Entries Tagged 'Bike' ↓
June 18th, 2008 — Bike, Livable City, The City
Like Mike Waters (River Phoenix) in
My Own Private Idaho, I am a connoisseur of roads. Whether on foot, by bike or on transit I love to wander through neighborhoods, observing how the character of a city changes from street to street.
I don’t mean to be daft, but the worst part of traveling on or around roads are the cars. One has to be vigilant to share the roads with traffic, but outside of personal safety there are environmental effects like the heat island effect, runoff and noise which shape the experience of a city-goer. More than perhaps we’re willing to acknowledge, cars have a tremendous impact on our enjoyment of city life. Walking across the Golden Gate Bridge these days can feel more like walking across the tarmac at SFO.
The automobile remains a dominant part of daily life for most in this country: for commuting, for errands, for travel. Some are rumored to even drive to the gym, get on a bike and
spin. But with news that gas is - gasp! -
officially expensive in this country (or rather, just not as cheap as it was) folks are finally
searching for alternatives. What first appears as a crisis may prove to be the forefront of a momentous shift in thinking.
I attended a meeting last Tuesday of
Fix Masonic which included a presentation of the City’s
Better Streets Plan. Masonic Ave is a North-South thoroughfare which exemplifies both the failure of traditional urban street design and the great potential for its transformation with progressive vision. The Better Streets Plan is just such a vision for the future of the City’s pedestrian landscape: safer, slower streets with clear crossings, public parks and seating spaces, permeable landscape, and extensive greening.
Here’s an example of the way the Better Streets guidelines can improve a typical residential street:
If we can entice (even initially coerce) people out of their cars and into a pedestrian and bike-friendly environment that is vibrant, safe and inviting, maybe we can shift the concept of a street - and thus a neighborhood or even a city - away from a transit corridor and towards a healthier, more versatile, more livable public space.
It’s hard for me to imagine the double-decker embarcadero freeway where there’s now a great plaza, but I think the transformation illustrates what can happen when you develop streetscapes with people in mind and not automobiles. Octavia Boulevard is not, in my mind, an out-and-out success but it does demonstrate the kind of urban planning foresight this city needs to create better pedestrian environments.
Check out:
Plant*SF - permeable landscaping as sustainable urban infrastructural practice and beautification effort
Better Streets - add your comments to the draft at upcoming events
September 21st, 2007 — Bike, Livable City, The City
It’s been a strange week for this urban dweller.
A weekend walk through Hayes, Civic Center, Russian Hill and elsewhere turned into, first, an ambush of bodily humours, and then a scatological scavenger hunt.
“Is it animal or human?”
“Projectile or pre-meditated?”
The nose gives you information your head wishes to forget.
Later in the week, I was on my bike when a driver refused to accept my existence and hit me. It was more of a lovetap - one that I could have avoided if I heeded the advice of a witness waiting at the bus stop and “stayed the hell of the road”. But my parents raised me to share my toys and I think the roads are for everyone to enjoy.
Every day is a golden day for a MUNI story. Yet, strangely, I don’t have much to take from this week other than the same slow crawl of a city bus. The bus stops, picks up passengers, waits for traffic to pass by, lurches forward, stops, picks up passengers, waits for traffic to pass…This week we learned that by shifting roadway priority to MUNI’s streetcars and buses on just 10 corridors, 3 out of 4 riders (out of a daily 600,000+) would see a speedier commute.
But to do this, you have to change the way the average person sees the city street.
It’s not a freeway…
It’s a fantastic walkway and a thriving marketplace for local foods.
It’s not an offramp…
It’s a neighborhood.
It’s not a parking space…
It’s a PARK(ing) space
So it can be done. Convincing people of the value of the land in an urban landscape may be as slow-going as MUNI, but a paradigm shift is possible.
April 5th, 2007 — Bike, Livable City, The City
Biking home from work a couple weeks ago, a couple of guys in an Olds with a ‘God Bless America’ sticker ran me off the road. They both got out of their car near a busy intersection and one ran towards me shouting ‘
Get a car, you homo!’
There seems to be something about driving that can turn reasonable people into impatient, even obnoxious jerks. I definitely notice the tendency in myself on the rare occasions I’m behind the wheel. For a small group of individuals though, driving appears to trigger sociopathic tendencies. I’ve been run off the road many times. I’ve had trash thrown at me. A mom revved her car behind me while her young kids flipped me off from the back seat. I’ve even been head-butted - ok that was as a pedestrian.
A column on Monday reported that an angry swarm of Critical Mass bikers attacked a minivan while children were screaming away inside. No journalistic inquiry into the provocation. No eyewitness commentary. Just the driver’s account of a vicious mob acting inhumanely. Maybe it’s my own experience, or just say, common sense, but I was quite skeptical of this scenario. Over the last couple days a broader picture has emerged and the details are not surprising to me. A reporter at the Bay Guardian was present at the incident and gives his account
A driver gets angry and impatient after getting stuck in Critical Mass and tries to drive through the crowd (which is stupid, illegal, and dangerous). To prevent injuries, the standard practice in such cases is for riders to place themselves and their bikes in front of the car. She hits said bicyclist (sure, maybe not hard enough to produce an injury, as you pointed out, but contact is contact) and then keeps driving forward. The rest of the bicyclists urge her to just stop driving, please, which she refuses to do because at this point she’s agitated and indignant. They pound on her windows, pleading with her to stop driving into a crowd of hundreds of bicyclists with her deadly object. Pretty soon, a bicyclist loses it and smashes her window
And here’s a television interview with some women who also witnessed the incident.
This kind of reportage and the actions of this driver and many others stem from the same asinine, but thoroughly ingrained idea: a car has the absolute right of way on the road. Bicyclists and pedestrians in America make up a fraction of those on the road but suffer 11 to 36 times higher fatalities than car occupants. And yet there remains this perception by some that, golly, drivers have it tough out there. Hooey.
People are so bent on getting from point A to B as fast as possible they neglect the repercussions of their behavior. Unsafe streets, riled up commuters, pollution. The automobile has been a major negative force in public health, climate change, urban planning, not to mention sucking away the funding and infrastructure for decent public transit and high speed rail. Now is not the time to crack down on “rogue” bikers, but a time to push for education and real policy towards improving the safety and health of everyone. A city with more bikes, more pedestrians and for the love of jesus, a better MUNI is something I think most of us can agree is a positive thing.
So to those good ol boys in the Oldsmobile and others, I say: Get a bike, you 20th century troglodyte. It’s good clean fun.
The title of this post, by the way, is from friend to the people, Willie Brown, who shook his Italian-tailored cuff at the bikers in Critical Mass back in the day.
