Bike Lane

March 19, 2004 - Ed in the Bike Lane

If everyone biked to work, it would solve many of today’s problems. First of all, we wouldn’t need as much oil, and therefore we wouldn’t need to deal with Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and all the others. Secondly, general health would improve because people would get more exercise, they would breathe cleaner air, and they wouldn’t get hurt as much in car accidents.

So, if you’re up on the stage competing in the Miss America pageant, you tell old Bob Barker that the way to make the world a better place is to get people to ride bikes. And, the best way to do that is to build bike lanes. As the voice told Kevin Costner in the movie, “If you build it, they will come.” And, that is what has been going on in Santa Barbara for the last umpteen years. In fact, the Bike Coalition says they have added $10 million of bike transportation improvement in the last 10 years alone. So they built it. Kevin Costner moved here, but what about the bikes?

Yesterday, the dedicated staff of edhat.com checked up on the progress of the bike-to-work movement. We counted cars, bikes, and pedestrians to see if the wheels of progress were turning in the right direction.

For a study area, we chose a block of State Street between Islay and Valerio where there is a very nice and safe bike lane. For a time period, we chose 8:00 am to 8:30 am, a morning commute time when most people on the road are there because they really have to get somewhere, i.e. few tourists or recreational bikers. We only looked at downhill traffic because bikes work better downhill, and that is the general commute direction in the morning - towards downtown.

We tuned our radio to Los Angeles news station KNX 1070, because they give the accurate time, making a tone at the start of each hour. “It’s 8 o’clock … beep” they said … and the counting began! Ironically, the top story in LA yesterday was about the guy shooting at cars north of Goleta - yet another reason why the world would improve if people didn’t drive so much.

After a half hour of watching downhill traffic, we obtained the following counts:

Cars: 274 (91%)
Bikes: 15 (5%)
Pedestrians: 13 (4%)

We also noted that only 1 of the 15 bike-riders we counted was female.

Receiving only 5% of the traffic from approximately 20% of the road does not seem like a very good return on investment for the transportation department as far as road space resources is concerned. For women taxpayers it is a terrible waste of space! Proportionally, there are twice as many women in the US Congress (14% in the senate, 13.79% in the house) as there are biking during the morning commute hours.

For the contest yesterday we asked subscribers to guess the downhill and uphill traffic. As we said before, the downhill traffic was 15 bikes. As we didn’t say before, the uphill traffic was 4.

Four contestant were off by a total of 3 in their guesses. They were EdIt, Ragtop, Angelica, Ironscotty. A random drawing chose EdIt as the winner. EdIt will receive a choice prize from the edhat.com prize grab bag.

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Ed Note - Subscriber EdsUp pointed out to us that the famous picture of Einstein above was taken in Santa Barbara.