Part of my New Year’s resolution was to become more involved in my community, especially with regards to bicycling. Walking the walk, I went to a meeting regarding the possibility of a Bike Boulevard on a particular street in Long Beach. This street, one of the nicest in the city, would be in many ways perfect as a Bike Boulevard. However, this street also houses some of the very wealthy and powerful in the city.
I attended the meeting as a participant and not as the media, but after getting so frustrated with what was going on, I wrote a rant and sent it to the editor at the magazine I work for, hoping to inspire one of the writers to pick up the story. Instead, I got a call that they wanted to print it and could I add 300 more words 
This is just an excerpt, it won’t be printed for another week. It sounds harsh, but the rest of the article is a bit more balanced, but I wanted to highlight just some of the absurdities that were being said at the meeting!
I went into the meeting thinking it was a win-win situation. What better way to start off the new year than supporting something that could benefit myself, as a cyclist, and the community at large.
This was not to be the case.
I passed the sign-in clipboard to the woman standing next to me who, I deduced, was obviously a displeased 1st Street resident by the sneer she gave me after she saw my helmet.
The night was more or less a tennis match with 1st street residents saying they didn’t want their historic district soiled by “all those people coming to their street.” And all the cyclists wondering, who exactly did they mean? It kept on and on with the basic insinuation that those people, cyclists, would bring in a reign of two-wheeled terror and decreased property value.
Some of the objections to the Bike Boulevard seemed so absolutely ridiculous they verged on conspiratorial.
One 1st Street resident said that she was opposed to the bike boulevard because bikes were just too noisy!
Another resident said that the traffic in the city wasn’t bad enough that the city should do anything to encourage bicycling. In 10 years when it was worse, then they should do something about it.
Somewhere a baby glacier is crying…err…melting.
Another resident expressed his concern for the safety of joggers and women with stollers (think of the children!) who might be hit and injured by runaway cyclists.
Another woman was totally up in arms because she knew, she just knew, that the state was going to print a map of all the bike lanes in CA (as a cyclist I could only hope for such a map!) and people from around the country would single out the those twelve blocks of 1st Street to drive their trucks, loaded with bikes, take up the parking spaces and spend all day riding up and down 1st street like gyspies.
Ludicrous.
At one point I couldn’t take it any more and walked to the front of the room and introduced myself, “Hi. My name is Russ Roca and I’m a bike commuter. I have a college degree. I don’t have fangs and I’m not going to steal your children in the middle of the night.” To which I was told, “that’s not what we meant at all.â€?
What did they mean then?
Popularity: 5% [?]
God, did you really do that?!? I am SO impressed by your moxie!!!
I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the article…hopefully there will be a web-based version you can share with us.
Everyone knows that recreational cyclists, joggers and women pushing babies in strollers are diseased junkies with loose morals and total disregard for decency
Seriously, I would think a multi-use area devoid of cars (is that what a bike boulevard is — eliminating cars?) would be a selling point and a way to drive UP property values, not down.
I’m also alarmed that California citizens could be against such an improvement — a lot of folks east of you look to California as a shining example of a state who’s trying to do right by the environment.
I guess we were wrong.
Yeah. I remember one woman’s face was priceless….mouth agape….
I did that primarily because all the residents were in the front and would barely acknowledge it when a cyclist would speak…
There was a very palpable Us vs. Them vibe
Dang Russ, you’ve got some balls. I’m very proud of you! I can’t to see this aritcle you’re talking about.
From what I gathered from the Portland video, a bike blvd would only increase property value…
[...] Posted in January 10th, 2008 by Don in Advocacy There was a post on bikecommuter.com about the city putting in a biking path through this area of the city and people were up in arms about it. So one of the writers for bikecommuter.com wrote and article, and posted and excerpt of it. The Post [...]
I’ve often thought while riding the bike blvds in Berkeley how much nicer it is for residents to NOT have as much traffic going past the house making traffic noise and being a danger to kids. I guess people tune out to noise like living near a train track, and if the kids stay inside playing video games they are safe.
These citizen reactions also sound a lot like the folks who constantly try to ban mountain biking around here by claiming safety issues and environmental destruction. “Never mind what studies show, I know better!”
Good for you Russ to make them feel stoopid.
Russ, it’s good to have you on the team. This is great writing, and an inspiration to all who tote the moniker “bike commuter.”
Welcome to the world of the NIMBY!!! The NIMBY or Not In My Back Yard (or street as it were), is a vile creature who supports everything as long as it isn’t in his/her “Back Yard”, and may theoretically have an impact on perceived property values. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY
My wife works for the local county, and you would not believe the rampant NIMBY-ism!!!
These are probably the same people that say “What can I do, I have to drive” when they get asked about the high cost of gasoline.
NIMBY! A friend of mine works for the telecom industry, and he reports that the same people who complain to their cellphone providers about spotty coverage are also the exact same knuckleheads who don’t want any more towers.
But this is a BIKE BOULEVARD — good for everyone…pollution-reducing, traffic reducing, exercise-increasing. How could this not be a win-win for that community?!?
Nice job.
No one said change would be easy. NIMBYism is there no matter what the issue is. It was great that you forced them to acknowledge your presence and that you weren’t going to steal their kids — even if they were in denial about the messages they had been sending.
The thing to try to keep in mind is that these neighbors are not your enemy. These are people who like where they live and have a certain level of fear about change. Their irrational comments that you would be a good citizen in your car and a monster on your bike speaks to that fear of change.
To me, the goal is to build a dialogue or relationship where you can discuss those fears as well as the actual benefits of the proposed change.
To be honest, to me this is one reason I’ve advocated that we call them something other than “bicycle boulevards.” Sure, they’re good for bikes. But, they do much more than that. You don’t have to ride a bike to enjoy a safer street.
Can you imagine that the reaction would be different if the project were labeled another term that was just as descriptive? — family parkway, family greenway, neighborhood greenway, home zone, etc.
How much focus was there in the discussion on current concerns on the street? Are people concerned about speed on their street? Are they concerned about commuters cutting through or large truck traffic?
Does the city have or plan to take any data about the street (how many cars? how fast do they drive?). Speaking of those joggers and strollers:
If I’m hit as a pedestrian with an impact speed of 20 MPH, there is a 5% chance I’ll die. At 30 MPH, 45%. At 40 MPH, 90%. Check out this poster that describes stopping distance and the impact of speed on crash avoidance and severity:
http://bikeportland.org/wp-content/images/speed_stopping_distance_big.jpg
The reaction time and stopping distances are directly from the Institute of Traffic Engineers. The stopping distance shows distance for wet pavement (it rains occasionally up here), average tires, on average pavement.
You put that in conjunction with kids’ and seniors’ special needs in traffic and it’s really eye opening. Kids, for example, have 30% less peripheral vision than adults and seniors have the same reduced peripheral vision as their corneas start to flatten. Kids have sound perception issues — a sound comes from the left, they look right. Kids and seniors, due to the physiological development of the eye, can not judge the speed of an object in a constant form. This means that if a dog is running at them, ears flopping, body changing shape they do a pretty good job estimating its approach speed. A car, no change in shape at speed, and they don’t do nearly as good of a job estimating its speed.
These issues play out in significant ways in crash data. People under 18 and over 60 are much more disproportionately in error in crashes because of mistakes made related to these changes to the human body through life.
If you ever need just the segment about bike boulevards, here it is:
http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/portland-or-bicycle-boulevards/
Good luck. Post a link to the article if it’s published online.
Thanks.
Greg
One last thing: Here’s a movie about Berkeley’s bike boulevards.
http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/berkeley-bike-boulevards/
NIMBY: Out here in the east, it’s not much better. I’m told Cambridge MA, bastion of the liberal left akin to Berkeley, is totally opposed to homeless shelters or halfway homes– anywhere one is proposed, property owners show up to shoot them down. Or look at Sen. Kennedy’s opposition to a wind farm offshore from his family’s (and his rich neighbor’s/supporters) Vinyard comound.
Public Hearing, like the one Russ attended, is the next step in participating in US Democracy after voting, another very basic civic duty that many seem to have forgotten. This is the official time and place citizens get to voice their concerns to their representatives in local gov’t. Write all the letters and fill out all the online petitions you want, but you will make the most impact by attending public hearings. You’ll also be surprised by what is reported, and perhaps more importantly, what is not–the general vibe of the meeting would not come across in the usual press the way Russ has presented it, and if there’s a hearing about something you really care about, you should attend even if you have no intention of speaking. If you do speak, try not to rant and try not to speak in generalities–address the immediate issue at hand. Reasonably explain why those who oppose you are wrong and present your points in easily digestible (short) sentences. Think sound bites. It can even be kinda fun once you get the hang of it, and if you come across as less hysterical than the opposition, a committee might certainly be receptive to what you have to say.
Get out there and participate in politics when things you are passionate about arise. Public hearing is the place to do it at the grassroots, local level–you have a far greater chance to get your point across and effect changes while speaking to a smaller committee with the limited audience local meetings tend to draw, then you do at almost any other point in the political process.
The leader of the meeting gave a very ill-prepared presentation. Having ridden in Palo Alto, Portland and Eugene, I would say that the majority of “bicycle boulevards� did not look like the slides he showed. To the trained bicycling transportation engineer, First Street is what’s known as a “shared street�. It is certainly wide enough to accommodate all roadway users WITHOUT a painted stripe. Realistically all that would be needed is a sign on the corner of every other street to let you know that you’re still on a bicycle-preferred route (i.e. Class 3).
I think that the biggest problem is that everyone lost sight of what the meeting was about. It was a concept meeting, not a design meeting. We weren’t there to talk about gates, or roundabouts, or like the gentleman in the front-right was stuck on, speed humps. We were there to talk about the idea of having a route to accommodate slower traffic safely from the East side of Long Beach to the West Side, and vice verse.
Residents on First could not seem to grasp that, no matter how many ways it was said, there is no money (city, county, state or federal) for “traffic calming�. There is however, millions upon millions available for bicycle-friendly implementations, which essentially equal traffic calming. If a street is bicycle-friendly, it is by nature a safer street; which is something that everyone wants!
Another issue that kept coming up was the beach path. Sure, it’s there… and it goes from Downtown to Belmont Shore… but unless either of those is your destination, it’s rather inconvenient. There are a very limited number of streets that are served by the beach path, and most of those don’t have any place of significance on them. One woman commented that having bicyclists on First Street would make it unsafe for the people jogging or pushing a stroller in the street… so why not send them down to the beach path as well? There is, after-all a pedestrian lane. And what are they doing walking their baby in the street?
There was a concern that having First Street marked as a bike-route would attract cyclists from all over the country to come ride on it, and that because they would drive their bikes there, they would take resident parking spaces. Ok, just because there is a bike lane on Bellflower does not mean that I wake up on Saturdays and decide that I’m going to go ride on it. The residents didn’t seem to understand that it would only attract transportation-oriented bicyclists, not recreational bicyclists. I just can’t image Velo Allegro doing blue and pink laps up and down First, instead of trucking down PCH or up the San Gabriel.
One thing I found entirely amusing is that nobody was opposed to bicyclists; in fact, many residents claim to be “avid cyclists� although their bikes were missing from the walls inside and poles outside. They aren’t even opposed to bike routes… just not in their neighborhood damn it!
Ultimately, I think a bike route will happen. The residents on First St. are residents IN Long Beach. They are not exempt from Long Beach traffic issues, or the changing conditions of fossil fuel depletion. Alternate transportation accommodations are going to run through the country like a freight train in the next decade, and they can either jump on board and have a say in where it goes, or they are going to get run over by it and left to deal with the fallout.
BTW, the next morning I decided to ride my fixie to work, so as not to wake anyone with the loud Campy freehub on my Xtracycle
Just turned in the final draft to the weekly. The editors cleaned it up and it’s a good read. I am excited about it coming out and like I said the article really is more balanced and isn’t me making fun of the residents all the way through. I’m excited and at the same time a bit worried about the response. I don’t want to incite something that would block the progress, but at the same time, I really felt compelled to point out how unreasonable they were being.
This street houses probably some of the wealthiest and well-connected people in Long Beach and no doubt they have exercised their political muscle in the past. The District Weekly, the mag I shoot for, is probably the last source of independent news reporting in the city that isn’t afraid to call bull**** when it sees it. We’ll just have to see how much of it is thrown around after the article comes out