When the Seattle Times calls Mayor Mike McGinn, sneeringly, “Mayor McSchwinn,” for his support of bicycling and bicyclist safety efforts, you may or may not laugh. You may want to point out that the road-diet-plus-bike-lane combination was implemented heavily by the mayor the Times lauds for his farsightedness.
When an ideologically stoked backlash to road diets appeared this time last year Seattle’s department of transportation argued they’d been doing road rechannelizations since 1972. But certainly the road diet as we know it got a boost lately from the Bridging the Gap levy, as SDOT recounts:
In 2007, SDOT worked with the Mayor and City Council to codify the Complete Streets policy in ordinance number 122386, which states that “SDOT will plan for, design and construct all new City transportation improvement projects to provide appropriate accommodation for pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, and persons of all abilities, while promoting safe operation for all users.”
In 2007, of course, Seattle’s mayor was Greg Nickels.
But you may also feel pained at the Seattle Times‘ callousness. Bike safety is a serious thing: life and death, in fact. Seattle has thousands of daily bike commuters, the Seattle Times editorial board aside, and bike infrastructure and bike safety mean a great deal to them.
The Times opinionators can apparently shrug a death or two off, if it means they get to make fun of a mayor they dislike. To The Economist cycling deaths made Seattle stand out. When they went looking for an example of the dangers of cycling in the U.S., they picked Seattle as the Goofus:
Nearly 6% of commuters bike to work in Portland, the highest proportion in America. But in five out of the past ten years there have been no cycling deaths there. In the nearby Seattle area, where cycling is popular but traffic calming is not, three cyclists, have been killed in the past few weeks.
The Seattle Times covered cyclist Mike Wang’s death, which happened a few blocks from Seattle Times offices. Then Ron Judd went on to mock Mayor McSchwinn a few more times. Being “for” bicycling is funny. It’s not as if there’s a real problem.
Here’s The Economist again:
…consider the death of Michael Wang. He was pedalling home from work in Seattle on a sunny weekday afternoon in late July when, witnesses say, a brown SUV made a left turn, crunched into Wang and sped away.
The road where the 44-year-old father of two was hit is the busiest cycling corridor in Seattle, and it has clearly marked bicycle lanes. But the lanes are protected from motor vehicles by a line of white paint—a largely metaphorical barrier that many drivers ignore and police do not vigorously enforce.
Well, economists have no sense of humor. One of the motivations behind SDOT’s complete streets is an attempt at what The Economist recommends: traffic calming. SDOT has simply been trying to get drivers to obey the speed limit on boulevards and arterials. The Economist writes approvingly of a 20-mph limit where cars are near bicycles, “a speed that, in case of collision, kills less than 5%.”
I imagine that’s cold comfort to anyone in that five percent, but at just 30 mph, the fatality rate (for cyclists and pedestrians) has skyrocketed to around 45 percent. Optimally, I believe, you wouldn’t have bicycles in contact with cars in a hurry: see Portland’s bike boulevards. (If you have an oft-ignored “Slow: Children Playing” sign on your street, why not talk to the City Council’s Sally Bagshaw about a pilot program?)
But no matter how you look at it, I think it’s time to stop ignoring the fact that there are lives on the line in this discussion. Reasonable people stop sniggering when people are dead.
It’s not a lack of bike lanes or road diets that kills cyclists, it’s the illogical practice of putting them in auto traffic in the first place, something Portland understand. Bicycle infrastructure needs to be properly funded with licensing and registration fees for the cyclists that use it and it needs to be separated from cars. This pseudo-civil rights attitude from the contemporary bike lobby about bikes “deserving” to be any place cars are is disrupting traffic, wasting money and killing people.
Please, Mike. Give that tired old excuse a rest.
Drivers don’t subsidize bicycle infrastructure, cyclists subsidize the roads everyone drives on. Just like you, we pay taxes, and already pay for far more than our share of the roads: http://bit.ly/jiY726
As for the other argument that it’s simply not safe for cyclists to share the roads with motor vehicles, what you’re really saying is that you, and other drivers like you, are incapable of driving safely.
I do agree with your support for cycling infrastructure, though. Properly designed bikeways will encourage more people to get out of their cars and onto two wheels — and at a minute fraction of what it costs to build roadways.
The basic problem is that any and all idiots can get a drivers license or ride a bicycle. Putting the two in close proximity will always result in death or harm to a cyclist. It is just basic physics of mass. Drivers just do not see bicyclists pedal powered or motorized. The current Mayor McSchwinn is on an active path to getting all autos out of Seattle. I fully expect the mayor to do the London thing, which is to ban or tax all autos 7 am to 6 pm in Seattle. Between all of the road construction projects, diet or otherwise, limited bike only paths, and more people and cars in a limited space will only make things worse. Take note the number of bike/pedestrian accidents around town or on the Burke/Gilman trail. Like they said a painted line in the road does not help anyone in the end. Mass Transit only works for 9-5 workers if they don’t live more than 10 miles from where they work. It does rain in Seattle and trying to get people out of their autos will be impossible.
Bad driving, by both motor-vehicle drivers, and bicyclists, is at the root of Seattle’s problems. I commute to work two-three days a week on my bicycle. Twice last week while riding my bike, I experienced near catastrophes – at the same location. Auto drivers who do not stop behind the stop sign, but poke out into the bike lane – often oblivious to the hazard they cause cyclists – are just one example of poorly-trained drivers who nearly kill us with their simple ignorance of good driving practice. Perhaps WSDOT, SDOT, and all the other DOTs, along with the Department of Licensing, need to get serious about “public safety messages” since we no longer have publically-funded driver education. WSDOT spends a lot of money telling us about “Good-to-Go” passes, but when is the last time they warned drivers about bad driving habits?
Police do pedestrian “stings” here in MD to cite unsafe drivers…maybe bicycling stings might help. While I agree that cyclists need to be accountable (I do see many disregard traffic rules) and safe (I almost wrecked an auto to avoid a cyclist who ignored a stop sign)cyclists are seldom the chief causative factor in bike/auto collisions. Ask motorcyclists …they will tell you how often they get ignored by drivers despite noise, lights and license on their “bikes”. I like Penalosa’s approach of segregating all traffic modes. Way too costly to retro-fit everywhere but all changes begin with a starting point. Anyone, whether on foot or a bicycle, who thinks motorists are capable of driving safely is way overestimating driver skills. Why do you think there are so many auto to auto collisions? 100% of the motoring public is incapable of driving safe 100% of the time. Assume otherwise at your own risk!When I bike I assume they want to hit me.