Local man’s screed given credence by MSM in slow news week
It’s dead August. Congress is not in session, schools are empty, and your shrink is still on vacation. Without the Olympics, the newspaper would be six pages long, and four of those pages would be filled with wire stories about dead gorilla babies.
Scraping the bottom of the barrel, the Wall Street Journal fills its Page One easy-reading column — a slot where whimsical news offers the ruling class a daily relief from the seemingly endless financial doom-and-gloom — today with a typically silly idea from San Francisco nutball Rob Anderson: Encouraging bicycle commuting leads to more pollution because “Cars always will vastly outnumber bikes, he reasons, so allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution.”
I guess by that logic, by driving less I’m actually encouraging drilling in ANWAR because my saving gas is hurting oil comapnies financially, thus making them more desperate for oil profits. Or how about this one: By giving the Olympics to China, the rest of the world is actually encouraging progress in human rights there, because the media attention will make them less likely to oppress people openly. D’oh!
Anderson mentioned previously on sf.metblogs here, here, here, usw.
The quotation you use is not mine but by the woman who wrote the article. The issue is San Francisco’s 527-page Bicycle Plan, which proposes taking away traffic lanes and street parking on city streets to make bike lanes. Several years ago the Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to pass the Plan, even though the city had done no environmental review, which is required under the most important environmental law in California, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Obviously, if you take away traffic lanes on a busy street, you might make traffic on that street a lot worse, which, under the law, is the sort of thing you must try to calculate before implementing a project. The city is now doing the EIR that they should have done several years ago, since the court agreed with us that one was required.
Rob Anderson is vilified by bike nuts because he is not one of them. He’s a somewhat cranky D-5 resident, but one who merely asked that the city fulfill the same CEQA requirements any other development would have to. The bike plan , however well intentioned, will be making a drastic and highly undemocratic change to how we all live and commute. I am a pedestrian, muni and bike rider myself, but I see no reason why the plan can’t be vetted properly. If it was a stream or rare toad that was threatened, you can bet the same people screaming against the CEQA in this case would be all over the developers to do one in that case. Thankfully the courts intervened and we are getting a real thorough look at the impacts of the bike plan. Get over it y’all … if the plan is feasible, eventually we will have more bike lanes. However not without a look at all the impacts…economic, environmental etc.