you'd expect. "I'm trying to be less
confrontational," says Frings. He's embracing politeness. "Can I just ask
you one favor?" he will say. "Can you give me a little more room next time?"
He takes his victories in handshakes, promises to do better, and the
occasional ticket police give a driver after seeing Frings's evidence. And
while he's not optimistic about converting the "haters"—those who believe
bikes have no place on the road—he hopes that if he can just get one driver
to be more empathetic toward cyclists, it's worth it. "Because the next
time," he says, "could be my time."
The confusion over the laws pertaining to cyclists unfortunately echoes
throughout the entire legal system, argues Bob Mionske, a two-time Olympic
cyclist and Portland, Oregon–based lawyer specializing in cases involving
bikers. "Enforcement is really where it all starts," he says. "If the police
don't respect your mode of transportation, don't expect the rest of society
to."
Laws are often unenforced. In researching a case in Tennessee where a driver
hit a cyclist (who was "lit up like a Christmas tree," says Mionske) while
passing, he found that the driver hadn't been given a ticket for violating
the state's three-foot passing law—in fact, he couldn't find a case where a
ticket had ever been given. Even worse, laws are sometimes used against
cyclists. In 2008, a cyclist in Madison, Wisconsin, who'd been hospitalized
after being "doored" was actually ticketed for riding less than three feet
away from parked cars—even though, as most state traffic codes note, it's
the driver's responsibility not to obstruct traffic of any kind when he
opens his door. But the biker had only bad choices: ride too far into
traffic and risk getting hit, or ride to the right and risk getting doored.
Wisconsin has since changed the law.
In Mionske's view, justice for cyclists is often invisible, handled with
civil settlements that rarely draw public attention. And criminal justice
often hangs on a knife-edge. When a 14-year-old teenager in Connecticut was
fatally struck by a speeding driver, Mionske notes that it was the driver's
prior convictions—including multiple DWIs—that helped land him in jail. For
anything but the most egregious cases, Mionske says, a driver who strikes a
cyclist—even fatally—is rarely even brought to trial. In the case of the
Vail hit-and-run last July, what changed things was that the victim was a
successful doctor. "He wasn't going to sit down on this," Mionske says. "Can
you imagine if the guy had been collecting aluminum cans?"
Like many cyclists, Mionske would like to see some version of the liability
system used in the Netherlands and other European countries, in which the
burden of proof in a car-cyclist crash is on the driver—the idea being to
encourage the user of the far deadlier vehicle to act more cautiously around
the more "vulnerable road users," as cyclists are called in road-safety
parlance.
Of course, if calling cyclists "vulnerable" makes it seem like they're never
to blame, that's not true, either. It's not just those hipsters on fixies
sealed off from the world by earbuds who give bikers an image problem.
Plenty of well-meaning bike commuters aren't aware of the laws, or fail to
use bright flashing lights at night, or turn without giving hand signals.
Statistically, some studies show cyclists running more red lights than
drivers—for a number of complicated reasons, whether to conserve momentum,
to get ahead of traffic and be more visible, or, more profoundly, perhaps
because their out-group status leads them to act that way.
But the red lights may be a red herring. The way cyclists get hurt seems to
have less to do with their own culpability and more to do with getting hit
by cars—either from behind or when a car turns right, the way Simonetti was
struck. Echoing research in the UK, a recent three-year study by Australia's
Monash University found that in 54 recorded crashes among a sampling of
cyclists, drivers were at fault nearly nine out of ten times.
Regardless of fault, there's another twist here. As various studies have
found, the more cyclists and cycling infrastructure a town has, the safer it
becomes statistically, not just for cyclists but for drivers and pedestrians
alike. When New York City put a protected bike lane on Ninth Avenue, some
protested it as unsafe for people on foot. But since the lane's opening,
pedestrian injuries on Ninth have dropped by 29 percent. Last year, as miles
of bike lanes were added, New York had its best pedestrian-safety record
ever.
While Mionske is generally positive about recent initiatives like Oregon's
Vulnerable Road User law, which stiffens penalties for striking a pedestrian
or cyclist, and the bicyclist bills of rights passed in a number of other
states, he believes that laws are not enough. "Until the public attitude
changes, you're not going to change the experience everyone has out there in
the world," he says, "whether it's other kinds of discrimination or
modism—discriminating against people because of their mode of
transportation."
THERE ARE TIMES, however, when the gulf seems too wide to span. On one of
his rides, Frings was hailed by a man standing in his front yard. The man
announced he had passed him earlier in his car. He told Frings he had almost
hit him, because he was riding too far into the road. "I tried to explain to
him the concept of 'taking the lane'—that the lane's too narrow for us to be
side by side, and drivers would think they could pass me even when there's
oncoming traffic," Frings says. "That concept, before I talked to him about
it, was completely foreign to him. He couldn't understand how it would be
safer for me to ride farther out."
Hence one of the major fault lines of driver-cyclist relations. While
virtually every cyclist in America is also a driver, relatively few drivers
are also cyclists. "People either don't know how to handle you," says Andy
Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists, "or they don't want
to handle you." There's an empathy gap that, as you know if you've spent
much time on cycling blogs, can cut both ways.
In one study in which drivers were asked how they feel about cyclists, one
of the recurring labels was "unpredictable." When asked to elaborate,
drivers often blamed the "attitudes and limited competence" of the cyclists
themselves, rather than the "difficulty of the situations that cyclists are
often forced to face on the road." When asked to describe their own actions
or those of other drivers, however, they blamed only the situation.
Psychologists call this the "fundamental attribution error."
So drivers, perhaps already stressed out from being late for work or stuck
in traffic, then have to negotiate their way around a vehicle they
essentially don't understand, causing even more stress, which they tend to
attribute to something about cyclists. It's a vicious cycle—most vicious, in
terms of actual harm, for cyclists.
Cyclists, too, can be as susceptible as anyone to "modal bias," thinking
that one's mode of travel is the "normal," even superior, one. After
researching my book, there may be no more conscientious—or paranoid—driver
on the American road than me. But I am still occasionally flummoxed by some
wrong-way night rider wearing black. I want to tell them, "Don't ruin it for
everyone!" Then again, I wouldn't tell a rude fellow driver not to ruin the
image of drivers.
Yes, cultural politics are getting weird, which may also explain some of the
tension, as Brian Ladd, author of the 2008 book *Autophobia*, argues. "Most
Americans," he wrote in a December post on the urban-planning Web site
Planetizen.com <http://www.planetizen.com/>, "know one thing about the
bicyclists they see on the roads: they are losers, and you thank God you're
not one of them." But wait, he says, noting the fashionability of cycling:
Who's doing the sneering here? "It's harder to dismiss cyclists as beneath
contempt," he says, "when you suspect that they might just be contemptuous
of you."
In thinking about how to improve driver-cyclist relations in America, the
easiest thing is to simply get more people on bikes. Growing up in the small
Wisconsin town of Twin Lakes, Mionske notes, he "didn't see more than two
road bikes in my entire childhood." Now, he jokes, "you've got packs of 40
guys riding around pissing people off." But with each new cyclist, he says,
it's no longer "the Other; it's us."
Few American cities have done a better job of getting people on bikes than
Portland, Oregon, where around 7 percent of the population bikes to work and
children cycle to school in huge "bike trains." And yet, last year, like
many recent years, no cyclist was killed. (By comparison, Tampa, Florida, a
city where fewer than 1 percent of the population commutes by bike, had nine
cyclist fatalities in four months in 2009.) Greg Raisman, a traffic-safety
specialist with Portland's Bureau of Transportation, says one key to getting
people biking is providing infrastructure—actual or symbolic. The city
features "bicycle boulevards" and bike-only traffic signals, and it's
planning new six-foot-wide bike lanes. It recently put some 2,100 "sharrows"
bike symbols on 50 miles of residential streets. He says the symbols send
messages to motorists and are, as many Portlanders have told him, changing
"people's mental maps of the city."
"We need to get people to change the way they think about transportation,"
Raisman says. While all road users need to step up in terms of behavior, he
believes, calling for cyclists to be licensed, as some critics have lately
done, isn't the right place to start. "I recently got my driver's license
renewed," he says. "They just asked me if my address was the same." Among
the things he was not asked was whether he was aware of traffic-code changes
like the 2007 Vulnerable Road User law or a new Oregon rule that makes it
legal for cyclists to pass on the right so they can filter to the front past
queues of cars stopped at traffic lights.
THE GREENWAYS of Portland seem very far away as Joe Simonetti and I pedal
down a street in the Bronx that looks like the nightmare underbelly of
America's car culture. In front of myriad body shops sit subcompacts with
mashed-in crumple zones and SUVs with spidery shattered windows. A billboard
urges auto-accident victims to dial 1-800-I-AM-HURT. Cars honk and weave,
delivery trucks wait parked in the bicycle lane. "The Bronx is lawless,"
says Simonetti. "It's the Wild West, dog eat dog—or car eat car."
We cross the Madison Avenue Bridge into Manhattan and a few minutes later
reach the Central Park loop, one of the few car-free spaces of the day. Our
ride has gone off without conflict, not that it's always so. "It's hard to
ride ten years without some incident," Simonetti says. There's a crash—not
always major—every season or so, not to mention logistical concerns like
bathroom breaks. He says he enjoys two-thirds of the ride but admits to
having to "push myself" through the final third.
But the benefits are clear. For one, Simonetti, despite being nearly two
decades my senior, seems ready to keep riding, whereas I'm struggling from
an old knee injury that's come wriggling up like worms after rain. For
another, knee notwithstanding, I feel fantastic. In a study by the
University of Surrey, car commuters reported having the "most stressful"
commutes, while cyclists saw their journeys as "interesting and exciting."
Indeed, where driving into New York City always leaves me feeling edgy and
irritable, I now feel curiously alive.
To cycle in America today is to engage in an almost political act, but
what's often obscured is the simple idea of pleasure. Andy Clarke notes that
bike-component maker Shimano, in some research it conducted with the design
firm IDEO, found that when you talk to adults and ask them about their
earliest childhood memory, "it invariably involves a bike—exploring their
neighborhood, careening down a hill, ditching the training wheels." We need
to rediscover that, he says. "They don't want to feel like they have to be
Lance. People want to be normal, and they want cycling to be a part of
normal life."
Returning from a visit to Cape Cod last summer, I was staggered to see a
traffic jam stretching for dozens of miles, heading to the beaches. Almost
every car had several bikes lashed to it. You could almost feel the
collective urge to escape traffic and get on a bike. I thought: *This is the
country that hates cyclists, that sees them as a road menace?*
Simonetti and I draw to a stop outside his office building, two people on
bikes amid Midtown gridlock. I ask him why he does it. "I have a tremendous
feeling of accomplishment," he says. "No matter what else happens in the
day, I can feel good about the ride. There aren't many other things that
make me feel that way."
How many people can say that about their commute? After saying goodbye to
Simonetti, I head home myself, riding over to the Hudson River Greenway,
that jewel of New York's expanding—and controversial—bicycle network, where
none of the larger thoughts about cycling in America intrude. I'm just
enjoying the breeze off the river and thinking about that final climb over
the Brooklyn Bridge.
--
And the last word goes to Goofy...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZgiVicpZGk