The Truth That Cannot Be Spoken
There’s an article in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of Bicycling magazine that makes an interesting point about bike facilities: basically, they aren’t.
As a beginning rider, Colin McEnroe took up the challenge of writing a column about his experiences with the sport as he ramped up over time.
It took him less than a year to conclude the following:
I’ve also acquired a set of mixed feelings about bike trails and lanes. The latter are strewn with piles of syringes, spent bazooka shells, and the carcasses of elves murdered by Sauron; you’re always about 30 yards from something you’ll have to swerve into traffic to avoid. Bike trails, meanwhile, are full of cyclists doing stupid things, like towing three skateboarders while wearing earbuds with Neutral Milk Hotel cranked up to 11. From a certain perspective, the worst place to ride a bike is any place with “bike” in its name.
I have to say that I concur with this sad state of affairs.
Boston and many of the surrounding towns have done a great job adding bike lanes. The difficulty is that they’re usually placed directly against parallel-parked cars: smack in the door zone, the most dangerous place on the road. The good news is that the number of cars and trucks that double-park often forces riders out of the bike lanes and thus out of the door zone, as well. And don’t get me started on the one foot wide “bike lane” that used to be the shoulder of Enneking Parkway.
Eastern Massachusetts is blessed with a wonderful collection of paved bike paths. The problem here comes from overuse. We have to share the path with oblivious walkers, joggers training for the Boston Marathon, sunbathing Boston University students, residents running their dogs off-leash, rogue Dept. of Conservation and Recreation maintenance trucks, kids playing ball, swerving skaters, and unsteady neophyte cyclists. Not that these things are bad; they just make our “bike paths” the most dangerous place one could possibly ride.
I’ve also heard some advocates preaching the panacea of “cycle tracks”: dedicated lanes between parked cars and the sidewalk, away from traffic. It sounds like a wonderful idea until you realize that it’ll be in the passenger door zone, with a curb that prevents cyclists from swerving to avoid a door. Never mind the fact that such a constrained space cannot simultaneously serve people who ride at speeds that vary from 3 to 30 mph.
This is why McEnroe’s column got a nod and a resigned sigh from me. Here in Boston, we’ve recently been given the mandate to create all kinds of bike facilities, but in the end none of them are of much value to cyclists. In fact, most of them present more frequent dangers to us than doing what we are legally expected to do: ride conscientiously in the standard roadway facility.
If the uselessness of dedicated bike facilities is obvious to even a first-year rider like McEnroe, that raises a lot of questions about the inappropriate projects that bicycle advocates have wasted our political capital on.