The Bike Wars

We Have Not Yet Begun to Fight the Bike Lanes by F.H. Buckley

The bike wars in my little neighborhood are coming soon to a city near you.”

Consider reading "Behind the Green Mask" by Rosa Koire and you will understand the agenda behind bike trails, walking trails etc.  

http://www.democratsagainstunagenda21.com/

Other reference sites: http://americanpolicy.org/

http://www.freedomadvocates.org/articles/transportation/

http://sustainablefreedomlab.org/category/general-information/

My brave little neighborhood of King Street in Alexandria, Va., has calmly met the challenges of the Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War, but now we're seriously annoyed. What's bothering us are the bike wars. The city of Alexandria has proposed to take away our street's parking spaces and replace them with a dedicated bike lane. The preening activists who favor these lanes are in my town, and they will soon come to a neighborhood near you if they're not there already.

It's not as though local cyclists favor King Street. It's a main artery, State Highway 7 that runs for 70 miles east from George Washington's Alexandria to Patsy Cline's Winchester in the west. Each day the road conveys 15,000 commuters past my house, traveling from Arlington and Fairfax to their jobs in Old Town or to the Patent and Trademark Office, along a two-lane street only 30 feet wide. Cars speed by, and city buses plow through our red lights at 40 miles per hour.

Our stretch of King Street is also extremely steep. The very few cyclists you do see on this thoroughfare use the sidewalk, as they are permitted to do. Coming up the hill, they rarely move faster than the very few pedestrians, so everyone's safe.

As for the residents, we're really attached to our parking spots. We like to tell our friends to drop by anytime. We don't want to send our plumbers to park a few blocks over, on streets that are already congested. Not a problem, the city tells us. Just get a special parking permit from city hall for visitors. And what about the occasional party? What do we tell our guests? Ah, the city's street coordinator said, channeling her inner Marie Antoinette, let them get valet parking.

Part of the bike brigade in Alexandria, Va. City of Alexandria

Many people on our street are bicyclists, so we're not anti-bike. When bicycling, however, we never use King Street. We'll take the safe side streets that get us to wherever we want to go. We're also not fabulously wealthy. We don't hire valets to park cars for our visitors.

But the bike activists are mobilizing the troops. The cycling advocacy blog Wash Cycle published a two-step action plan, calling on proponents to stand up for the lanes by inundating the city council with support. Alexandria Transportation Commissioner Kevin Posey has taken to firing off tweets about how "some neighbors can't bear the thought of giving up unused parking," and that opposition to bike lanes represents "a trend where a few wealthy residents oppose projects to benefit middle class consumers."

The problems of a few hundred Alexandria residents wouldn't deserve a great deal of attention if all this weren't part of a growing national movement that pits local homeowners and businesses against cyclists and their trendy allies on city councils. It happened in Washington, D.C., in 2011, when Adrian Fenty's support for bike lanes helped make him a one-term mayor, and it's going to happen across Alexandria. Bike wars have also broken out in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, Seattle, Austin and elsewhere.

Forget religion and politics, says New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. What you don't want to talk about at dinner parties is bike lanes, she told a luncheon in January.

We're seeing a similar kind of activism in the national "Park(ing) Day" movement. These are open-source events when artists and activists take over a parking space, put a coin in the meter, and for two hours turn the space into a mini-park or gallery. We've had them in Alexandria, and they can be a lot of fun, bringing out the tiny anarchist in all of us. What's behind the movement, however, is an anticar political agenda. The Park(ing) Day Manual tells us the point of the movement is to let people know that "inexpensive curbside parking results in increased traffic, wasted fuel and more pollution."

Our little squabble illustrates the tactics you can expect to see when the bike wars reach you. Cyclist-commuters may number no more than 2% of the adult American population according to a 2002 report by The Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center, but they are the ones who go to city council meetings. They'll push for the kind of "Complete Streets" policy that our city adopted, one that gives priority to pedestrians and cyclists over cars.

In the abstract, that will sound innocuous, but when the time for implementation arrives, you'll find yourself losing your street parking, street by street, as roads are repaved. And parking spaces are just the beginning. As Mr. Posey wrote on the blog Greater Washington, "if we can't take a few parking spaces, how will we take the traffic lanes?"

When you see the bike activists in your neighborhood, be warned that they tend not to play nice. Our local gang misrepresents their number and talks of assembling a "critical mass" of cyclists who will ride together up King Street. On their blog, one of them urges bicyclists to "ride slowly and smack in the middle of the lane, especially at peak times."

Come to think of it, if you've ever been held up by a cyclist blocking traffic when there was plenty of space on the side of the road, you've already participated in the bike wars.

Source: Wall Street Journal, by Mr. F.H.Buckley.

WSJ, 11.8.13 By F.H. BUCKLEY, Nov. 8, 2013 6:31 p.m. ET
Mr. Buckley is a resident of King Street, Alexandria, Va