Those Pesky Bike Lanes

They Just Don't Fit In

Pine at Tenth, in warmer weather.

Yeah, bike lanes really detract from the historic character of our neighborhood.

When people talk about historic character in this way, they are being typically ahistorical Americans, as I've discussed before. What they really mean is bikes don't conform to the existing paradigm.

And it's true. Bikes don't fit the existing paradigm. I think that's what I like most about them. As I wrote to a friend five years ago,  "I can't help thinking that bicycles, starting as a disruptive force, may well be the catalyst for a long-needed solution."

We hear a lot about disruptive forces these days - Uber, Trump - but many disrupters seem content to just keep throwing bombs.

A Word in Praise of Uber
I'd like to put in a word for Uber here. I think people, in Philadelphia at least, may be forgetting how terrible our taxicabs were before Uber showed up.

I remember years ago, calling for a cab to pick me up at my house and take me to the airport - about a 20-minute ride. It was a nice day, with the sun shining as I recall. Things started well enough; the cab showed up, not terribly late, and I hopped in. Like most cabs of the time, it was well-worn, with body dents and a shabby interior. As I pulled my creaky door closed, the driver told me that he wasn't sure the cab could make it to the airport; but, he said, if it broke down, he'd call for a replacement to take me the rest of the way. At this point I didn't have a lot of time to get to my flight, nor did I have a lot of confidence that a new cab would arrive at my house any time soon, so I told him to go ahead. In the end we got there in good order, but as you can see, I haven't forgotten the experience.

In the bad old days, you could never be sure a cab you had called would actually show up; you could never be sure that the car was in good operating order, but you could be pretty sure it would be run down and dirty; and you never knew whether your driver would know how to get to your destination, and you might well be called on to serve as a volunteer navigator.

When Uber arrived, the cars showed up when they said they would; the vehicles were clean and in good running order; and the driver didn't have to ask you for directions. And guess what? The cab companies, faced with some actual competition, have also raised their game. (As for the city government's interest in the customer experience, I think that may also have improved a bit.)

Uber was, and is, a highly disruptive force on our streets, and I'm not sure they have any intention of packing away their hand grenades, but it's worth pointing out that Uber and its cognates forced even the taxicabs to improve dramatically on basic blocking and tackling.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
I don't know which is worse: Defending the shop-worn old ways that the cab industry had clung to for so long, or showing up with a massive disruption and then refusing to move on from throwing hand grenades because it's so much fun. Scholars - and not just the Marxist ones - use the framework of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis as an analytical tool. When people say they want their politicians to get back to the work of producing solutions (and relative calm) instead of wallowing in strife, I think they're talking about the need to move on to synthesis.

People who are well insulated from it seem to have a high tolerance for strife. Those more exposed to the elements generally like it when the wind is down and the sun is shining.

Synthesis for Complete Streets
When it comes to designing streets for all users, including  pedestrians and bicyclists as well as motor vehicles, we seem to be mired. The forces for change (antithesis) are making some progress, but the forces for maintaining the present paradigm intact (thesis) still own not just the ball but also the entire playing field. Bicycling, in the view of these people, exists by sufferance and not by right.

There is only one precedent that I know of for the kind of struggle we're currently engaged in on our streets. It took place in the 1920s, and it is rightly described as a war for the streets. With dead people, grieving widows and mothers, the whole nine yards.

At the beginning of this war, pedestrians had the right-of-way on the street. At the end of it they were confined to sidewalks and crosswalks that they entered at their peril. (For more on all this, see Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011. For a shorter read, see Cars & Bikes - The Back Story.)

Why? Here There Is No Why.
Looking back from the vantage of the twenty-first century, one of the truly weird things is the use of the word accident instead of crash. We had shipwrecks, and then we had train wrecks, and when the cars came we had traffic accidents. As if they just happened. An act of God, perhaps, but certainly having nothing to do with the agency of the driver of a large, heavy, fast vehicle (cue F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, from 1925).

It would be interesting to know more about how the word accident came to be used for car wrecks. (Chapter 8 of Norton's Fighting Traffic describes the radical reconceptualization of rights and responsibilities on our streets that took place in the 1920s. For a good article on the early history of the word accident, click here. And here's a nice story from Vox on the issue of crash v. accident.)

The Italian writer Primo Levi spent some time in Auschwitz during World War II and lived to tell the tale. Shortly after arriving he was sitting by a window in his barracks - his new home. It was cold, and he was very thirsty, and there was an icicle outside the window. He opened the window and broke off the icicle, but before he could slake his thirst a guard grabbed the icicle away from him. "Why?" Levi asked the guard in German. Who replied, "Hier ist kein warum." Here there is no why.

Auschwitz was an unfathomably worse place than the typical American street, but the principle is the same. It's pretty disabling. If you want to know why anxiety levels are so high in this country, one place to look is the local street corner.

A Discouraging Precedent
History does not really offer a lot of encouragement to bicyclists and other proponents of complete streets, at least in the United States. Other countries, particularly in Europe, are doing quite well redesigning their public spaces and reducing traffic casualties.

And there is a relatively small band of people in the United States who are dedicated to changing the status quo. Some of them even work for the city government in Philadelphia.

But the money and the preconceptions and the stereotypes are pretty much all against us, and the adherents to the existing paradigm seem basically impervious to rational suasion; and, in the rare event that we actually get something built that hasn't been crippled during the design process, these people appear unwilling to believe the evidence of their lying eyes.

I'll keep slogging on, and I expect that most of my brothers and sisters in Philadelphia will do the same. And perhaps we'll continue to make progress slowly. But without some kind of a game-changer, I don't think we'll ever get out of the strife and mire. Call it a marathon without the fun. The new synthesis seems beyond reach.

Park at Eighth Ave., Asbury Park, December 2019.

See also Reimagining Our Streets, Vision Zero in Philadelphia, It's the Road Design, Stupid, A New World Being Born.