The Politics of Bike Lanes...Vote Against Them...Show up and take Credit when they go in!?

Yesterday I had the "privilege" of being invited to a grand opening of the new Keystone complete street redesign...which includes some new bright green thermoplastic sharrows and thermoplastic highlighted bike lanes.  Don't get me wrong, these bike lanes (and complete street design) are a great thing and I have actually been riding them for a couple weeks.  They also represent a protracted battle where a few residents who had a council member's ear delayed their implementation for more than a year!  Hmmmm....a few voices holding up bike lanes in City Council.....sounds strangely familiar.....hmmmfff....Virgina Street!?

RTC and City Council Brass patting each other on the back and celebrating "their" efforts and success!?

The part that was hardest to swallow about this whole photo op.....That Naoma Jardon was there to share in this success.  She held the process hostage for a year based on her own "research" about traffic studies (that were just plain wrong), baseless concerns that people wouldn't be able to get out of the neighborhood to get to work if we removed a lane (traffic flow is actually better this way), and just perhaps out of ignorance.  None of these is a valid reason to delay a project when you have a host of experts at RTC telling a council member it's a good project and the majority 80+ percent of people at the public meetings support the project.

Once the project is completed and works out really well (reducing traffic speeds, improving traffic flow, and helping reconnect two neighborhoods previously separated by a "highway") here she is to take credit for a great improvement for our city.  Classic politician move....ugh!!!!

On the up side....after two years of work and a dozen plus public meetings.  We have bike lanes on Keystone!!!  So, while the process may be ugly, if you hang in long enough apparently we can still make it happen!  So let's hope our tenacity will get us some bike lanes in Midtown in the next few years!