That’s Good For You, Good For Everyone Else.
Wednesday, May 26, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL
I’m going to talk about bikes today. So I’m going to speak very slowly, so my colleague Dave, “I’ll get out of my car when they pry my cold dead hands from the steering wheel” Addis, will perhaps understand me.
It’s funny about bicycles. When I suggested a while back accommodating them more on local roads, Addis, who has become the leading supporter of the traffic-jammed, suburban status quo, could only think of Bejing or Bombay. Yellow and brown hordes on rusty bicycles jostling for space on dusty roads with chickens and stray dogs yapping at their heels. Who wants that?
A different image comes to my mind. I think of two of the wealthiest and most civilized cities on earth — Amsterdam and Copenhagen. In my travels there, I remember beautiful women in elegant skirts, and men wearing fine linen suits, bicycling along to work or shopping.
All that biking was good for the natives. In Copenhagen, I remember a grandmotherly women blithely pedaling by me as I, on my rented bicycle and anemic calves, struggled to keep up with her.
I think of Seattle — another wealthy, liveable city — where the buses have bike racks and people put up with the steady drizzle to ride bikes everywhere.
Bikes have about them the aura of the childish, the silly and the inconsequential. They needn’t. For trips of a few miles or less, bikes can be the perfect vehicle. They are easy, casual and convenient. Add a rack and you can carry a bag of groceries or a shopping bag.
We have the perfect terrain for bicycling. We are as flat as Holland, with better weather than Seattle or Copenhagen. But we build everything so reflexively for the car, we rule out other ways of getting around.
In Amsterdam and Copenhagen, something like a third of all trips are by bicycles. Last time I checked, Copenhagen planners were hoping to see this rise to 50 percent.
A lot of people using bicycles transforms cities. To state the obvious, it’s a lot easier to accommodate a rack of 10 bicycles in front of a store than a parking lot for 10 cars.
New Norfolk City Manager Regina Williams got this right away when I spoke to her about it. Every person that rides a bike is one not driving a car, she said. It frees up space on streets, and represents another parking space that does not have to be built. There is no reason downtown Norfolk could not have thousands of commuters, shoppers, students coming into downtown every day by bicycle. Older cities, with their densities and finer grained network of streets, are ideal for bicycles.
In Hampton Roads, Virginia Beach should be the worst place to bike and in a lot of ways is. A city built around high-speed corridors like Virginia Beach Boulevard will always have difficulty accommodating a guy on a bike. Still, the city has done a good job of including separate bike paths on some of its newer streets, like South Independence Boulevard around Green Run. It also has a wonderful route from Fort Story all the way out General Booth Boulevard in the newer suburbs.
Norfolk and Portsmouth are lousy places to bicycle. This is a tragedy because it should be the opposite. Their older, straighter and narrower streets with clear, right-angle intersections are safer and better for bicycles. A cyclist can mix with traffic on a Colley Avenue in Ghent, or around Olde Towne, without dread.
But the same cyclist will eventually come to one of the giant, high-speed highways, like Brambleton Avenue or London Boulevard, that have been ploughed through these cities without much thought. Even crossing one of these roads is difficult, much less biking in them.
A perfect example of this is at the corner of Brambleton Avenue and Botetourt Street on the edge of Freemason in Norfolk. You come across the Hague on the lovely footbridge from Ghent, originally built for streetcars, and are then faced with a raging river of highspeed traffic on Brambleton Avenue. No crosswalk. No stoplight. I have seen a dad with two little children, all on bikes, trying to dart their way across this rushing stream without getting killed. I fear someone will be eventually.
In the short term, Norfolk and other planners need to add cross walks, stop lights and other devises to accommodate bikes. In the longer run, planners need to narrow traffic lanes on major highways like Brambleton or Waterside Drive. Narrower traffic lanes slow down cars, and frees up space for bike lanes and on-street parking. Planners need to think about bikes as naturally as they now think about cars.
This isn’t just being nice. The middle-class rides bikes, and if Norfolk and Portsmouth wants more of them, or to keep the ones they have, they need to make it easier for them to pedal places.
Right now, Norfolk thinks about bikes last, if at all.
Why doesn’t the MacArthur Center Mall have any bike racks in front of it? This is such a natural and obvious thing to do, when parking is both tight and charged for, you have to wonder what was on their minds.
One hopeful sign. The redesigned Church Street in Norfolk includes bike lanes, one planner told me. That’s a great start. If we start including bikes in our thinking, there’s no reason we can’t be the Copenhagen of the East Coast. Automobile Addis might never leave his well-cushioned front-seat, but the rest of us would like to now and then.