Now USA Today is in on the BS...and a rant about car costs

In addition to local rants, we now have a national columnist with USA Today, part of the (Gag)net, er Gannet corporate ruination of the print media, asking if "motorists (have) let bicycle 'rights' go too far." The columnist presents distorted opinions of two bicycle-car crashes as if they are factual, then goes on to rail against the cyclists for being "in the way" or being at primary fault. One case was of a woman who hit a cyclist who was taking the whole lane, and who the driver simply did not see (right in front of you? You didn't see her? Where was your attention?). The other was the fairly infamous case of a doctor who angrily passed three cyclists near Los Angeles, then allegedly swerved in front of them and hit his brakes hard enough to force the cyclists to rear-end his car. Not surprisingly, many people posting on the related forum cite the analogy of blaming a rape victim for dressing provocatively. Read the column, and see what you think. If you feel compelled to respond to USA Today telling them that their columnist is a twit, feel free.

Anti-cyclists often say things along the lines of "bike riders don't pay their way to use public roads." They seem to think that roads are paid for purely as a function of fuel taxes and vehicle taxes. Aside from the inanity in their failure to recognize that none of the tax revenue dollars are so discretely channeled, their claim is specious on many other grounds.

There is much documentation on how much the car-centric facet of our society costs our society--both in real dollars and in terms of lost opportunity/productivity and damage to our environment. Kirk puts some numbers out in a recent post on how society is subsidizing auto use. A couple data points in particular jumped out at me: we have three parking places for every single car in use, and over 90% of those are "free" to the user. I don't know whether this number includes the spot where the car is kept when the owner is sleeping--if so, it would be FOUR parking slots per car--but that we as a society feel it necessary to devote so much real estate to empty parking spaces seems pretty insane to me. As Kirk points out, the cost of creating and maintaining those parking spaces is paid by all of us, in higher retail prices and higher taxes. This says nothing about the ecological impact of all that asphalt (more on this in a moment).

Several years ago, I was working for a company that sold small storage buildings. Part of my job there was to secure building permits for those buildings that required them--anything with a one-hundred square feet or larger area, and anything on commercially-zoned property. In the course of doing that part of my job, I learned a bit about parking lot size rules. I've forgotten the details, but a business is required to have adequate parking for its clientele unless certain other factors are in play--a coffee shop that is a couple blocks from Kirk's home is allowed to use on-street parking shared with several other businesses in that block of Frankfort Avenue, for example, because most of those buildings were already there before the coffee shop opened. Another location of that coffee shop company a mile or so away (and right around the corner from where I live) must have at least so-many spots, because there is room for that many spots. They cannot enlarge the building if their business grows to need the room inside, as it would require them to sacrifice parking spaces to do so.

Granted, there are a few times a day that the parking lot is full--those slots are pretty important to the business. However, if one considers a parking lot like that at, say, Oxmoor Center, where there are slots that are filled perhaps once or twice a year, the picture changes a bit. The lot at Oxmoor covers acres and acres--I am not good at counting acreage, so I'd be hard pressed to estimate how many acres of asphalt is there, but it's probably over forty (George Rogers Clark Park, on Poplar Level Road across from Audobon Hospital, is roughly forty acres in size, and Oxmoor is larger). That's a lot of asphalt, and with all that pavement, rainwater control is a big issue. None of that ground under the asphalt gets a chance to help control run-off. All the water goes directly into Beargrass Creek, which runs UNDER the south wing of Oxmoor.

And Oxmoor is not the largest sprawl of open parking lot in our town. There is as much, if not more, parking at a popular mega-church a few miles east of there. Since it's a church, the community doesn't even get tax revenue on the property (and I could go on a long separate rant about that church's impact on the local ecosystem, with its many massive traffic snarls per week of people driving cars to the see-and-be-seen church services).

When a road is repaved, I always have mixed emotions about it. Like most road users, I certainly enjoy a smoother road surface and the resulting comfort and safety benefits. I can't help but think about the ecological impact, though. That's a lot of oil holding that aggregate together, and where does it go as the roadway wears to the point of needing to be repaved? When road crews grind old ashpalt away before repaving, they do so to re-use the aggregate. I'm fine with that, to a point--re-use of gravel means less quarry digging, reducing somewhat the impact on the ecosystems AND is less expensive for those funding the road repairs (you and me). The rough surface left between the grinding process and the repavement work is a temporary inconvenience, for the most part, although it does require a bit more vigilance when riding a bike on it. To make that reclaimed aggregate into asphalt, though, they have to add oil. That's a LOT of oil. Again, where does that oil go as the asphalt wears?

I mentioned that a parking lot creates problems in terms of water run-off. If there is an acre of asphalt parking lot, it's reasonable to assume that a good portion of the ground under that lot gets VERY little water in it. Sure, the water table rises from time to time (witness floods), but there remains a section in the middle of that acre that doesn't get much chance to absorb, even for a little while, its share of that water. The water goes into our storm sewer system until that system is over-loaded. A couple months ago, much of Louisville got to see first hand how bad things get when a storm sewer is forced to operate far beyond capacity.

Concrete lots are not much better than asphalt. While there is not as much oil in concrete, there is the silica dust of concrete production.

In both cases, there is the cost--financial and ecological--of moving the materials from where they are produced to where they are used. Those are big, heavy trucks, and the roads have to be built to withstand the abuse from those vehicles. Those trucks take a fair bit of fuel, oil, and other resources to operate. They drip oil (as do most vehicles to some degree or another).