The Fine Art of Balancing a Street’s Ecosystem

Just saying it’s a bike boulevard
doesn’t necessarily make things better for bikes. (Photo: Reno Rambler)

Think of a street as being like an ecosystem, in which various
users — pedestrians, drivers, bicyclists — move through an environment,
sometimes enhancing it and sometimes damaging it. When a street is out
of balance, users suffer. So does the human infrastructure of the street
— the businesses and residences that line it.

As with any complex ecosystem, it can be tricky to “fix” a street
that is out of whack. That’s the topic of a couple of posts on the
Streetsblog Network this morning.

First off, Reno
Rambler asks what is wrong with the Nevada city’s first bike
boulevard — a theoretically laudable initiative that the blog’s
author finds lacking in execution:

The real problem with Reno’s bicycle boulevard is that it
basically is a boulevard in name only. It’s fine to slap some signs up
and paint the street, but if you don’t employ some basic car traffic
diversions or reduce the speed limit for cars they exist as bike
boulevards in name only.

Case in point, and I realize this is anecdotal evidence, but the
boulevard is my regular route for commuting home, and in the several
months since the new signage has gone in I have had more altercations
with cars than before it was “converted.” The incidents have mostly
involved drivers revving their engines behind me to intimidate and then
swinging around in a reckless manner while whipping by. Occasionally,
the run-ins include honks or shouts.

In this case, it sounds like the bike boulevard is almost creating
more problems than it solves for this particular street-ecosystem. Maybe
not as extreme a case as the disastrous introduction of the Indian
mongoose to Hawaii to extirpate rats, but you get the idea.

Over at Dotage
St. Louis, they’re talking about another complex and
counterintuitive street situation. On the one hand, the city is
celebrating its first “Open Streets“
events, in which major thoroughfares are closed to cars and freed up for
exclusive pedestrian and bicycle use for a few hours.

On the flip side, St. Louis is reopening 14th Street to cars,
nearly 40 years after it was closed to motor traffic in the name of
creating a pleasant pedestrian mall — a move that was a complete
failure:

The strange irony is that, for the benefit of pedestrians, cars
should be on a lot more streets in St. Louis than they currently are
even encouraged to go. An urban, traditional street grid works best
because it gives the pedestrian and the motorist multiple options
for making the same trip. This has implications for the sauntering
pedestrian who might stumble upon a new corner store that she’ll then
patronize regularly as well as the emergency vehicle whose driver can
choose to bypass a busy intersection’s bottleneck by maneuvering down
some minor streets. (Whenever we urbanists complain that tourists or
suburbanites or who have you never see the “real” St. Louis, we need to
realize that the city is hiding its best assets behind road blocks and
private streets).

While closing off streets with barriers and bollards and such
seems like a great idea for pedestrians, it actually renders streets
semi-private and much too quiet for comfort.

There are no clear-cut answers to these conundrums. Best practices
are constantly evolving. What’s required is flexibility and nimbleness
on the part of government and planners — and citizens as well. Municipal
authorities need to be empowered to try new things, and also need to be
able to admit when their experiments aren’t working or need significant
modification.

In the current political climate, of course, that kind of reasoned
approach can be hard to come by.