I’ve just returned from South Florida and will be assembling a few observations over the next couple of entries. This one focuses on bicycles – the transit article (mostly about Tri-Rail and its implications for Austin) comes next.
Delray Beach, the town immediately north of Boca Raton (where I grew up and where we stayed with my parents during most of the last 3 weeks), is obstructing a plan by the state highway department to rebuild state route A1A with standard bicycle lanes on each side. A1A is the main (in most parts the only) north-south route on the barrier islands which separate the ocean from the Intracoastal Waterway. In other words, this is the beach road, and not surprisingly, this is where the rich people mostly live. This is also where most people want to ride their bikes, for obvious reasons.
The state highway department in Florida seems to be very progressive, at least compared to TXDOT. On previous visits home, I’ve noticed a lot of (narrow but usable) bike lanes painted on major arterials throughout the region (this area, being mostly suburban, gets most major roads built and paid for by the state, as is the case here in Round Rock but not in Austin). In fact, A1A throughout Boca Raton was granted nice new bike lanes a few years ago, and they enjoy heavy use. This has resulted in a much saner trip for both drivers and cyclists on this road.
Anyways, the folks up in Delray who live on the road aren’t happy with the plan to extend this facility further north; and they got their city commission to listen. The city came back with a proposal to build 3-feet wide mini-shoulders on the road, combined with 10-foot car lanes. Sound familiar? It’s even worse when applied to South Florida, where so many drivers are marginally skilled and elderly. If the state bows to the wishes of the locals and builds this facility, people will be far worse off than with the current shared lane — it will appear to drivers that it is safe to pass cyclists without crossing the double-yellow line, and people will get hurt and killed. There is some hope that the Florida DOT will overrule the local decision, and the local mainstream press has some opposition being heard in op-eds (which doesn’t happen here thanks to the gutless Statesman), so it’s all not yet lost, but I wouldn’t say I’d bet on a positive outcome there.
This is a timely development since the restriping specified in the Great Shoal Creek Debacle of ’00 is about to finally be implemented here in Austin — the local neighbors, who glibly assert that “curb
extensions and lane stripping will be installed finally under a compromise
agreement between the Allandale and Rosedale neighborhoods, the city, cyclists,
pedestrians and emergency services.” while participating in a process which showed that neighborhood thuggery will still beat sound engineering and progressive politics any day of the week, are going to see 10-feet “shared parking and bike” lanes next to 10-feet travel lanes. In other words, the most important bicycle route in the city (a “bicycle arterial” as I like to call it) is held hostage to on-street parking, and rendered less safe than it was before. This is a compromise in the sense that a deer and a wolf “agree” that the wolf will eat the deer.
This “compromise” (which I voted against at the UTC, all on my lonesome) was nothing more than a slap in the face to reasonable cyclists who want to coexist with drivers and parking — as demonstrated by the original plan (with on-street parking preserved on one side of the street). And anybody who voted for this farce should be banned from ever claiming to be pro-bicycle-commuting for the rest of their life. It shows that you can’t expect to get good results when you sell your basic principles for the sake of getting along, or, as an anonymous contributor to Michael Bluejay’s list put it:
I am dismayed that Mike Dahmus was so damned right about this whole debacle from the very beginning. Although originally, I was very hopeful that a community consensus could be reached that could benefit everyone (and possibly even improve relations amongst the diverse users of SCB), I see now that I was completely naive. What we have now is little better than what we had originally: parking in bike lanes. I’m still hopeful that traffic will be a little calmer, but I doubt that drivers will remain in their lanes, and cyclists riding near the stripe will be at risk of being struck. Any possibility that a mutually beneficial result could emerge from a consensus-based process — however slight — was completely dashed when the whole process was hijacked by Paul Nagy. There was a point where Gandy had hood-winked everyone into thinking a panacea solution existed, when he should have known better that his “solution” would never make it past city engineers. (I actually don’t feel bad at being deceived by this snake oil, as so many others — except Dahmus — were also taken in, including many from the bike community.) I place full blame for that on Gandy for playing politics by trying to please everyone when it’s clear that that is impossible. We hired him as an “expert,” and clearly he is not.
