Cambridge’s bike lane mandate hurts us all
An op-ed by former city councillor Jen Devereux (“Wordle this: Roads that allow space for bikes and buses are safer,” Feb. 25) belittles the growing opposition of residents to Cambridge’s bike lane mandate. She likens it to a conspiracy about a word game, castigates opponents’ sky-is-falling rhetoric and admonishes them with therapeutic advice that feelings are not facts and emotions are not truth.
Her call for a return to norms and an end to what she cites as the “bike wars” rings hollow, because she ends her piece with a reminder that two people have been killed by drivers in Porter Square since 2016. This strikes me as ironic, since the bike wars she laments were touched off by cycle advocates using two 2016 cyclist fatalities as a rhetorical battering ram to advance cycle lanes in Inman Square, Cambridge Street and Brattle Street.
Organized cycle advocates doing business as Cambridge Bike Safety used this emotional appeal to shut down debate and short-circuit consideration of financial, environmental and social costs as well as alternative means to improve safety for all. Those who voiced objections were even labeled killers by association with the unfortunate and, by all accounts, blameless drivers in the fatal crashes.
It is said that truth is the first casualty of war. The same can be said of our bike wars. Facts are rarely checked and only valued for their emotional impact or clickability, and the arguments or interests of opponents are dismissed out of hand..
If we want to move forward from this situation, a good first step would be to see it not as a war but a social dysfunction, not zingers flying between partisans, but the equivalent of a heart attack of endemic mistrust in our body politic. It affects everyone and harms us all, because if we don’t trust each other, if we don’t trust our government, we won’t be able to act with the unity we need to meet the existential threats of climate change or the immediate needs of our community. We have to figure out how to work together on common solutions to critical problems, and the bike lane disputes are a distraction from the real work that must be done.
Trust cannot be restored by city councillors tut-tutting citizens for voicing concerns about the bike lanes when the actual impacts become apparent. Indeed, the councillors created the current civic mess by not involving the very people – the body politic – that they represent.
The contentious discourse and public debate that Devereux bemoans could and should have taken place before the mandates in the Cycling Safety Ordinance were enacted in 2019 and strengthened in 2020. She acknowledges that parking is the third rail of politics. Other councillors must also know. Yet to this day the majority of the City Council as well as city administrators play down the scope of the bike lane mandate, branding them as benign bicycle safety improvements. And obligatory public notices of community meetings and installation of new bike lanes were utterly ineffective, leaving most residents and business owners in the dark until the eve of installation.
But now the truth is coming out that the bike lane mandate is a big deal. It touches the third rail of parking. And the City Council’s defective process has created a giant mess.
The mandated lanes make up a 26-mile network covering 10 percent of Cambridges public streets, including Massachusetts Avenue and other major arteries, and must be completed or in construction by 2026.
It will mean removing many hundreds of parking spaces, in some areas half or all of the parking, as well as loading zones needed for deliveries to and pickups from businesses. Costs are not known, but will be substantial. Engineering services alone for the first quick-build lanes, not including implementation, have averaged $160,000 per mile. The full design and build of just one major intersection, Inman Square, is budgeted to cost close to $10 million.
The financial impacts on local businesses are not known because the city has not asked the affected businesses. In places where parking has already been removed, some business owners report that their revenues have dropped 45 percent. As parking access and loading zones are removed over time, there are reasonable fears that commercial dead zones will spread to sections of Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge Street and Huron Avenue where there are now thriving, diverse shopping districts.
Thousands of residents who rely on street parking and access to homes, necessary services and local shops will also be adversely affected.
The scope of the bike lane mandate is so broad and complex that the City Council might reasonably have put it on the ballot for residents to vote on in a municipal referendum before acting on it. Instead, the council passed the mandate after limited public discussion and debate and deputized the director of Transportation, Traffic & Parking to inform the affected residents and owners in community meetings of what cycling safety means for them.
Now that citizens more clearly understand the grand plan and how it affects them, we are starting to see the beginnings of the kind of vigorous, contentious, factual debate that is needed for democracy to work and that we as Americans expect. These stirrings should not be discouraged or tamped down, but rather welcomed as a hopeful beginning of the civil discourse we urgently need to build trust in one other and strengthen our community.
John Pitkin, Fayette Street
John Pitkin has been active in Cambridge civic affairs since 1971 and served as chair of the Cambridge Transportation Forum, which was created by the City Council and city manager to coordinate citizen participation in transportation planning in 1972.
Costs are not known, effect on business is not known, long term effect of loss of parking is not known… so let’s be aggressively against any change? I’m confused by the point of this article and the hollow argument it presents.
Bike lanes improve safety for all rode users, cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers. Less people driving and more people walking is better for our health, environment, and long term well being.
The world as a whole, not just Cambridge, is very polarized and trying to complain about it in relation to bike lanes completely misses all sorts of other larger societal issues.
There have been hundreds of people hit by motor vehicles while riding bikes in Cambridge since 2015. This is open data, all available right here: https://data.cambridgema.gov/Public-Safety/Police-Department-Crash-Data-Updated/gb5w-yva3/data
And some people have been killed, yes.
Unfortunately I can’t use that as an argument for safer streets, because this a “rhetorical battering ram,” an “emotional appeal,” and therefore invalid. So let’s pretend I didn’t say that.
One could point out that a bunch of elected city councilors passed the first ordinance, ran again, mostly got re-elected, and then extended the ordinance, and then ran again, and then mostly got re-elected, but apparently getting elected three times is in a row and passing legislation isn’t democratic enough, so therefore that’s an invalid argument. So let’s pretend I didn’t mention that either.
I should also add that bringing up the cost of Inman Square reconstruction is completely irrelevant:
1. The ordinance timeline calls for quickbuilds. Quickbuilds are vastly cheaper than full reconstructions, that’s one of the benefits.
2. Inman Square was not part of the CSO timeline, it was a project approved by the council before that, as the author well knows, having attempted (and failed) to sue the city to stop it.
3. The only places that will have some more expensive construction for bike lanes are stretches of Mass Ave south and north of Porter (and this will require a vote by city council to approve it). The goal being to keep more parking! The other exception is streets that would be reconstructed anyway as part of the city’s ongoing road maintenance (in order to re-pave roads and sidewalks), for example River St.. Since these would be reconstructed anyway, they are expensive projects regardless of bike lanes, and are budgeted through the normal capital budget as they have been for decades.
Bike lanes are great, but rollout has been terrible. I’m unclear why they have to remove parking on mass ave near businesses, rather than create bike throughways on streets like oxford, somerville ave and orchard, where parking does not affect businesses nearly much? A referendum would have been a better choice, along with more planning and input.
The testimony from numerous small businesses about the devastating impact of the city’s ill-thought-out removal of parking is compelling. A city cannot thrive if it destroys the small businesses which are crucial to livable neighborhoods. Bicycle safety is an important issue but using it as a battering ram to destroy existing patterns of transportation and business is counterproductive. We need a process with genuine neighborhood input. At every city-sponsored “community meeting” that I have attended, the decisions have already been made and the only purpose of the meeting is to inform the community of how the plans by the City Manager, Transportation Dept etc. will be implemented.
I find it ironic that John Pitkin, a man who has allegedly spent most of his adult life fighting climate change, is now spending his time (3 op-eds in the last year) fighting against a carbon free form of transportation that has broad support in the city.
Note that Pitkin is not “fighting against a carbon-free form of transportation.” There is general agreement that promoting bicycle transport and bicycle safety is a good goal. The issue is the inflexibility of a mandate that creates severe harm to neighborhoods and businesses, and high-handed approach taken by the City Manager and Transportation Department. With good community input, it should be possible to extend protected bike lanes while also protecting business access and neighborhoods.
“The financial impacts on local businesses are not known because the city has not asked the affected businesses.”
Some understandably risk-averse business owners have a model that works (for them) and they’re scared of it changing with no obvious benefit (to them). But that doesn’t suggest they have a better understanding of current or future impacts.
Because we actually do know that protected bike lanes don’t kill businesses. We know that because where protected bike lanes have been implemented, in cities all over the world and right here in the US, they have not, in fact, killed businesses.
Cambridge is a special place, but it’s not so special that we ought to dismiss evidence from other cities as to the effects of trading some parking for safe, climate-friendly infrastructure like protected bike lanes. The effects are more biking (which means cleaner air, lower emissions, and less traffic for those who do drive), no or slightly positive impacts to most businesses, and, crucially, reduced loss of life and limb for cyclists, pedestrians, and even drivers.
It’s not like there’s no research on this. There is research, and it supports the idea that protected bike lanes save lives and are perfectly compatible with a vibrant local business scene. There is no reason to believe these changes will harm businesses, and there is every reason to believe they will save lives and provide a host of other public benefits.
Lastly, there has been terrible communication about these changes, but not from the city. It’s come in the form of flyers and social media posts spreading blatant misinformation (e.g. the flat-out false claim that ALL PARKING will be removed on Mass Ave) that continues circulating even after repeated correction. Getting people riled up over alarmist lies really does harm our civic discourse. So the people doing that should stop. Please.
Can we hear some discussion about how all this affects seniors, many of who cannot or choose not to ride bikes? The solutions of our problems should accommodate all important segments of population and not ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’.