Will more rabble rousing turn Tucson into Portland?
Friends of mine somehow pried me out of my house yesterday to attend Grist columnist Elly Blue’s presentation at El Mercado last night. It was an old-fashioned road show, with a great presentation about bikes and economics followed by some short movies, mostly extolling and scrutinizing Portland’s biketopia. There was good food, too. It was a fun evening.
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
September 16th, 2011 at 1:06 pm
For one thing, Tucson could eliminate its minimum parking requirements that create dead zones and burden business owners and hurt the economy and social-engineer people into driving, and replace them with modern laissez-faire parking management technology like SFPark to prevent parking shortages.
September 18th, 2011 at 7:38 am
[...] Will more rabble rousing turn Tucson into Portland? [...]
September 19th, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Tucson never was where Portland was, so matters of how Portland got from where it was to where it is are not necessarily generalizable to Pima County or Tucson. Maybe for some areas of Tucson, but not the whole sprawling mess. And, the whole sprawling mess is not unique to Tucson.
Rabble rousing’s best chance for success as it relates to cycling lies in micro issues, neighborhoods where population density and bike use are highest: remove that nonsense stop sign, repave sensibly, calm the traffic, tell your local businesses about bike racks,BICAS go mobile and reach out to sprawl…find a constituency out there, especially with kids. These little things can mean a lot if there is patient sustained determined effort.
But rabble rousing cannot correct sprawl.
Sprawl is one of those USA things that is too big to fail (TBTF). Sprawl has been around for many decades and is not going away. There will be no mass exodus from the suburbs or the exburbs to the inner cities no matter how much sense that might make. Because sprawl is TBTF, the most change one will get is remediation: improved bus transpo to jobs, improved shopping nearby, perhaps consideration of going car-lite by people who have chosen or have been brainwashed to live in sprawl. They’ll have to do their own rabble rousing. It will likely take decades. Keep in mind that Republican Mitt Romney was recently summoned to the Old Pueblo by…by an iconic folksy Old Pueblo car dealer. Serious, fundamental change won’t be easy, cheap or even possible, especially for the victims.
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Complicated things that aren’t fully-understood:
“Car Lovers Like Mass Transit More Than They Think”
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2011/09/dear-car-lovers-you-riding-transit-more-you-think/104/
“Why America Can’t Have Nice Things”
http://networkedblogs.com/mRmbR