Two-wheeled transportation comes to Springfield
It isn’t quite ISIS crossing the Mexican border, but from the way that some people reacted to it, you’d have thought that the arrival of bicyclists on Second Street threatened our American Way of Life. Which it did, if the American Way of Life means not being late to the International Route 66 Mother Road Festival.
One letter-writer to the SJ-R complained, “Springfield has to be the only city that actively works to make traffic worse” by taking away “traffic lanes” for bike lanes. Such complaints proceed from the deeply rooted assumption that bicycles or pedestrians are intrusions onto space that by right and custom belongs to motor vehicles. Isn’t it in Genesis that we learn, “On the eighth day, God separated the drivers from the riders, and he saw that it was good”?
Traffic lanes are bike lanes, as the State of Illinois legal code makes clear: “Every person riding a bicycle upon a highway shall be granted all of the rights and shall be subject to all of the duties applicable to the driver of a vehicle.” When I was younger I used a bicycle for transportation, and rode in open traffic lanes all around Springfield; it is not an experience for everyone. But bike lanes are traffic lanes too. Streets exist to allow people to move about the city, and it doesn’t matter whether they do it on foot, in motor vehicles or on streetcars or bicycles.
A phrase you hear a lot in bikeway debates is “culture shift.” Sometimes that refers to people who grew up in a car-centric society coming to accept riding a bike as a legitimate way to move about a city. More often, the shift is required of those many Americans who believe that it isn’t, and who regard anyone on the street who is not in a car as an intruder. That belief has roots in what the economists call entitlement bias. But the resentment of cyclists is also tangled up in our ideas about wealth and class. Bicycling is popular on university campuses and in Europe. That’s enough to damn it among those who regard bike commuters as eco-freaks who probably voted for Obama and shop at farmers markets and own yoga mats – in short, not Just Folks.
You know what they say. First they come for your driving lanes, then they come for your football games, and then . . . .
Of course, not every charged encounter on the street is a symptom of our social fevers. Sometimes drivers get peeved at delays that the reduction in car lanes can cause. Other commentators have noted that encountering a rider on the road also introduces an unwelcome if momentary anxiety. Bump into a car, you bend a fender; bump into a bicyclist, you break a leg. Insurance! Police reports! Delay!
To some extent, sharing streets is a skill that can be learned. The street environment in a big-city downtown differs from a small one by being not only more crowded, but more complex. The experienced big-city driver develops a tolerance for, or rather a comfort with, this complexity. But his small-town counterpart regards the best driving experience as not the safest or even the fastest, but the one that demands least from the driver.
If it makes anyone feel better, the adjustment to the introduction of past travel innovations, beginning with railroad trains and eventually including streetcars and automobiles and motorbuses, stirred virulent emotions (and not a little mayhem) in the capital. It usually took a generation for city hall to write new traffic rules, build new facilities and for the public to adjust their expectations of travel.
The process is less fraught these days.
Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, it is possible for Springfieldians to prepare today for their multimodal future. All they have to do is read the newspapers from places where the adaptation to two-wheeled transportation is well-evolved. The small California city I lived in for a while has an extensive bikeway network complete with separate bike-only signals at intersections and bike overpasses to carry riders over dangerously busy intersections. Drivers are accustomed to their presence, and gripes are directed not at bike commuters but at loutish recreational cyclists who clog roads on weekends. In Portland, Oregon, which boasts more than 300 miles of bikeways with more a-building, merchants have realized that it’s a good thing that bike lanes slow car traffic, because drivers now have time to see their storefronts; landlords on one neighborhood commercial street petitioned the city to abandon a traffic lane in each direction and replace them with bikeways. There are problems in such cities, but they are being worked out, one project at a time.
The golden age of travel from the end of the streetcar age until the beginning of the bicycle age until today, when motor vehicle drivers had the streets wholly to themselves, is over. Springfield in 20 years will look like California cities of comparable size look today. Get used to it.
Contact James Krohe Jr. at jkrohe@illinoistimes.com.
Editor’s note The press conference for the group trying to raise the minimum wage in
Illinois by fi rst getting a big vote on the November ballot advisory
referendum began with a shout out to Café Moxo, where the Wednesday
event was held. “Café Moxo gets it right,” said George Hemberger of
Raise Illinois. He said Moxo not only pays a “living wage” well above
the minimum of $8.25 an hour, but also provides medical, dental and
vision benefi ts. As a result, he said, 85 percent of the workers have
been on the job more than fi ve years, and the place is packed every
lunch hour. Businesses that already pay above the minimum have a stake
in getting the minimum raised, not only to help level the competitive
playing fi eld, but also to give about a million Illinoisans more money
to spend on their products. Ed McGrone, a low-wage worker who struggles
to buy hamburger and can’t afford bacon, was right when he said “it’s
ridiculous to argue over raising the minimum wage.” –Fletcher Farrar,
editor and publisher
