We all saw the outlandish piece in Friday’s Boston Globe by Brian McCrory suggesting it would be better to remove all bicycles instead of promoting more. Here’s dotriderblog’s response. Doubt it will be run, but hey it felt good to press that send button….
Dear Globe
I expect Brian McCrory’s suggestion that bicycles be banned from all roadways in his piece on Friday was toungue in cheek. Just to start however, his presumption that Boston’s streets were made for cars in most cases is wrong. History shows that downtown was layed out from the cow paths and most of the spoke roads heading out of town were trolley lines. None were ever designed to carry an automobile.
What McCrory also doesn’t seem to realize is that a person on a bike isn’t in a car that takes up ten times the space. He should be rooting for more riders instead of none. If bikes were banned, street traffic in Boston would be a more snarly mess than it is today as riders would be forced back into their cars or onto the T overwhelming both of those modes of transport.
His assault on bike culture is off the mark as well. Certainly the early adopters are folks who are prone to taking chances and if you think they’re bad on a bike chances are they’d be worse in a car. Data from other cities show that as the number and percentage of riders goes up, the rate of accidents and laws broken goes down. Yet another reason Brian should be rooting for more bikes not none.
It’s too bad his rant will ad fuel to the fire from those who yell at riders to ‘get off the road’ each and every day. It’s too bad the Globe allowed this rant to run instead of asking McCrory to raise the bar a few notches and look at the issue in a serious manner. If so he would have found the Hubway system to be the half-baked, out of sequence, exclusionary tourist-based system that it is. He might have pointed out the woeful lack of biking infrastructure that should have been in place before any bike share plan was considered. He would have discovered the tin ear the Mayor’s Bike Program has to the residential neighborhoods who are getting little in terms of resources for bike infrastructure at the expense of the development of Hubway.
There’s a lot of stories surrounding the Hubway system, running a piece suggesting bikes be banned didn’t shed light on any of them.
