It's Not a War, it's a "Global Struggle"

The opening salvo has been fired, and the much-anticipated "War on Cars" has finally made its way to the Windy City, via an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune by one John McCarron, adjunct professor of urban studies at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. It's the sort of screed we've come to expect, full of outdated stereotypes, faulty logic and straight-up misinformation.

Let's begin with the elephant in the room. From 2001-2009, 369,629 people died on America's roads, an average of over 41,000 per year. To put that in perspective, that is just above 0.1 per cent of the national population, equivalent to a city the size of Minneapolis being wiped out, or nearly 125 9/11 attacks. I really think it's time the streets-are-for-cars-so-everybody-else-can-get-out-of-my-way-or-go-fuck-themselves crowd drops the "war on cars" rhetoric. Unless, of course, they're willing to confront the crimes against humanity waged in their name over the past couple of generations. Nearly everybody has lost somebody near and dear to them in an automobile crash, yet somehow we accept these losses as the cost of simply moving around. Per capita casualty rates are significantly lower in every other industrialized nation, so why does it need to be this way?

To answer this, we must look at how we've built our cities over the past fifty years. It's no secret that trillions in federal funding has gone to subsidize freeway-centric development. We've paved over some of the most productive farmland in the world so that people could feel like gentleman farmers of yore, tending their quarter-acre lawns. It always takes time for latent costs to become apparent, in this case a confluence of factors including the housing market collapse, rising crude oil prices, crumbling infrastructure, political gridlock and a rash of other reasons have created a perfect storm of generational discontent.

He's right about one thing, all the bike lanes in the world are pointless for the elderly or infirm. But then again, so is auto-centric development. When my 95-year-old grandmother's eyesight got too poor for her to drive safely, she had to leave her small-town home of nearly four decades to move in with my parents. Not that she necessarily wanted to, but the nearest grocery store was twenty miles away, and the prospect of being a shut-in unable to walk to even the most basic of amenities can be a powerful motivator. This speaks more to a history of misplaced priorities than anything. You're expected to drive, drive, drive, everywhere you go, until you get too old and start running people over, then we don't care about you anymore. May as well check yourself into a hospice and welcome the enveloping darkness.

I'll grant McCarron one more point. He would look silly in "cyclist couture", then again most people do. But to presume that you need to be Spandexed-out to ride a bicycle is patently absurd, and proof that he is clueless about what is fueling this cultural shift. Anybody dressed in such a fashion who is not involved in an organized race, is, in my estimation, a dweeb, and I enjoy snickering and sneering at them every time they whip past me and my heavy steel-frame commuter. I'm in no mad rush, you see. Even at my slower pace I can make the trip downtown in roughly the same amount of time it would take to drive, fight off traffic and search for parking. Furthermore, I certainly get no ego boost from cycling. If anything, my id feels threatened every time a driver passes too close or speeds by.

It's time we recognize that maybe cars just aren't all that good for us. Something happens to us when we get behind the wheel, where even the most good-natured among us turn into assholes. We suffer from a national addiction deadlier than all illegal drugs combined. I readily admit that cars are useful tools, but heroin can also be a useful sedative. Our reptilian brains progressed through all of evolutionary history going only as fast as our two feet could take us. Then somebody domesticated the horse, and we maxed out for another 4000 years or so. We've had the use of cars, and the speed and power they represent, for about 100 years, "forever" in our short-attention-span culture, but hardly a blip in the Grand Scheme of Things. Will cars even still exist in another century? What am I, Kreskin? In some form I'm sure they will, but I doubt we would recognize them as such. Will every single person drive around by themselves all the time? Most assuredly not. People are changing their habits, and society is being forced to come along. This is hardly limited to Chicago, to the United States, or even to the developed world. As a species, we are finally realizing that moving people is more important than moving cars. And if you don't like it, move to Houston.

2011, A.D. (After Dooring)

I've been called a lot of names, both affectionate and otherwise in my day, and as of a little over a week ago, I can add yet another slur: statistic. Ladies & gents, I must now claim my place among Chicago's growing legion of victims of car doors.


There I was, happily trundling along Milwaukee Avenue on my evening commute when suddenly, a car door swings open just feet ahead of me. I managed to swerve out of the way and avoid hitting the woman and her door, but the sudden jerky movement of my heavy bike that is not designed for such sudden jerky movements brought both bike and rider crashing to the pavement.


In that split second, a hyper-awareness of my surroundings kicked in, predominated by the thought, "Oh shit, there's a van right behind me on my left." To the credit of the van's driver, he managed to stop mere inches from running me over. I hate to think what might have happened had he been momentarily distracted via text message, a bad song coming on the radio or what have you.


"I didn't see you!", I was told. Yeah, no shit. Luckily for all involved, damage to human and bicycle was minimal. I walked away with a sprained finger and a pretty gnarly bruise on my right thigh. I was pretty shaken up by the event, and in all the commotion dealing with the fire crew and paramedics that arrived on the scene, I somehow managed not to notice the motorist stealthfully leave the scene. One of the firefighters took down the license plate number before she left, and this was included in the police report. So not only was I doored, but I'm now among Chicago's lucky hit-and-run victims, as well. Bravo.


I've been relying on two-wheeled transport for several years now, and this was by far the worst thing that has happened to me. It's also been remarkable how one incident can erase years' worth of confidence on a bicycle. I got my bike out of the shop on Saturday afternoon and my first time in traffic that evening (mild traffic at that, and on my own block) nearly gave me a panic attack.


Of course, this sort of crash is entirely preventable. It's also entirely foreseeable. I wrote in this very blog just a few months back about Milwaukee Avenue's narrow chasm of doom also known as the "shared lane". Since that time, I had been riding up and down that strip anyhow, in the belief that the most direct route must be the best. I put that theory to the test this morning, my first day back on the steel horse for my commute. I took my winding, all-backstreet route from Logan Square to downtown, it added...wait for it...five whole minutes to my trip. During which time I was able to roll along at my own comfortable pace, without jerky dudes passing me on the right. So I guess this is it, Milwaukee Avenue. We've had a good run, but I'm not going anywhere near you until some changes are made in your street design.


As an aside, apologies for the recent dearth of posts. I started a new job a couple months back which has been taking up my time. The dust is beginning to settle now so I hope to get back to a semi-regular thing around here.

Chicago Cycle Chic, 1915 Streetcar Strike Edition

Two posts in one night, it's a record.


Finally, thanks to a streetcar strike 96 years ago, and countless hours digging through the Library of Congress American Memory site, I can contribute a Chicago entry to the global Cycle Chic craze. I can't not do it, as the math states that bikes+Chicago+labor history+natty dressers=irresistable.

A rainy day in the Windy City. The building on the right looks familiar, but I can't place it. Anybody?

This dapper young gent has the right idea.

Both photos come from the Chicago Daily News archives.

The Stuff They Didn't Build & Crowdsourcing History

While doing some digging around in various online archives, I came across a digitized journal brief that appeared in the November 1892 edition of The Manufacturer & Builder, heralding the development of "An Asphalt Bicycle Road from New York to Chicago":

It is seriously proposed, by the great bicycle manufacturers of the country, to build an asphalt road, from 20 to 35 feet wide, and extending from New York to Chicago. At all events, the proposition is announced to have been made in good faith, and has already been discussed in the daily papers. 

Peter Gendron, of the Gendron Iron Wheel Co., of Toledo, Ohio, is reported to be the prime mover in this remarkable scheme, which is said to be under consideration by the bicycle makers of the country. A highway of this character would be, indeed, an object lesson is propagating the gospel of good roads. We will watch the future development of this enterprise with interest.

I'm a sucker for old-timey language, and I seriously would like to own stock in the "Gendron Iron Wheel Company of Toledo". Obviously, a thousand-mile "bicycle road" never came to fruition, but paved highways were a reality in most of the country within a quarter-century. This is yet another reminder of the role the cyclists' lobby played in developing the federal roads-building projects of the early twentieth century.


Some cycling amenities were built, however, like the pictured California Cycleway. It looks suspiciously like this recently-erected cycle bridge in the Netherlands. A private consortium built the link between Pasadena and Los Angeles, but eventually went bankrupt. The right-of-way was later used for a streetcar line, and finally became the Arroyo Seco Parkway, one of the world's first freeways. Quite the encapsulation of Southern California history.


Of course, bicycles were all the rage at the turn of the last century. Races draw huge crowds to velodromes around the country. Check out this view showing the start of a bicycle race outside Chicago's historic Water Tower on Michigan Avenue overlaid on the modern streetscene.


Be prepared to lose the rest of your day after clicking the link, as it directs you to WhatWasThere.com, a site that allows users to upload historic photos and layer them over modern Google Streetview images. This is a website that I've been wanting to exist for quite some time, and was quite glad to find it. So glad in fact, that much of my free time over the past few weeks has been spent filling in the map of Chicago's Near Northwest Side, among other places. I can envision this being an indispensable tool for urban planners, historians, educators and all manner of folk with an interest in changes to the built enviornment. See these views of Logan Square in the '30s or of the 1966 Division Street Riots for some other great contrasts.

Five Minute Fashion

My cycling philosophy, as it were.

It's quite simple.

I don't care what you say, I think that this guy...

...looks much cooler than this guy.

Shopping

The Damen Avenue CTA Blue Line station, as seen on Google Streetview. Did somebody lock a shopping cart to the bike rack?

Anybody recognize their bike?

Les Bicyclettes de Londres

Back from 'the Smoke' with a tale or two to tell. I wish that I had better photos to document but my camera was constantly malfunctioning. I landed right at the peak of last week's 24-hour Tube strike and set about making my way to the city. Upon alighting the Heathrow Express at Paddington Station, plans called for me to catch a bus to meet the friend I was staying with and collect the keys to her apartment.
Once I reached the street, the chaos of a million disrupted commutes became apparent, as I encountered a mob of hundreds waiting for buses. When mine came up and I realized it was already packed to capacity, and that cabs were in short supply and high demand, I decided that suitcase or no I'd have an easier time of hoofing it to Belgravia. Along the way I passed a rather picked-over cycle hire station, as well as a couple of Londoners with yet another transport alternative:



Unfortunately, the bikes were not an option for me, as you currently need to purchase an annual subscription to the service to use them:



As the empty racks can attest, the bikes were in great demand. From my observation perch on the upper deck of a London bus, it would seem that the highest demand is coming from business guys in suits. They were hardly the only bikes on the streets though, and watching people weave through London traffic gave me an entirely new perspective on just how much street width is needed for a proper bike route. Most London streets have just a few inches clearance between the traffic lane and the curb and yet cyclists were out using those inches in force.



The photo at right gives you an idea of the general alignment, though here in Hyde Park there is a wider-than-average traffic lane and a separated cycletrack alongside. Most streets do not have such a luxurious expanse off to the side, just picture a bike following those yellow stripes. The exception is on streets with bus lanes, which are open not only to cyclists but motorcycles as well, and in some instances, black cabs.


By the following day, the strike had ended and most Tube lines were running pretty much as normal. The shared bikes were still in high use however, and seemingly still mostly by these dashing Savile Row types. I took time to do a mental inventory on the types of private bikes being ridden about the city and it was a little surprising; while most riders tended to be on hybrids, there was a rather large contingency of home-grown Pashleys and similar upright models, a huge number of folding bikes, and the number of fixed-gears I encountered could be counted on one hand.

All in all, it would appear that cycling is thriving in old London town. I arrived just a couple of days after the Mayor of London's Sky Ride, which drew upwards of 85,000 participants this year. As I stood on the sidewalk...er, pavement, on Essex Road in Islington during the evening rush hour, the number of two-wheeled commuters passing me by was astounding. It makes perfect sense to me, in a city where it can take fifteen minutes to move two blocks by motorized vehicle (no joke).

I have a few more posts to wring out of this trip, on Dublin's growing bike infrastructure and on how my learning of Daley's impending retirement colored how I looked at things. Oh, it's good(?) to be back.

Selling the Sizzle

Screen grab from Amazon Kindle commerical


I hate television commercials. And yet...I'm secretly fascinated by them. I can't remember the last time that I (consciously) purchased a product based on an advertisement, yet for years now, I have been paying much closer attention to them than might be considered healthy. Not so much to the products on offer or the slogans used to sell them, as to the settings and the mise-en-scene on display. It is for this reason, for example, that I have recognized the mean streets of Portland, Oregon (home to advertising giants Wieden+Kennedy) in an extraordinary number of car commercials over the past few years.

Like many people, I'm pretty much obsessed with Mad Men. I could go into a lengthy diatribe about what I think is going on, but I'll spare you. One of the things I think the show does really well is to illustrate how advertisers are able to tap into the mass psychology driving the zeitgeist (except for the times when they're hilariously out-of-touch, even for the time period). Even before I got sucked into Don Draper's world, I had been noticing something strange happening. Bicycles were everywhere in TV ads. These range from cutesy-schmootsey-ness to pointless mockery to downright irritation. But even more than these ads featuring (sorta) active cycling, there's loads out there where bikes are static props in the background. Small cars being marketed toward urbanites are especially prone to this, I've seen maybe a half dozen auto commercials in the past year where bikes are placed on the sidewalks like any other street furniture.

You're probably thinking, "So what?". Anybody who has ever taken a film class can tell you that nothing gets in the shot that isn't meant to be there. When sets are decorated, they don't just grab a bunch of stuff and throw it out there. Every frame is storyboarded over the course of weeks, if not months, and props are picked very carefully. This isn't to say the directors of any of these commercials is going to be the next Hitchcock (or even Ed Wood), but they do have budget constraints, and nobody goes out and buys a few bikes to stick in their ad "just because". They want their commercial to appeal to a certain demographic, and that demographic is increasingly viewing bicycles as a normal part of the street fabric.

So what if it boils down to little more than crass marketing? The marketing targets the money, and the attitudes of those who would spend that money has changed. Advertisers understand it already, even if politicians don't.

I Won't Share You

Flickr photo by James Cridland

Chicago joined the ranks of bike-sharing cities last week to much hoopla. Da Mayor cut a ribbon, a couple of newspaper articles were written, and hooray, we have 100 bikes that cost $10 an hour. The bikes are nice, but if you don't happen to pass by one of the six stations (all in the Loop and lakefront tourist bubble), you probably wouldn't even know they were out there. Meanwhile, London launched their Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme (rolls right off the tongue) with 5,000 bikes across the center city and more to come.

I've got a real problem with the way this is rolling out, and I don't have very high hopes that this "trial" will be too successful. If the assumed goal of a bike sharing program is to get people onto bikes who haven't used one in a while, making them available only in the traffic-choked downtown core probably isn't very enticing. If the stations were in actual neighborhoods where actual Chicagoans actually live, people then might decide to try one out, and then realize that riding a bike isn't so bad. This is precisely what has occurred in Paris, since Vélib’ was introduced, sales of adult bicycles have increased.

Over at Urbanophile this week, Aaron Renn has a post on uneven development within cities, a topic which is often on my mind. This is a classic example in my opinion. Chicago's neighborhoods can't get their potholes filled or have their recycling picked up, but the corporate owners of the Willis (née Sears) Tower can get multimillion dollar tax subsidies, and the Loop can get 100 bikes (so long as the city doesn't have to pay for them).

Bike sharing in selected cities by the numbers:

May 1995 - Copenhagen City Bikes - 2,500 bikes, 110 stations (soon to be replaced by a new system)
May 2005 - Lyon Vélo'v - 3,000 bikes, 350 stations
March 2007 - Barcelona Bicing - 3,000 bikes, 400+ stations
June 2007 - Montpellier Vélomagg - 750 bikes, 59 stations
July 2007 - Paris Vélib’ - 20,600 bikes, 1,639 stations
May 2009 - Brussels Villo! - 2,500 bikes, 180 stations
June 2009 - Montreal BIXI - 3,000 bikes, 300 stations
February 2010 - Mexico City Ecobici - 1114 bikes, 84 stations
April 2010 - Denver B-Cycle - 400 bikes, 40 stations
May 2010 - Melbourne BIXI - 610 bikes, 52 stations
June 2010 - Minneapolis BIXI - 700 bikes, 65 stations
July 2010 - London Barclays Cycle Hire - 5,000 bikes, 315 stations (so far)
2011 - Toronto BIXI - 1,000 bikes
July 2010 - Chicago B-Cycle - 100 bikes, 6 stations

Chicago is the third-largest of the cities listed above in population, yet with the current numbers there is roughly one shared bike for every 28,000 residents. That oft-repeated Chicago axiom (falsely) attributed to Daniel Burnham comes to mind..."make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized". Even the much-maligned SmartBike DC program is more widespread. It may all be in vain anyhow...if the predicted Tea Party electoral gains actually materialize this November, at least Denver's system could be in jeopardy. A gubernatorial candidate in Colorado apparently believes bike-sharing is part of some devilish UN plot to subjugate Real Americans. The future looks bright, friends.

Lest I Forget

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about dangerous cycling spots in Chicago. That post garnered a lot of positive feedback and I subsequently realized that I forgot about one of the worst ones. Logan Boulevard & Western Avenue.

Logan is a major bike route, connecting the boulevard system to Elston Avenue. Let us begin with Logan eastbound as it passes under the Kennedy Expressway:




View Larger Map

The boulevards feature service drives, which I always use as the center lanes have very little curb clearance and high speeds. As Logan approaches the Expressway, these end and bikes must enter the lane or use the sidewalk. The road curves as it passes under the freeway and the train viaduct, which is just a bad combination. I don't like driving west through here in late afternoon as well, when the light goes from dark shadow to blinding sun in an instant, all while managing a curve and trying not to hit a cyclist on your right.


View Larger Map

Moving along, Logan crosses Western Avenue, one of the busiest streets in the entire city. Here you can see the bad combination of shadow and street alignment. Furthermore, as you cross Western, Logan narrows from two lanes to one, before a dedicated bike lane appears. Traffic is often nightmarish here, with many people trying to turn left across the bike lane into the Target parking lot.

This one I don't have any simple answers for. I have lots of complicated, expensive ones but I doubt those will get very far. At the very least, bikes need to be given their own space under the freeway overpass. There's already been one cyclist fatality at this intersection in the last couple of years, memorialized by a ghost bike. (As an aside, while I appreciate the ghost bikes, I find this one to be rather distracting every time I pass it. I would hate to have to point out the irony if someday somebody were killed because a driver or cyclist was too focused on the side of the road.)

More posts to come in the near future, I've gotten some excellent feedback lately and it's greatly appreciated. Nice to know there's somebody out in the inter-ether.

The World Laps Chicago

Since the World Cup is on it's two-day break before the quarterfinals begin, I have a chance to think about things less important. A few years back, Chicago was held up as a shining example of what big cities could do with bicycle infrastructure when the civic elites set their minds to it. Then, apparently, Mayor Daley got distracted by his dreams of Olympic glory, selling off the rights to the city's parking meters, inventing new ways to use the English language and who knows what else. Nowadays, a lot more is happening in New York, London & Mexico City than here at home.

I've been reading about what transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is doing in New York for the last couple of years with great envy. It wasn't until I finally booked myself a trip to London later this year that I realized how much we've slipped. As we all know, London is a sprawling metropolis, and as excellent as their transit system is, I've grown so accustomed to getting around by bike that I figured it would help out my patience and my wallet to do so during my visit. They don't have an ideal system in place just yet, and reading the comments on various posts on the Guardian's bike blog would indicate that there is still a very, very long way to go. But let's run down what's coming down the pike just this summer...400 bike share stations throughout the center city and completion of the first two "cycle superhighways". All under the aegis of a Conservative mayor in need of a new hairstyle who rides a bike to work. The city is spending £110 million just this year, a big chunk of which is coming from Barclays, who get naming rights to the programs and even get to put their logo on the maintenance crew's uniforms. But what impressed me more than anything is that the city's bicycle plan is totally integrated within the framework of Transport for London (TfL), the government body charged with running the Tube and double-deckers. Go to TfL's website and you can find an entire section with information on bike sharing, route planning and even a page where users can upload their own routes into a Google Maps mashup.

Again, the system isn't perfect, one of the largest flaws being that bikes aren't allowed on subway trains and only on buses "at the driver's discretion". However, it really got me thinking about the RTA here in Chicago. Public transit planners worldwide struggle with the dilemma of the "last mile". Including bikes in the equation would make transit a lot more attractive, especially in the suburbs, but of course only if adequate infrastructure exists to ride them on. This is something London really isn't too far ahead of us on, traffic has decreased since congestion pricing went into effect, but it's still pretty horrendous. And those streets are narrow, some London streets could fit into a single lane in a place like Schaumburg.

Speaking of lane width, I remember hearing an anecdote once about how the Mexican government promised to double the total mileage of the Mexico City's freeways by the end of a certain year. Money for the project either dried up or was siphoned off and the authorities simply doubled the number of lanes by remarking the roads and claimed it as a success. Nowadays I guess we would call this a road diet. The effect of these sorts of actions just made room for more cars, and now the city government is attempting to undo some of the ill effects, notably the infamous air pollution. A few years back they introduced the hoy no circula scheme, which restricts drivers from using their cars on a certain day each week based on the last number on their license plate. Now, the local government is pushing bikes as the ultimate solution and has begun by expanding bike parking, installing ramps down stairs into Metro stations, bike boxes, pedestrian bollards, bike sharing, all that good stuff.

None of this stuff is all that difficult. Chicago had a deal in the works for a bike share program a couple of years ago that fell apart, and is now tentatively moving forward with 100 bikes at six stations. Six. Compared with 400 in London, where stations will be no more than 400 meters apart, which do you think will be more successful? Despite Complete Streets design measures being passed by the city, county and state, I've seen very little in the way of new bike lanes, bike parking, bike anything over the past couple years. There has been some stirrings of support for bike boulevards and the like, but it seems like the grassroots support falls on deaf ears at CDOT, possibly because the agency just named it's sixth commissioner in five years? Mayor Daley set a very ambitious course five years ago with his Bike 2015 Plan...unfortunately, the amount of work left to do is daunting.