Kelly Davio’s previous Waiting Room columns for The Butter can be found here.
Some weeks ago, I was late for a meeting and waiting at a crosswalk, impatient with the incredibly long red light. Just as the signal finally turned my way and I began my slow progresses from curb to street, a Typical Seattle Biker—white man, brown beard, tight shorts, pointy helmet—came rolling up the curb cut in front of me. He then did what Typical Seattle Bikers do: that unnamable thing of jerking the bike’s handlebars back and forth and bouncing the wheel about. (I’ve asked around, and apparently the goal of the exercise is to “work on balancing” by heaving around in this way.)
I tried to skirt around him, but I’m not all that great with my own balance. The fact that one of my feet doesn’t entirely lift up makes me veer off to the right at times, and in trying to out-maneuver a guy bouncing about on a moving heap of metal, I ended up somewhere between the light post and the local weekly paper’s news stand. By now, the red hand was flashing. There was no way I was making the light, and I was unamused.
“Look,” I told the guy, “I’m just trying to cross the street!”
He gave me an outraged look in return. “And I’m just trying to ride my bike on the sidewalk!”
Never mind that riding a bike is not what a sidewalk is for. Never mind the fact that I was obviously having difficulty getting where I was going and could have used a little space. This is just life in the United States’ 6th “most walkable” city. This is a place where, if somebody isn’t mowing you down with a bike, there’s bound to be construction that forces you into the road, or tree roots and jagged concrete that can trip even the most conscientious pedestrian. Add mobility issues to the mix and you’ve got a walkable city that excludes those who can’t walk.
Because I move at a glacial pace, the fact that I can walk somewhere doesn’t mean that it’s remotely worth my while to do so—it might take me two, maybe three times longer than it takes an average, able-bodied person to cover the same amount of ground. Muscular weakness means that, even if I get where I’m going, I won’t necessarily be able to get back. And when walking increases my risk of falling, as it often does, that’s downright dangerous. This, of course, is me speaking as a person who’s able to walk. Those who need scooters, wheelchairs, or other assistive devices to get around have an even more impressive gauntlet to run every day.
So when I hear people extol the virtues of walking everywhere and the environmental benefits of “going carless” (think of the carbon emissions! The air quality!) I smile amenably while I imagine shooting lasers out of my eyeballs. Now, I’m not a total jerk when it comes to the environment—I don’t go around using plastic shopping bags that I then stuff down the blowholes of orcas off the coast. I don’t dump pesticides into the watershed or toss garbage off local bridges. I recycle. I have been known to compost. I plant little flowers for the bees. But I refuse to believe that I owe it to the polar bears to struggle along on foot everywhere I have to go.
My mobility issues are by no means an isolated case. There are 19 million of us in the U.S.—that’s over 10% of the population—who report mobility limitations. Women are disproportionally affected, as are African Americans and older adults.
When you look up and down a city street at everybody who’s enjoying a walkable neighborhood, where’s that one person in every ten who’s struggling to get where she’s going? You might not see her—she might well be staying home. The more walking takes a central role in our community life, the more isolated those of us with limitations become. We don’t want to expose ourselves to unnecessary risks by forging ahead on foot, and the more social judgment that comes with driving, the worse we feel about ourselves when we take our wheels out. So we stay in. At least, I do.
It’s tempting to look at a city like mine and see only gestures in the right environmental direction. Seattle, after all, was among the first cities to attempt “Car-Free Days” and “Bicycle Sundays” that banned cars from many of our city streets. Our green-painted bike lanes look nifty. But increasingly fewer places to park cars (and hence fewer ADA-accessible parking spaces), diminishing budgets for reliable and safe mass transit, and ever-higher density living with stairs everywhere (scratch those expensive elevators)—to me, that doesn’t represent progress. It represents a way to make neighborhoods more enjoyable for the young and healthy while squeezing out the aging and disabled. A city doesn’t warrant the term “community” if one of every ten members can’t get around.
I’m all for making cities more ecologically friendly, but until inclusivity is just as important to us as sustainability, please—I’m begging here—can we keep the bikes off the sidewalk?
Tags: city living, disability, kelly davio, the butter, the waiting room
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Objectively, I agree that getting around by bike is great! Save the environment! Get exercise!
In practice, the bicyclists in Boston are a huge menace. Half of them bike in the road, but don’t stop at red lights or stop signs, and tear through packs of pedestrians (who have the right of way), often knocking them over and/or screaming at them. The other half are the people who rent the Hub bikes, and wobble around on sidewalks and through squares completely ignoring the signs that say to walk your bike through those areas. It drives me crazy. I guess it stands to reason that Boston bikers have pretty much the same attitudes as Boston drivers.
(Obviously, if you are a Boston biker and don’t act like this, this does not apply to you.)
I almost get mowed down crossing the street WITH the light WHILE I have the walk signal by bicyclists at least once a week. Usually more. I’m not exactly hard to see and THEY! HAVE! A! RED! LIGHT!!!!!
Same in New York. It happened to me two or three times on one lunch-break walk a couple of days ago. Emulate rude driver behaviors and I’ll despise you every single bit as much as I despise rude drivers, guys! (I say “guys” because it’s male cyclists who cut me off 99% of the time.)
And don’t even get me started on cyclists riding in the opposite direction from the car traffic. News flash: I will step off the curb with my head turned in the direction the cars are coming from, and I won’t see you coming, and we’ll both get hurt if you hit me, but I’ll get hurt worse. GRRRRRRRRR.
A dude on a bike cussed me out once for carelessly stepping out in front of him… when he was going the direction opposite traffic… on a one-way street… on the opposite side from the actual marked bike lane. This was three years ago and I’m still pissed at that jackass.
I am a Boston biker and I hate Boston bikers. I try to be calm and forgiving, sooooo many of them are just so damn stupid!
I realise that sharing anecdotes is what we do on online message boards, but as communities we need to take care not to let them shape our transportation policies. People on bicycles do not show up as a major menace in any of the data available. For example, according to a survey by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/pdf/811841b.pdf), they are not even among the top 69% of cases for injury among people walking – whereas bad infrastructure is indeed represented quite strongly there.
I bike to work every day, and I’ve had cars yell at me to use the sidewalk. I was so frustrated with a guy who yelled at me for riding on the road that I followed him to a gas station and told him that it’s actually ILLEGAL to use the sidewalk. I feel like I should point out that he was also wearing a cowboy hat? (It seems relevant.)
People in the Midwest are the worst. They don’t yield to pedestrians in crosswalks and they have no idea about bikes. Meanwhile, I’ve lived in cities where I had my bike impounded for going the wrong way on a one-way street and the majority of people walked. Needless to say, since then I obey all traffic rules, as though I’m a car.
Grrrrr.
getting yelled at by a car to get on the sidewalk on a two lane one way street, then moments later having a bicyclists going the wrong way down that one way street at me in the road, was quite a few minute in my Midwest city.
One time I was stopped at a red light, sitting in the left turn lane (as was my legal right to do so). The light for the right lane turned green, and the lady in the car behind me started honking at me.
Because she wanted to turn right.
FROM THE LEFT TURN LANE.
But somehow I’m the one in the wrong because I’m a dastardly cyclist.
I am one of the very lucky people in Seattle who does NOT have mobility issues, but I often think of how my very nearly immobile mother would fare in my chosen city. Almost none of the businesses in the city are wheelchair-accessible, there’s almost exclusively street parking (and not much of that) and of the five different apartment buildings I’ve lived in, only one of them had an elevator. She wouldn’t be able to see my home, my place of work, or a staggeringly large number of the places where my husband and I like to eat and shop because she can’t get up more than two or three steps. And even if she COULD get into some of the shops and cafes we like to frequent, there’s hardly enough room for a wheelchair-bound person or someone with a walker to navigate in such confined spaces. I’ve thought for a long time that Seattle could do better. Thank-you for giving a first-person perspective to these problems.
There’s so much focus on bicycling in my city, which is good, but not nearly as much on mass transit, which is so frustrating, for the reasons you lay out here.
Argh – here in NYC they don’t bounce, they circle .Standard operating procedure for bikers seems to be: while riding in street or bike lane, approach crosswalk, notice the red light against you, and start biking circles. Acceptable areas for your circles: in front of the stopped cars, near the curb cut by the corner, and/or inside the crosswalk full of pedestrians. Note that all these circling paths are within dangerous distance of the traffic flow that’s going with the green light, and those cars and bikes might have to swerve into oncoming traffic or come close to the pedestrian-filled crosswalk to avoid you.
WHY these bikers can’t put their feet down and stop their damn bikes, waiting for the light, is beyond me. Sometimes I think it must be a biker challenge, like getting home without hitting a red light: “can I ride from point A to B without ever putting my feet down and coming to a complete stop?”
I think some cyclists are really klutzy about disconnecting and reconnecting to the pedals, or else they become convinced that ever taking your feet off the pedals once you are aboard is somehow uncool, so they create hazards to maintain the hip image they think they have.
It sounds like what Seattle needs is not more emphasis on cars, but more (and better-accessible) mass transit. Well-designed mass transit also has the advantage over cars of being usable by those who cannot drive due to disability, age, or not being able to afford a car. Since the evaluation of “walkability” usually (when it’s seriously done, rather than used as a buzzword by real estate agents, etc.) gives weight to mass transit access, I really question whether increased walkability ordinarily correlates to decreased accessibility overall. A system which requires an individual to have the capacity to self-transport over long distances will not do well for the disabled.
But, yeah, as much as I want to support them, bikers can be a huge menace.
Isn’t a large part of the problem here the “diminishing budgets for reliable and safe mass transit”? It’s all well and good to try to make the city “walkable” and reduce car usage, but if you don’t give options to those who can’t walk the additional distances that such policies produce then you’re not actually making anything better. That’s been one of my major frustrations with Seattle in particular: how do you expect people to get around the city (a city that’s very long and narrow, so there are often long distances involved) without either a car or reliable, safe, extensive mass transit?
I will never understand why Seattle tries to force ever larger numbers of people onto mass transit without ever actually having a plan for how to accommodate those riders in a safe, consistent, civilized (read: not packed into busses in manner of sardines) way. I blame, at least in part, our former mayor who treated the entire city like it was his private bike club, not a functioning metropolis.
Well, and that the buses are actually run by the county, not the city, which means budget increases etc. are voted on by people who live outside of Seattle and don’t consider mass transit important. When you break the votes down, city residents always vote overwhelmingly to fund Metro, but the rest of the county doesn’t, so funding doesn’t happen.
Yes, this is so frustrating here.
It’s really, really important that the conversation about lessening car use in cities includes keeping options open for people whose current best option is driving, but the root issue here is the dominance of cars over every other mode. As people get older in cities designed for cars, they either have to keep driving unsafely or end up essentially confined to their homes. (AAA just released a study about how giving up their driver’s licenses makes elderly drivers depressed because they end up socially isolated–as if the issue is that we need to keep elderly drivers on the road, not prevent people from being car-dependent!) And in my own city alone, I can think of a bunch of cases in the last year where a driver hit and killed/injured pedestrians with limited mobility (elderly, on crutches, walking with a bunch of small kids) who were crossing streets designed with only cars in mind. Our buses are all wheelchair-accessible, but buses often can’t pull up to the curb because people illegally park too close to the stop.
A lot of the issues brought up in this piece are similar to the controversy within the bicycling world itself–there’s a big subset of people who promote “vehicular cycling” (making it easier for bikes to share streets instead of building separate infrastructure for them), even though vehicular cycling isn’t safe or attractive to a lot of more vulnerable/cautious groups. Similarly, my city spends a lot of its Streets budget on expensive ADA curb cuts doesn’t spend money enforcing laws about blocking the sidewalks in between.
The only circumstance under which I’ll ride on a sidewalk (aside from these weird suburban hybrid sidewalk/multi-use path things that are used almost exclusively by cyclists, joggers, and dog-walkers) is if it’s a very bad street for cycling (no shoulder and fast traffic) and the stretch of sidewalk is free of pedestrians that I can see, and it’s with the understanding that if a pedestrian happens along, they have the right of way. (And even then I feel bad about doing it, so I mostly stick to the bikeable streets.) I’m genuinely sorry that you ran into the hipster asshat, and I hope he gets a double flat in the rain.
this is what frustrates me about walkability (and bike-friendliness) ratings: they can only do so much with the data available, so they’re really a measure of density, and the existence of infrastructure, but not the quality of any of those things, or the pleasantness of the walk, or the traffic laws and how much drivers actually obey them…. And the most walkable city in the US inevitably fails in many ways (personally I consider excellent transit access key, because what is even the point of walkability if the walkable destinations aren’t connected to one another). AND those things are citywide averages, when even New York has plenty of neighborhoods that require a terrifying dash through fast-moving traffic.
blergh, I just want us to do so much better, and know far too many reasons why we won’t anytime soon.
That guy is definitely not supposed to be biking on the sidewalk, and he should know that it’s his job to get out of your way, not the other way around. But Seattle really needs better bike paths and bike lanes, because as things are right now, a lot of the time I don’t actually feel safe using the bike lanes. I think a big part of making a city safe for pedestrians is making it safe for bikers, because as long as bikers are regularly getting killed while using the official bike lanes, they are going to keep going on the sidewalk.
Some of the more inventive bike lane solutions Seattle’s trying seem to be making things worse. For example, everything happening on Broadway. It’s hectic, visually confusing, crowded, and looks, to me, like a horrible, horrible accident waiting to happen.
It’s perfectly legal, and in some situations encouraged by authorities, for cyclists to ride on sidewalks in Seattle.
This is HORRIFYING to me.
There are templates for accessible, bikable, walkable cities. They aren’t in North America though, and they take both infrastructure money and a willingness by drivers and cyclists to not act like entitled assholes.
Ugh, Bike Dudes. I’m an avid cyclist – it’s my primary form of transportation – and Bike Dudes still annoy the shit out of me. This isn’t the BMX Games or the Tour de France or whatever, guys; we’re just trying to get around town, so chill the fuck out.
It really is amazing how much Bike Dudes manage to provoke so much more hate than jerks on any other form of transportation. (Part of the problem, of course – we pretty much expect drivers to act like entitled jerks…)
I mean, I hate jerk drivers even more than jerk cyclists because jerk drivers are more likely to kill me. But this article was talking about a specific breed of jerk cyclists, so that’s what I was focusing on.
I’m mostly a pedestrian, and in my case it’s because I almost never have to deal with jerk drivers on the sidewalk. If I only had to deal with jerk cyclists at intersections, I’d probably hate them less.
As a pedestrian, I am most infuriated by jerk drivers; even though they keep to the road and I keep to the pavement, their behaviour still infuriates me (not indicating when turning into a road I am trying to cross; driving the wrong way down one-way streets so they’re approaching from an unexpected direction; pulling too far forwards and blocking the pedestrian crossing when the light turns red). I do see jerk cyclists and jerk pedestrians, and they are awful too, but I reserve most of my hatred for the cars as they’re most likely to kill me.
Ah, that’s true.
I kind of harbour a grudge because I’ve been nearly run down by cyclists a couple times, in the winter on poorly cleared sidewalks where dodging them involved getting snow in my boots. The jerk drivers I’ve encountered have been better at stopping well before they ran me over, though of course you’re right that they’d be more likely to kill me if they didn’t.
Most of the cyclists I encounter are on the road, thankfully; I do get annoyed when there are people cycling dangerously on the pavement, but it’s rare enough that road traffic is my main concern, and the cars pose much more of a danger than the bikes. If I had to dodge more pavement cyclists, I’m sure I would have a lot more ire directed at them.
Dude was a prick. I’m a daily enthusiastic bike rider, and dude was out of line. Track stands are rad and all, but not good for life in traffic. Also, when you’re in walking/shared facilities, you yield to the more vulnerable road user (e.g. when I pop up on the sidewalk to pedal to my office’s parking facility, I yield to people walking, because I am, at least in these circumstances, not a total jackass).
Your article poses a very interesting question. Is there a correlation between increased funding for walk-and-bike-friendly urban planning and decreased funding for public transportation? I’d love to see someone do a study on that.
Also, I had assumed that while the ADA grandfathers in older buildings without adequate access, I thought that new construction would have to provide access even in hipster neighborhoods. Does anyone here have insight into how that works? There should be a way to push cities to maintain access for those with mobility issues. It would also be interesting to see if removing car drivers (by encouraging walking) frees up more parking than is lost, or if there are specific losses in handicap spaces that may need to be made up by specifying street parking space as handicap.
The truth is, most of us can’t see beyond our own needs. I often have childless people extoll the wonders of car sharing in my city, but there’s nowhere for me to put the carseats in that SmartCar! That’s why it’s so important to have multi-modal transportation planning.
In theory, yes, new construction has to provide access, but enforcement doesn’t seem to be that high on most governments’ priority list. Recently the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) underwent a several-million-dollar renovation of some old El stations… and did not bother making those stations ADA compliant in the process. Because something something “lack of funds” something.
ADA is a civil rights law, so it’s technically enforced via lawsuit, except in Texas (and possibly other states I don’t know about), which actually does require buildings be inspected for ADA compliance by professionals registered with the state to do those inspections.
And compliance a) was only required starting in 1992, which wasn’t all that long ago b) is usually triggered if you make alterations above a certain magnitude and c) only requires that you make the alterations to the maximum extent feasible (to avoid people just not making alterations at all because of cost). Hipster restaurant renovations and the like are probably skating by on the maximum extent feasible provisions in a lot of places.
The city of Seattle SUCKS for handicapped parking. The very little parking there is is almost never designated for handicapped people. THis is why I stay on the East side as much as possible – very few people run me over (I trained on my cane for getting out of my wheelchair on the Sammamish River trail, where only one in five bikers tried to run me over…) But Seattle needs to get on this because everyone in this city isn’t thirty and non-disabled, and they need to start acting like it.
To me, “walkability” necessarily includes public transportation because the whole idea is you’re getting all across the city, and any city is way too big for anybody to really be criss-crossing it solely on foot. Walkability = you can get on and off buses and subways and trolleys close enough to your destination that you can walk anywhere you need to go. I don’t understand how a city is walkable without public transportation — these things can’t, let alone shouldn’t, be pitted against one another! It just doesn’t make sense. (Unless there are people with seven league boots out there).
That said I completely can imagine that the city of Seattle has not worked out yet how its public transportation and pedestrian and biking routes should connect with one another. And I am sorry to hear about what sounds like a truly lousy experience with a biker. But I don’t think you need to frame your argument around what you are opposing as “walkability” per se.
People really need to start planning cities in the US with the handicapped and the elderly in mind. We ALL become elderly and therefore less mobile and often handicapped, even if we weren’t earlier in our lives (and of course many people do experience this earlier). In the course of an entire lifespan, very few people are going to escape mobility issues — in that sense, it should be seen as a norm for us all – as a universal condition! It is amazing how it nonetheless gets left out of the conversation.
I should be clear that I’m not against “walkability” in concept. But I think it’s important that we think about how our infrastructure and public services affect all people, including those who can’t walk, or can’t walk safely. We don’t, at least here in Seattle, do that very well at all.
Yeah, it sounds like Seattle has a very weird set-up.
Many (non-US, I guess?) cities with buses always have automatic lifts in one stairwell not just for wheelchairs but anybody who wants extra help, tramcars that stop every few blocks, public transportation networks that cover every neighborhood without exception in the city, etc. And all the forms of transportation are designed to hook up seamlessly with one another — it’s called “multimodal transportation” here and is a big deal in (walkable) urban design. I hope it comes to Seattle soon.
Oh man. I have a front-row street to my local walkability/bikeability debates because I sit on an active transportation committee. It consists almost entirely of Bike People, who are pretty much all able-bodied, young to middle-aged, and in glowing, outdoorsy good health. I like the Bike People, but I think sometimes they wonder why this fat, asthmatic, out of shape woman who doesn’t even own a bike is at the meeting. But I walk the sidewalks and I ride the buses!
There’s a whole brouhaha around an upcoming reconstruction of the main drag downtown. The Bike People/city planning want to include a bike lane and decrease parking. The businesses are up in arms about it. I’m realizing that the voices I’m not hearing in the conversation are those of people with disabilities, and that’s not right. :/
Ugh, I find Bike People so annoying* (and I regularly commute by bike). It’s not that they like biking. It’s that many of them seem to assume that IF ONLY EVERYONE adopted their lifestyle the world would be perfect, and anyone who doesn’t is just making bad choices or something. They seem to assume that everyone has their advantages and privileges. It’s an entitled attitude, one that’s more subtle than many, but still there.
*I know not everyone who cycles is like this! But there’s a definite overlap between particularly enthusiastic Bike People and ‘healthy living’ bullies who imply (or sometimes just say) that those with health/mobility issues are in their situation solely because of their ‘bad choices’ :/
The Burke-Gilman trail in Seattle is designed for walkers and cyclists and I can tell you it is terrifying to walk on. At one point, not far from the University of Washington, it makes a blind corner towards a retirement home. I can tell it is satisfying to speed around that corner, swinging across the path with abandon. It is far less satisfying for anyone who is not extremely nimble on their feet, who does not have excellent hearing to detect silent bicycles speeding towards them or who does not have superpowered reflexes.
I became hyper-aware of the issues with “walkability” the summer I fell down the basement stairs, tore a ligament in my foot, and had to spend my first semester of grad school on crutches. The school was in a hugely walkable area! But it was a mile walk from my apartment to the bus stop (because I lived in a low-income neighborhood, where of course people don’t need as thorough a bus service as they do in ritzier areas, right?), and then a five-block walk from the other bus stop to my classes, and that was up a couple of hills and some very inconveniently placed ramps. Because who needs bus service on campus! College students are all pretty fit, right?
As they say in the disability rights communities, being able-bodied is a temporary state. I am not above wishing that some of these obnoxious bike people/community designers/whoever it is who decides the bus routes should be out of that state a little more often. For the good of the community, you understand.
Oh my god, YES. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
80 years ago people from inner city Cleveland could take the interurban(slightly more trainlike than a streetcar) train out PAST my neighborhood, spend a day in the woods, and go home. It’s a 45 minute circuit plus 15 on either side of that for getting TO the highway now. And no public transit–if you tried, you’d have another 45 minutes from the last stop on the train, and it’s 2 bus routes and then nothing the last 6 miles.
Why can’t we have trains?
Bristol in England also has this problem. When I was in a tricky manual chair, everyone who pushed me was shocked and disgusted by the state of the roads and pavements. When I got a more lightweight wheelchair, different people were shocked by the camber on things, that meant we either had to get a running start and speed across them, or I would tip out of the chair sideways. Don’t even get me started on cyclists in this fucking city. “i know my rights” is so often used, screamed at you, said under someone’s breaths, or flat out YELLED, that it has actually become a running joke within our family. When a cyclist does something that endangers both themselves and someone else, we imagine that with their dying breath, they will say “its your fault! I know my ri….”
Seattle bikers, especially the tight-shorted dudes, are the absolute goddamned worst. for being the types of dudes that will take up space from pedestrians and then act wounded about it because they’re biking, which is basically the same thing as saving the world?? No, sir.
(says me, who has been in Seattle for-goddamned-ever, and has bike-commuted until my commute grew greater than ten miles)
the worst. they are all fired.
I’m reading ‘The Power Broker’ (biography of Robert Moses) right now and it’s fascinating how so many of these issues (cars vs public transport vs walking, city authorities allocating funding according to personal preference, class/privilege ramifications of transportation decisions) are still relevant today.
Fred Armisen captures the mindset of this type of biker so well on Portlandia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3nMnr8ZirI
Finally reading this, and want to say thank you. The very vocal anti-car people often are also the ones who look down on anyone who’d be a bus driver and allow those of us who can’t bicycle to get around.