Well, it’s National Bike Week and I noticed that the League of American Bicyclists has proclaimed Tucson and the eastern Pima County region a “Gold Level Bicycle Friendly Community.” Hmm.
It looks good on paper, but I’m not convinced. A key factor that seems to be missing from their criteria is the existing driver attitude toward bicyclists. Infrastructure and public education programs are great, but the message doesn’t seem to be getting across to many local drivers (as evidenced by their behavior on the road). I have seen bicyclists cut off, tailgated and verbally assaulted by drivers; news stories on auto vs. bicycle fatalities are sadly frequent fodder for the evening news.
Never mind the fact that bicycle theft seems to be a UA area pastime. My locked bike was stolen out of my backyard (!) several years ago, so it does make it difficult to enjoy the city’s bike paths.
If this is “friendly”, I shudder to think of what’s going on in the Bronze cities.
What do you think?
This article appears in May 17-23, 2007.
A close friend of mine was knocked off her bike by a motorist, an older woman who blamed my friend for “coming out of nowhere” (i.e. following the rules of the road). My friend ended up with a pinched disc in her vertebrae….I don’t know the medical details, but she needed to have surgery. The end result was a lifetime of shooting pain down her spine and legs, eventually resulting in an addiction to pain killers. All this because some old woman couldn’t be bothered to keep her eyes open for bicyclists sharing the road. So yeah, I concur. On top of that, I had a very nice 15-speed bicycle stolen from the UA campus. Bike theft is a cottage industry there. All of this said, I can’t think of any other cities that are better for bicyclists, and Tucson probably has extra advantage due to lack of snow or frequent rain.
Radical infrastructure changes at major intersections will help more than education programs. But that’s costly, so forget it.
Cyclists who commute should probably use sidestreets and neighborhood streets — won’t add much time or distance to the commute. It’s not fair but it’s smart.
Cyclists who ride for recreation should do so early (like 5 or 6 a.m.). Most do anyway.
Complaints about bikes being stolen from UA or backyards are irrelvant to the issue. All kinds of things get stolen all the time from all kinds of places in all kinds of cities. It’s not fair and it’s not nice and friendly.
Bike paths like Rillito RiverWalk, Mountain Ave. and other places = good
Most of Tucson = bad
It’s just that our city is not fully bicycle friendly. This is due in part to its expansive nature (took me an hour once going from Oracle and Orange Grove down to Campbell and Ft. Lowell – ticked off my friends in a car with that one b/c they waited like 40 min.).
It is also due to roads like Grant and Speedway with relatively narrow bike lanes combined with heavy traffic density.
However, good weather probably notched up the Old Pueblo’s rating.
Incidentally, if you’re on Facebook, see this group: http://arizona.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2208023542
Hey Tucson Bikers: MASS UP!!! Gather and ride at your monthly Critical Mass ride….By biking en masse and (politely & legally) taking over the thoroughfares, Bicyclists can promote the use of bicycles as a viable means of transportation. Critical Mass a reclamation of space, a demonstration to show that the city belongs to people and not machines. When is your Critical Mass Ride!?!?!
It’s true. The so-called gold rating is a sham. Assault and abuse of cyclists are as common, and unpunished, in Tucson as lynchings of blacks were in the south.
The construction and paving needed to link all of the river paths along the Santa Cruz and Rillito should be a top priority to provide cyclists a safe, separate alternative to risking their lives in order to commute from one side of Tucson to the other.
Connecting the River Parks to the new paths in Marana would allow those who choose bicyles for transportation to avoid the chronic I-10 suburban malignancy usually referred to as “road construction”.
It’s sooo uncool to compare mistreatment of bicyclists to the lynching of blacks. What’s next — calling inconsiderate drivers Nazis?