Quote:
Originally Posted by LosAngelesSportsFan
We have horrible leadership with stupid council members that are either corrupt, stupid or more worried about peoples genders and disarming police. We need to get rid of pretty much everyone on the city council other than Traci Park at this point.
|
Politicians are loathe to do anything about improving the pedestrian or cycling experience because they get so much blowback from motorists when they do so. When LA took out a lane in each direction on Vista del Mar south of Marina del Rey to add bike lanes and curb speeders, there was an unbelievable howl of protest. That howl included complaints from the City of Manhattan Beach which ironically turns Vista del Mar into a charming, narrow, two-lane shopping paseo when the street crosses its city limits. The City of LA was forced to reverse the Vista del Mar traffic calming and the street is back to being a full-fledged race track.
San Diego is even worse. The city added bike lanes to a modest stretch of 30th Street in North Park. 30th Street is one of two major shopping streets in the North Park area and it has a lot of pedestrian-scale charm. The protected bike lanes meant taking out street parking since the street is only 1 lane in each direction. This small step also provoked an avalanche of protest, from shop keepers and from people who didn't want to lose free street parking. (There is an underutilized paid parking structure available.) The common complaint was that since the bike lanes weren't jammed with cyclists, they weren't worth the loss of parking places. The reasons most bike lanes aren't used in San Diego is because they usually don't go very far and they're usually unprotected. A half-mile stretch of bike lane, in and of itself, isn't going to convince a lot of people to hop on their bikes.
San Diego has signed up for a massive cut in green house gas emissions and it is expecting that much of it will be achieved by people commuting by bicycle instead of car. But bike lanes, especially protected lanes, are way down on the list of city priorities, and the lack of new cycling infrastructure is the result.
As far as Traci Park is concerned, I wonder how her positioning as a no-nonsense champion of neighborhood interests will affect her attitude to bike lanes, traffic calming and other measures that many motorists view as obstacles to getting where they want to go as fast as possible. It would be nice if a pragmatic moderate also had the sense to realize that the city can't continue to prioritize the private auto at the expense of pedestrians, cyclists and transit users.