Book Review: Pedaling Revolution

I just finished Jeff Mapes' Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities, and I want to post a brief review before I have to bring it back to the library.

Mapes is a political reporter at the Oregonian, which means he lives in Portland, about the most bike-friendly city in the US. The book is about the growth of bicyclists as an organized political force over the past, say, 30 years; the benefits of cycling for a city; how various cities (Portland, Davis, CA and New York (!)) have planned so as to make themselves more amenable to cyclists, and chapters on the safety concerns and health benefits of cycling.

One of the early chapters is dedicated to a visit to Amsterdam, considered the mecca for cyclists. European cities have not always been as bike-friendly as they are now; making them so has taken a combination of social contract and government encouragement and support (read: investment). The basic difference between European and American cities when it comes to cycling is that European drivers (and policymakers) accept that bikes have a right to be on the road, and that it is the car's responsibility to be careful of them. In America, most drivers - if they think about cyclists at all - consider them a nuisance at best. The attitude of our society to the biker's right to the road is exemplified when one thinks of bikers killed by motorists and the generally light consequences (to the motorist) that result. In Europe, if a motorists hits a biker, it's a big deal. Here, it's considered that the biker getting what he* more or less deserved.

*American cyclists are likely to be male; in Europe the ridership is more gender-balanced, primarily due to increased safety

The underlying assumption of Mapes and the scholars, activists, and cyclists he speaks to is that there is strength in numbers, meaning that the more cyclists there are in any given city the safer cycling will be - cars will become accustomed to looking out for them, and the city will make the necessary accommodations in planning.

Of course, the easiest thing a city can do to accommodate cyclists is painting lines on the street and inculcating a "share the road" ethos. In some cases where the streets are too busy for that, other options include a cycletrack, which is basically a separated cycle track set off from the road, sometimes between parked cars and the curb. Some cities put their roads on what are called "road diets," taking away lanes to make room for bikers and making the traffic calm down.

As you will read in depth on my mate John's vital blog Cycling in Wichita, most of the biking accommodations in Wichita are recreational, i.e., bike paths that go twirly twirl twirl and don' t you get you from one place to the other very fast at all. If you try to use bikes for travel you find pretty quick that most of the arterials are not where you want to be on a bike. 40 mph, two lanes right up to the curb.

There are some roads which could serve as bike routes with little loss to the convenience of motorists; I think of 1st Street on the east side going downtown. Some other roads would need to go on a diet to be useful, such as Douglas between Rock and the entrance to Eastborough, which is something of a miniature race course.

Which leads to the question of why a city like Wichita should make any accommodations for a mode of transportation which probably accounts for less than 1% of the travel in town. Shouldn't transportation policy be centered around the kind of transportation that most people want to use?

Well, there are a couple of things to say about that. First, surveys consistently show that more people would ride bikes if they were safer and more convenient to use. And as I said before, more is more, and the more people we have riding bikes the more people will see it as a reasonable option and will join them. And this is a topic that I plan to spend some more time on in the next couple of days in another context, but cycling has so many health benefits, as well as benefits to the livability of a city, pollution amelioration, etc., well, it just makes a lot of sense for some of the copious amounts of money the city, county and state spend on road construction and spend, say 2 or 3% of that on improving bike infrastructure.

The final chapter in Mapes' book is about getting children to bike. Let me throw in a quote:

A government travel study in 1969 found that 87 percent of all kids who lived within a mile of school walked or biked. ... That changed over the ensuing decades as traffic become more intense, parents became more fearful, the neighborhood school became less common, and two- and three-car households became ubiquitous. By 2001, only about 15 percent of kids were getting to school under their own power. And... as few as one-third of students who lived within a mile of school walked or biked.

He mentions how traffic patterns can be particularly intense right around schools, and that nearly half of students who are hit by a car on their way to school are hit by people driving other kids there too.

I know all this is true for us. Take a look at this, the location of my kids' elementary school:

Webb is a busy arterial and, just to the south of this picture, Central is one as well. There are hundreds of cars and dozens of buses going in and out every day. We live 1.8 miles away, and I think my wife may have walked it once or twice, but I never have. And there are no bike racks at the school.

As Mapes points out, the people who are the most ardent bicyclists, and the most ardent bike advocates, tend to be those who have good memories of biking when they were younger. We don't have much of that, these days. And that doesn't give one a lot of hope that the kids who never biked will grow up to be the ones who change the paradigm about transport in this city or this country. Something needs to be done about that, before it's too late.

And a good first step is reading Mapes' book!

A neighborhood ride

On Sunday afternoon I went on a bike ride along the Gypsum Creek bike path with John B of the Cycling in Wichita blog. He organizes these monthly bike rides to check out various trails around town, and the Sunday ride picked up pretty close to my house and the stars aligned - meaning DW let me go - so I went. John's description of the ride is here, and his earlier review of the path is here.

I don't have too much to add to what he says except to emphasize that the weather was not cooperative. Earlier in the day I thought the ride might get cancelled; it remained quite blustery, and although the temperature climbed into the 60s, the strong head winds on certain parts of the path made cycling quite exertive, if that's a word. I rode in first gear most of the way, especially on the way back (which I rode alone, as John continued on to his home on the west side) and had to stop a couple times to rest. Of course, it was also my first major ride of the spring, probably around 10 miles round trip, so that probably had something to do with it as well.

The path is pleasant enough initially, the part along the creek, although further on it goes through some pretty decrepit areas of town -- Planeview and then the abandoned Joyland amusement park, which strikes me as a good place to do a photo shoot for a band but not a place you want to spend much time in alone. On the way back there were 3 stray dogs on the path there and that was disconcerting, although in the end they didn't engage me.

While I'm on the subject, John did a nice job before the municipal elections of reaching out to the candidates to ask their positions on bike infrastructure. He also had a longer think piece around the same time in which he made the point that bike infrastructure is a privilege, not a right.

Speaking for myself, this blog's implicit assumption is not to presume that the city and other governments owe cyclists anything in the way of infrastructure. Sure: I keep harping on wanting to see one or two genuine, right-through-the-middle-of Wichita, east-to-west bike paths or dedicated bike-lanes, that request isn't exactly on the Founding Fathers' list of self-evident truths. Or, at least it's not on the Kansas version of that list.

Well, I've less polite than John, and I do think that cyclists have the right to expect the infrastructure that we pay for through our taxes to accommodate us. Wichita sees biking as a recreational activity and that's why what we get is meandering bike paths; I see bikes as transportation and want to get from here to there. The twain don't meet.

But opening the streets up more to bikers is not necessarily an expensive proposition. In fact, a little bit of a public education campaign ("Share the roads"), a painted line on some of the major thoroughfares; these things don't cost much - less than a dedicated bike path along a creek, and a lot less than the repairs on streets that are necessitated by the car culture, and a hell of a lot less than a new access to K-96.

In other words, there's a lot of low hanging fruit here - it wouldn't take much expense to make Wichita a significantly more bike friendly place than it is right now.

Another reason to love Obama

The story is worth reading too.

It takes more than just a share-the-road sign

The death of an experienced cyclist in Chatanooga, Tennessee leads to this sensible, thoughtful and well-reasoned editorial in the Chatanooga Times Free Press (h/t Carlton Reid). It recounts the discourtesy and even hostility with which some drivers treat bikers who dare to utilize the road and makes this recommendation:

A remedy for such malicious disregard should hinge on enforcement of the law against such potentially lethal driving, and legal and public education policies. Local and state transportation agencies and governments should consider a range of changes to improve driver awareness and road safety for cyclists, and pedestrians, as well.

A focused public information campaign, particularly in urban areas where bicycling has become a widely popular method of alternative transportation and recreation, should aggressively inform drivers of their legal obligation for safe driving when they encounter bicyclists.

State and municipal governments should consider both tighter driver safety laws and penalties, and also broader efforts to establish designated and more clearly delineated bicycle lanes that contain barriers to vehicular traffic.

One can't really say that bicycling has become a "widely popular method of alternative transportation" in Wichita, but maybe it would be more so if the city government spent a little effort on educational and enforcement efforts like the ones described in this editorial.

The first bike entry of spring

I rode my bike to work for the first time this season on Friday. Right now it looks like, weather permitting and if I have no other appointments I need to drive to, that I'll be biking on Mondays and Fridays. Tuesdays and Thursdays I have to pick up the kids from school, and Wednesdays DW takes DKs 1 and 2 to Hebrew School and she drops DK3 off at my job on the way.

Anyway, getting out the bike led me to look at some of the links that I've accumulated on the subject, and here are a couple: a good one if your biking to work depends on the weather, a 50 page sampler of the "Bike to Work" book that I'm eagerly awaiting.

A big(ger) ride

I had to miss John B's group ride this morning because I had a Hebrew School teachers' meeting this morning. (Sunday morning leisure ends at Labor Day.) But I had a long ride of my own - from my house to Emanu-El (Central east of Woodlawn) for the meeting, then to an unveiling at the Hebrew Congregation's cemetery (21st and Oliver), and then back to Emanu-El's garage sale at the Holiday Inn on Rock and Kellogg. I guess it was about 10 miles or so. It was the longest I'd ridden since I got the bike. (Shorter than John's daily commute, just to keep it in perspective.)

It was a pleasure to ride on a Sunday because, although I still used neighborhood streets as much as I could, when I found myself on 21st or Oliver or crossing Central to get back it was not nearly as spine-tingling as it can be during the week.

I got on the bike path near Town Center East and Douglas but it seems to disappear into the morass of construction at Kellogg, where there doesn't seem to be any way to cross. I know the path continues south, but does anyone know how to pick it up south of Kellogg?

Also, I discovered via surfing to cycling related sites one called Commute by Bike, which has a lot of good tips, especially for the beginner, on how to ride in traffic, how not to be smelly at work, and like that. There's also a link to a podcast on cycle commuting that you can download from Itunes. Apparently it's preliminary to a book on the subject that's going to be out this fall. I listened today while I was doing the shopping later in the afternoon and it was 20 minutes long and interesting enough. They spoke to people from Copenhagen and Amsterdam, where biking is well integrated into the life of the city. Their focus is on taking cycling back from the sports industry, and I can certainly agree with that. Definitely worth a look.

Bigger is badder

Article in today's Times Style section on the tensions between cars and cycles, increasing now that numbers of cyclists are increasing due to the price of gas. For once, the Times is not completely focused on New York, so there's some use for us in Small City land.

There may well be jerk bike riders, but most of the hostility, as is so often the case, comes from the people with more weaponry - in this case, more metal. Case in point, a recent Missouri case when a guy killed two riders just because he didn't want to yield, and was acquitted by a jury of vehicular manslaughter.

It's comparable to the discussion about SUVs vs. smaller cars five years ago, when George Will said, why wouldn't I want to be in the bigger car? There's a sense in this country that people deserve what they get, whether that's being without work, or a home, or health insurance, and if it includes being splattered over the sidewalk, oh well...

Breaking in the bikes

We picked up the bikes from L&M (our local shop, really local, like walking distance to the house) before we left but it was so darn hot last week that we really couldn't bear to do any riding. But the weather broke while we were away and since we got back Thursday night and I had Friday off DK1 and I took the bikes to the main bike route along the Arkansas River near the museums downtown. (For those of you not from here, the river is pronounced like it's spelled.) DK wanted to go see the bodies exhibit at Exploration Place, but a quick look at the website showed it was expensive to get in ($2o for me, $18 for her) and we'd come home in part because we didn't want an additional day of admissions charges and meals out, so we had to back-burner that. I still hope to do it with her, maybe for her birthday.

Anyway, we rode the path basically from Central to Harry, it's about 6 miles round trip. We'd never done it before so we ended up on the wrong side of the river and we had to walk our bikes across a bridge at one point, but the day was beautiful, the bikes worked really well, we had sandwiches that DW had made for us that we snacked on before turning back. We had a good conversation. We stopped for a minute at the museum also (the free part, we have a membership). It was fun! (And can I also mention here that the new seats were a very worthwhile investment!)

It felt a little weird to drive the bikes to a place for a ride, but I would almost have to do that to any bike route at this point, especially if I have a kid with me. John B. linked to a place where you can commit to riding a certain number of miles instead of driving, and I plan to ride to work most days (Larry B from KMUW, who's an avid rider, helped me plan a good route for that), but I couldn't even really ride to the grocery store at this point because the only way there from here is along a 6 lane road. Yikes!

But... this Friday ride was a very good start!

B.I.K.E. in the U.S.A.

The hotel in KC had bikes available for guest use, and we did so twice: once to go down to the Plaza to walk around (about a 10 minute ride) and once to go to the Nelson (about 20 minutes). It was one of pleasures of the trip, and the ability to ride a bike around is one of the pleasures of urban living generally - although of course most cities (including KC, and certainly Wichita) are not really equipped for bikes to be used as one of the major modes of transport.

It so happens that my folks brought their bikes to us this time, fairly aged Raleigh 3-speeds that (I kid you not) they rode maybe a couple of times in the (can it be 30+?) years they've had them. When they lived in Cape Cod about 10 years ago we visited and had the bikes worked on and then rode them a couple of times, then they went back into storage and probably haven't been ridden since. DW is not all that enthusiastic about them because the tires are narrow but free is better than not free. So we lugged them back to Wichita and put them in the shop for another reconditioning, this time including new (padded) seats - the originals were hard as heck!

They are essentially touring bikes and that's what I want them for, I don't expect to do much off-road but since I got here I've been wanting to ride to work. It's a distance of only approximately 2 miles - too far to walk, but it feels ridiculous to drive, especially with gas the way it is and the fact that I drive a big car. But of course, the roads between work and home are quite fear-inducing from a bicyclist's perspective. There's one possible alternative route, at least to work, that is a little longer but on not quite on as scary streets. Anyway, once the bikes are back I'm determined to give it a go.

It so happens that a couple of websites connected to this new interest of mine have come to my attention - one is the Cycling in Wichita blog, run by a fellow named John Buuse, and the other which I found through John is a Commuting by Bike blog. John says that Wichita is among the worst biking cities in the country.

I hope it will save gas and money. I hope it will get me some (much needed!) exercise. I hope I don't get killed. I bought a helmet. But bike-riding seems like one of those baseline things for simple living - a core principle, if you will. So I'm gonna try it.