City Council Approves Bike Plan
Kathy in Cincinnati
approved an allocation for our first official bike plan in 32 years.
As if that isn't enough, Michael Moore was recently appointed Interim
Director of the Department of Transportation & Engineering. He's
cooperative, smart and wants to get things done.
Here's the deal: Council gave $150,000 for the Bike Plan, which,
believe or not, isn't enough. With the economy the way it is, I'm
afraid, even if we get a plan done, there might not be any money left
over to make it happen and another pretty, glossy book will sit on the
shelf gathering dust.
Bike/PAC is trying to do as much work as possible so we don't have to
hire outside professionals. Maybe we could use some of that money to
change our streets, educate the public and put in more bike racks.
Under "files" I've posted the VERY, VERY rough draft of the document
we eventually hope to present to Council and the Department of
Transportation about what we want to see in our new plan. We came up
with these ideas by looking at plans from other cities (where they did
pay the big bucks for the fancy consultants) and stole their best
practices. (We looked at Seattle, Columbus, New York, Toronto, and
Charlotte.)
There are a bunch of smart people who participate in this group.
Would any of you be willing to look at this plan and make
suggestions? Suggestions come in all shapes and sizes, including
relevant quotes to incorporate or articles for an appendix or images
that make our ideas pop.
Please pass this message to friends, organizations, groups and
cyclists who care. The more brains and hearts we get involved in the
future of bicycling in Cincinnati, the better our plan will be. Send
your comments by January 21 (we work fast at Bike/PAC!) to me at
executiv...@gmail.com.
Thanks,
Kathy
Chair of Cincinnati Bike/PAC
Mark Hooton
city's core would make it any safer for cyclist? I just don't see the
logic? Could you enlighten me?
On Jan 15, 10:58 am, Kathy in Cincinnati <executive.drea...@gmail.com>
wrote:
kathy holwadel
I like a man who actually thinks when he reads. Apparently you fall
into this category.
You have caught me. Two way streets have absolutely nothing
whatsoever to do with making the environment safer for cyclists.
I was the one who gave us the starting point for the ideas included in
the first ROUGH, ROUGH draft and I looked at city transportation plans
as well as bike plans - because when a city is successful in
institutionalizing cycling into the transportation system, there is no
longer a need for a separate plan for bikes. It all works together.
Transportation plans in other cities - as they try to attract people
to the city center - have found that one way systems are confusing to
people who do not come to the city center every day and therefore are
reluctant to venture into the maze. I know this is a fact with my own
friends who live in Sycamore Township.
I ride a bike - but on a personal level I'm really interested in
making Cincinnati more live-able for everybody, no matter what mode of
transportation we choose.
That was my thinking. Thank-you for caring enough to ask.
Kathy Holwadel
Chair
Cincinnati Bike/PAC
513-681-6424
Pedal Power: the affordable transportation alternative
Daniel Mocsny
> You have caught me. Two way streets have absolutely nothing
> whatsoever to do with making the environment safer for cyclists.
If anything, I would expect one way streets to improve cycling
safety, by reducing the number of directions from which
threats can come. For example, one-ways eliminate the dangerous
threat of head-on crossing collisions.
> Transportation plans in other cities - as they try to attract people
> to the city center - have found that one way systems are confusing
> to people who do not come to the city center every day and therefore
> are reluctant to venture into the maze. I know this is a fact with
> my own friends who live in Sycamore Township.
Learn something new every day - it had never occurred to me that
one-way streets make downtown Cincinnati harder to navigate. Plus,
I would not consider a regular square grid layout to be a "maze."
There is rarely any mystery about how to get over to a parallel
street - just make two left turns or two right turns.
The roads that complicate navigation downtown are the limited-
access highways that chop up the land like rivers, and don't follow
the grid layout. Cyclists aren't allowed to use those roads, so
they basically just get in our way. I can see how motorists who
gaswaste downtown on the interstates would be unsure of what exit
to take if they did not plan ahead.
However, that problem is going away, as GPS technology already
exists and continues to improve and become more consumer-friendly.
It is obvious that we already have the basic technology to make
navigation almost completely idiot-proof. It may take another ten
years for this technology to percolate all the way down to the
idiots who need it, but ten years is nothing compared to the time
scale for a city transportation plan.
That is, any transportation plan should account for the technological
advances likely to occur over the life of the plan. We can expect
GPS navigation equipment to become cheaper, more widespread,
and usable by progressively duller people. Therefore, it would not make
sense for a city plan to invest resources in any project whose
*sole* purpose is to simplify navigation. By the time they finish
building such a project, technology will have rendered it moot.
Furthermore, it's a bad idea to encourage people to drive cars to
a downtown area or anywhere else. It would be better to spend the
resources to encourage people to use mass transit or bicycle.
All transit plans are probably doomed to fail, however, if we don't
MASSIVELY INCREASE FUEL TAXES. (Unless the goal is to encourage
more automobile traffic.)
As long as gaswasting remains cheap, people will continue to waste
gas. Automobiles ruin everything, by undermining every competing
transit option, and then by demanding more and more and more space
and infrastructure and resources. Each additional car on the road
increases the pressure on everybody else to drive a car, setting
up the vicious cycle that locks a whole culture into automobile
addiction.
I don't think there is any "nice" or "soft" path to prying people out
of their cars. After all, cars are not "nice" when they terrorize and
occasionally kill people who refuse to use them. Consider how much
violence cars have used to take over the world - cars have killed
more Americans than all of America's wars combined. There may be no
gentle way to break the stranglehold of automobiles.
Just because we may be uncomfortable with the idea that we might
have to use some type of coercive measure to make the world
safe for humans again, automobiles do not hesitate to use force
to terrorize cyclists off the roads. The U.S. did not defeat
Nazi Germany by singing "Kum Ba Yah". To defeat automobiles,
we might actually have to start telling the truth to people.
There must also be punitive policies, such as high taxes on
fuel, and additional taxes levied on gas guzzling vehicles.
If we want to be "bike-friendly," we have to be "car-hostile."
The degree to which we are car-hostile is the degree to which we
are bike-friendly. There's no point in kidding ourselves about this.
There isn't enough room for cars and anything else. If you can
remove half the cars, then there is more than enough room for everything
else, since nothing else requires nearly as much room as cars do.
But half of drivers aren't going to stop driving simply because
another option is available. Before there were cars, we had other
options, such as clean electric trolleys all over Cincinnati.
Once people got the car option, they ripped out all the trolleys.
The only way to bring the trolleys back is to at least partially
cripple the car option. This will probably happen of its own
accord eventually, since petroleum is finite, but once oil
starts running seriously short we may be in so much economic
trouble that we won't be able to build trolleys or anything else.
Europe generally has had historically high fuel taxes, and this
pretty much explains the differences with mass transit and bicycling
between Europe and the U.S. Even in Europe, however, automobile use
keeps "wanting" to increase, so huge is the demand for personal
motorized transportation even when it is expensive. Despite the
marvelous high-speed trains that cross the Alps, lots of Europeans
still want to drive their expensive, slower gaswasters to vacation
in Italy, because when they get there they like to have their cars
with all their gear. They want to go places where there aren't
any train stations.
But Europe does have a network of high-speed trains, because they have
taxed motor fuel enough to create a market for mass transit. Most people
only care about their own immediate cost - they don't really care about
the environment, or Global Warming, or Peak Oil, or being "green", or
any of that stuff that only a tiny minority of activists know anything
about. Most people only care about their own out-of-pocket
cost right now, and their own personal convenience. Don't listen to
what they say, see what they do.
Now that the price of petroleum has temporarily dropped, due to the
global financial collapse, gaswasters who still have money are
back to shopping for gas-guzzling SUVs. Unbelievable.
The U.S. finally has elected an intelligent President, for a change,
so now there may be some chance for the U.S. to accept the reality that
the U.S. is the WORLD'S LARGEST IMPORTER OF PETROLEUM and needs to start
taxing fuel like all the other oil-poor countries have historically
done.
Countries like Japan, France, Italy, etc. never had the history of
abundant oil like the U.S. did up to the 1960s, so they always viewed
petroleum imports as a problem that needed to be discouraged.
In the U.S., we are crippled by our history. What our culture regards
as "true" solidified during the decades when the U.S. was the world's
largest oil exporter. Not many people realize that the U.S. used to
be like Saudi Arabia, but that is where the U.S. attitude toward
gaswasting comes from. As a culture, we believe cheap and
endless oil is our God-given right.
Everybody takes it for granted that they can drive a car as much as
they want. Gasoline will always come out of the pump like magic.
There will be no negative consequences to burning as much as we like.
Reality is much different than that, but the average American dullard
is about 50 years off schedule.
Incidentally, Saudi Arabia is increasing its own consumption of oil
by 6% per year, just like the U.S. did through the 1950s and 1960s.
At some point, the exploding population in Saudi Arabia will feel
less inclined to sell their petroleum to us, when they could enjoy
burning it up themselves. Why let a bunch of fat Americans have fun
when it could be a bunch of fat Saudis having fun?
> I ride a bike - but on a personal level I'm really interested in
> making Cincinnati more live-able for everybody, no matter what mode
> of transportation we choose.
If we really think all modes of transportation deserve equal
support, and we can deny there is any conflict going on here,
then effectively that just amounts to promoting the
default choice, which is the automobile (and by extension, a
growing dependence on foreign oil).
People generally prefer automobiles because automobiles provide
the greatest benefits of convenience, personal control, and sloth.
However, automobiles also generate the largest external costs
of any form of ground transportation. They take the most space,
they waste the largest amount of the scarcest fossil fuel (most
of which the U.S. must import from countries who don't always
like us), they kill the most people, they make the most people
fat, they play the largest role in promoting crime, etc.
Unless we create policies that internalize the external costs
of automobiles - that is, unless we force motorists to pay for
the mess they make, and the destructive path they have taken
the country on - then we will encourage motorists to make
a bigger mess, and end up with a bigger crash when reality
becomes our negotiating partner.
--
--- Daniel J. Mocsny
kathy holwadel
resources for Transportation Choices. Cincinnati has an abysmal
record and I feel like I'm starting at Ground Zero which is the
political recognition that there ARE choices.
If I went to City Hall sounding like I hate cars, they'd call me a
"whack-job" and go right on about their Build It and the World Will
Drive business.
You are speaking of a revolution. Don't think they don't know it.
Right now, the anti-gas guzzlers are a very small minority. The trick
is to infiltrate, to keep showing up day after day, meeting after
meeting until the powers that be finally believe we are not going
away.
I will do my best.
How are you going to help me?
The Choir