Biketopia

How to make Philly a cyclist's paradise.

by Isaiah Thompson

Neal Santos Cyclists: Alex Schuetz and Christina Carbone

Yeah, we know. You — that is, some of you out there —hate bikes. More specifically, you hate bikers. All of them. You don't discriminate.

We know, because you announce it, over and over, like a vendor hawking fruit from a truck. It happens pretty much any time any of us at City Paper write something about bicycles. The comments are always the same: "Bikers have no respect," "bikers break the law," "bikers deserve to suffer bloody, horrible deaths at the front end of my car, which I love."

So let's get this over with, bike-hater. Are some bicyclists assholes? Absolutely. Some are nice little old ladies, too; some are businesspeople, some are blue-collar workers, and some are hot chicks/dudes whom you may not want to curse out just yet.

We could spend the next few thousand words arguing about the voluminous ways that you, driver, hate bikes.

The thing is, that conversation is old. And boring. And, increasingly, irrelevant.

Because right now, more Philadelphians are biking than at any time in recent memory, possibly ever. According to the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, the number of riders here has doubled in just three years. You can gripe, but biking is here to stay.

Maybe you should give it a shot?

The benefits, especially to someone living in the city, are immeasurable. There's the beautiful efficiency of the thing: The bicycle is the most energy-efficient human transportation machine ever invented. In terms of units of energy over distance, nothing even approaches it. You can ride a hundred miles on a bowl of pasta, if need be.

As a means of traversing the city, the bike has unparalleled advantages. To have a bike is to be free of traffic jams, of lines, of always waiting, waiting, waiting. The nightlife possibilities alone are staggering: no cabs, no buses, no trying to park, no walk of shame. Your bike, like a 20-pound limousine, is always ready at hand. Put a rack on it and haul your groceries. Put your sweetie on the back and take her for a ride. Strap on a cooler, for god's sake, and go play some bocce.

It gets better still if you can manage to swing not owning a car. No more "pain at the pump" for you; gone are the insurance bills, the mechanic's fees, the stickers and inspections, the car washes and parking tickets.

There aren't many loopholes like that — legal ones, anyway — in modern civilization.

In cities around the United States, more and more people are having this revelation. And more and more, the cities are responding. In the last few years, one metropolis after another has installed bike lanes, developed bike plans, created positions in city government to promote bicycling.

Philadelphia, meanwhile, has been hovering between progress and decay. True, we've seen the installation of hundreds of miles of bike lanes in the city. But those lanes were planned more than a decade ago, and — like so many things in Philly — are in danger of crumbling away.

Recently, there have been signs of hope. Mayor Michael Nutter, who ran as a bike-friendly candidate, has directed the Planning Commission to develop the city's first comprehensive bike plan. He also made good on a campaign promise to hire the city's first-ever bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, a position many other large cities have had for years. And this year, for the first time, Philadelphia was named an official Bicycle Friendly Community by the League of American Bicyclists.

Among bike advocates, there's a sense of excitement, of possibility. Plans are being made, visions laid out, funding sought.

The question to ask right now isn't whether Philadelphia can be a good bike city — flat and compact, with a big biking population, it already is. The question is whether Philadelphia can be a great bike city, and what it might take for Philly to become ... Biketopia.

Let's start where a lot of bikers do —along Kelly Drive, in Fairmount Park, the most heavily biked stretch of asphalt in Philadelphia and one of the only places in the city where a rider can cruise without having to worry about getting hit by a car.

Kelly Drive is so appealing to bikers that its allure has become a concern. Last August, the Inquirer ran an article about congestion —human, not motor —on the path. The situation was described as a growing problem, which, as bicycling increases in the city, it is. But it's hardly a new one. A full decade ago, the Inquirer printed an almost identical piece. The problem then was the same: Many users, one narrow path; poor to no signage; no sense of order.

In the 10-year interval between the two articles, the now-defunct Fairmount Park Commission did little to address the situation. Signage remains poor; calls to stripe the path were ignored. But the real problem, which now belongs to the city's Department of Parks and Recreation, is that there are too many bikers in too small a space.

Luckily, there are a couple of possible solutions.

One is to connect the path along the drive to a much larger network of bike paths. Technically, the path along Kelly is just one small piece of the 128-mile Schuylkill River Trail, which stretches north to Valley Forge and beyond. But the route is split by a long, unmarked gap between the end of the Drive at the Falls Bridge and downtown Manayunk, where the trail picks up again.

A loose coalition of advocates, led by the Schuylkill River Park Alliance and the Bicycle Coalition, is trying to close it. The Alliance's mission is to "create the region's first green transportation corridor" by finding just under $21 million in funding for that and eight other projects that would extend the Schuylkill River Trail nearly five miles, pushing it farther south across the river at Grays Ferry and past Bartram's Garden, beyond the end of the existing trail. (Recently, Councilman Curtis Jones Jr. introduced a resolution, which passed, calling for federal, state and local officials to support the trail's completion.)

Meanwhile, another more immediate fix is just across the river. Martin Luther King Drive (formerly West River Drive) isa biker's paradise: nice and wide, four and a half miles long, and big enough to fit all the cyclists you could ever want, with a concrete path —bad for biking, but ideal for a pedestrian or jogger —right alongside it.

The challenge is that the drive, technically a park road, also functions as a four-lane highway for drivers looking to bypass I-76.

And so a bizarre compromise exists: Every weekend during the summer, the entire drive is closed — for a lousy five hours. At noon, half the drive is reopened to traffic, while the remaining half stays closed until 5 p.m. (a good three hours before sunset this time of year). Then the road is given back over to cars. They don't do holidays, either. Bikers out for a ride last Memorial Day were greeted by all-day traffic.

For two short years, between 1993 and 1995, park users successfully lobbied the Fairmount Park Commission to close the entire length of the drive on weekend days. The party ended, though, when Mary Mason — AM radio personality, politico and, it so happened, newly appointed member of the Commission — raised a stink and persuaded the commission to institute the current "compromise."

In an attempt to assuage furious cyclists, the commission promised better signage and enforcement of the 35-mph speed limit. But cars didn't stop speeding. In 2006, 6-year-old Riley Boyle was killed when a car crashed through a gate meant to block traffic. In response, members of the Bicycle Coalition stood on the drive with a speed gun, to determine the proportion of cars that were breaking the law. The result: 100 percent.

Two weeks ago, a crash at the entrance to the drive (again involving a child) led the Bicycle Coalition to launch a new "Take Back the Drive" campaign, demanding that the city close not half, but all of MLK on weekends.

In a statement released Tuesday, Rina Cutler, deputy mayor of Transportation and Utilities, said the city has installed better signage at the entrance and is looking into the possibility of rumble strips. As for closing MLK, she says, "Enhancing [the drive] as a park roadway rather than a high-speed bypass road, is a more complex issue."

On one hand, a compromise over MLK seems to be in order: Drivers like it, bikers like it, so why can't we share?

On the other hand, though, the terms of this debate are maddeningly tilted in favor of cars. It's tempting —really tempting — to say nuts to them.

What if we closed the drive to through traffic, every hour of the day, every day of the week?

This may be wildly, totally unrealistic. There's no political will for such a move. It would inconvenience drivers and nearby residents. The Bicycle Coalition isn't even close to calling for it.

But it's not crazy. MLK is a park road, not a highway. Who says we need the most popular portion of our biggest park buffeted on both sides by traffic? Why not take four miles and let Philadelphians walk all over it?

No? Then let's make a real compromise: Let cars have MLK whenever they want — provided they share. The fact that most cars speed on the road is a good sign that MLK can afford to be cut down to one lane in each direction. The extra space can become a permanent bike lane.

Look, I'm just throwing stuff out there. But why not think big?

Mark Stehle THE ADVOCATE: Alex Doty, executive director of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, believes that building more bike lanes is the path to more, and thus safer, biking.

But park paths alone won't get us to Biketopia. The future of bikeable cities isn't recreation, but transit. It's not on the verdant shores of the Schuylkill, but on the crowded, congested, traffic-ridden streets of the city where the real battle for Philly's bike future will go down.

Philly's got a number of decent bike lanes. But it needs more of them, a whole criss-crossing network — like cars have.

For stalwart non-bikers, this demand can seem unreasonable: a relatively big accommodation for a relatively small group of people. But bike lanes aren't so much for the people already biking, as for people who aren't, but might consider it.

Bike lanes may just be paint, says Alex Doty, executive director of the Bicycle Coalition, but they encourage riding. "Bike lanes are the single biggest reason for the doubling of biking in this city," he argues.

Behavior, the theory goes, follows planning. It's certainly true of cars: The more miles of roads and highways that have been built through American cities to relieve congestion, the more people drive on them. Philadelphians can bemoan traffic all they want, but the city can't build roads forever.

What it can do is try to get more drivers off roads and onto bikes. And there's a strong case to be made that the more bike lanes there are, the more people will use them.

"What European cities taught us," Doty says, referring to places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where as many as a third of all commutes are by bicycle, "is that you need to build a network, not just a trail, that is a functional system of transportation."

The Bicycle Coalition wants to see that here; and so does the mayor — in his new Greenworks Philadelphia plan, Nutter sets a goal of reducing the number of vehicle miles traveled in the city by 10 percent. So how do we make it happen?

Right now, Philadelphia has about 200 miles of bike lanes. That's not bad, but the so-called "bicycle network" is incomplete and fragmented. There are gaps, lanes to nowhere, mysterious disappearing ghost lanes, the infamous lineless lanes along Columbus Boulevard. Then there are miles of lanes lost through atrophy. Ten years since bike lanes started emerging, many have crumbled and faded to the point of disappearing.

The most obvious hole in the network is Center City. Although it's the most heavily biked neighborhood in Philadelphia, Center City contains only a handful of bike lanes — one on 22nd Street, two short ones bracketing Independence Mall, and none going east-west.

These gaps aren't simply an oversight. The lanes that have been put in, says former city engineer and de-facto bike czar Tom Branigan, "represent what I would call the easy streets to work on ... we made a conscious decision to go after those first."

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Nutter's new directive to the Planning Commission is to deliver on that down payment, and tackle the not-so-easy streets. In theory, the city's new plan will be the comprehensive, high-minded vision for a bikeable Philadelphia that never quite materialized when previous efforts to build a bicycle network were made.

Among the smaller ideas being floated are things like better signage and more bike parking. Council recently passed legislation requiring new large construction projects to include racks or other amenities for stowing bikes.

The bigger, more intriguing idea is to create some kind of bike-friendly east-west and north-south connectors running through the heart of Center City.

Broad Street, Chestnut and Walnut will be closed completely to all cars.

No, just kidding. In fact, none of the largest streets seem likely to be targeted, even for a humble bike lane. (And not without reason. A few years ago, an experiment that turned half of Chestnut into a bike- and bus-only lane went awry: Drivers, unable to make a legal right turn off Chestnut, were furious; businesses on the street complained bitterly; even bicyclists weren't crazy about getting stuck behind buses.)

"The goal is not to try to put a bike lane on every street," explains Doty. "I would rather have a street where you really make an effort than have a bunch of mediocre bike facilities."

Right now, the focus is on a couple of smaller, one-way streets between South and Walnut — probably Pine and Spruce. They are two-lane, one-way streets going in opposite directions. One possibility: Remove a lane of traffic from each, widen the other lane, and put in a nice big bike lane.

That's a bike-friendly plan. But what about something a little more ... Biketopian?

Getting bike lanes through the heart of Center City would be a real coup for Philadelphia bikers. Elsewhere in the country, though, cities are experimenting with models beyond simple bike lanes. One example is the "bike boulevard," a city street —usually low-traffic, often residential — that's been retrofitted to be super-friendly to bicycles and simultaneously discourage car traffic.

The city of Berkeley, Calif., created what's probably the most extensive network of such streets, using massive bicycle symbols, special bike-detecting traffic lights, and, in some cases, speed bumps and traffic circles to give bikes an advantage.

And the real cutting edge is in Europe. Among the most far-out ideas is a model created by Dutch engineer Hans Monderman, something of a legend in urban engineering, who came to the conclusion that urban streets were safest when people actually have to deal with one another on a human level. Monderman's idea was, more or less, to get rid of conventional intersections, ditch traffic lights and the like, and force people to actually make eye contact to figure out what's up at traffic circles.

Would there be opposition to filling Pine Street with bike-friendly speed bumps, bike-triggered traffic lights and European-style traffic circles?

Um, yeah.

Branigan expresses serious doubt about bicycle boulevards in Center City. "We're not ready for that in this country," he says. Even modest bike lanes on Pine and Spruce won't likely be easy, though he thinks they're a real possibility.

There's reason to be optimistic: Charles Carmalt, bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for the city, says he's been meeting with neighborhood residents and finds them receptive to, if not bursting with joy about, the bike lane idea.

"They just don't want to have to give anything up," he explained recently.

Doty, for his part, thinks Philadelphians are "starting to ask ourselves questions like, if you've got two 9-foot lanes, how much more traffic are you actually getting through that street?"

His main point, he emphasizes, is that it's worth a shot to try something. He cites New York, which recently experimented with shutting down Times Square to traffic, as an example of what can be done with an open mind and a little paint.

"In transportation, people tend to think about big amounts of money and long-term projects. New York's attitude is much more, 'What can we do here with paint? What can we do here if we just change lanes around?'"

"Try it," he urges city officials. "Try it on a pair of streets between Lombard and Walnut. Put down the paint and if it works, great, and if it goes to hell in a handbasket, you put it back the way it was."

Isaiah Thompson IN MEMORIAM: The Philadelphia Ride of Silence, which commemorates those who’ve been killed while riding bicycles, was lead by a ghost bike.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited by Andy Dyson, executive director of the West Philadelphia-based nonprofit Neighborhood Bike Works, to attend a small graduation ceremony for some of the kids in the group's after-school program. Twice a week for eight weeks, each kid had learned to disassemble and fix up a bike. At the end of the course, they got to keep it. Every year, about 250 kids participate in similar classes; Dyson estimates NBW has had more than 2,000 graduates in all.

Riding back from the graduation together, I watched as Dyson took his place squarely in the middle of the road, neither flinching nor yielding as car after car pulled up impatiently behind him —and yet obeying every traffic signal and coming to a full stop at every light.

"It's part of my vision of the future," he explained, almost apologetically. "In my future, bicyclists obey traffic signals."

For all the ambitious bike-friendly engineering schemes and policy goals, what bike advocates like Dyson and Doty want most of all is very simple: for biking to be normal.

And for biking to be normal, normal people have to feel it's safe.

One of the chief hurdles to a world where many more Americans bike, Doty says, is their perception of safety. But the safety of biking, it turns out, increases as more people bike.

This is not true for cars: When gas prices rose last year, Americans responded by driving less. The total number of miles traveled by car decreased by 3.6 percent, while car fatalities dropped even more, by nearly 6 percent per mile traveled — if early figures bear out, the lowest per-mile fatality rate since 1961.

But with bikes, more riders means a lower rate of crashes. Biking in Portland has quintupled in the last 15 years,and yet, as that number climbs, the number of reported crashes per bicyclist has decreased dramatically. Last year, despite having more people riding bikes than ever, Portland had zero bicycle fatalities.

Within these statistics lies an amazing possibility. If more bikes on the roads makes people safer, and safer roads encourage more people to bike, then voila: A virtuous cycle is created. Doty's hope is that the loop has already begun.

Two weeks ago, hundreds of bicycles converged for the city's Ride of Silence, an annual event in which cyclists take to the street, slowly and in complete silence, to commemorate those killed while riding. It was a moving event, made all the more poignant by some bicyclists who wore pictures of loved ones they had lost. Dyson led the pack, pulling a trailer behind him with a white "ghost bike" in memory of the dead. (And it felt safe, riding in that crowd.)

Still, Doty pointed out to me later, drivers don't have it much better: Last year, more than 37,000 people died in automobile crashes in the U.S. —the equivalent of three plane crashes a week. "To me, that's the untold story about cars," Doty said.

Dyson, who is wary of engineers and bureaucracies, thinks public education campaigns are the key to persuading people to drive less. If more bicyclists follow the law, and many more drivers learn to deal with them, that could tip the scales.

For Doty, the answer is bike lanes. Lanes, he argues, reach more people than any education campaign ever will. And whether or not bike lanes themselves keep bicyclists safer (this is a point of much debate), the sheer number of new bicyclists they draw will. Drivers will have to deal with bikes, because biking will be normal, whether they like it or not.

Which brings us back to you, bike-hater.

As gas prices inevitably rise again, and as more and more people discover the joys and efficiencies of biking, your choice won't be whether to deal, but how. If you can, I suggest you get a bike and give it a shot. You wouldn't want to get left behind.

"If people want a government that lets them drive on every square inch of the city, they get a city full of traffic jams. Who am I to tell them they want something else?" mused Dyson over the phone recently. "I ride a bike — so I get where I'm going faster."

(isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net)