I live in Edmonton, Alberta. This is both a blessing and a curse. It is geographically one of the least eventful places on Earth. The odds of untimely death or injury in Edmonton has got to be one of the lowest amongst all human population centres. The happiness index and cost-of-living are well within acceptable first-world standards.
The problem was raised by Francis Fukuyama in his now-thoroughly debunked and abandoned treatise, The End of History and the Last Man. Basically, he argued that once people satisfied all of their basic needs, they would run out of things to do and would stop striving for anything greater. The problem with his book is that he reckoned that humanity as a whole had gotten there. Sure, we still have poverty and whatnot, but he argued that we had found the right TEMPLATE. He wrote that we had found the recipe: liberal democratic government, plus a largely (but not completely) capitalist economy yields the best systematic pattern for the eventual satisfaction of all human needs; there's no point trying to develop new ideologies or economic models. We've found them all, and we just need to fine tune what we've got.
Of course, Fukuyama was wrong. The People's Republic of China is setting historical records for elevating vast numbers of people from poverty and increasing standards of living en masse, all without any effort at liberal democracy. In some ways, they are moving in the opposite direction, removing any limits on Xi Jinping's term limits as President.
Unfortunately, in Edmonton what we see is the sort of decadence and arrogance one would expect from a society that has assumed that Fukuyama was right. Basically, we see a system of municipal governance that has long ago stopped striving for excellence, and has turned a relatively static system of revenues and expenses into short-term splashes of visible electoral promises, rather than any significant long-term development or planning.
Bike Lanes
This brings me to my point of complaint with the City of Edmonton. This relatively minor Canadian conurbation has blundered around like a blind pig in recent memory when it comes to the only thing of importance to its citizens at this level of government: infrastructure. The idea of having a train transit system share a grade and intersections with road and pedestrian traffic was idiotic enough, but those same intersections and routes are now being shared with yet another form of transportation: bicycles.Bikes are fine. They're healthy forms of exercise, they can get a person from place to place with a small carbon footprint, etc. Nothing wrong with bicycles. The problem comes when roadways that have been designed, built, and maintained by motor vehicles are ripped up and reconfigured to accommodate specific bicycle traffic.
Historically, the problem with bicycles has been that they are difficult to define as either pedestrian traffic or vehicular traffic. They are too fast to mix comfortably with people walking along sidewalks, and too slow to mix comfortably with automotive traffic. In some places like The Netherlands, the problem has been addressed by creating new paved avenues designed specifically for cyclists, sometimes at the expense of motor vehicle routes. The current municipal leaders of the City of Edmonton thought that they ought to follow this example despite the fact that Edmonton is a winter city, with bicycle travel being impractical for at least five months out of every year.
So what we have is this: the neglect and outright obstruction of other modes of transportation in favour of spending city resources specifically to cater to bicycles.
Setting aside the physical aspects of construction - materials, equipment, pollution, closures, detours, signage, defoliation, etc., and putting the financial aspects into shallow focus, I will begin my objection to the city council's initiative to prioritize bicycle traffic with a fundamental principle - it is exclusionary.
Exclusion
Philosophically, a municipal government's responsibility ought to be toward all of its citizens. Revenues accrued from the population should be spent in ways that maximize benefit to as many of that population as possible.In short, bicycle lanes benefit a specific few for a specific time every year to the exclusion of everyone else. Who is excluded?
People Who Can't Cycle a Bicycle
There are a host of physical and mental conditions that prohibit a person from operating a bicycle. Short of creating special camps for the infantile, elderly, and invalid, there will never be a population that is 100% bicycle-capable.People Who Hate Frostbite
Bicycles are great from April to September. Not so much in the other five months. Those who insist on riding bicycles through knee-high snowdrifts in temperatures that freeze exposed flesh in minutes are a special sort. To construct a city's transportation strategy around that particular breed of individual would smack of myopia.People Who Need to Carry Things
There are all manner of trolleys and baskets that can be attached to a bicycle in an effort to allow them to transport cargo, but they are generally expensive, space-consuming, and inconvenient for people of differing abilities and incomes. Bicycles by themselves are unable to meet the needs of a single parent shopping for a three or four-person household. For low-income families, walking would be a more efficient alternative, regardless of distance.People Who Need to Commute
Endurance athletes are not bothered by fifty or sixty kilometres of travel in a single outing. For a person who needs to make such a trip in order to reach a minimum-wage job every day, such a journey would involve a considerable investment of time and energy, often to the detriment of job performance, work/life balance, or health.People Who Need Help and Services
One of the symptoms of a poorly-planned urban centre is sprawl. The more a city expands outward from its core, the more expensive it becomes to provide electricity, water, sewage, transit, and emergency services (police, ambulance, fire, rescue, utilities). The provision and maintenance of those services comes via roadways. Replacing roadways with bicycle-only paths constricts traffic and thus any maintenance of utilities and services.People Who Like the Environment
Anyone who has spent time at a major transit hub where a dozen or more diesel-powered buses congregate at once will know how air quality is affected by idling traffic. When roadways are constricted by bike paths to the point that buses must stop and cause gridlock whenever they encounter oncoming traffic, they contribute more to air pollution, carbon dioxide emissions, and products of incomplete combustion than an efficient traffic flow would.People Who Like Seeing Nature
Every city block-length of bicycle path that replaces a traffic lane is accompanied by anywhere from eight to over twenty pieces of signage and directional instruction. This means that in between all of the instructions to pedestrians, motorists, and cyclists, it often becomes difficult to discern where living examples of the natural world like trees, shrubs, and grass might be in evidence. Bad enough to choke on all of the fumes from the construction vehicles and equipment building the bicycle lanes as well as all of the traffic that has been stalled and jammed, but one must tolerate the visual pollution of dozens of fluorescent signs, posts, and cones.People Who Need Money
Bicycles are cheaper to purchase than motor vehicles, it's true. They also do not require fees for registration, insurance, and licensing. That being said, some families are dependent on public transit precisely because they cannot afford bicycles that are street legal. A cyclist can be fined if he or she is operating a bicycle without:- a bell or horn
- at least one brake device
- a CSA-approved helmet (if under 18)
- a white headlamp, red tail-lamp, and red rear reflector (at night)
So while cyclists do not pay any of the fees that go towards maintaining roadways, they have enough other equipment considerations to dissuade or disqualify families in need from using their replacement.
Conclusion
The predominant beneficiaries of new bike path construction at the expense of motor vehicle traffic lanes are affluent summer hobbyists. The people who are excluded and disadvantaged include the elderly, the disabled, the needy, and the average motorist. The time, money, and resources that have been spent planning, building, maintaining, and monitoring bicycle paths would have been better spent lowering the cost for a rider to use public transit - something that would have benefited all segments of the community. Taking all of the motor vehicle revenue (including traffic fines and petrol taxes) and spending it on projects that specifically harm the efficiency of that particular branch of infrastructure seems counter-intuitive.Randomized Song List
Here is my most recent song list, as selected randomly by my little digital device.- Some Days Are Better Than Others, by U2
- Doncha Wish Your Cyborg Could Dance Like Me, by DJ Earworm
- Let Me Roll It, by Big Sugar
- Your Lucky Day in Hell, by Eels
- Proud Mary, by Creedence Clearwater Revival
- What's My Name, by DJ Earworm
- Kung-Fu Fighting, by Carl Douglas
Other than the fact that there are two DJ Earworm song in this list, when they may in fact be the only DJ Earworm songs that I can name, there doesn't seem to be anything remarkably thematically unified about this list. Oh well, another day of distance may confer a different perspective.
Until next time, it's good night England and the Colonies.
