Bikes, bikes, bikes

If you haven’t read Joe Wos’s screed against bike lanes in the Forum section of Sunday’s P-G, you might find it interesting.  The real purpose of bike lanes, in his (humorous?) opinion, is to allow “white men with bushy beards and black-rim plastic glasses a quicker way to get Downtown to play their banjos on street corners.”  The guy just isn’t in our corner.  So his arguments are:

• “a study in Helsinki showed bike paths to be more dangerous than sharing roads, and a study in Vancouver that reported a decrease in business along bike paths.”  I don’t doubt that there are such studies, but I’ll bet there are plenty of others contradicting them.  Especially the latter- again, I don’t doubt that some bike paths experience a decrease in at least some types of business, for some period of time- but I would be very surprised if, overall, the presence of bike paths didn’t have very positive economic impacts on the local area as a whole.
• “Safety concerns are pointed to as the main issue driving the introduction of bike lanes, yet Pittsburgh requires neither helmets for bicyclists over 12 nor bicycle licensing or registration.”  OK Joe, your point is….. that this means we shouldn’t develop bike paths?
• “the next step is to cut the “ittsburgh” from Pittsburgh and replace it with “ortland””.  Horrors- the dirty word, Portland!
• “Bicyclists have taken to fat-shaming our city, claiming health and environmental benefits as well as the moral high ground.”  Oh, give me a break.
• “Make no mistake; this is partly about race. It is about white privilege and entitlement.”  Aha! The RACE CARD.  Could it be that poorer folks don’t have access to trails as often as the more affluent, and so aren’t out there as often?  Nah- it’s simply that those hipster bike Nazis are racists.
• The one major point he makes is, in my opinion, very valid: good public transportation is more important than bike lanes.  And here’s another bet:  the great majority of bicyclists would agree with that.  But of course he is likely making a misleading argument for the simple reason that good public transportation systems are so expensive, and bike lanes so relatively inexpensive, that developing the lanes has virtually no negative affect on the whole public transportation system.

So it’s encouraging to see that he caught a LOT of online flak.