MoveLouisville

As disappointed as I am with the local engineers and others within Public Wrecks (sic), including the "bike/pedestrian coordinator" who trumpets that his survey mirrored the Geller whackonomy,* I wonder how much of their fealty to bike lanes is driven by their bosses, who look at stuff like mode share for the sake of mode share or as a metric of how friendly a place is to those using that particular mode of travel (without realizing that individual safety is a prime component of how to build mode share)?

Louisville's "next big thing" (without even finishing the last "next big things"--those being the $300,000 in paint spillage that *might* include some decent bike boulevards, locally defined as quieter streets where cyclists are encouraged and motor traffic is all but discouraged and the boondoggle called the Ohio River Bridges Project--is being called "MoveLouisville."

I attended an informational presentation recently, and aside from being another opportunity to get involved at the planning level, I am warned that there will be a push for "Bike Infrastructure" as part of this 20- to 25-year plan.

Louisville is one of those cities that has little in the way of a grid system--many of our primary arterials are radials from near downtown, and there are not many good arcs between those radials. It doesn't help that well over half of the county was farmland or fallow until after that world-wide dustup in the 1940s, and was developed in the 1950s and beyond with the assumption that if one is anybody at all, one would not deign to use a bus or bicycle (or even walk) to get to anything more distant than one's next-door neighbor's patio. It will be exceedingly difficult to rework our street network to correct that, considering that there are several physical barriers (cemeteries, creeks, wetlands, single-family housing developments, etc.) to get around to get from one radial to the next.

"MoveLouisville" is a multi-modal approach to changing the way we as citizens get around town. It's a recognition that things are in some disarray now, and wanting to help our community build intelligently (we could spend time grousing that it's already too late for that, or work to undo the damage to the extent that we can).

One comment I heard that was encouraging to me was along the lines of, "we need to think of our streets as public space, not as hard-set asphalt or concrete streets or roads. We can change how they look--add trees, add curbs, subtract or reallocate parking spaces. The current configuration is not forever."

I must admit that my own imagination is not up to but so much of that task, but I hope to help shape things for the better--better for the community, not just for cyclists or folks who walk instead of drive, but for all of us.


* The Geller "taxonomy" is famous--or infamous--depending on one's outlook. It seeks to categorize people on a scale of whether they would ride bicycles, and is often used by people who think that mode share is of paramount importance as a way to guide spending on projects that would lure folks onto bicycles.

Never mind that rider safety is a product of individual riders' behavior, supported by well-designed infrastructure that doesn't violate the rules of motion that underlie well-written traffic law. I can teach a neophyte rider successful behaviors that obviate any perceived need for special bike facilities.

Never mind, either, that those who fall into the "interested but concerned" category will quite often find other excuses for not riding. Or that those who currently ride on sidewalks will continue to do so right beside a painted bike lane (as I see at least a couple times a month along Westport Road), suggesting that even they realize that the bike lane is a bad place to be.