Mass Transit vs. Bike Infrastructure
[The following story makes me think can we really have mass transit when there are no sidewalks? Can we really have walking as transportation or an extension of mass transit with poles in the middle of the sidewalk? Can we create great places to live surrounded by car sewers? Are great places to live solely defined by all the things that you have to drive too? The attention to detail for all modes of travel especially biking and walking has to get to the planning table.]
From Washington, DC's K Street to SF's Van Ness, and East Bay/Oakland's Telegraph Ave BRT, it seems like bike infrastructure continues to get cut out of the picture not because it makes any sense to cut it, but because advocates of all stripes are all too willing to accept that bikes are not, and cannot be, 'serious transportation'. These are 'transit corridors', dontchaknow, and by definition that means stuff that pollutes and makes loud noises and can reach very high top speeds, if not very high average speeds. Oh, and it's obvious that buses always have and always will move more people than bikes can/will.
Like Le Corbu's Towers in the Park, there is a certain seductiveness to this Jetsons-like vision of high-tech transitways filled with gleaming, zooming biarticulated buses and shiny new hybrids and e-cars of various types, while relegating the humans to their rightful refuges -- aka 'sidewalks'.
But once we move this vision from the vague, happy-faced, brightly-colored, and clean-looking drawing boards out into the real and dirty world of everyday street life in the city, that seductiveness can then be seen as vanity, ego, and frivolity.
We can have transitways without the required walk and bike infrastructure, but that will not deliver us decent places to live.
I stopped by the San Leandro (one of the East Bay BRT towns) informercial
meeting last night -- long enough to ask someone (vice-mayor of San Leandro)
where the bike lanes were that I'd heard about. Thankfully, a bystander
helped point them out (saving us all from further discomfort), in their
microscopic glory, on some small western portion of the route through that
town. An existing, if short, bike lane to the east would be cut, apparently.
When the bike lanes did appear, they did so between moving traffic and
parked cars.
My message would be...don't be a Democrat. Don't fold your tents so early.
Don't negotiate away your biggest prize before you even sit down at the
table. And, recognize what your biggest prize is -- a walkable and bikeable
street/avenue/corridor. It's not buses or trains or
buses-that-look-like-trains or any other sort of motorized concoction. Go
with Gehl. Stick with the Green Transportation Hierarchy, or what we might
rename it to -- the Livable Streets Transportation Hierarchy. Be sweet to
pedestrians and cyclists, and everything else will work itself out. Let the
motor heads fight it out for the remaining street space. Planners need to be
taught that coming to the table with anything less than the minimally
required treatment for walkers and bikers is a non-starter -- we won't even
discuss it -- we're not on board -- you can spend the next five years of
your political life, planners/Mayors/Councilpersons, and all your political
capital pushing through Scheme X, but it won't stand a chance of garnering
our support until you show us some respect.
'$9,000 per ton of emissions abatement' -- not including 'built-in/full
lifecycle' construction costs -- for one of SF's BRT corridors. I have no
idea if that number is attractive or not, relatively speaking, but I can't
help but think what simple buffered bike lanes would do on any corridor that
currently held 'traffic sewer' status.
$225 million for Geary BRT to shift 7.5% of drivers onto buses. Again, I've
no idea if those numbers are attractive or not, but I feel like cyclists
(and would-be cyclists) are not getting what they require. A recent
Streetsblog SF article suggested that one of the SF BRT projects wasn't
looking like a sure thing because...well, among other things, bike
infrastructure wasn't part of the deal, so bikers were giving the project a
collective 'eh'. Good -- any project that doesn't take care of non-motorized
folks first should die a quick death. I say let's be a bit more explicit
about it.
I know the Cleveland Healthline BRT got bike lanes for at least part of the
route, and the Orange Line BRT in LA got that separated bike path. The SMART
train, north of SF, will get a parallel-running multi-use path.
I guess the same argument applies to LRT lines -- don't throw away cyclists.
I think the BRT cases attract more of my ire because I'm, simply put, a BRT
hater. Giving away cycling street space to trains almost seems tolerable,
but buses? Not a good deal, imo.
Pedestrians and cyclists on the most important corridors -- especially the
most important corridors.
http://www.livablestreets.com/projects/streetsblognet/lists/streetsblognet-discussion/archive/2009/10/1256377803714