San Francisco Bike Blog

Some folks in the Little Italy neighborhood of Manhattan don’t like the new protected bike lane:

Sean Sweeney, director of the Soho Alliance community organization, said he supported a bike lane on Houston St. — not on Grand St.

At least one of the winning arguments for this situation is to tell concerned citizens that bike lanes on every single street in Manhattan are inevitable. We should do the same here in San Francisco.

The New York argument might look something like this:

Bike lanes on every single street in New York City are inevitable. It’s going to happen. There’s just no other way New York is going to be New York in the future with this many cars messing it up. There’s no room. Every street - every boulevard - every highway - every bridge and tunnel - every inch of this great city will have either a bike lane or will be designed to accommodate bicycles and pedestrians in a safe manner - either by strict traffic calming with 5 MPH speed limits or with a pedestrian-only street. Walking and biking and mass transit are how people are going to get around New York in the future. Most of us already do. You know what percentage of shoppers are using their cars? 6 percent. 6! That’s almost nothing - and look how much room they take up. Most of us walk and take transit. After we get this bike lane, more of us are going to bike. Cars take away from the city in so many ways - of course they have nasty dirty smelly pollution and they’re crazy loud so you can’t have seating on the sidewalks, but they’re especially good at harassing and terrorizing pedestrians and cyclists. They don’t let us go where we want to go. We’re always watching left and right, worrying, trying not to get run over. We want to be able to walk and bike around the city in peace — window-shop and stop at the stores and restaurants we want to stop at, and not act like cockroaches running away from the light. The car is over. It is going away. Cars are bad for pedestrians - they kill children and older folks. Cars are expensive. They take up too much room. They isolate people from one another. Some European cities are great because they’ve done a better job at controlling cars. New York is going to do the same thing, now. We should have done it decades ago, but we’re starting now. Better late than never. Today, people talk about Paris for shopping and dining and living. Tomorrow, maybe they’ll talk about New York. Pollution is not just soot and smell and exhaust fumes and horns - it’s killing the planet. It doesn’t matter whether you or I or anybody else likes it or hates it or anything else - we don’t have a say in the matter anymore - God has decreed that we have to stop punching Mother Earth in the face or she is going to drown us all. We have to change. It’s inevitable. There is no room for cars anymore in New York City. We have to learn how to get by without them. We have to make it easier for people to get around in more sustainable ways - namely walking and biking. All we’re doing is helping your street to get the massive influx of street traffic from actual humans that buy stuff, not cars. We want, need, and expect your business to flourish. It’s no use talking about bike lanes on some other street somewhere else on the other side of the city - they will be on every. single. street. of the city.

Oddly enough, the ‘Traffic: How We Drive blog’ just posted about some research which talks about ‘cognitive dissonance’ and ‘inevitability,’ and wonders whether there is anything to learn from a public policy standpoint. I think there is.

Of course, you know I believe we should demand proper bicycle infrastructure on every single street and road in and around San Francisco - including and especially the major ones. This meshes nicely with my belief [Please join me?] that proper bicycle infrastructure is inevitable. We can do it now, we can do it later - take your choice - but it will happen.

The future is not streets with bike lanes - it is streets with car and truck lanes - very few of these types of streets - the city will be for humans, first - cars last:

These lanes for non-tethered, motorized vehicles will have traffic operating under highly controlled conditions. It will generally be assumed that these lanes will allow for commercial traffic - deliveries. Private automobiles who wish to pay the $400 congestion charge to enter the city will be welcome as well. There will be little if any space allocated for private motorized transportation - and we will make the correct accommodations for our motorized brothers and sisters with limited mobility (motorized wheelchairs, etc.). The city will be geared towards walking, biking, other active transport, and mass motorized transport - to the extent that it is deemed necessary - in that order. Driving will be something our parents’ grandparents did.

In summary, not only is advocating for proper bicycle infrastructure on every street the only correct/just/fair/honest/sustainable advocacy position, it is probably also the most politically-viable strategy.

On our path towards decency and dignity and humanity, I would be willing to tolerate temporary solutions like ‘bicycle boulevards‘ until such time that real solutions can be found, and these types of temporary solutions can only be feasible if we approach them with the explicit understanding and mechanisms to make it increasingly more pleasurable to live on these streets, which probably means mechanisms which also make it more difficult, year after year, for motorized traffic to terrorize pedestrians and cyclists. Bike boulevards are only a temporary, half-baked solution, because shared space, of course, is a fraud.

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