Andy Gee asked:
Anyone else have any neighborhoods where the biking goes from
wonderful to miserable by crossing a street?
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You bet. In my hometown of Eugene, Oregon, we have one of the best
systems of onstreet bike lanes and offroad paths in the country. There
is also a strong bicycling culture and the attitude of motorists is
generally good towards it.
However, just to the East, across Interstate 5, all this is
reversed. In this other little city, whose name I don't use in polite
company, the only bikepath that existed for years, was built and
maintained by the Eugene water & electric agency, along a powerline of
theirs. They've built a couple of their own short bikepaths in recent
years, mainly for the purpose of qualifying for federal road funding.
There's just a few bicycle commuters here, but they run a gauntlet
through a crush of assorted and inconsiderate rednecks on the single
connecting street through the town. There's other busy streets that are
narrow and without shoulders, that are the only routes a cyclist can use
to go many places. I've been a member of a bicycle coalition in Eugene,
that acts as an advisory group to that city. I've suggested that we
extend the coalition to include this other town, to help improve things
there, but no one in either place wants anything to do with this idea.
There's been a couple of people in the public works dept. of this
other town who have tentatively
secured some funding for a couple of major bikepath connectors, so there
is a glimmer of hope.
But, they are without much support in these projects from the public and
are riding on a steep incline, to get anything done. In the last twenty
years, funding was secured and planning completed here, for two big
bikepath projects. One was for a 3-mile path along a millstream,
connecting two parks. The other was for a 35-mile rails-to-trails path
to another town. In both cases, property owners along parts of the
routes exerted their influence on politicians and the bikepaths were
permanently cancelled. These residents didn't want the kind of
riff-raff who ride bicycles being able to pass by the rear of their
properties. Never mind the kind of people who were driving motor
vehicles in large numbers by their frontsides.
As the thread implies, a huge cultural difference
can exist on opposite sides of a narrow dividing zone.
Steve McDonald