P1090660 Ghost Bike For Jack Layton by Martinho on Flickr.
The Scaly Scales of Justice »
Sure, cyclists should ride intelligently, but having respect for the power of a car is the driver’s job. If they lack that respect then the car should be taken from them.
Being only as interested in the taxonomy of American cycling subcultures as I am in baseball statistics, I have never been a Bike Snob reader. (And sorry, mom in law, I haven’t read that book you gave me.) But as Brooklyn Spoke pointed out, this is a righteous post.
The “power” that Snob is talking about is at the crux of everything that happens on our streets, from the subculture of masochistic cycling to the grateful nod that pedestrians give to motorists for being allowed to enjoy their lawful right of way.
In our society’s submission to this power, we’ve even corrupted the principle of responsibility such that it is far more often critically applied to pedestrian and cyclist victims than the people controlling the powerful vehicles that killed them. In the not-so-old days this social norm meant the very opposite: an obligation of those with power to use it with honor, respect, and care.
But anti-collective, anti-social, mechanized America has almost privatized responsibility out of existence. That noble ideal was rebranded as “self-responsibility”, an obligation not to be maimed or killed (so that no one else has to endure the unpleasantness). But we already have a lower, truer apprecation of that in our bones: it’s called survival. Survival is what’s left, when laws and social conventions are brushed aside.
Is this how we want to live?
via n8han, whose posts are always insightful and well phrased. very often i find myself reblogging him because i agree with his analysis and he sums up nicely my thoughts on the matter. i reblog him often.
In the end the resistance that she and the city have encountered has to do mostly with parochialism and selfishness. Some New Yorkers seem offended by the notion that we should be more like such biking havens as Copenhagen, Paris, or for that matter, Portland, Ore.: life here is too urgent and blunt and brutal for such crunchy-granola niceties. Besides which, no one wants to give an inch, literally: not the Prospect Park West gripers who lost parking spaces to the bike lane, not the drivers of delivery trucks whose jobs are sometimes complicated by such lanes, not the Manhattan traditionalists who feel that sharing just a few of Central Park’s transverse paths with cyclists — as the city decided in July they must do — requires too much in the way of vigilance from people ambling among the trees. The complaints were loud and passionate.”
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NYT op ed Bicycle Visionary
And misleading. Several polls have shown that a majority of New Yorkers favor the creation of bike lanes, at least in the abstract. The problem is that it’s a relatively soft, quiet support, reflecting the limited use of those lanes. According to Department of Transportation figures, about 15,500 cyclists daily entered Manhattan’s central business district between Battery Park and 59th Street in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That’s in contrast to 762,000 cars.
But ridership is definitely growing. A decade earlier, only 4,700 cyclists entered that part of Manhattan. And over the last 20 or so years, the percentage of New Yorkers who use cycling to commute has doubled, to 0.6 percent in 2009 from 0.3 percent in 1990, according to an analysis of census figures by John Pucher, a Rutgers University professor who studies bicycle trends worldwide. That still leaves New York behind Chicago, with 1.2 percent of commuters on bikes; Washington, D.C., with 2.2 percent; San Francisco, with 3 percent; and Portland, with 5.8 percent.
WHAT’S keeping more cyclists in New York from doing so? “The indifference of the New York City Police Department is the biggest obstacle,” said Charles Komanoff, a mathematical economist and past president of Transportation Alternatives. He and other cycling advocates said that police officers too seldom ticket drivers who ignore cyclists’ rights, particularly by treating biking lanes as temporary parking spots and thus forcing bike riders to swerve into and out of traffic. As prevalent as such lane-obstruction is, I’ve noticed more news reports on cyclists blowing through red lights, and I’ve found myself envying, of all places, the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Its mayor recently deployed a tank to crush a Mercedes-Benz illegally parked in a bike lane.
Without going quite that far, our city’s police officers must do more. And the transportation department must expand markedly the number of bike racks citywide — the official city count is about 12,800 — so that riders can rest assured that they’ll find a safe place to stow their bicycles. Pucher is the co-author of “City Cycling,” a forthcoming book, which notes that Paris has about 1,490 bike parking spaces — slots in racks, for example — per 100,000 people, London about 1,670 and Tokyo about 6,400. And New York? About 152. “It’s lousy, lousy, lousy,” Pucher said.
This street in ‘s-Hertogenbosch (aka Den Bosch) in the south of the Netherlands was recently updated to include cycle lanes. You can see the street in both directions as we do a 360 degree turn on the roundabout on one end of the street.
It is obvious that cycling in this street is now more convenient than before.
The red color of the cycle path is not paint. It is a different color asphalt so it will not wear off.
This battle is about so much more than a few city clerks on Bromptons — or whatever the stereotype of the London cyclist is this week — having to deal with more hostile traffic on the way to the office from Waterloo. Blackfriars represents a battle over the very basics of what sort of a place we want London (and Britain) to be. By driving these great roads and massive junctions through the centre of our cities we are not just sacrificing — sometimes literally — cyclists and mass cycling. We are destroying a chance to step towards a fairer, more pleasant and more liveable city. And with that we are falling behind the progress of the rest of the world and sacrificing London’s future as a competitive world city. And all to avoid inconveniencing the pampered powerful few, and to accommodate a bunch of wasteful business practices.”
Bicyclist harassment outlawed by Los Angeles City Council: A new law makes it a crime for drivers to threaten cyclists verbally or physically.
Photo: A bicyclist pedals through downtown Los Angeles after the City Council passed a pioneering law to protect cyclists from harassment by motorists that backers described as the toughest of its kind in the nation. Credit: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times
(Source: Los Angeles Times, via patrickedwardkiefer)
Giving space to pedestrians so they don’t have to worry about getting hit by cars doesn’t mean the city is getting ‘countrified.’ If anything, having cars as your only option of getting around is exactly what it means to live in the country. Walking is a hallmark of city living and you should be able to do it safely.”
— Concerns Aired at Fowler Square Plaza Meeting | Brownstoner (via n8han)
(via n8han)
watch as NYC street users take turns breaking existing traffic laws and getting in each other’s way!
we need a better system.
3-Way Street (by ronconcocacola)
A little bit of chaos can be fun, but I’m happy to not be living there…
Jeff Word was crossing Valley St at the crosswalk from Terry Ave N into South Lake Union Park the evening of May 18 when a driver ran a red light and struck him and his bicycle. Word reacted quickly and was able to put his foot onto the car’s approaching hood and push off. The collision damaged his bike, but Word landed on his feet unharmed after being thrown across the crosswalk.
New report and map chronicles the visceral reality of 47,000 preventable pedestrian deaths »
The highways-only lobby insists that pedestrian safety is a “frill” and a local responsibility. But 67 percent of these fatalities over the last 10 years occurred on federal-aid roads — roads eligible to receive federal funding or with federal guidelines or oversight for their design.
That’s right: Federal programs have encouraged state departments of transportation to prioritize speeding traffic over the safety of people in our neighborhoods and shopping districts. Shouldn’t our tax dollars be used to build streets that are safe for all users, and not deadly for those on foot?
The irony is that fixing these conditions is relatively cheap: Existing funds for that purpose — now targeted for elimination — amount to less than 1.5 percent of the current federal transportation outlay. A policy of giving federal support only to “complete streets” that are designed for the safety of people on foot or bicycle as well as in cars would cost next to nothing.
Drivers clocked going over 30 mph as they zoom past the city’s new digital “Slow Down” signs will soon get an added bonus: a skeleton image, intended to remind them of the potential consequences of speeding. It’s a good start, but couldn’t the DOT at least give the skeleton a top hat, or throw some dancing bears on there? We guess we’ll take what we can get. The signs are intended to reduce speeding, and NY1 asserts that “one way to slow down traffic is simply to give more tickets, but Mayor Bloomberg said today that because of the city’s tight budget, that’s not going to happen.” Besides, the NYPD is already maxed out ticketing all these speeding cyclists.
At a press conference today, Bloomberg told reporters, “You should see… how they label cigarette packs. They have pictures of skulls and crossbones, they have pictures of lungs, people breathing through their throats. The idea is to get people to realize that what they’re doing could kill them or kill somebody else and to encourage them to obey the law. And unless you make it graphic people don’t get the message.”
But is the skeleton too graphic? Will its sudden appearance cause more accidents when speeding drivers are startled by its spooky scary visage? We’re going to have nightmares for days just seeing a photo of it—it’s more terrifying than a werewolf bar mitzvah!
via gothamist
Does Cuozzo think people would drive if 98 percent of streets were dead ends, filled with dangerous obstacles and didn’t go where they are needed?
The city doesn’t build bike lanes for the people already on bikes. It builds them for people who don’t ride, but who would if it was safe.
— Paul Peterson, Portland, in response to NY Post’s The truth ‘spoke’ here: Bike lanes are a waste
