Re: stopping wheel theft?

jobst.brandt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

In spite of many bicycles in the locked compound, a traffic jam of
SUV's and trucks deliver and retrieve what appears to be the majority
of seventh to ninth graders to David Starr Jordan middle school. What
will it take to bring communities back together so that parents do not
fear for their children's safety on the streets of their home town.

Same here (Boston area), good question. My impression is that street safety is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Streets are deemed unsafe, so no one uses them, so drivers come to expect no "impediments", speed and carelessness go up, and then the streets really are unsafe.

Traffic calming is a very contentious subject. I'm a firm believer, not in any one technique, but in the necessity for some mechanisms to control vehicle speeds and access. Even my very progressive community seems to be at best ambivalent, though.

More cars packed onto the same roads have increased congestion all over the country. Since there's no room for new roads (often, and that only postpones or relocates the inevitable), officials respond to complaints by restriping more lanes in the same width (narrower lanes, shrunk medians & shoulders) and turning a blind eye to speeding. Motorists, frustrated by traffic jams, seek to bypass through residential neighborhoods & back roads, and throttle up when the traffic thins to make up for lost time.

I live in a suburb close to the city, and the last decade or two have brought ever increasing volumes of commuters who use neighborhoods as alternate highways and overflow parking lots. Officials (& many residents) seem to just shrug and say that's just the way it is. In reality, it's like an arms race, where the outcome is inevitable unless you do the unthinkable -- disarm.

Our (Boston) mayor has had something of a recent epiphany when he began bicycle commuting. He realized "this traffic is awful". Nothing like cycling a few miles in the other guy's moccasins. Things look very different on a bike than they do in the cocoon of today's vehicles. That lovely purr of "performance" exhaust pipes jars you to the bone when not attenuated by all that soundproofing. That delicious climate control is not so comfortable when its waste heat spew is added to the tarmac radiation on a steamy summer day. With GPS navigation, cell phone glued to the ear and satellite radio ambiance, the pedal crankers in the road are reduced to some dim abstraction, blurred by speed and tinted glass until they're just part of your master of the universe video game.

It's a tragedy of the commons. People flee the congestion in suburban sprawl, but bring the congestion with them, like smallpox. The costs, both monetary and social, get increasingly externalized. The number of apparent paradoxes multiply: lower the gas tax to compensate for higher pump prices? But, won't that encourage more consumption? Or: traffic makes it unsafe to walk/cycle, so I'll drive. It's a shell game where nobody wants to tote up the actual costs (e.g. Iraq, childhood diabetes). Competition for time and space have turned us into road warriors, rage and scapegoating have become the social norm (much to the detriment of cyclists). The change in public sense of what a road is for, with zero tolerance for deviation, have made even local streets follow the rules of limited access highways (no pedestrians, bikes, horses). When there's an "incident", cops (while they've been trained to respond with sensitivity) more than ever have the "what'd you expect" bias -- as in the "Maybe it is legal (to bike here), but it shouldn't be".

To get us out of this chicken & egg dilemma, some eggs are going to have to be broken. It reminds me of the auto emission wars of the 70's. There was a huge outcry about the predicted negative consequences (expense, efficiency, foreign competition, etc.). It takes but a brief ride behind one of those antiques to appreciate what today's air quality would be like if nothing had been done. The doomsayers were wrong. Now, much as then, the preceding decades were times where values and policies encouraged the very problem and precipitated the crisis. Switching everybody to Prius clones won't fix things this time, though. We can't pave our way out of it, either. America, having invented the car, now needs to save the world from it. We have met the enemy, and it is us.

We have been sold on a seamless experience. We want the TV commercial version -- empty streets (slightly wet for dramatic reflections), green lights all through midtown, sultry model in evening gown riding shotgun. Instead we get Tom Joad, bumper to bumper in rush hour logjams. It's no wonder people are a bit testy. The deeper question is whether life is really better fully carpeted, climate controlled and electronically augmented. I don't know, just add the flowers and the mannered men in the dark suits and you've got pretty much the opposite of life. Call me a crank, but I need more sport and more utility in my world than that.
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