Still looking for a New Year’s resolution for your city? For inspiration, look to this short from Clarence Eckerson at Streetfilms. It shows the remarkable before-and-after transformation of several streets and intersections in New York City over the last several years.
Eckerson has been documenting conditions on the city’s streets since the 1990s, and he has a huge archive of footage. Here, he juxtaposes images of key New York locations before, during, and after radical redesigns that took place under the jurisdiction of the Bloomberg administration’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan. Eckerson shows the transformation of Times Square, Herald Square, the Brooklyn waterfront, the Queensboro Bridge, and several other formerly car-choked areas that are now havens for human beings on foot and on bicycles.
If you’ve been walking or riding a bike in these places over the years, you know how profound the changes wrought by Sadik-Khan’s policies have been. But now that New Yorkers have begun to get used to more humane streets in many parts of the city, it’s startling to see just how stark the contrast is. It makes you wonder, how did people accept the previous status quo?
Bill de Blasio’s new transportation commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, has a tough act to follow. Yesterday, before de Blasio’s inauguration, she was outside City Hall meeting with members of Make Queens Safer, Make Brooklyn Safer, and other street safety advocates, who were rallyingin support of the new mayor’s ambitious “Vision Zero” plan to eliminate traffic fatalities in the city by 2024. It was an early indication that we won’t be going back to these “before” pictures of New York streets any time soon.
I’ve reported before on so-called conservatives, including the crack sniffing mayor of Toronto, waging war against bicyclists.
The Tea Party is particularly suspicious of bikers – because bikers are Bolsheviks, right? I mean, you start opening streets to foot traffic, pretty soon you’ll be legalizing marijuana and coming after our white women.
It’s a little more nuanced than that, but not much.
But the likely Republican candidate for governor of the state, Tea Party darling Dan Maes, thinks the bike sharing program is the first step to a sinister U.N. takeover, according to comments reported in the Denver Post.
Well, maybe not the bike program in particular, but the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, of which Denver — and 15 other Colorado cities, and hundreds of U.S. cities — is a member.
Maes said that Denver mayor John Hickenlooper — his likely Democratic opponent in November — was “converting Denver into a United Nations community”:
“At first, I thought, ‘Gosh, … what’s wrong with people parking their cars and riding their bikes?’ But if you do your homework and research, you realize ICLEI is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.”
He added, “This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms.”
In the United States, response to many issues falls along political party lines, including taxes, guns, abortion – and now cycling, according to some commentators.
Mother Jones, the self-professed “news organization that specializes in investigative, political and social justice”, published a story earlier this year with the straight-to-the-point headline: “The GOP Hates Bikes.” In this piece, author Stephani Mencimer noted two cases where Republican lawmakers drove anti-bicycle agendas.Mencimer cited the examples of Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who had looked to cut transportation funding for bike paths and pedestrian trails, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who had looked to cut spending in the nation’s capital, including outlay on a bike-sharing program.
So, is the Republican Party truly anti-bike, as Mother Jones alleges? John Forester, cycling transportation engineer and bicycle advocate, notes that there are still many traffic laws in America that discriminate against cyclists and “neither party has expressed interest in repealing these laws”. However, he admits: “One can list the issues regarding bicycling on which major American political parties differ.”
Many US cities have seen vast improvements in cycling infrastructure in recent years, including better bike paths, and Forester credits this to party lines. “Democrats like greater urban density and centralization – the opposite of the historical trend – because they believe it’ll reduce motoring and increase bicycle transport,” he tells BikeRadar. “Republicans have a stronger preference for suburban living, with its decentralization, and wouldn’t change for the purpose of increasing bicycle transport.”
This isn’t always the case, though – New York City made its greatest strides in becoming a bicycle-friendly city under mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, both Republicans. It would seem that in New York at least, politics and bikes don’t necessarily follow the same path. This is backed up by the case of Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat who now resides in Brooklyn, and his wife Iris Weinshall, who formerly served as NYC’s Department of Transportation Commissioner.
During Weinshall’s tenure she was accused of dragging her feet on cycling efforts and more recently, the pair have publically complained about the bike paths in Prospect Park West. Weinshall actually helped organize a group called Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes, with the aim of removing the bike paths. It would seem the pair suffer from a bit of not in my backyard syndrome.
Mitch Berg, the conservative radio talk show host and avid cyclist, feels the perception of the Grand Old Party being anti-bike is down to two things. “I think it’s a little of the ‘Single GOP politician’s statement getting stuck on all conservatives’ bit and a little bit of expanding a facet of conservative opinion, which may or may not be neutral on bikers themselves, that objects to public funding for paying for bike amenities – lanes and the like – out of gas tax receipts.
“I hear that one a lot in the Twin Cities,” Berg adds. “Minneapolis – one of the best bike cities in the country – is constantly complaining about being broke on the one hand, and then spends a lot of money on things like bike lanes and ‘bike co-ordinators’ with full-time salaries.”
Congressman Thomas Petri (R-Wis.) echoes this view. “Plenty of Republicans value the role bikes play,” he says. “What Republicans hate are taxes, which means they don’t always race to build biking infrastructure or view it as a local versus federal responsibility. For my part, I’ve played a major role in building bike paths in my home district. The local reaction to that has been mixed. In any case, the current mood in Congress makes that kind of effort much more difficult.”
Many in Wisconsin do value Petri’s contributions, both at the local and national level. “Representative Petri has had a long history of supporting cycling,” Dave Schlabowske, communications director for the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin, tells BikeRadar. “While Rep (Earl) Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has been the more vocal supporter, Petri has been a little quieter, with the Midwestern attitude.”
Petri’s opinions on cycling closely mirror those of the Democrat Blumenauer, suggesting that cycling is just one part of an overall healthy lifestyle. “Cycling is more rewarding when you’re in good shape, so riding bikes and adopting other healthy behaviors are mutually reinforcing,” he says. “I’ve participated in walking and biking programs at schools in my district to encourage young people to be active and instill habits that will last as they grow older.”
Berg thinks part of the problem is that there’s a “partisan fringe” on both sides that politicizes biking. “Some ‘progressives’ see biking as an attack on the ‘consumption’ lifestyle; some conservatives see ‘bike culture’, as manifested by groups like Critical Mass, to be vapid counterculture pretenders,” he says. “And conservatives who bike take a certain amount of flak – usually but not always good-natured – from other conservatives because of the ‘counterculture’ image that biking has adopted in urban, Democrat areas like the Twin Cities and Portland.”