As somebody living in St. Paul, I would love to have a street as well-plowed as the bicycle path depicted in the Dec. 8 paper.
Rob Kahn, St. Paul
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Since moving to Los Angeles six years ago from St. Paul, I — along with my wife, who grew up in Minneapolis — have often looked on with envy at the progress Minneapolis has made in its commitment to the safety and comfort of people walking and biking. Though she has a typical Minneapolitan's arrogance concerning St. Paul, my hometown hasn't been a total slouch either — hello, Capital City Bikeway!
See, here in L.A. things are different. Although there is sunshine all the time, and, outside of some neighborhoods, not much topography to speak of, we have done diddly-squat when it comes to making people who walk and bike safer here. In fact, worse — we have regressed, installing fewer miles of bike lanes since Mayor Eric Garcetti came into office. And that's a shame, because traffic collisions are the leading killer of children here.
Unfortunately, all too often we hear the same argument in L.A. as to why we shouldn't stripe any bike lanes that Dr. Geoffrey Emerson offers in a Dec. 8 commentary in the Star Tribune — that ambulances wouldn't be able to go anywhere ("Bike lanes are just a hindrance around busy medical facilities"). This is an assumption made without evidence as Emerson "wonders" and "supposes" but doesn't have anything to cite (it's the same here in L.A. when people assert this). It's also a wrong assumption at that. According to "Best Practices — Emergency Access in Healthy Streets," commissioned by Los Angeles County Public Health, bike lanes offer space for emergency vehicles to travel as well as increased turning radiuses, facilitating turns.
The worst thing though, to me, is that this idea — that bike lanes hinder response times and therefore they should be rooted out — belies not being able to see the forest through the trees. If fewer people are hit by cars because there's a complete, and safe, network for biking, there will be fewer collisions for emergency responders to respond to in the first place, which is what we want, right? Maybe not if you're a TV hospital drama writer, I guess — where would our shows be without car crashes? But hopefully, for the rest of us, we want a safer world to begin with.
Last, I don't understand, while after postulating that an ambulance could drive in a bike lane (which it could), Dr. Emerson thinks the 28th Street bike lane should be eliminated. There is a buffer with flexible bollards there. If it truly is difficult to maneuver an ambulance in the bike lane in winter with snow, the bollard tops can be removed, facilitating travel for the emergency vehicle. Mountable curbs could also be built, again, if it were a vital issue. The fact that we can't have that discussion — "Hey, how do we improve this?" rather than just a rote "Take it out" — disturbs me greatly.
Take it from a couple of Minnesotans living in L.A. without a car, and talking up Minneapolis everyday to everyone here — don't go backward on your progress, especially just to cater to fantastical postulations that have no backing in reality.
