Revolution Schmevolution

In a previous post I cited a series of articles written by Jan Heine of Bicycle Quarterly (sheesh, why do I even subscribe to that magazine when Jan puts everything but the ads on his blog..?) about the relative merits of bicycle-specific infrastructure such as separated bike lanes, cycle tracks, etc. The gist was that there is a battle between those who advocate for bikes to have separate-but-equal facilities and those who want bicycles to be treated as vehicles - granted rights on the road equal to cars. I suggested, in my intuitive, non-scientific way, that there was likely some middle ground where bike lanes and cycle tracks would continue to proliferated in densely packed urban cores, bikes would continue to be treated like malformed stepchildren in the suburbs and in the country we would still have to clench our Lycra clad sphincters every time one of those gigantic pickup trucks blows by, but otherwise would still be happiest on such roads with their light traffic.

In his follow-up post on the topic, Jan has done what Jan usually does, which is analyze the options from a rational, statistical perspective aimed at maximizing the safety of cyclists and has recommended almost exactly the opposite of what we seem to actually be doing. He argues that on city streets where automobile traffic is moving slowly, riding in the street is the safest approach. Where the speed picks up a bit (up to 30 MPH), painted bike lanes allow sufficient separation to assure bikes and cars can coexist peaceably. And when cars are flying, he acknowledges that completely separate bike lanes are warranted. He cites the example of Munich, Germany which has engaged in a decade long effort to modernize its infrastructure and has apparently achieved a 70% increase in bicycle mode share in just nine years; 17.4% of all trips in Munich are now made by bicycle.

His key recommendation suggests the creation of Fahrradstraßen, bike boulevards where cyclists have the dominant right-of-way. Personally I have difficulty imagining many American cities will ever consider bicyclists worthy of the top spot on the totem pole. It just seems too European. But the concept is definitely intriguing. Just take a few strategically placed, lightly used side streets and designate them "bike boulevards". Cars can still use them, but bikes have the right-of-way. This would get a lot of bikes off the main arteries and make cyclists feel safer, which would get more people on bikes which would reduce traffic on the main arteries. I just have such a hard time seeing Americans giving priority to bikes over cars.

Maybe if we make it a nationalistic thing. Make it about beating the Germans. You know, Let's get those Krauts before they cover the world in Fahrradbahns! It might work. After all it worked once. I mean we entered WWII to save the English, who we don't much care for (and who, I might add we had to forcibly expel from these beloved shores a mere 158 years prior), and the Jews, who many Americans would probably have liked to exterminate themselves. We could get some awesome propaganda posters made and whip up the anti-Teutonic fervor that's always lurking just below the otherwise quiet exterior of the average American. Nah, it would never work. Or, I guess we'll just keep things just the way they are, which is what I suspect we'll do.

The problem is that the communities with the greatest desire for improved infrastructure, i.e., cities, don't really need much in the way of improvement. And those most in need of improvement, i.e., suburbs, don't want it (meaning don't want to spend money on it). So we'll end up with all kinds of separated lanes in the cities where we don't need it and the suburbs will continue to be soulless, car focused hellscapes populated by Humscalade driving distracto-moms shuttling their obese offspring from one diabetes clinic to the next while shouting at their cell phones over the television in the back seat playing a continuous loop of drool inducing mental pablum. Sorry Jan. We're not in the Old Country anymore...        

Pokey dokie

I'm not sure where you'd go to find a washboard these days, but I sure am glad Ryan Koenig, the percussionist for Pokey LaFarge found one. Dredged up from Mississippi bottom land of southern Illinois, the St. Louis band manages to transport listeners back through a Victrola horn to a warm crackling time when musicians actually had to know how to play their instruments. This is the flavor of American music revived by the Coen Brothers' Oh! Brother Where Art Thou. I don't know if it's the Great Depression-Great Recession connection or the plethora of Tweedy hipsters that have sprung up in our cities over the last few years that makes Pokey's tunes feel so relevant, but there is something about the that just seems appropriate. I'm just glad to have found them. I'm so happy, in fact, I'm singin' la la la.

Pokey and the boys swing the NPR offices

Devolution Revolution

One small step for man

This is the end

Neil Armstrong put the first human footprint on the surface of the moon in 1969, three days after my sixth birthday. The actual memory of seeing it on TV is now lost in the hundreds or thousands of reruns of the event, but I have a distinct recollection of having been told that this was the greatest achievement in all of history, the pinnacle of human ingenuity, and that it was performed by the greatest civilization planet Earth had ever had the good fortune to have hosted. Land of the free. Home of the brave. My country 'tis of thee (whatever that means). In those days America was number one with a bullet! And I believed it. I think most of us in my generation did.

We were born into a world in which even the sky was not the limit. Anything was possible and despite a few minor anomalies like the war in Vietnam, the odd political assassination or the race riots in cities all over the country, America was leading the world into the trans-planetary future of infinite possibility. It's been all downhill from that point on. Looking back from our current vantage point, I've come to see the moon landing as the high point of human evolution. It was the last time a pedestrian was celebrated and what seems like, at least from a transportation perspective, the beginning of the end of human powered locomotion.

Just as soon as NASA could figure out how to do it, they got a car up to the moon so the astronauts wouldn't have to trudge around the way Armstrong and Aldrin had had to do. That was it, Apollo 15 - the last time any American had to walk further than the car port. Should humans ever go back to the moon, my guess is that the first thing they'll do is construct an inter-crater connector (ICC). And that should kick off the next phase of human evolution: the symbiotic fusion of mammal and machine. Call it Homo Automobilis.

In the beginning

What we think of as the modern human more or less began when our primate ancestors came down from the trees and walked out onto the grasslands. To this day we maintain an irrational fondness for lawns. Just fly into any city in the southwest if you don't believe me. They're piping water hundreds of miles so they can grow grass in the desert! So, given how intrinsically defining bipedal-ism is to humans, it is amazing to see how foreign an activity walking has become to modern Americans. This fact was brought into focus for me when a couple of young nieces came to stay with my wife and me for a weekend recently. Without thinking much about it, my wife and I routinely walk to restaurants, theaters and shops in our neighborhood but when our young nieces, aged eight and eleven, were confronted by the prospect of a fifteen minute walk to get to a park, they acted as though they were being tortured.

I initially attributed their resistance to simple preadolescent slothfulness, but the more I thought about it, the more it kind of made sense. They live in one of those new McMansion subdivisions where the sidewalks just mysteriously end, they are driven to school each day and there is a TV set in the family minivan. Their entire lives basically seem to be spent on a virtual sofa. They have hand-held devices with them at all times - the first thing they did upon arrival at my home was demand free WiFi access - and there is video streaming in front of them more or less twenty four hours a day. Walking to the refrigerator is about the longest distance they have to traverse without being in a car. And it turns out that in this respect, they are really just typical Americans.

"...the idea that that we, this species that first hoisted itself into the world of bipedalism nearly 4 million years ago—for reasons that are still debated—should now need “walking tips,” have to make “walking plans” or use a “mobile app” to “discover” walking trails near us or build our “walking histories,” strikes me as a world-historical tragedy."     The Crisis in American Walking

We're Number One! We're Number One! We're Number One!

Only thirteen percent of American children walk or bike to school —  down from 50% in 1969. 23% of American children get zero exercise per day. Zero. You don't have to go farther than the nearest mall — to which, by the way I'll bet you have to drive — to see that Americans are becoming increasingly, astonishingly obese. In fact, obesity is one of the only remaining characteristics in which we can still claim to be a world leader!
    
And the funny thing about this is how resistant we are to do anything about it. Witness the recent uproar over the proposal to ban absurdly large sodas in New York. Or the kind of push back you get for insisting that our neighborhoods should be walkable. Now, I'm really happy to be an American and I'm glad we repelled the British occupiers, but equating NYC's prohibition on trans fat in restaurants and large sodas with tyranny just seems silly to me. And labeling people fascists just because they want to wean our citizens from the corporate gavage that is turning us into a nation of diabetics is just laughable. But then I guess our tricorn-hat-wearing forefathers started a revolution over a beverage, right? So maybe it's not so weird that greet limitations on our consumption of corn syrup as tantamount to the imposition of Stalinist totalitarianism.

I've consequently had no alternative but to recognize Armstrong's first step on the moon as the zenith of human evolution. After that point it's all devolution, as we walk less and sit more and slowly, inexorably become fatter and fatter, less able to even lift the weight of our ever growing bodies, transforming from Fat Bastard, past the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen phase, through the Jabba the Hutt metamorphosis and inevitably back into some kind of legless fish creatures. And we'll complain about the tyranny of anyone who tries to intervene between us and our Kröd-given right to pollute ourselves with fake food and wallow in the soothing glow of our Retina screens.

So off we go, forward into the past...

Integration Segregation

Jan Heine, editor of the much esteemed Bicycle Quarterly has recently engaged in one of his typically analytic discussions on the relative merits of the various types of bicycle-specific infrastructure popping up around US cities. In particular, he seems a bit incensed over a newly unveiled cycle path in his home city of Seattle. In the age old argument between those who advocate for equal rights of bicycles on the street (let's call them Vehicularists) and those who advocate for bicycles to be segregated from car traffic as much as possible (George Wallace took all the fun out of the term best used for these folks), Jan seems to be tending toward the vehicular side. But if you know how Jan's mind works (which you would if you read Bicycle Quarterly or his blog, Off the Beaten Path), you would know that he's really more of a data weenie than an ideological zealot. And more importantly, he is a lover of elegant design; and anyone who loves good, sensible, utilitarian design has got, inevitably, to hate most of what passes for bicycle-specific infrastructure.

My own city, that is the nearest big city, the one around whose edges I have spent the vast majority of my life, has been engaged in the rapid expansion of cycling infrastructure over the last decade or so, and is struggling as are many of our cities to figure out exactly how bicycles fit into the overall flow of traffic. We are in the early days of what sometimes seems like a genuine transformation of our city. And as is always the case with all of nature's transformations, we are experiencing growing pains. And it's not difficult to understand why.

"...evolving designs reflect a learning process, as bikes are squeezed back into a streetscape long dominated by cars."

The division between the two camps is completely understandable. White guys in Lycra want to be allowed treated like equal citizens, afforded the same rights as people in cars. They don't want to dodge baby strollers and speed walkers and all the other obstacles strewn about the average "mixed use" trail. And they want to make left turns without having to wait through two stop lights. The Dutch apparently don't mind waiting, but that's be presumably because they don't have real jobs to get to.

Pass the Dutchy on the left-hand side.

On the other hand, most people, thank Kröd, don't want to dress up in skin tight synthetic clothing, put a Styrofoam ice cooler on their heads and max out their lactic thresholds just to get to work or the store. It's the usual tribal warfare between caffeinated Baristas trying to get to work quickly and moms getting their kids safely to school; between racers and riders, carbon and steel, people who live in Copenhagen and people who live in an exurb with streets named after the features bulldozed to build the development.

I love this particular ideological war because it starts with the premise that it's good to have more people riding bikes. The argument is about how best to accomplish that goal. A worthy conversation. I am personally of the opinion that neither side is absolutely correct. We're not going to dig up all our cities and remake them around the bike. And the suburbs are not going to become friendly places for human powered vehicles until the gas runs out.

Ultimately we will find a range of options, more or less appropriate for each situation. I think cities will do a lot of retrofitting of their existing infrastructure, putting in bike lanes, bike shares and bike parking. Suburbs will continue to worship cars and parking lots but over the past decade more rail trails, sidewalks and mini-villages have popped up, so maybe there is hope yet. And country roads will still be lovely places for a delightful cyclo-tour despite the occasional yahoo in one of those silly big pick-em-up trucks hollering, "get off the road!"