There is a noticeable change in the atmosphere in St. Cloud related to the acceptance of bikes on the street. Cars seem to me to be a bit more accommodating and respectful - that needs to go both ways BTW. Things are moving though, and the article inspires ideas related what we may be able to do here.
Keep the faith and get out and ride!
For all you Talking Head fans:
This Is How We Ride
By DAVID BYRNE
THIS summer the city’s
Department of Transportation inaugurates a new bike-share program. People who
live and work in New York will be able to travel quickly and cheaply between
many neighborhoods. This is major. It will make New Yorkers rethink their city
and rewrite the mental maps we use to decide what is convenient, what is
possible. Parks, restaurants and friends who once seemed beyond plausible
commuting distance on public transportation will seem a lot closer. The
possibilities aren’t limitless, but the change will be pretty impressive.
I’ve used a bike to get
around New York for decades. There’s an exhilaration you get from self-propelled
transportation — skateboarding, in-line skating and walking as well as biking;
New York has good public transportation, but you just don’t get the kind of
rush I’m talking about on a bus or subway train. I got hooked on biking because
it’s a pleasure, not because biking lowers my carbon footprint, improves my
health or brings me into contact with different parts of the city and new
adventures. But it does all these things, too — and sometimes makes us a little
self-satisfied for it; still, the reward is emotional gratification, which
trumps reason, as it often does.
More than 200 cities
around the world have bike-share programs. We’re not the first, but ours will
be one of the largest systems. The program will start with 420 stations spread
through the lower half of Manhattan, Long Island City and much of western
Brooklyn; eventually more than 10,000 bikes will be available. It will cost
just under $10 for a day’s rental. The charge includes unlimited rides during a
24-hour period, as long as each ride is under 30 minutes. So, for example, I
could ride from Chelsea to the Lower East Side, from there to food shopping,
later to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and after that, home. This system is
not geared for leisurely rides up to the George Washington Bridge or to Coney
Island. This is for getting around.
I’ve used bike-sharing
programs in London, Ottawa, Washington, Toronto, Barcelona, Milan and Paris. In
London, where they introduced a public bike program two years ago, I could
enjoy a night out without having to worry about catching the last tube home or
finding a no longer readily available black cab. In Paris, the Vélib program
has more than 20,000 bikes and extends all the way to the city’s borders.
Significantly, the banlieues, the low-income housing projects that surround
that city, aren’t included, so the system reinforces a kind of economic
discrimination, but maybe more coverage is coming.
New York’s program will
have some advantages over the Paris and London programs. New York’s high-rise
housing projects are scattered throughout the city, so neither they nor their
inhabitants will be excluded from the covered bike-share program area. The ugly
tendency to segregate by race and class will be, in a small way, mitigated
here. By bikes!
PROTECTED bike lanes in
Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Vancouver signal increasing acceptance of
bikes as a modern transportation alternative and increasing interest in bike
safety. Some of these cities even have stoplights for cyclists, most of whom
actually stop. European bikers take traffic rules seriously: passers-by yelled
at me once when I stood in a bike lane, as New Yorkers often do, and chatted
with a friend.
I just completed a Latin
American tour, not a music tour, but a series of discussions about bikes and transport;
there it seems every city has its own bike-share program, many with peculiar
local traits. Bogotá, Colombia, for example, has ciclovías, when the main
streets are closed to all traffic except cyclists on weekends. Though Gabriel
García Márquez reportedly had to lobby his community for approval for a bike
path that was to go through his neighborhood in Bogotá, today those citizens
are completely sold on biking as a way of getting around; Bogotá bike use has
increased by a factor of five. Significantly, the increased biking has affected
the city’s economy, as Bogotá recently extended a network of bicycle paths
through lower-income neighborhoods around the city’s periphery, making it
easier and more affordable for those who don’t live in affluent areas to get to
work. Bike paths = jobs.
New York’s system will be
a lot like the one in London, which I used last summer. Before setting off, I
downloaded a map and app that showed me where to find the bike station closest
to my hotel, near Soho Square and to my destinations, an art gallery in Mayfair
and later a restaurant in Notting Hill. I made one payment — a pound (about
$1.50 — cheap!) — and I was good all day; there are no additional charges as
long as each bike trip is under 30 minutes. (It’s easy to keep bike trips
within that time limit because there are loads of stations where you can drop
the bike off, and you can get a new bike after having a coffee.)
So, I don’t have to worry
about leaving my bike somewhere if it rains or if I decide to cab home? Nope. I
don’t have to worry about parking my bike outside for hours? Nope. I don’t have
to think about whether my friend has a bike if we’re going somewhere together?
Nope. Everyone has a bike now.
In Paris, Montreal and
Washington — other cities with systems that work the same basic way — I could
use bikes to get to work or meetings, run errands and get pretty much wherever
I wanted to go. Often, I arrived at destinations more quickly than friends who
took cabs or the subway.
At home, it’s gotten
easier and safer to ride in the last few years. The city has added 280 miles of
bike lanes and paths since 2007; if you stick to the paths, biking is less
scary here than in London and Paris. I wouldn’t advise a novice to ride down
Canal Street or (God forbid!) on Flatbush Avenue, because there are lots of
lanes of different kinds of traffic there and no protected area for bikers.
How do I use a bike on a
typical day? The other afternoon, I took a break from writing and biked south
to Chelsea to get groceries. I rode down the protected bike lane on Ninth
Avenue; it’s definitely a lot more relaxing to ride in these than it is to
negotiate naked New York streets, though you do have to watch out for
salmon-cyclists who ride against the flow of traffic.
I try to stop at red
lights and often feel lame when other cyclists zoom by. But if this system is
ever going to be safe enough for kids, stopping for lights and following
traffic rules is something we all have to do. I was ticketed twice here in New
York for running a red light; I got the second ticket while riding downtown to
argue the first one!
After getting my
groceries I tossed the bag in my basket (yes, very geeky, I know) and rode home
up 10th Avenue. If I had wanted a safer, quieter ride, I could have gone over
to the Hudson River bike path, which I use to commute to work in SoHo. The ride
along the water is gorgeous and relaxing. Compare the feel of pedaling along
the riverside to the clenched-jaw, stressed-out feel people have when they
drive to work, get stuck in traffic, pay a fortune for parking or circle around
looking for impossible-to-find street parking. Just saying.
I realized that bike
travel had practical value a long time ago, when I was a kid, in Baltimore. I
lived in Arbutus, which is on the outskirts, near the city line. There was
public transportation, a bus line, but it was designed mostly to get people
into the central city. It was useful for an occasional urban gawking adventure,
but it was useless if I wanted to visit my friends. So I rode a bike to get to
the nearby neighborhoods where they lived and where my high school was.
The house in Arbutus was
flattened in 1970 and became a parking lot. My parents moved to a suburb
farther outside the city, and I went to college. My parents were part of the
phenomenon known as white flight, which involved lots of mostly white people
leaving cities for suburbs and houses with yards, a garage and a driveway where
they could park the cars they needed to get around. (Anyone who has seen “The
Wire” knows how this removal of the urban tax base affected public services,
especially the school systems that were available for the primarily black and
minority urban population left behind.)
When I finished college,
I wanted to live in the city, where the excitement was. Like a lot of other
young people, I arrived in the city with no money and lived in glorious
squalor; we spent most of our full, busy lives in bookshops, bars, tiny
apartments and cheap ethnic restaurants. It was exciting and productive, but it
wasn’t easy, and eventually we wanted life to be less of a constant struggle.
We saw that people in other urban centers, especially in Europe, were finding
ways to live with their cities rather than in spite of them. How could
we do that?
Questions like this
aren’t uncommon and spring from a sense that one’s life might be rewarding in
ways that don’t have to do with material success, status or making money.
Quality of life — cliché though it has become — eventually became a big
consideration for a lot of people, not just artists and immigrants, but also
businesspeople, designers, office workers and code writers, who came to the
city and wanted to stay. They want to raise children here and live a vibrant,
exciting life as they grow old.
I just turned 60 and have
no plans to retire to the suburbs. I love it here. For me, and lots of other
people, the answer to the question “What would improve the quality of our urban
life?” involves simple things like ... um ... bicycles, which make getting
around — and being in — the city easier, more pleasant and more affordable. New
York is one of many cities that are creating all kinds of new green spaces,
riverside parks and bike programs, all of which are symptomatic of our desire
to make our cities into our homes.
Look around you. Bikes
are everywhere: in glamorous ads and fashionable neighborhoods, parked outside
art galleries, clubs, office buildings. More and more city workers arrive for
work on bikes. The future is visible in the increasing number of bikes you see
all over the urban landscape. This simple form of transportation is about to
make our city more livable, more human and better connected; New Yorkers are
going to love the bike-share program; culturally and physically, our city is
perfectly suited for it.
David Byrne is an artist
and musician.
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