George Carlin dead at 71
One more time, everyone:
Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker and tits.
common sense traffic law
Doing my local bloggist duty to spread the word. The Strib is doing an informal poll on whether it’s a good idea to allow cyclists to essentially treat stop signs and yields and stop lights as stop signs, proceeding when it’s safe to do so. Surprisingly enough, it’s potential state legislation, proposed by Rep. Phyllis Kahn, DFL-Minneapolis, and Sen. Jim Carlson, DFL-Eagan. A suburbanite even!
As others have noted, many cyclists have long used this common sense approach to riding in traffic. When you’re earning your own momentum with real physics class-style sweat-inducing work, making a complete stop becomes a tedious thing. Boo hoo! you say, you’re riding a bike for exercise, right? What’s the big deal?
Try this scenario: you’re riding a bike home alone, late at night and hit a red light. There isn’t a car within view, but current traffic law says you should wait several minutes there until the light changes to proceed. No matter how tony the neighborhood, a pedestrian wouldn’t stand in the middle of an intersection waiting for a light to change; you would feel too vulnerable, and it’s the same for a cyclist. Substitute being alone for being cold, riding in the middle of winter, and it’s a health issue too.
The counter-argument is the slippery slope; that giving special consideration to cyclists will allow all sorts of law-flouting by 2-wheeled hooligans. That’s exactly what we’re planning, people, full-on cycling mayhem in the streets. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This proposed legislation is quasi-important not because it’s allowing cyclists to stop only optionally, it’s important because it introduces into law the idea that cyclists are a different class of road user. This could backfire, of course, and lead to further laws that would relegate cyclists to permanent 2nd-class status on the roads, requiring use of cycle paths, etc. Or it could lead to cementing our place on the roads and recognizing that (just like oversize trucks, for example), we belong on the roads but with some minor modifications that allow for the reality and nature of the vehicle.
So go vote already (at the end of the article).
local geography and politics
I’ve been sitting on this post for a few days, but with the recent transportation bill override (woot!), it’s worth another look.
One by-product of not biking to work every day is that i’ve had a lot more radio time lately in the car. There was an interesting story on MPR this morning about a recent political poll showing the radical differences between the central city and suburbs. The thumbnail version is that the closer you live to downtown, the more liberal you probably are. Within the city proper, 77% of the residents identify as democrats. Get to the inner ring of suburbs, and just over half of the residents call themselves democrats, and once you’re in the exurbs, there are 10% more republicans.
This seems somewhat expected, given typical urban statistics, but it still makes for an interesting map. According to the radio story and the people interviewed, the new republican stronghold in the state is a ring of suburbs that are 95% white, affluent, and somewhat isolationist in nature. They’re people who want their own space, and can afford both larger properties and the additional transportation cost of living away from their fellow man. This from Rockford, MN mayor Mike Beyer: “You’re not part of an apartment complex, which is a communal area. Communal to me is social, and social goes to socialism. But here, it’s your space, your time, your business, and that’s generally conservative people.”
Yes, all of us in the city live in apartments are are socialists. We have to sign papers and carry cards.
Those values that are apparently driving the rich white conservatives out of town are the opposite of what i look for in where to live. I like knowing my neighbors and shopping in places where they recognize me and having the option more often than not to walk or bike for an errand because i only need to go a few blocks. I love realizing that i haven’t started my car in over a week, and that my kids ask to walk to the store for a snack or to bike to their friend’s house. There’s security in knowing that my neighbors and friends are looking out for each other. I have my house and yard and our own playset, but those features are no more important to me than my front porch, or the alley.
The political polarization is interesting in light of the fight over the recent transportation bill here. It was passed over the governor’s veto, and that’s a good thing. The current federal administration, seems to think that they can continue to cut taxes while spending gobs of money on things like an overseas war. Our governor, likewise, seems to believe that we can maintain even our piss-poor standard of roads in the state let alone new bridge construction and other infrastructure maintenance without any new money coming in. This despite a $6 BILLION shortfall claimed by the DOT for projects scheduled in the next few years. Who’s paying for this? Our kids are. Yes, it’s all on borrowed money, so Chinese investors own us now. Our jobs are being shipped overseas, and soon we’ll all be working the counter saying, “Would you like shrimp chips with that?”.
It’s also interesting because more specifically (and speaking generally) the very conservatives who live in the outer suburbs and do the majority of the driving (living further from work and having no public transportation options) are the ones who refuse to pay for anything while still demanding more road capacity. The only thing they’re actually conserving is their own wallet. Residents in the city get grief for wanting to build things like light rail as a way to reduce congestion, but we’re generally willing to help pay for it. This is conservation on a much larger scale, and it takes bigger thinking than the view from the steering wheel.
This is one reason i’d rather ride my bike.
it’s about flippin’ time
35 miles per gallon for cars, SUVs and pickup trucks by 2020
Senate passes energy bill, boosting mileage standards - CNN.com
I don’t particularly agree with the ethanol side of the bill, but the improved gas mileage is nothing to sneeze at, since it applies to the worse offenders (SUVs and trucks). I hope that the ethanol requirements lead to some momentum toward better sources than field corn, which is energy-hungry to produce and incredibly hard on the land.
The bill’s provisions require half of the new cars be capable of running on 85 percent ethanol or biodiesel fuels by 2015. It’ll be interesting to see if this precipitates a major shift by manufacturers toward diesel engines running biodiesel as a quicker & easier way to conform to the standards. A majority of European cars use diesel engines, and increasingly efficient engines, thanks to ever-stronger standards there. I know of a German family who just sold their ~6 year-old VW van because the emissions fee for it was increasing 8x for next year. It seems natural that VW and others will take the lead on this in the US market. Despite the big push for ethanol, diesel engines already have the edge on efficiency the only real knock is the particulate emissions. With this sort of incentive though, the soot emissions problem with diesels is sure to get some quick attention.
the 3-legged race for Ward 4
I should have posted this as a preview last week or earlier, but we co-hosted a house party for Russ Stark last night with neighbors and fellow bike folks Scott & Carrie. By co-host, i mean that we emailed some people and made cookies, then showed up at their beautiful house and excellent spread complete with little sandwiches.
It was great to be able to spend some time talking about neighborhood issues and developments with someone who knows so much about it. We’ve known Russ mostly through email and various bike-related things he’s done through the Midway TMO, but hadn’t talked that much in person before. Russ has lived in Midway about 7 years (as long as we have), having lived in other cities with both worse and better-laid out than St. Paul, and has made a career of studying city planning and public policy. He’s a policy scholar, a fairly recent arrival, but settled and invested in the neighborhood and its future. He also has kids around the same age as our kids, and in that way represents a lot of new families in the neighborhood with young families.
The other candidates in the race are Randy Schubring, a long-time neighborhood resident and DFL activist, and Bernie Hesse, who is sorely lagging behind with his campaign website, but seems to be getting some endorsements. I don’t know anything about Hesse, but both Stark and Schubring seem to have a good handle on the neighborhood and what needs to be done to steer a course that favors the neighborhoods and residents over the next few years. Schubring has some visible supporters around, with campaign signs (featuring a bike) in a few places. Knowing that he co-founded the St. Paul Bike Classic is enough to raise some interest among us bikies, and he certainly seems to have a good base of political experience too
Between Stark and Schubring, it’s sort of a 3-legged race. They have worked on many of the same neighborhood projects fighting for the same side (SuperTarget, for one), are both major bicycle advocates, and both understand that zoning is one of the key tools to guiding the evolution of Midway as we incorporate light rail and deal with its many ramifications. In short, they’re running in the same direction on a track that i like, and I think they’d both do a good job for the Ward. I’m supporting Russ because I’ve known him longer, we see him often around the neighborhood, and I like his ideas. They’ve both said that they’ll follow the DFL nomination, and i’m sure that whoever wins there will have the support of the other.
It’ll be a very interesting time in the neighborhood over the next few years. There is a lot of good momentum going on; major new construction, older building renovations, the extension of the Greenway along Ayd Mill (unfortunately delayed another year), and of course planning the light rail line. At the same time, there are some gaping vacancies along University and troubling engineering problems in the light rail implementation. It really feels like it’s time to participate in this work to be sure that the human-powered local resident has some space in the new plans, because there aren’t many chances like this for such a major infrastructure change.
the case for separated bike lanes
An interesting video via Russ Stark
From the YouTube description:
Advocates from Transporation Alternatives, The Project for Public Spaces, and The Open Planning Project join “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz and Enrique Penalosa to call for New York City to consider experimenting with some physically separated bike lanes in the near future.
It’s a good short video, with some nice examples of different bike lane construction around the world. It’s interesting that London is used as an example while there are some serious cycling advocates over there trying to abolish bike lanes (with the idea that chaos leads to safer roads, in a nutshell).
I don’t think all bike lanes are wonderful or necessary, but having some physical separation on major routes would be a Good Thing. Interaction with traffic is (i think) the main deterrent to increasing the number of bike commuters. I can see the potential counter-argument that pedestrians won’t want to cross bike traffic to & from their cars, but i’d be interested to see how much of a problem it is in practice.
While watching the video, i couldn’t help but think that many of complaints about drivers would be solved by stronger enforcement of existing traffic law. Parking and turning on a bike lane should be disallowed, if it isn’t already, and enforced as such. Loading zones could be marked as allowed, otherwise cars ought to stay out.
Likewise, i can’t help but wonder how many fewer people would use a cell phone while driving if police more strictly enforced proper turn signal use?
Sidewalk surfin’
A current article on the The New Yorker website talks about the extremes of bicycling advocates (pro/con) in NYC. To me, the crux of the article is that there are more bicyclists on the streets there, and less space for them to ride. The perspective of the 90-year-old woman is telling, as she watched the automobile take over the streets to the exclusion of cyclists and pedestrians both.
Sidewalks are really not great places to ride a bike, and i doubt that most cyclists would choose to ride on a sidewalk if they had safe space to ride in the street. I’ve heard the arguments against bike lanes, but that’s really an argument for experienced cyclists who can handle cycling in traffic. It’s the casual cyclists who tend to use sidewalks because they don’t feel safe on the street, or they feel like they’d have to ride faster than they want to on the street. If there’s safe space to cycle at a reasonable personal pace on the street, it’s a safer bet for cars and pedestrians too. Cycling for the streets, walking for the sidewalk.
Minnesota bicycle traffic laws: 169.222
Here is a link to the Minnesota bicycle traffic laws. You know, just in case…