Keri has an interesting post and discussion at Commute Orlando concerning this French video showing terrible conflicts and encroachments on the bicycling infrastructure.
Where should we place the blame? With the design of the infrastructure? The drivers? The culture? The apparent lack of traffic enforcement? The bicyclist who made the video?
How about “yes” to all of those?
While I admire the separate and superior bicycling infrastructure in the Netherlands, I understand how and why it is unlikely we will ever build anything like it in the United States. We can design it. We can build it. We might even be able to afford it. But we do not have the culture of respect for our fellow road users to make it work. If we were people who were kind, considerate, and patient toward our fellows, then all we would really need are streets designed for all of us. If we were that way in the first place we would have such streets in the first place.
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Thanks Andy! I thought the comments on this were one of the best discussions we’ve had on CO. Mighk made some really excellent points.
Andy said: “If we were people who were kind, considerate, and patient toward our fellows, then all we would really need are streets designed for all of us.”
If people were kind and considerate, we could target infrastructure solutions to areas where they are needed to facilitate access, bypass complex arterial intersections, permeate barriers between quiet routes, etc.
On his recent visit, John Allen and I were discussing speed bumps (the ones on my street are nasty, bone-jarring domes). He said “speed bumps are a hardware solution to a software problem.”
You can’t fix a behavior problem with an infrastructure solution. To change behavior, you have to change thinking. We’ve seen a proliferation of increasingly nasty traffic calming devices in Orlando—from speed domes, to pinch points, to brutally rough brick streets. We still have a speeding problem. We still have a problem with motorists cutting through neighborhoods. We still have a problem with fundamental disrespect for other people. And to add insult, most of the traffic calming furniture is hostile to BICYCLISTS. We’re paying for the sins of others.
The same concept applies to creating separated, parallel infrastructure in a downtown area. Creating cycletracks is a reaction to social problems of cycling ignorance and motorist selfishness. It doesn’t solve those problems, it only reinforces them. Worse, it creates a more restrictive environment for bicyclists. Unadulterated streets accommodate bicycling so much better: allowing freedom of movement, freedom of lane choice, ease of left turns, choice of speed (I can mosey at 8-10mph, or I can hammer at the speed of traffic).
If you remove the social problems of bad driving, territorialism, speed-entitlement, etc., and look at the whole of our street miles, the vast majority already accommodate all vehicles. The ones that are unpleasant and uninviting for bicycling are part of a much larger land-use and traffic planning problem. But at least we can target solutions there, if we’re not squandering resources elsewhere.
Pedestrian infrastructure is another story — at least here, it is really substandard and incomplete.
Posted 10 Jun 2009 at 8:39 am ¶Keri… Just to put a finer point on it, when I say “streets designed for all of us” I am no longer talking about “complete streets.” I probably should have made this clear. I’ve seen some goofy things coming out of that movement along the lines you describe.
I’m thinking we need less traffic calming and more mind calming. How do we accomplish that?
What I’ve done in this post is really begin thinking along much more radical lines: What would our streets look like and how would they function if kind, caring, considerate, and patient people had designed them from the very beginning? I do not have an answer. But I suspect our streets would look and work a bit differently
Posted 10 Jun 2009 at 9:03 am ¶I like where you’re going with it!
Yes, mind-calming… I’ve been at this social issue for almost 2 years, looking for solutions, peeling away at the layers… like an onion… and it makes my eyes water like an onion, too.
There are seemingly-intractable cultural overtones governing the way people drive. We need such a fundamental attitude adjustment from “it’s all about meeee,” to “I’m part of a community.” But we need that in general, not just on the road.
The first house I owned was on a cut-thru street. They way that affected my space and restricted movements around my home left an impression on me. I couldn’t let pets get out in the front yard, for fear they might be run over by someone going 45mph up my residential street. I didn’t have children, but would have had the same fear. I had people honk at me when I was backing a trailer into my driveway, because I was impeding their progress in front of my home.
Selfishness is the primary corrupting force in our traffic culture. We don’t go out on the road and think of it as the public commons, where we all must interact as a community. We go out and think “I have to get to X place, by X time, GET OUT OF MY WAY!”
There’s a layer of lifestyle there. People have chosen to live really far from everything and we’ve built a culture around that.
There’s a layer of stress, business and time-management there. People have chosen lifestyles and careers that keep them on an endless treadmill of stress and hurry.
There’s the layers of lack of law enforcement and traffic justice, 85th percentile, entitlement to speed and associated normative behavior (tailgating is a form of enforcement of that normative behavior and people who do it feel totally entitled!).
I keep peeling. Which one do we solve first? Can we find a linchpin layer that will lead to cascade solutions?
Posted 10 Jun 2009 at 9:41 am ¶Keri… Interesting a provocative questions there. No clue here about answers. But I wonder if there is some tipping-point issue somewhere deep in the core of that onion — an issue that creates the “ah-ha” moment in which people choose to see themselves as part of a community.
Actually, humans are built to create community. But our evolution (?), perhaps, has encouraged us to see this in the narrowest us-versus-them (tribal) sense.
Posted 10 Jun 2009 at 2:56 pm ¶Keri wrote:
“The first house I owned was on a cut-thru street. They way that affected my space and restricted movements around my home left an impression on me.”
Kevin’s comment:
One solution to this problem is to eliminate cut-thru streets. It is easy to erect barricades that only permit cars on residential streets to go straight out to the nearest arterial road, but allow bicycles to go through. For cars, every residential street is a dead-end street.
This can be a quick and easy low-cost solution with barricades across streets or at intersections. Or it can be part of a sophisticated and integrated transportation plan, as in the City of Gronigen. See:
http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2009/02/how-groningen-grew-to-be-worlds-number.html
Let’s face it, changing attitudes is hard – just ask any priest. But eliminating a cut-thru street is cheap and easy.
Posted 11 Jun 2009 at 9:28 am ¶