Alexandria Bike Wars

[jrenaut]

Wow, that was pretty funny. I just don’t understand that kind of anger.

It’s also amazing that he actually argues that driver lawbreaking makes the street too dangerous for bike lanes, but doesn’t seem to think rampant lawbreaking that endangers the lives of others is a big deal.

[jabberwocky]

I didn’t know that cyclists didn’t have lives, jobs or families. And also that a 5 percent grade is “very steep”.

[lordofthemark]

@jrenaut 80154 wrote:

Wow, that was pretty funny. I just don’t understand that kind of anger.

It’s also amazing that he actually argues that driver lawbreaking makes the street too dangerous for bike lanes, but doesn’t seem to think rampant lawbreaking that endangers the lives of others is a big deal.

Eh, guy was over the top before, and he’s lost, so he’s venting. This war is over.

OTOH, he’s gotten a lot of play in national conservative periodicals he couldn’t have gotten otherwise. Like Warhol said ….

But I love this

“They also don’t have lives, jobs, families.”

Can’t wait to tell my wife that I can now ride (and wherever I want, not commute) every day, cause I don’t need a job and don’t have a family to spend time with.

[PotomacCyclist]

It’s scary that some people have so much anger about bikes, cyclists, bike lanes, bikeshare and bike infrastructure in general. Since these people are so forceful in “defending” single-occupant car driving (from what threat, I don’t know), it’s safe to assume that they are frequent car drivers. That self-entitled and aggressive approach to driving is noticed by other users of the roads (cyclists and other drivers, along with pedestrians in crosswalks and on sidewalks).

Some of them have the ongoing notion (unchanged from the 1960s or 1970s apparently) that cycling is somehow a hippie thing, limited to college radicals, hipsters and anarchists. But then when you read about real-life cyclists and see them, you notice that there are a lot of cyclists of all ages, occupations and backgrounds.

Unfortunately, rational discussion won’t sway some of these hardcore individuals. But maybe it can inform the larger group of reasonable people who can be important for budget and infrastructure decisions at the local, state and national levels.

In the meantime, I continue to hope that I don’t encounter one of these angry ideological drivers, mostly for fear of them trying to kill me with their cars. I guess they might call it legitimate homicide, or something like that.

[Guus]

Wow, so much anger! It is a little scary indeed.

[dkel]

@Guus 80181 wrote:

Wow, so much anger! It is a little scary indeed.

What did you expect? All cyclists are commies. Everybody knows that. :rolleyes:

[Steve]

When I was young, we used to play a game in our neighborhood called “Bike Wars.” It was basically tag on bikes, and once you got within a bike length of someone they were considered “tagged.” It involved a lot of hiding, riding thru neighbors’ yards, etc.

Those bike wars were more fun than these ones…

[Justin Antos]

@jabberwocky 80156 wrote:

I didn’t know that cyclists didn’t have lives, jobs or families.

You all have families? Huh. I thought you arrived by stork.

[eminva]

Wait a minute, is this serious? I thought it was tongue in cheek (he’s no Jonathan Swift, but intended as satire).

Liz

[ShawnoftheDread]

Wow, I clicked through expecting some real invective. That was pretty mild — in fact, I’ve called cyclists much worse than that.

[TwoWheelsDC]

@ShawnoftheDread 80266 wrote:

Wow, I clicked through expecting some real invective. That was pretty mild — in fact, I’ve called cyclists much worse than that.

Just the other day I yelled “Vichyite Collaborator!!” at a guy who shoaled me….so yeah, I don’t get what the big deal is.

[lordofthemark]

@ShawnoftheDread 80266 wrote:

Wow, I clicked through expecting some real invective. That was pretty mild — in fact, I’ve called cyclists much worse than that.

“City Council is also busy repopulating Alexandria with their Pajama-Boy supporters.”

I guess it wasn’t so much vitriolic, as just completely bizarre. Like what is the dude smoking?

“We’re an old historic city, and that’s just what Council hates.”

I mean this has to be a joke about the Council, right? Also its interesting to note that in colonial times, everyone had parking spaces for their second cars. No one lived in mini-apartments, they all had SFHs with at 2000 Sq ft, right? And everyone lived in households consisting of a married couple, two kids, and a dog. Even the slaves, the indentured servants, the sailors, I mean EVERYBODY right?

“Instead, they keep approving condos with mini-apartments, six-story boxes with a Trader Joe’s on the ground floor and bicycle racks in the basement.”

Sigh. Must.Finish.Decluttering.And.Move.To.Alexandria.Now.

[cvcalhoun]

They helpfully fixed that one for me, by magically causing me not to be married to my wife the moment I cross the Potomac. Umm, not that I’m bitter or anything…

@lordofthemark 80157 wrote:

Eh, guy was over the top before, and he’s lost, so he’s venting. This war is over.

OTOH, he’s gotten a lot of play in national conservative periodicals he couldn’t have gotten otherwise. Like Warhol said ….

But I love this

“They also don’t have lives, jobs, families.”

Can’t wait to tell my wife that I can now ride (and wherever I want, not commute) every day, cause I don’t need a job and don’t have a family to spend time with.

[brendan]

@cvcalhoun 80285 wrote:

They helpfully fixed that one for me, by magically causing me not to be married to my wife the moment I cross the Potomac. Umm, not that I’m bitter or anything…

[JimK]

Here’s another article by Buckley about the King Street Bike lanes, this one from the 11/8/13 Wall Street Journal. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t think these articles are satire.

Here’s a link (text follows):

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303482504579177811109786586

F.H. Buckley: We Have Not Yet Begun to Fight the Bike Lanes
The bike wars in my little neighborhood are coming soon to a city near you.
By
F.H. Buckley
Nov. 8, 2013 6:31 p.m. ET

My brave little neighborhood of King Street in Alexandria, Va., has calmly met the challenges of the Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War, but now we’re seriously annoyed. What’s bothering us are the bike wars. The city of Alexandria has proposed to take away our street’s parking spaces and replace them with a dedicated bike lane. The preening activists who favor these lanes are in my town, and they will soon come to a neighborhood near you if they’re not there already.

It’s not as though local cyclists favor King Street. It’s a main artery, State Highway 7, that runs for 70 miles east from George Washington’s Alexandria to Patsy Cline’s Winchester in the west. Each day the road conveys 15,000 commuters past my house, traveling from Arlington and Fairfax to their jobs in Old Town or to the Patent and Trademark Office, along a two-lane street only 30 feet wide. Cars speed by, and city buses plow through our red lights at 40 miles per hour.

Our stretch of King Street is also extremely steep. The very few cyclists you do see on this thoroughfare use the sidewalk, as they are permitted to do. Coming up the hill, they rarely move faster than the very few pedestrians, so everyone’s safe.

As for the residents, we’re really attached to our parking spots. We like to tell our friends to drop by anytime. We don’t want to send our plumbers to park a few blocks over, on streets that are already congested. Not a problem, the city tells us. Just get a special parking permit from city hall for visitors. And what about the occasional party? What do we tell our guests? Ah, the city’s street coordinator said, channeling her inner Marie Antoinette, let them get valet parking.
Enlarge Image

Part of the bike brigade in Alexandria, Va. City of Alexandria

Many people on our street are bicyclists, so we’re not antibike. When bicycling, however, we never use King Street. We’ll take the safe side streets that get us to wherever we want to go. We’re also not fabulously wealthy. We don’t hire valets to park cars for our visitors.

But the bike activists are mobilizing the troops. The cycling advocacy blog Wash Cycle published a two-step action plan, calling on proponents to stand up for the lanes by inundating the city council with support. Alexandria Transportation Commissioner Kevin Posey has taken to firing off tweets about how “some neighbors can’t bear the thought of giving up unused parking,” and that opposition to bike lanes represents “a trend where a few wealthy residents oppose projects to benefit middle class consumers.”

The problems of a few hundred Alexandria residents wouldn’t deserve a great deal of attention if all this weren’t part of a growing national movement that pits local homeowners and businesses against cyclists and their trendy allies on city councils. It happened in Washington, D.C., in 2011, when Adrian Fenty’s support for bike lanes helped make him a one-term mayor, and it’s going to happen across Alexandria. Bike wars have also broken out in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, Seattle, Austin and elsewhere.

Forget religion and politics, says New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. What you don’t want to talk about at dinner parties is bike lanes, she told a luncheon in January.

We’re seeing a similar kind of activism in the national “Park(ing) Day” movement. These are open-source events when artists and activists take over a parking space, put a coin in the meter, and for two hours turn the space into a mini-park or gallery. We’ve had them in Alexandria, and they can be a lot of fun, bringing out the tiny anarchist in all of us. What’s behind the movement, however, is an anticar political agenda. The Park(ing) Day Manual tells us the point of the movement is to let people know that “inexpensive curbside parking results in increased traffic, wasted fuel and more pollution.”

Our little squabble illustrates the tactics you can expect to see when the bike wars reach you. Cyclist-commuters may number no more than 2% of the adult American population according to a 2002 report by The Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center, but they are the ones who go to city council meetings. They’ll push for the kind of “Complete Streets” policy that our city adopted, one that gives priority to pedestrians and cyclists over cars.

In the abstract, that will sound innocuous, but when the time for implementation arrives, you’ll find yourself losing your street parking, street by street, as roads are repaved. And parking spaces are just the beginning. As Mr. Posey wrote on the blog Greater Greater Washington, “if we can’t take a few parking spaces, how will we take the traffic lanes?”

When you see the bike activists in your neighborhood, be warned that they tend not to play nice. Our local gang misrepresents their number and talks of assembling a “critical mass” of cyclists who will ride together up King Street. On their blog, one of them urges bicyclists to “ride slowly and smack in the middle of the lane, especially at peak times.”

Come to think of it, if you’ve ever been held up by a cyclist blocking traffic when there was plenty of space on the side of the road, you’ve already participated in the bike wars.

[Author]

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