Sweeping the Bike Lane

This Is Not a Fake Picture

1700 block of Pine.

I seem to recall, in community meetings nearly a decade ago, people questioned the existence of street sweeping machines that were small enough to fit in a bike lane. And frankly, I'd never seen one before January 2, when I took this picture.

So bike lane sweeping machines are real. The picture is not a fake. I am not a bot.

Still, I have always been impressed with the inventiveness of the anti-bicycle crew. Back in 2016, Randy LoBasso wrote a story for the Metro detailing some of the fact-free gossip swirling around bike lanes in Philly. His focus was on a community meeting in Wash West to discuss proposed upgrades for the Pine-Spruce bike lanes. I think the meeting left us all with a sense of stalemate.

The next year, 2017, Emily Fredricks was killed in Wash West, at 11th and Spruce, and in 2019 the Pine-Spruce bike lanes were upgraded to their current state.

Memorial gathering for Emily Fredricks.
"For now we see through a glass, darkly ..."
I Corinthians 13:12

We have definitely made progress since 2016, but the underlying opposition among various parts of the community remains a constant. The basic tactics are the same: throw a lot of chaff in the air, and do your best to distract people from the fundamental issue: parking in the bike lane cripples the bike lane.

Nowadays, opponents of bike lanes frequently start their argument by stating that they are in favor of bicycling. Often they say they are bicyclists themselves. They just don't want to have a properly functioning network of bicycle lanes in Philadelphia, because that would interfere with their ability to drive their cars and park those cars wherever they damn well please. 

Of course, they don't say that last bit out loud. Instead they spray the room from a grab-bag of bandaids - how about speed bumps? A decent tool, doesn't address the underlying issue. I could go on - but enough.

The opponents of bike lanes are persistent, and they need to be watched. But we have made progress - just look at that sweeping machine at the top of this story - and I think we will make more progress this year.

"But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away." I Cor. 13:10 

See also The Traffic at J'aime; Flex Posts on Pine and Spruce; Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends; The State of Play on Pine-Spruce; Mayor Parker Signs No Stopping Bill.

Unleashing the Oligarchs

Where Will It End?

Marie Antoinette gets around. Asbury Park boardwalk.

People are grasping for historical parallels to help them think about what the second Trump administration might look like. The 1920s, 1890s. The 1850s, with the slavemasters ascendant and Roger Taney declaring in the Dred Scott Supreme Court case that blacks are inferior human beings.

All these priors are good. But I have one more. Time: around 1790. Location: in a different country - France. This is when Marie Antoinette, the queen of France, did not say "Let them eat cake." But she might as well have. Marie and her husband, Louis XVI, and pretty much the entire French ruling class, had been giving clueless arrogance a bad name for a very long time.

Marie and Louis do remind me of the oligarchs who are coming into power in the second Trump administration, which Timothy Snyder has dubbed Trumpomuskovia. 

I think the oligarchs, and their ringleader Trump, will make the fatal mistake of overreach. They are definitely primed for it. The reality they live in - the bubble, if you will - is a place that brings them comfort and power on a silver platter. Their earwigs and flatterers are quick to praise anything they do as an act of genius, explaining to lower-class people such as journalists that a stupid, impulsive, lurching mistake is actually a masterful piece of political jiu-jitsu, or perhaps just a brilliant bargaining chip that will cause the opposition to give the oligarch what he really wants, and be grateful that the worst has not happened.

There are wealthy and apparently intelligent people on Wall Street, and in many other places, who don't believe that Trump will actually deport millions of people, both undocumented aliens and American citizens whose sin was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I think Trump will try. I also think he will fail. He may avoid ruffling the feathers of industrial farmers in largely rural red states by attacking blue cities in blue states. I'm a fan of the movie Casablanca, where Humphrey Bogart tells Major Strasser that there are parts of New York City that he would advise the major not to invade. 

Or look at what happened in the airports in 2017, when the first Muslim ban went in. Lawyers flooded the zone and gummed up everything in sight. It was beautiful, in a messy way. 

Cities are gooey, with occasional patches of quicksand. Going in is easy. Getting out again is another thing.

Or take the tariffs. People say he won't do the tariffs. That would be a good thing, but a fail for Trump. And if he does pass them, they will be a disaster. A brilliant disaster, of course, and exactly what Trump wanted. Tell that to Herbert Hoover. (For information on the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff act of 1930, click here.)

Trump and his oligarchs will try to do these things, and others, and - I think this will be their downfall - they will continue to squeeze the middle-class lemon until the pips squeak. 

As I said, I think their fatal flaw is overreach. I don't, however, think the response will be at all like what happened in the French Revolution, with people rising up in the streets of Paris. I personally think the troubles will begin in the world of finance, as they did in 2007-2009 and on many prior occasions. And I think this is Trump's weakest point. He and his motley crew don't understand the issues, aren't interested in learning, and will be unable to cope. I think they will panic.

This is, of course, what happened during the Covid pandemic.

I'm hopeful that what comes next will not be terribly violent. There are examples of bloodless revolutions. The one closest to home is what Franklin Roosevelt did after his election in 1932. But my favorite is the 1989 fall of the wall in Berlin, followed by the reunification of Germany. And East Germany, a country for four decades, ceased to exist.

I think we are headed into a period of major reconstruction, and not the one that the Project 2025 people have outlined. Instead I see positive change. This needs to start with our Constitution, which is clearly broken and needs to be fixed. We also need to reform the Supreme Court and purge the grafters and perjurists. But I don't think that is the end. We certainly need to reexamine the role of oligarchs in our national life, and while we're at it I think we need to have a close look at the American corporation, which may have evolved to the point where it is doing more evil than good. Certain companies and perhaps even whole industries might be called upon to explain what their value added is. I'm thinking particularly of the health insurance industry, where I worked for sixteen years. (Paul Krugman plays with the idea "that at this point private health insurance is, in large part, a parasitical racket.")

This will all be quite scary for many people. But I for one am very hopeful for the future. Scared to death, but hopeful.

Greetings from Asbury Park. Or, if you prefer,
Darkness on the Edge of Town.

See also Quagmire, What a Cold Civil War Feels Like, What's Wrong with a Nice Little Recession?