Jeff Jacoby, everyone’s favorite Fox News parrot, piped up today in a piece titled “Urban Roads Aren’t Meant For Bicycles” and proves that he is an ass.
- How Jeff Jacoby Views Driving To Work
After the death of Dr. Anita Kurmann at the intersection of Mass Ave & Beacon St in Boston’s Back Bay (Struck by a truck), we should pause and think about how we make Boston’s streets work for everyone, not just those who commute around in their cars.
To be honest, I think anyone who commutes into Boston in a car is certifiably insane. Before moving to Our Fair City (Sorry, I suppose that’s Cambridge to your Car Talk fans) I spent the better part of a decade commuting along the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. For anyone not families with the Merritt, it’s a beautiful scenic byway that was built by the WPA in the 30s. It’s beautiful. People used to park their cars in the median and picnic. However that was then, and the modern reality of the Merritt is that it’s a parking lot from 7-10 and from 2-8 every day as it’s the only alternative to I-95 to commute through Fairfield County towards New York, Stamford and White Plains. The Merritt should be a major highway, but the local NIMBYs have objected to any plan to widen the road, increase capacity or otherwise mitigate the traffic that isn’t going to do anything but increase as the decades wear on. I spent, on average, an hour going each way to & from work, 10 hours a day, 40 hours a month, 520 hours a year (Before vacation). What a waste of time, effort, energy, money and pollution.
I moved to Boston to escape that. I’m your prototypical millennial (Oh to have been born a few years earlier and have been part of the much cooler sounding “Gen X”) who values his family time and work/life balance. I don’t want to sit in traffic for hours a day. I take the T to & from work and am fortunate enough to be able to live close enough to the Orange Line to commute to my Financial District job. The car stays at home and is only taken out when needed (Which is unfortunately all too often). And that’s a shame, because I have a really fun car – German import, 300+ HP, dual-turbo, AWD, manual transmission, sports tires – it’s a blast to drive out in the country or in the mountains. But for getting around the city it’s the wrong tool and it may soon be getting sold.
And that brings us back to Mr. Jacoby. Jacoby seems to want everyone blasting around Boston in their 300 HP machines, too busy yelling at the pedestrians and buses getting in their way to notice that they’re wasting their lives sitting in a metal box on wheels that can do 120+ on the track, but is doing about 15 up Mass Ave at rush hour.
According to the latest Census Bureau data, more than 122 million people commute each day by car, truck, or van. Fewer than 900,000 bike to work. Do the math: For every cyclist pedaling to or from work, there are 136 drivers. Add the passengers who commute by bus and streetcar, and that ratio is even more lopsided.
I won’t dispute how many people drive vs how many bike to work – Americans love their cars. And out in the suburbs it makes lots of sense (Remember the Merritt Parkway commuting? I could have ridden my bike – even thought about it when I was training for a triathlon – but even at the Merritt Parkway’s slow speed, biking the back roads up & down hills, would have taken me longer. And then I’d get a double workout on the round trip). But this is a suburban view that doesn’t belong on our urban streets. And the US Census supports that, reporting that Boston has some of the highest levels of bike commuting in the country.
As America is reversing its trend of urban decay and as people move back into (Or at least more near) cities, we have to think about how we’re going to get all of these people to work, to shop and to everywhere else that their lives will take them. Cars are a massive waste of space on our limited city streets, as this picture illustrates:
Comparison of space usage by cars, buses, and bikes. Münster, Germany was one city mentioned by the Mayor that provides excellent bike infrastructure.
Busy thoroughfares aren’t meant for cyclists. They are meant for the cars, trucks, and buses…
On this point, I couldn’t disagree more with Mr. Jacoby. Do you really think that Boston’s roads were built for cars? Considering that most of the street grid of greater Boston was laid out prior to 1908 when Henry Ford started producing the Model T., I don’t think that’s the case. Our roads were built for pedestrians, horses, carts, and eventually streetcars:
Look at all that traffic! Oh wait, everyone must be on the trolley…
So what makes Mr. Jacoby an ass? It’s his “screw you, I’ve got mine (read: car), so everyone get out of the way” attitude, and the way it’s parroted in the article’s comments. I mean, I suppose if Jeff and everyone else wants to continue sitting in their cars as they sit in increasingly crawling traffic into Boston, that’s their choice (Or maybe he’s just upset that the Globe’s office is a 10 minute walk from the JFK/UMass Red Line stop?). But the utter disregard for cyclist related deaths and injuries with this “They shouldn’t have been on the road in the first place” attitude just reeks of the same “collateral damage” arguments you hear when our country kills innocent civilians overseas to attempt to kill a single suspected terrorist. To so lightly flout the lives of others in the name of commuting convenience makes Mr. Jacoby an ass.
But what Mr. Jacoby fails to do is provide any alternatives or ways to improve traffic. Maybe he’d be happy is we tore out the Orange Line and started building the Southwest Expressway so we can get more cars into the city? As Dr. Evil would say, “Riiiiiiiighhhhhhhhhhhhhhttttttttttt….”
The fact of the matter is as time goes on, Boston and its surrounding cities are going to become more dense. We need to provide people real urban transportation alternatives, such as an improved subway, better bus connections, local rail access (Think Indigo Line) and yes, bike access.
The one point I’ll agree with Mr. Jacoby on:
Bikes aren’t treated like cars for a very good reason: Bikes aren’t like cars. Which is exactly why they don’t belong on busy city streets. Cyclists and traffic don’t mix. It’s not just foolish to pretend otherwise.
That’s the best argument I’ve ever heard for exactly why we should be building out more bike infrastructure in the city. We need protected bike lines, bike boxes at intersections and protected routes that can get a bike anywhere in the region without having to make cyclists mix it up with cars. As we continue to evolve into a 21st century city, we”ll need to sort out how to make us all fit. Until Mr. Jacoby wants to offer up constructive advice on how we can do that, he will continue to be an ass.
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