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

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

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.

http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/berkeley-bike-boulevards/

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

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?!?

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.