Bikes Cause Pollution? SF Gadfly Says ‘Yes’
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It takes a village to raise a child, but apparently it takes only one blogger with a lawyer friend to hobble a whole city’s efforts to encourage bicycling.
Wall Street Journal writer Phred Dvorak describes all the sordid details in an article about San Francisco resident Rob Anderson, who has almost single-handedly stopped the city’s pro-bicycle plans cold.
Anderson began his crusade against bikes in 2004, when San Francisco officials unveiled a massive plan to create more bike lanes, bike parking and cycling incentives across the city. The plan set a goal of having bicycles responsible for 10 percent of all city trips by 2010.
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Anderson, a twice-unsuccessful candidate for the city’s Board of Supervisors and a blogger on local politics, thought that was a bad idea. By eliminating some car parking spaces and traffic lanes to make room for more cyclists, he argued, the biking plan would create more traffic jams. Cars sitting in traffic would be idling more, meaning more pollution pouring into San Francisco’s atmosphere, he said.
Anderson and his attorney demanded the city conduct an environmental impact study first. When city officials said no, he then took them to court. A California Superior Court judge agreed with Anderson in late 2006, ordering the city to stop all pro-bike activities until it finished the study.
And, nearly two years later, that’s where things continue to stand. City officials are still working on the study, but they don’t expect to finish until next year. Meanwhile, there are no details on how much the study is costing, or how much pollution the city could have cut had it been able to move forward with its bike plan as hoped.
You can read the whole sorry story here.
(Photo image credit: Dave Cohoe at Wikimedia Commons under a GNU Free Documentation license.)
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