Amsterdam

The more people bike, the safer it is.

by Brian Howard

Spurred by expensive oil and tight budgets, biking's been increasing exponentially in Philly. And we're about to outgrow the admittedly never-quite-adequate infrastructure that's in place.

But there was a time when even mentioning a bicycle network would have resulted in someone chucking a bottle at your head from a speeding car.

I've been advocating fcycling in these pages since 1995. Michael McGettigan's been agitating for cycling in Philly for a whole lot longer. I asked the co-owner of Trophy Bikes, an early member of the Bicycle Coalition and champion of folding bikes (Trophy is hosting the weekend-long Round Up Folder Bike Fest, info at trophybikes.com/events) about the dark, early days.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

"I guess when I was 12 I rode my bike from my parents' house in Southwest Philly to City Hall using an old SEPTA map," recalls McGettigan. "People kept pushing past me. I got cut off by people and beeped at several times. I knew that seemed wrong to me."

As a bike commuter in his early 20s, he remembers "being hit in the head with a strawberry McDonald's milk shake."

McGettigan figures that then, as now, the animosity was a form of cognitive dissonance. "People in cars are promised everything and they get less than ever," he says. "Car ads promise you high speed, easy parking spaces, nothing ever in your path. The reality is that in Center City, driving a car is just a stupid thing to do most of the time. It's the worst part of people's day. ... The frustration of those people in their cars is in seeing how free pedestrians and cyclists are."

He's a cyclist, so he can go on all day about the tyranny of motorized culture (for instance, the slower the traffic that passes your house, the more your home is worth and the more likely it is you'll know your neighbors across the street). But he's not deaf to the assaults lobbed at cyclists from pedestrians. Which he counters by turning the argument around on drivers:

"To them I say, as one example, go to the south side of Rittenhouse Square and watch people blow the stop sign and the red light in twos, fours and 10s, in 2,000-pound vehicles while talking on cell phones. ... If you give me the choice of being run over by a car going twice the speed limit on Walnut Street or riding on the sidewalk for a block and a half, I'll take the latter."

Which is to say that Philly's come a long way — the Bicycle Coalition, for instance, no longer has to kick and scream to be heard — but there's still work to be done. McGettigan bemoans the paucity of Center City bike lanes ("They could have bike lanes through Center City by Labor Day if the Center City District wanted it"), lax law enforcement ("How many speeding tickets are issued on West River Drive?"), and a lack of seriousness in addressing bike crashes, noting that there were pieces of shattered helmet — "that's crash evidence" — left on the ground following a recent crash on Martin Luther King Drive. (He picked up the pieces and has them in a plastic bag, should they be needed.)

Which is not to say that biking is necessarily dangerous; the more people bike, the safer it is. "Bicycling in Center City is incredibly easy. And bike infrastructure is so freaking cheap. It's a really good biking city already. And you tweak it a little bit, man, this could be Amsterdam on Schuylkill."

(bhoward@citypaper.net)