This Week in the Mercury
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Bikes Reasons Why the O's Bike Plan Article Pisses Me Off
Posted by Sarah Mirk on Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 12:39 PM
I was going to very articulately rip Joseph Rose and the Oregonian a new one after I saw their front page article headlined, "Portland Bike Plan goes before City Council, but can the city afford it?"
But then Jonathan Maus at BikePortland.org posted such an effective, line-by-line takedown of this bullshit anti-bike pandering that I'll just quote his thoughts at length and confine my own opinions to bullet points. From BikePortland:
The article makes apples-to-oranges comparisons of the price of the completed bike plan ($613 million) to the $575 million MAX Green Line (which is funded by the federal government), and “all transportation projects in the metro area” ($630 million a year). Then, despite the fact that the plan does not commit the city to spending anything on bikeways, the article states that Mayor Sam Adams “doesn’t flinch at the estimated cost.” ...This is an important point: The bike plan is not about creating a city where you must bike. Live 10 miles from town and need to get to work? Go ahead and drive (although transit would be a good option). Need to pick up a couch from Macy’s downtown? Go ahead and drive. There is nothing wrong with using a car when you need to. The problem is that because the way our infrastructure and policies have been historically set up, too many people need to drive too often.
Here are my top problems with the article:
• The headline sets up the idea that bikes are an expensive, perhaps unnecessary investment for the city. As I've reiterated again and again, the problem with digging up money for bike projects is not that they're expensive, but that they're currently severely underfunded at both city and state levels. Though 6.4 percent of Portlanders get around primarily by bike, less than 1 percent of the city's capital transportation budget goes to bike projects. Less than one percent of the entire state transportation budget goes to bikes and pedestrians. Fully funding the bike plan would mean upping bikes' nibble of the budget pie to a small slice.
• Portlanders WANT the city to spend more money on bikes! Across the city, a whopping 18 percent of Portlanders said bikes should be the city's TOP funding priority over the next two decades. Not one percent of the pie. The top funding priority.
• This bullet point isn't even a real bullet point. I just wanted to use this line to post this other pie chart, a survey of business owners in the Alta study (pdf) which also reported bikes create $63 million annually just for the City of Portland:
- ALTA
- Bikes make money for Portland. All you haters suck my balls.
• This line about funding: "Some ideas — licensing and registration fees for bicyclists, a citywide sales tax on new bikes and advertising in bike lanes — would target just cyclists. But a proposed 'green transportation' bond would ask everyone to pay." Everyone should pay for infrastructure that helps the whole city! Even if you don't ever get on a bike in your life, getting more Portlanders on bikes would decrease pollution, improve city-wide health and cut car traffic. Making the streets safer for bikes and pedestrians improves everyone's health and safety.
• In closing, good for Sam Adams for "not flinching" at the cost of the bike plan. Let's hope that attitude translates into actual policy and Adams pushes the Council to adopt, fund and build the bike plan when they debate the plan tomorrow.
This is the kind of bullshit that makes simple, common-sense advances for bikes a tooth-and-nail uphill pedal. I'll see all of you at the BUILD IT bike plan rally at City Hall (1221 SW 4th Ave) tomorrow at 1:30 pm. Maybe I'll have calmed down by then.
Update 2/4: Writer Joe Rose responds over at his Hard Drive blog.
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the basic economic concept too often missed: not spending on something is same as saving money (duh). the less we are forced to spend on roads, the more we save (like skipping the Macy's "sales" for years on end). reducing driving reduces wear on the roads, allowing spending to be (safely) deferred, and voila: money, well, not in the bank but not taken from taxes, fees, etc.
yet another demonstration that the bike community's #1 job: education.
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Second, in helping people compare costs, it's best to only switch one or two factors, while keeping all others constant. The article switched several things at once, hence the apples to oranges note. It switched the mode, the years of costs, and the single facility v. network issue, keeping only cost constant (i.e. comparing [681] miles of [network] for [bikes] over [20] years to [about 8] miles of [Max Green Line] of [single facility] over [a few] years.) People can't make fair comparisons when they're asked to change so many variables.
The take away from the article: decision makers need to find some money to make sure the bike plans aren't just plans, but actually built facilities. Our job is to keep the pressure on them so they do that.
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People with less debt (and therefore fewer monthly payments) are going to be able to spend more money locally instead of sending it off to Citi or Chase or whoever every month. This means a healthier local economy from both a business and a personal perspective.
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As for the poll question, if would seem to make much more sense to ask business owners if spending $613 million in tax dollars over the next 20 years on bike projects is something they would support. I'm guessing the results wouldn't be to ALTA's or smirks liking in that case.
I think it's plenty reasonable to think spending that kind of $$$ on something a relatively small number of people will use is a poor decision. You'd have to greatly increase the number of people who frequently bike to make that kind of investment worth the while, even taking into consideration the benifits increasing bike use has on non-bikers.
Is the O's article skewed anti-bike? I think that's very possible (though I don't know they have a dog in this fight), but you could make an even stronger argument that everything smirk writes skews heavily pro-bike (and yes, I do realize that pro-bike initiatives benefit those who don't necessarily bike). In fact, I don't think that's even debatable. Anything short of an outright stamp of approval is going to be met with with derision by the mer.
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p.s. Here's a quick Math™ lesson: 6.4% < 1%. If you're gonna rage with logic like "that kind of $$$ on something a relatively small number of people of use is a poor decision", you might want to haul out a calculator and reckon how "relative" that small number is.
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The "more than 5%" number is 6.3% now, but they expect that if they spend the "less than 5%," that the "more than 5%" number will be 25%. Then add in the health/congestion/reduced maintenance benefits, and suddenly it is a no-brainer.
If we followed your logic, we never would have paved the roads in the first place, after all, in the 1900s "a relatively small number of people" owned cars.
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As to biases, I don't know how size of publication or the means of publication (re: print vs. blog) factors into that discussion. Bias is bias.
tk: I read the report too, and to my admittedly imperfect knowledge of such things, it's seems rather specious. If I'm reading it correctly, numbers from larger stores that wouldn't release their fiscals are estimated in the study. If a pro-bike organization calls up a bike shop and asks them how much money they made, I'd probably be inclined to inflate the number both for my own pride and for the good of the cause.
And ALTA counting their own employees and budget in their study, along with that of the BTA, is, in my opinion, bullshit. Counting the jobs of those who work for the city who sometimes work on bike projects is slightly less bullshit, but still shady. Counting donations brought in for OHSU by the Lance Armstrong Livestrong ride? Again, that's suspect.
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And if you want to claim that my ten years of bike commuting is "recreation"-- well guess what? I think our tax dollars should support recreational facilities too, like all those horrible, evil city parks that nobody ever uses.
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All Oregonian tax payers (which includes cyclists, drivers, or none of the above) pay for transportation, just like all Oregonians pay for public schools.
You can't just pick and choose what you want your taxes to pay for,[REST OF COMMENT DELETED: UNNECESSARILY ABUSIVE. KEEP IT SEMI-CIVIL, FOLKS.—EDS.]
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Bikes contribute no taxes; I don't ride a bike; I don't like the idea of my tax dollars going to bikes. Is that really such an unfathomable opinion? You can say that I'm missing the point by claiming that more bike projects will mean fewer drivers on my roads - but can you honestly not understand why the topic still leaves a bad taste in my mouth?
Bike taxes to contribute to bike projects! It sure sounds logical to me.
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http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/Blogto…
I also like the comment: "Perhaps we should also tax people who pick up litter to pay for garbage cans and street cleaning."
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Sarah, I don't understand how any of these bullet points are problems with Rose's article. If Portlanders generally believe that bike facilities are worthwhile, as you persuasively report, then Rose's reporting that it costs a lot of money to build bike trails will not deter Portland from supporting their construction.
I mentioned this on the BikePortland thread: I don't know why Rose decided to compare a 20-year figure to a 1-year figure. To my mind, that's the biggest weakness in the article.
But I honestly don't understand why Rose is the target of so much vitriol because he's reporting that there are plausible arguments against funding this plan.
Here and on the BP thread, I think it's simply strange that people want to evaluate Rose based on the presumed outcome of his article, not based on the factual content of the piece.
It seems as if you're implying that the question of expense doesn't even deserve to be publicly raised. I think Portland's pro-bike community needs a noisier debate about the merits of bikes, not a quieter one.
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