Stupid Bike Tricks, Part One

As a bike commuter, I get awfully tired of seeing stupid cyclists. As a social scientist, I am amazed at how people use space. This picture is a classic example of a stupid bike rider, and an interesting example of how Boiseans differ from Portland residents.

So what is happening here is that this guy has just come barreling down the sidewalk off of Crescent Rim. Mind you he is 1) on the wrong side of the street; 2) on the sidewalk which is for PEDESTRIANS; 3) not wearing a helmet (I too often am guilty of this as well). But the big problem for me here is that that sidewalk gets a lot of pedestrian use, and it is SO DANGEROUS when bike riders come hauling ass down that hill yelling ON YOUR LEFT ON YOUR LEFT ON YOUR LEFT and scaring the hell out of pedestrians who are trying to walk to the park, school, Papa Joes, or one of the other businesses down there. Don’t be that guy.

It’s also really interesting to note that you NEVER see this in Portland. Not once in the year that I have been living between Boise and Portland have I seen a bicycle on the sidewalk. Not once. Portlanders have a very well-defined sense of space - cars stay where they should, as do bikes and pedestrians.

Where in the Treasure Valley . . . are all the bike lanes?

I’ve been commuting via bicycle for the last year-and-a-half, and I have people say to me all the time something to the effect of, “I don’t know what the hell you cyclists are complaining about, there are bike lanes ALL OVER downtown and the rest of Boise.” As my recent twitpic tirade showed, however, that is not the case:

No bike lanes on Broadway

No bike lanes on Idaho Street in downtown Boise

No bike lanes on University Drive

So if there’s no bike lanes on the main east-west thoroughfare in downtown Boise, and none on the major streets near the University where HUNDREDS of students use bicycles to commute, just where the heck are they?

Well, they are currently few and far between, but ACHD is actually working to rectify that with a nearly 300 page plan to better prepare Ada County to truly be a safe and decent place to cycle (instead of just paying lip service to safe cycling as we have done in the past):

The new plan, if/when enacted, will finally resolve the issue of really having no bike lanes downtown. Below is the map showing current bike lanes in the downtown core:

Not a pretty picture. All we have now is bike lanes on portions of Main, and Ninth. The rest of downtown is a crap shoot. It doesn’t help also that 1) The city of Boise controls NONE of this; and, 2) that CCDC actually owns Eighth Street. Throw ACHD into the mix and you have a few too many cooks in the road building kitchen. The proposed bicycle lanes for downtown looks a little better:

The ACHD proposal adds lanes on Eighth and Tenth. This is a good start, but I still think we need to continue talking about our transportation system and what exactly we want it to accomplish.

For my part, I don’t want traffic moving quickly through downtown - that is only one vision of what our streets should do. My sympathies don’t lie with the guy who works downtown and lives in Meridian, who just wants to get his SUV out of here, up the Connector, and into his three car garage in a non-descript subdivision where he knows none of his neighbors.

Vision #2 is different: People staying downtown spending money, socializing, networking, and coming up with new ideas. A downtown that is cool, clean, diverse, and SAFE for people to wander, ride, sit, contemplate, enjoy.

These are our streets. The engineers we employ at ACHD build our transportation grid based upon what kind of downtown, city, and region we choose to live in. The new bicycle plan is a great start on implementing vision #2. Let’s keep it up.