man machine

cross posted to Seattle Great City Initiative

This started out as something of a rant. I've been frustrated with a local campaign that I've been peripherally a part of, called Streets for People, part of the Seattle Great City Initiative and now the Seattle Network. The stated campaign philosophy uses the right words, about moving away from auto dominance and making streets better for walking, biking and transit. My experience of it so far, however, is that it is dominated by bicycle enthusiasts. When I first wrote this, I have to admit to actually writing something like "male, testosterone driven, speed obsessed bicycle advocates" because that represents the person who tends to jump down my throat if I dare to suggest that cyclists might control their speed in certain situations. This is of course biased and unfair to the women cyclists who are equally obsessed, but I have hormonal issues of my own and should probably avoid writing this at all. Ah, well, here it is anyway.

If this was still the rant, I would be going on about the difference between people and human powered machines, which is what a bicycle is. They are technologically advanced machines, capable of ever greater speeds, dependent on complicated gearing systems. The speed, and the cyclists speed obsession, is the problem with mixing these speed machines on the same paths with people on foot. Of course, the real speed machine, the deadly one, is the automobile. Giving streets, or a larger share of them, to people on bicycles would benefit pedestrians as well, by getting the bikes off the sidewalks.

That's enough ranting now, really. The point is that this campaign should be about finding common interests, getting the single-issue advocates out of their silos and combining efforts between interest groups, to greater effect. We seem to be reinforcing and increasing the number of silos instead. When I became unhappy with Streets for People, I started looking around. There's another group called Safe Walks, which sounds good, but the focus is on building sidewalks in the annexed suburbs. I'm not really interested in advocating for more infrastructure for single-family neighborhoods, although they do have a deadly serious problem for people trying to walk along arterial roads. I'd still rather reduce and slow down the cars, to make streets safer for people, but those neighborhoods are too heavily car dependent.

Then there was the big push to renew the parks levy, which I have to say I really didn't care about at all. My streets are my open space, and downtown parks are the receptacle of problems that have not found solutions, havens for the disenfranchised and for drug dealers. I have my own silo of interests, and our public right of way contains all of them. Open space, sunlight and air circulation, park and playground, place for green infrastructure, for cyclists, walkers and transit, it's all there in the street, if only we could combine our efforts to take back a share of it. This would-be rant is probably counter-productive, and more indicative of my own faulty biases than of possible solutions, but it seems that one element is at the root of the goals of many of these groups, and that is taking back space, public space, from dedicated car usage. One element, one goal. Could we all get obsessed with that one?



(A final note on obsession: The title of this post is from a song by Kraftwerk, whose lead singer was so obsessed with cycling that, after being in a coma from a terrible bike accident, his first words upon awaking were to ask for his bicycle.)