I liked this week’s comment because it comes from the reader every writer wants — a person at the receiving end who puts some work into it. Charley read a wonky article (The Alpenrose hearing: Nollan and Dolan), clicked into an even wonkier critique by Keith Liden, and then made all that information his own and thought about it.
He collected his ideas (which went beyond Nollan/Dolan or Liden’s Alpenrose critique) and took the discussion to a different level.
Here’s the big picture from Charley:
Keith Liden’s prepared testimony was very readable, and seemed convincing. Impressive work.
One comment (about the City wondering why more people don’t ride bikes) made me think of both the City’s elected leaders and the City’s voters in a new light: I think *both* the elected leaders and voters are overstating their support for policies related to bicycle safety, pedestrian safety and CO2 reductions.
I’d argue that we have a lot of preference falsification around these issues.
The way I see it, the elected leaders are representing voters’ preferences pretty well: most voters like the sound of “let’s fight climate change,” and like the sound of “pro-bike,” but aren’t personally invested in either cause.
I mean that literally. What amount of their own money would voters be willing to spend on climate mitigation? Voters are more enthusiastic about taxing “rich people” or “corporations” to fight climate change, but directly taxing the middle class is clearly unpopular.
Similarly, many local people like bikes and want safety for riders… but clearly there’s a good bit of local pushback against new bike lanes, or other safety treatments.
Surely, some of these are not the same people! I mean, many people who oppose bike lanes also don’t give a hoot about bike riders’ safety.
However, I think there’s some overlap: how often do we hear someone say “I’m a bike rider, too, but bike lanes are not a good fit for my street because we need on-street parking.”
As regards elected leaders, I’ve never gotten the sense that any are *particularly* invested in cycling as a solution to our problems.
Many are of course happy to sign off on some amount of funding for safety improvements, and some have even gone to bat on controversial issues (Sam Adams over BES funding, iirc; Hales on off-road cycling). But more often we have examples of public support and behind-the-scenes disinterest or opposition (Hardesty, Mapps, Fritz).
Perhaps I’m being too cynical about this. Even if it’s not as strong as preference falsification, I’d still argue that politicians and voters overstate their support for cycling and climate mitigation. Most local voters want to think of themselves as environmentally-minded citizens, so candidates flatter us by adopting “pro-bike” positions, etc. That’s the mechanism by which the transportation safety hierarchy adopted by the full City Council, but is ignored (as Liden expertly points out) when it comes to accommodating the housing development at Alpenrose.
I do not mean this as some kind of denunciation of rank hypocrisy! I think bike/pedestrian safety and climate mitigation are hard and expensive nuts to crack. There are differences in impact that create entrenched opposition to change, and fully funded solutions would require enormous sums of money.
It’s no surprise that some people feel hopeless, or conversely, that some people maintain a kind of blissful ignorance as to the true costs of either project. Most of us feel “on edge” to one degree or another. Who really feels economically secure? Secure enough to devote a substantial part of our income to climate mitigations? Few people feel physically secure enough to risk commuting by bike, much less give up owning a car.
Even then, we’d still like to see positive change… just as long as it doesn’t cost us too much.
Thank you Charley. You can read Charley’s comment, under the original post.
