And there was some astute analysis in there, and discussion of exactly how Portland got from where it was to where it is. Something that came up more than once was the role of raucous, extra-legal or semi-legal or illegal actions of the locals. There was mention of a “People’s Department of Transportation” and of course critical mass. I’ve never been a fan of critical mass here in Tucson but I do admit that civilly disobedient challenges to the status quo have played an important role in bringing about change. The Stonewall Riots, for example, and of course the sit-ins in the ’60s that inconvenienced the privileged classes in the Jim Crow South. Why shouldn’t we inconvenience motorists here in Tucson sometimes?

But I see so much progress in Tucson on this issue that I question whether antagonizing drivers is ever going to be the right way to go. Even the Tucson Police Department is finally coming around to acknowledging that bicyclists are legitimate road users who have a right to exist and survive their trip. That’s a big step forward from just four years ago, when cyclists were treated with open disdain and contempt by the TPD traffic division and its supervisor, Sergeant Tim Beam. (Beam used to be supervisor of the traffic investigations unit, but now heads up the photo-radar department and thankfully does not have the involvement with cyclists he once had. His replacement is, I think, a big reason we have seen such a change in how TPD handles motor-vehicle/bicycle collisions and the lighter hand taken with traffic tickets given to cyclists.)

That said, we obviously have a long way left to go. Tucson is plagued by sprawl and wide roads that encourage people to drive fast and go long distances for what they need. And there’s a freeway that needlessly cuts our city in half. It’s going to take some bold vision and planning to reverse course, and that’s where I see us as having a different challenge than Portland had. We need to retrofit whole communities and lifestyles to get people on their bikes. We need to knock it off with the cookie-cutter developments in the hinterlands and we need to start giving people alternatives to their mode of transportation and to where they need to go in the first place. No number of bike lanes will help the person who needs to go three miles in the hot sun to a decent grocery store. That person needs better bus service and a closer grocery store. And they might also appreciate living arrangements that offer an option to live closer to work. Which means more building up and less building out.

How can we make those bigger design changes happen? Is there a role for rabble rousing to solve our problems? Or is it hopeless until gas finally hits $6 or $8 or $15 a gallon?

–Erik Ryberg

Here we are getting outdone by Lithuania. Looks like a pretty nice place to live.

–EBR

I read this New York Times article yesterday about First Lady Michelle Obama’s successful campaign to persuade Wal Mart, Walgreens, and other retailers to provide healthier food choices and reduce the prevalence of “food deserts” in our communities. A food desert is an area where more than 500 people live further than one mile from a reliable source of healthy food.

After thinking about it for a second, I realized that I live right in the middle of such a place. So I went to the USDA’s Food Desert Locator to make sure.

It turns out that an awful lot of Tucsonans live in a food desert, and Arizona ranks nearly five times the national average for urban housing units inside food deserts, at 10.2 percent. Nearly fourteen percent of all Arizonans live in a food desert.

I am no fan of Wal Mart and I’m not going to start shopping there, but I have to salute them for taking this step, and I admire the work Mrs. Obama has done on this issue. I wonder if fixing our food desert problem might go a long ways toward fixing our bike-friendliness problem, too.

–Erik Ryberg

In Portland they don't have bike shops, they have bike galleries.

And consider it confirmed: this place has been so thoroughly bike-ified that it is no longer recognizable as America. There are bikes, and people riding them, everywhere. Virtually all of the bikes are somewhat customized, well-constructed things, and during my entire visit I saw only one person on a bike that did not fit him. Here in Tucson, by contrast, I find myself constantly wincing in imagined knee pain every time someone rides by on a far-too-small box-store mountain “bike.” Not so in Portland — I only saw a handful of bikes that looked to hail from Wal-Mart, and even they fit properly. Perhaps Portland has a superhero who swoops out of the sky and adjusts people’s seatposts for them. If so, I wish he’d pay a visit to Tucson.

Here's how they handle the trolley track problem in Portland

But the interesting thing about Portland is that other than some conspicuous green paint at dicey corners and a whole lot — really a whole lot — of bike racks, their infrastructure doesn’t seem to be any better than ours.

The difference seems to be that in Portland, more so than here, there are lots and lots of places you would want to go, and that arriving by bike poses no problem. Because those places are distributed everywhere, there are probably a lot of them close to wherever it is you live.

Which is a feature of density and design.

According to the internet, Portland has roughly twice the density of Tucson. In other words, there is twice as much space surrounding each person, on average, in Tucson than in Portland. People are twice as far away from one another in Tucson than they are in Portland. And what do you suppose is in all that extra space? Community gardens and art galleries? Nope, asphalt. Asphalt is what is in that space. Wide swaths of it that let us drive like crazy to get through places rather than to them. And huge parking lots to accommodate us once we at long last and great personal risk arrive at the place we think we want to be.

Portland doesn’t do it that way. Much more than we have, they have filled up their spaces with places to sit down, to walk, to shop, and to eat. And the result of course is that you don’t have to go so damned far to get to a place to do those things, and along the way you don’t have to compete with a thousand other people, in increasingly large SUVs and increasingly foul moods, also trying to get to those places.

Which all of course leads to the depressing realization that Tucson’s bike problem is not solvable by bike infrastructure and the Bike Advisory Committee.

We’ve got a bigger problem.

–Erik Ryberg

Everywhere you turn in that town there’s somebody riding by on a bicycle, surrounded by a crowd of motorists scrambling to slow down, move over, and let the cyclist pass. There are bikes and bike racks and bikey things everywhere. Good grief, there is even a Park Tool stand mounted in the airport for assembling your bike!! Advertisements throughout town picture cyclists.

It all seems pretty great at first, to be sitting there sipping cappuccino and watching the bicycles go by, but after awhile I started wondering, is it real? Am I in a real place? For one thing, every single person in town seems to be young, beautiful, rich, white, and eerily happy. They are all riding very hip bikes or driving brand new Mini Coopers. Even the ones smoking cigarettes look healthy in a suspicious kind of way, and it seemed like everyone’s clothes fit them better than ours do in Tucson. I started feeling kind of nervous and began having paranoid thoughts about how maybe there is some kind of army that comes out and clears away all the regular people, and how maybe I wouldn’t make the cut and should clear out of there while I still could. So I did.

Late update: I see now that what was meant to be facetious in this post actually comes off as kind of negative. Let me be clear that I think Portland would actually be a pretty good place to live if it weren’t for the near total lack of winter sunshine and Sonoran hot dogs. –EBR

–Erik Ryberg

After being hired by the cyclist, preparing for trial, and showing up for trial, the case was dismissed because the officer failed to show.

Now, perhaps he was called to some terrible emergency en route to the courthouse. Or perhaps something tragic occurred that prevented him from appearing. I hope not. But it seems to have been happening a lot lately with these tickets, and I am starting to suspect that cyclists are getting ticketed for things the officers wish were illegal, but are not, and which the department then fails to prosecute should the cyclist challenge them.

–Erik Ryberg

I had to tell him that generally speaking, probably no. I do remember a time when people would bring their young kids on the TNBR, but that was back when the routes were a little more carefully chosen and the ride started earlier. Most parents would probably prefer not to guide their nine-year-old down Sixth Street at 9:30 PM on a bicycle.

Why isn’t there a ride in Tucson that would accommodate my friend and his daughter? It seems like there should be one. Right now the best I can think of is the annual Ciclovia and the BICAS bike-in movie rides.

–Erik Ryberg

Readers of this Website know that I have been very critical of TPD since I started it back in 2007. In fact, the whole reason I did start it was my frustration at TPD officers who were not citing motorists for collisions with cyclists that were demonstrably the fault of the motorist. Over time I also became a critic of their failure to distinguish assaults on cyclists from the several hundred run-of-the-mill assaults that occur every month.

And something that really irked me was their using State safety grant money to pay themselves overtime to stake out likely four-way stops and ticket cyclists who didn’t put a foot down at the stop sign.

So now comes word via www.tucsonvelo.com, first, that TPD will actually be using this year’s safety grant to target wrong-way riders and cyclists riding at night without lights. That is a huge improvement in my opinion.

But now this, also from tucsonvelo:

In addition to the information in the previous story, Skeenes said they are using plain-clothes bicycle officers who are are being followed by an unmarked police car looking for drivers who violate the three-foot law.

Skeenes said bicycle officers often get more room than regular cyclists, but said cars do pass too closely occasionally.

According to Skeenes, the bicycle officers often can not catch up to cars. The unmarked police car allows the vehicles to be caught to cite the driver.

I’ve been pleading for this kind of thing for years now (one example), but never thought it would actually happen.

Seems there’s been a real shift in TPD’s attitude. If they follow through, I salute them. They have historically been the one seemingly insurmountable hurdle in dragging Tucson into the class of truly “bike friendly” communities.

–Erik Ryberg

I reviewed his police report, and found that the officer noted that the cyclist’s inattention was the cause of the collision. The driver, by contrast, was recorded as having “taken no inappropriate action.”

Carry on.

–Erik Ryberg

. . . we don’t have great examples in town yet except for parts of 3rd Street and University Blvd. That facility only has two out of the five core elements that make up a bike boulevard. We have some work to do on that corridor to prioritize bikes better in removing some stop signs, adding better wayfinding signage, adding pavement markings and in calming traffic better. The two core elements that it has today are the bike/pedestrian signals to help cross busy roads and it has pretty low traffic volumes.

The same recipe should work well on other local streets given that not everybody in town lives off of 3rd Street. We have over 600 miles of bike lanes in Tucson, yet only 96 miles of residential bike route. Most of the 96 miles lack the five core elements that make up a bike boulevard. Tucson’s urban core is as dense as Portland’s neighborhoods where bike boulevards are thriving (both at about 5,000 people per square mile). These residential bike routes should be upgraded. If we can do that we might then some new riders out on the streets.

Anyway, below is how Boulder, now a “Platinum” bike-friendly city, does it.

EBR