I bike to work!

During 2010 Dorchester received:

1. Repainted (partial) bike lane in Franklin Park.

2. Uncompleted bike lane and sharrow on Talbot Avenue

3. Uncompleted bike lane on Columbia Road

4. Bike lane on Blue Hill from Morton to Talbot and from Columbia to Warren

5. Sharrows south of Peabody Square on Dot Ave.

This is added to American Legion Highway sharrow/lanes and lanes in Franklin Park and Old Road from 2009.

Why uncompleted? The painters ignored the engineers and didn’t put in some of the characters on Talbot Avenue. Quite a number of stretches of Columbia Road received the same treatment. We went 9 weeks of informing the city of same to finally get a notice that the painting was done for the season.

Oh yeah! And NO SIGNS!

What we missed.

1. All of Bowdoin Street was resurfaced…no lane or sharrow.

2. Park Street from Washington to Geneva was surfaced. No sharrow.

3. Melville Ave surfaced. No sharrow

4. Olney Street surfaced. No lane (by a school).

5. No progress on the “Missing link’

So show up at the Bike event on Thursday if it isn’t snowed out and ask for SIGNS to accompany all the nice new lanes around town. They can’t ticket drivers and scofflaw parkers without the right signs!

We’ll continue to advocate for better bike infrastructure, educational services and community support for Dorchester.

We’ll try not to flame anyone here or on fb or any public forum. That’s not to say we won’t present the facts that might make someone look bad…

We’ll try not to judge anyone. We’ll just present the facts and let the readers make their own judgement.

Generally our advocacy will be more muted than last year. However, ANYONE is free to quote me, use photos from the flickr/dotbike site or my break down of the sites statistics to make a point.

We’ll try to find things we can be FOR rather than things we’re AGAINST… After this post we’ll try to avoid negativity. But not until after this last spout…

We still believe the Boston Bike Share is a collosal waste of time talent energy and money. Had that effort been expended toward completing the as yet other uncompleted tasks in Boston we’d be that much further along. The infrastructure development progress has been good but:

1. We chronicled the uncompleted paint jobs. We have yet to mention there aren’t ANY street signs to accompany the new sharrows in Dorchester or elsewhere that I’ve seen for that matter…

2. Parks still thinks it is doing us a favor to do a half assed job.

3. Today is the only day we’ll say anything negative about Bike Share in 2011 UNTIL it actually is rolled out and failing (as predicted here and in any other public forum over the past three years).

4. The fact that bike share is already closing in on 2 years too late just reveals how pie in the sky and unrealistic an idea it was.

5. Who is the Metropolitan Planning Council anyway? We had begun an effort to get a PUBLIC HEARING on the bike share since there has NEVER been any request for public input. The Boston City Council should be ashamed of itself for letting this travesty go on. Anyway, if there is a hearing it won’t be due to my efforts. Feel free to use this idea though and contact me for support of same idea. You know I’ll be there if there is a hearing.

That’s it for now! Happy New Year! Happy peddling! Remember Dorchester when advocating!