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It seems Portland, OR drivers might start complaining that Portland is too bike friendly:
Tonight, the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability will hold a public hearing on the proposed Portland Bicycle Plan 2030, which will guide the city’s planning on bike projects over the next two decades.
And, if recent voice mails left on the Hard Drive voice mail are any indication, there’s a chance that the gathering could in some ways resemble last summer’s often unruly town halls on health care reform.
Only in Portland could motorists feel like they are the victims of discrimination.
I say, more please!
Bikes are extremely good for the environment. They’re cheaper than cars. And they hold out the potential of pushing back urban and suburban sprawl – another huge cause of global warming and environmental destruction – and turning cities back into livable, walkable (and bikeable) places to live.
If that means discriminating against cars by giving bikes a bigger share of the roads, I’m all for it.
6 Comments
agreed–I don’t share the love affair with cars…making it easier and safer for people to bike seems like a pretty good idea
Only in Portland where full face beards are still popular with the ladies, save for the ones that date Black Men (I should know) could do something like this. If you want to make more bike lanes go ahead, but don’t come out with this nonsense that bikes are cheaper, no shhh sherlock $1200 Cannondale vs $10,000 Nissan Versa, DUH.
Porland has great public transportation, it has bike lanes everywhere.
Be happy, poor people are not going to all of sudden fall over themselves to buy bikes. Expand Public Transportation if you want to get people out of their cars and run them all hours of the night. I couldn’t get a the correct Bus to Tualatin one evening I was in town.
I live here.
It’s not that Portlanders might start complaining. The complaining has been going on for quite a while now.
Years ago, I made the conscious decision to not bike in the city. Too dangerous, the way people drive. Now, my advancing age assures I won’t be revisiting that decision.
Unfortunately, driving a car has become more hazardous as well, on account of having to watch out for the majority (yes, majority) of cyclists who choose to run stop signs and blow through red lights. When driving, it’s stop and look for these cyclists at every intersection now.
Motorists sit at red lights and steam as the cyclists ride by and through. And all the times where, after passing a cyclist with care (often slowing and waiting for extra room to open up between the parked cars on the right and oncoming traffic on the left), you pull up to the stop sign or red light, only to be passed by the cyclist who doesn’t stop. Meaning you’ve got to pass them again, one or more times as the process repeats at the next stop sign.
Giving bikes a bigger share of the road? Glad to, for the ones who observe the traffic laws. It’s just that too many are making the unilateral decision to take a bigger share.
Do I sound like a reactionary? If I do, then so be it. It’s just that I see the rules of sharing the road are social compacts that we agree to, and my sense of fairness gets beat up when I see people making conscious decisions that the rules don’t apply to them.
Here in San Francisco, almost half of motorists realize that bicyclists need to conserve momentum and wave me through stop signs. Seriously, cars have power brakes and gas pedals. Speeding up and slowing down is trivial for you. Bikes have to contend with hills and wind, not to mention autos which, when they make a mistake because they’re driving too fast and don’t see us can instantly kill or maim us. Bicyclists do not kill or maim motorists. The rules of the road were crafted for both cars and bicycles back in the day, but as cars began to dominate, the laws that we have to bicycle under changed to reflect the reality of driving and not that of bicycling.
Usually it is the right wing mind set that cannot rest until the letter of the law trumps the spirit in order to preserve order.
So long as motorists drive slowly, there are few problems. Driving on city streets is not supposed to be a freeway experience, bicyclists enjoy full rights to the road, and what difference does it make if you have to pass those who bike ahead faster or those who lagged from the light’s last cycle?
And if you’re getting emotionally worked up while driving as you say, then you need to take care to ensure that your anger about cyclists getting a step or two ahead of you for a moment or two does not translate into violence. Portland has many side streets that are less dangerous than the main grid. Maybe you should try bicycling on those to chill out?
I’m almost 50, a senior citizen as a gay man, and I still bike everywhere all the time on the gritty streets of San Francisco.
We need to use federal stimulus money to fund transit operations to lower fares, strengthen service, and make transit more attractive than driving, and ensure that the feds make an ongoing commitment to subsidizing clean transit options that reduce reliance on foreign petroleum. It was criminal that Obama did not do this earlier this year.
And we need to make it easier to remove auto lanes for bike and transit lanes. I know politics often flows on a glacial scale, but I’ve been working on a project to ensure that the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) does not mandate an environmental impact report when the City removes an auto lane for bikes or buses for 7 years now and we’ve not quite made progress. The antiquated Reagan era standards assume that such a switch would increase congestion and delay, resulting in V8 land yachts burning leaded fuel and fouling air quality when stopped in heavy traffic, yet SF has had no air pollution hot spots in 30 years.
As a result of not solving that problem, SF has been enjoined by a judge for 4 years from implementing any bicycle plans until it performs that bogus study. We expect a Superior Court hearing to dissolve that injunction this month.
Lotta folks posting at FDL with right-wing mindsets, then, about how we’re a nation of laws. Sounds like you are saying we need to change the laws. I agree with that. It also sounds like you’ve got very frustrating roadblocks to doing that in the bay area. I sympathize.
I also understand about conserving energy and momentum. Very good reasons for the behavior I describe. And very good reasons why we need to develop our infrastructure to help all forms of alternative transportation.
That said, I stand by my narrative of my frustrations as a driver here in PDX. I do work on the emotions that come up when I drive. No chance of translating into violence, if that reassures you. I hope you understand a little better now.
I’ve always found it curious how motorists shift the conversation to bicyclists not obeying red lights and stop signs according to the a precise reading of the law in order distract from the fact that cyclists must readily cede legitimate right of way to motorists violating the law under penalty of death or disability.
I guess the progressive way is to offer up affirmative action to keep the less powerful party to the interaction safer rather than to focus on how the less powerful party is not 100% graceful under pressure in the eyes of the more powerful party.