Radio Button Biking

I live in Gainesville, known to be a very bike-able town by some standards. Compared to Cambridge, Boston and St. Louis I agree! But it is an exercise in decision making. Is there a town in the USA where you can always be a cyclist in your commute? From start to finish, I have not found a route to my office where I don’t have to decide to be a car or a pedestrian at times. Take a look at this photo; as I am going along, happy on my bike, approaching NE 16th Ave, I must decide to bail out to the sidewalk in my friend Crystal’s driveway (yellow line to the right of the red car merging into the would-be bike lane), or become part of the car-going crowd (2 choices). Here you can see the decision is being made at dusk when drivers get confused about what they are seeing, so if I choose the car radio button, I could be car-sandwich guts!

On my fair street (see photo) – and on many that I have carefully chosen through the historic tree-lined mossy Pleasant Street and 5th Ave neighborhoods to get to work – I must drive in the main car-driving space, but because of low car volume and speed, it feels like I get to be a bike. About 90 percent of my work route is made of streets like this but there are 3 intersections where I must decide to play in traffic, or ride on a sidewalk.

Last year our wise city chose to alter the smooth straight shot of SW 2nd Ave that had become a popular bicycle highway out of it’s biking lane siphoning 100s of bicycling commuters to UF every day. They added pretty landscaped roundabouts that Gainesvillians are still at a loss over how to maneuver. In this photo you can see there is no driveway-to-sidewalk bailout option, but one is forced to enter the circling tumbler of 19-year-old car drivers on cell phones discussing the evening’s greek swamp-swap party who wouldn’t know how to yield at these funny rotaries if they WERE paying attention. I don't bike SW 2nd Ave often anyway, just too many cars.

Here you can see my friend Stacie walking Casey across 16th Ave which allows a bicyclist to remain a bicyclist through the intersection. A rare street indeed.

I’ve been lucky and careful, assuming always that I am invisible (but I admit trying to beat cars to cross a street when in a hurry) and wearing my helmet (most of the time). I know too many friends that have been maimed or killed by mindless drivers and this attitude of “oh we’ll put in a bike lane when it fits here and there” isn’t helping any. Our city council is always planning how to reduce traffic by changing bus routes and exit ramps. If they could safen up and continualize our bike lanes, and provide secure dry bike parking (goto the Netherlands!), we might get more people out of their cars.

(And don’t get me started about the useless bike lanes on campus that are occupied by UPS, Fisher Scientific, hotel shuttle buses and maintenance vehicles every morning. I asked a bike cop why this was allowed, he said it wasn’t allowed, I said yes it is allowed, it happens every morning right in this block where you give tickets to cyclists not making full stops at the stop sign, and he said they aren’t supposed to… I just bike in the road on campus instead of weaving in and out of the bike lane around trucks.)

Check out this nice video on biking culture in Amsterdam. When the bikes get mashed up they get dumped into canals! See here how they recover dumped bikes with a barge! See this site for more serious bike safety/death/injury numbers.