IT IS LONG PAST TIME TO TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT!
Boston - The other night we went to a holiday gathering with someone from where she works. I rode my bike to her place of employ and she, who normally bikes, had driven our car. We left at 5:22pm and drove until 6:17pm to reach her colleagues house. The total distance: 7.15 miles- in 55 minutes!
This was through the heart of the 14.6 billion dollar traffic infrastructure "improvement" called the Big Dig, which is now officially "complete".
We couldn't help but ask- is the traffic like this every night? The answer, "That's pretty normal. But I get work done on the phone. I play CD's. It's my time to relax." He's also desperately trying to lose weight and drives 10 minutes more to the gym 4 nights a week for 45 minutes to an hour after he drives home. And he has a stack of parking tickets and literally $200 worth of quarters stashed by the door for meters every day, which he must run down and refill every two hours.
Naturally, the fact that we bike to work came up and the difference for him and his partner, who also does a commute into Boston daily, was that we have a bike path that pretty much takes us door to door to work (plus a mile or two of streets). Now, as my wife rightly pointed out, I would have just ridden on the roads from their home into Boston. But they simply wouldn't want to and to be honest I don't blame them. The route they would have to take is heavily travelled, several narrow bridges, poorly lit at night, car dealerships, strip malls, gas stations, bus and truck depots line the route.
Getting people out of the comfort of their car- a controlled environment and onto bikes means that they are suddenly subjected to the environment that they were once insulated from in their car. Not everyone wants to do this or should be expected to do this- no amount of "bicycle education" is going to brainwash them into thinking it's any "fun". A bike path running along the shore line or the river with trees and benches that connects to bike lanes going through residential neighborhoods would attract commuters like my wife's colleague. But we spent 14.6 billion dollars so that more people could sit in their cars for a longer time every day.
If you don't think traffic engineers and urban planners are studying the Big Dig project as a pretty dismal failure and looking for alternatives that would more than likely ease traffic by reducing the need for that many cars to be on the road then think again. You may refer to this as anti-motorist but it's simple logic.
- buzzman
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