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| Bike park at the central train station in Copenhagen. |
This is a tough one.
As a rule, I'm not a on-this-hand, on-the-other kind of columnist. That's chicken ... umm ... bleep. My job is to not equivocate but make a stand. If you're going to take Vienna, as Napoleon said, take Vienna. No half measures.
But regarding the ordinance Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st) outlined in Fran Spielman's article Thursday, allowing Chicagoans to take photos and turn in commercial vehicles violating parking ordinances, leaving their big blue electric Prime vans in bike lanes and crosswalks, well, I'm torn here.
It's good that it's being delayed, so the issues can be weighed.
On the one hand, as a former avid city cyclist, in my younger days — for years after the Divvy system rolled out, I wrote a periodic "Divvy Diary" recounting the joys of blasting those big blue bombers down Chicago streets —I know you take your life in your hands every time you have to veer around some double-parked doofus.
Why should innocent cyclists energetically going about their business be forced to risk getting themselves creamed by a bus so that housebound shopping addicts sprawled on their sofas can receive their daily, if not hourly, infusion of superfluous junk?
On the other: I too order from Amazon. I too marvel when something bought a few hours ago shows up, Johnny-on-the-spot. I don't have a dog in this race, living as I do in the sprawling, low-density leafy suburban paradise that is Northbrook. A half dozen Prime vans could simultaneously pull up in front of our house, day or night, and easily find a place to park. Some days, it seems they do.
In the city, most blocks are wall-to-wall parked cars. So where else are delivery trucks supposed to stop, if not in bike lanes and crosswalks? They only stop briefly, and if you happen to come hammering along and, checking your heart rate on your Apple watch, rear end one, well, tough luck. Maybe you should concentrate on where you're going, and you won't get doored while fiddling with your bike computer.
Then there is the risk of dragooning the population into traffic enforcement. Is that respect for law? Or trying create a population of snitches?
La Spata isn't only doing this out of concern for law, generally, but to scratch his own private itch. He's a cyclist, posting Instagram videos of himself leading critical mass bike rides to meetings of the City Council Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety, which he chairs.
All good, right? Onward toward a Scandinavian-style cyclist's paradise? Or another example of leaders putting their own priorities first? Maybe La Spata should sponsor an ordinance encouraging police officers to snitch on each other. Because right now the code of silence requires them to cough into into their fists twice upon detecting thin blue line crime, provided no one is around to hear the coughs.
There is risk involved. As someone who walks around a lot, and often takes photos of what I see, I'd hate to be minding my own business, trying to capture an evocative arrangement of snow on a bare tree branch, only to have some burly delivery guy run over, knock my phone out of my hands and jump on it because he thinks I'm taking a photo of his license plate.
OK, Steinberg, choose. Ordinance = bad. Is not a culture of snitching another milestone in the road to totalitarianism? Stukach they called it in Soviet Union. Squealing. We start by encouraging people to report someone parking in a crosswalk, then before we know it, schoolchildren are turning in their parents for working on Trump's birthday.
We're closer than you think. In case you missed it, the National Park Service just scratched Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth from its free entry holiday list, replacing it with the 47th president's birthday. Thank God we're all so numb, or we'd have to scan the headlines with our phones in one hand and air sickness bags in the other.
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Yes, that was shocking when I read of that a day or 2 ago about the Trump bday freebee erasing MLK Day, etc.
ReplyDeleteI'll be brief: Screw LaSpata.
ReplyDeleteWhat's going to happen is going to happen. It doesn't matter how I feel or what I think.
ReplyDeleteRecent data shows that commute times have risen and congestion has increased. Delivery trucks lessen the number of people in cars going places. But at least when they get there they park in a lot. Not in the middle of every side street all at once.
That's true for all of us, Franco. But tell me, how does that attitude work for you. "Look, our lives are meaningless gyrations on a tiny speck in a far flung corner of enormous indifferent universe, whose flash-in-the-pan existences are entirely without purpose or result. That said, are you free Saturday night?"
DeleteWorks pretty good. Keeps my blood pressure down. Has its roots in the serenity prayer, Tao te Ching , be here now. ohm
DeleteIf someone is breaking the law (whether double parking or assault), then it is a citizen's duty to report it.
ReplyDeleteFirst reporting...followed by what? Citizen's arrest? Dream on. Chicago has long been a place where people have been attacked, and even killed, over parking spaces, for moving "dibs" chairs, and over snow removal (plow drives as well as citizens).
DeleteIn a city where too many believe that "snitches get stitches"..squealing, ratting, reporting--call it whatchoowanna-- will only lead to more incivility, more violence, more gunplay, and more death. It will make Chicago an even worse place, not a better one.
A trucker clocking someone taking a picture? That's a when, not an if, if this plan becomes reality.. Has everyone here already forgotten that a-hole sportsclown who was stabbed in Indianapolis in a parking dispute? Guaranteed to happen in Chicago. Especially if it goes from the City That Works to The City That Rats.
One thing I've noticed everywhere in Chicago. No matter how many cars are parked on a street, there's almost always at least one open spot. Most fire plugs have open spaces, the one across the street from me is always used by the delivery trucks. But the people in cars are are always double parking when there's an open spot just 30 feet away. I guess they're too lazy to have their friends walk that extra few feet!
ReplyDeleteAnd far worse that the demented, deranged, fat, moronic, egomaniacal, fascist traitor making his birthday a free day is that he has illegally had the National Park Service put his portrait on certain NPS annual passes, which is flat out against federal law, which requires the passes to only have photos of landscapes & wildlife of the National Parks on them!
ride share drivers are the worst. absolutely refuse to pull to the curb
DeleteNeil,
ReplyDeleteYou make some valid points, but you also miss a number of them. And i suppose that's ok.
I believe we should be doing everything possible to disincentivize cars, or incentivize biking, walking, and public transit.
I believe that amazon and uber are two of the worst things to have happened to our society. Neither serves the greater good. Neither make people better. Neither make the areas they operate in better. They are convenient, though i would argue that their very existence and success make everything else in the world less convenient.
If you live in an American city, you'll find that they have been laid out in a car first ideology. Garage parking behind, garage parking underneath, curbside parking in front of your domicile. Streets are wide enough to park on both sides and have a car drive down the middle. Wide thoroughfares with parking on both sides and high speed limits connect little pockets of homes bursting at the seams with drivers late to appointments, first time here uber drivers, and closed lanes from delivery vehicles. Our infrastructure was not built for half of the lanes to be used for parking, even if its just for "five minutes."
Think back to all the public backlash when they wanted to widen Willow Road; it will make the street too busy, it will add congestion, it will be bad for the neighborhoods... The stretch between the highway and Waukegan has very few houses that pull out onto willow, but imagine how absolutely horrible that stretch would be if the road was never widened and there were deliveries on that street multiple times an hour.
The truth is, we shouldn't need to take pictures of cars and trucks parked in bike lanes. The police should have people riding up and down the streets ticketing people all day long. You'd have a budget surplus in a week. Look at how terrible the loop gets when cars "park" in the bus and bike lanes and then a bus needs to block three lanes to go around. Sure, people shouldn't be asked to report the violators, but no one else is going to... and lord knows the drivers are going to try and scare the bikers out of biking at all.
And one last thing... When's the last time the L was delayed because of a double parked car on the tracks in the loop? Things only work right when people respect the rules. Uber and Amazon respect profits, and until their profits are effected by the rules, they will continue to make our lives worse; and not just in their double parking.
You seem to think that simply declaring things is persuasive. It's not. Of course Amazon and Uber contribute to the public good. They just don't advance the sort of society you wish we could get back to —stroll to the corner store, have Mr. Whipple tie up your purchase in brown paper and twine. But that society is gone. If you ever had a cab drop you off in some industrial nowhere, as I have, then needed to get back, Uber is a godsend.I never drive into the city when I can take the train, and my most common form of transportation there is walking, buses and the 'L.' When they widened Willow Road, all the residents put out signs about the danger to their children. In 25 years of driving down Willow, I don't think I ever saw a child on the street. Not one.
DeleteNeil, you are absolutely right.
DeleteWith nearly everything.
But I still don't believe that Uber or Amazon have made society better in any way.
They are the epitome of selfish and help push the world apart. Something should be said about having to interact with other people when you hailed a cab a the train station, when you had to make time to purchase something, when our entire economy wasn't built on dreck shipped from china.
I understand the convenience. I understand the "cost savings." I understand how much easier a lot of things are now thanks to both uber and amazon, but that doesn't mean they are good or benefit society. Both Amazon and uber have made us more insular and unwilling to engage with people who are not in our direct circles. They have created the gig economy where a very few people make billions of dollars and the rest of us are pitted against each other via gamification and instant gratification.
I don't need Mr. Whipple to tie up my purchase, but i also don't want to be stuck behind an amazon delivery truck, which is parked the wrong way as i watch the driver throw a box at the front door of a house. I want people to have living wages and be able to walk where they need. I want less cars on the streets and more bikes. I want people to give up the first taxi at the stand for the old lady who took the train down to have dumplings with her grandson at podhalanka. I want better than convenient and cheap. I want less dreck and more quality. I want people to be able to enjoy life, and the amazon trucks combined with the uber drivers who have florida plates and don't seem to know where to go in the city don't help.
But i've been called an old grump before.
And as far as the sidewalks go... look at those delivery robots that are starting to take over the sidewalks.
Double B: Chicago was actually laid out the way it is because of horses. that's why we have long narrow lots & alleys. The stables for the horses were put way back at the alleys, because the horses & their waste flat out stunk, so those smells were away from the living quarters!
DeleteAnd as for Amazon, it's simply what Sears & Wards were over 50 years ago when each had their own delivery trucks around Chicago, as did Field's, Carson's & other retailers.
As for the bike lanes, they are the absolute worst idea ever in this city. I never owned a car & rode a bike for over 60 years until my hips gave out a few years ago. Now Clark St between Ridge & Devon is a traffic nightmare & the buses I take there are totally screwed up by it now being one lane in each direction, from the former two lanes. Exactly how many idiots are out riding in the snow & freezing temps? I always preferred quiet side streets & alleys to ride on, far safer than any main street!
Plus the city has actually had to buy special narrow street sweepers & plows for these absurdities!
At the risk of agreeing with Clark St., I pretty much agree with his 12:16 comment.
DeleteOverhauling our streets to make them better for bikes seems like a swell, environmentally-focused idea. Alas, I just don't believe that people in this society are ever going to utilize bikes in the way they do in, say, Copenhagen. Particularly in winter.
All the expense and trouble that has gone into putting bike lanes on major streets should have gone into making public transit better and safer, IMHO. Like Mr. Street, I've ridden bikes in the city for decades. With or without bike lanes, I'd rather ride on a calmer side street than a bike-laned major thoroughfare, and you just can't convince me that making cars and buses slower on the big streets has increased the amount of biking enough to make the junior lanes worth it.
As for the issue at hand, I don't know what can be done. Amazon and UPS trucks aren't going away, and they need to pull over somewhere. Often, there's no place for them to go. I don't like that much, whether driving or biking, but folks taking photos of them is not going to solve the problem.
On the other hand (since I'm not a columnist, I often invoke that phrase), I can only imagine that our genial host is getting quite a bit of feedback for this column elsewhere from the biking community, if they're paying attention!
Double B: The more of your comments that I see and read, the better you sound. And I agree with you about many things, but Mister S has some valid points.
DeleteTime only advances...it never goes back. You cannot return to the past, no matter how much you would like to and how much "better" it might have been. Culture is the same way. It never "goes back"...and the old lifestyles and cultural touchstones we enjoyed in Fifties and the Sixties are not coming back. Wishful thinking. Dream on.
There is a huge page for Baby Boomers at Fakebook. Appropriately enough, it's called "Baby Boomers (1946-1964). It has about 1.4 million members. And most of them are there to reminisce and wax nostalgic about their kid days, and what they said and did, and how they sang and played. And above all, how much they miss their youth, and how much better life was, and how it sucks now. But they're looking through the blurry vision of declining 79-year-olds. Life as a nine-year-old, in 1956, is always going to look better.
Far fewer cars in 1956, and pollution-free streetcars were in their final clanging days. Different age cohorts were singing the same songs and watching the same shows. Broadcasting and not narrowcasting. Far less fragmentation and division and discord. Of course it wasn't all rosy. The Cold War, nukes, civil rights, all sorts of social and cultural upheaval. Times always look so much better in the rear-view mirror.
But like it or not, we're stuck in the 2020s... with Amazon and Uber and the gig economy and too many of the other things that neither of us want or like. I now take comfort in the fact that the time I have left is fairly short, and that I will not be around to see things get even worse.
Does the thought of nonexistence scare me? No. All life is finite. Cats. Plants. Trees. People. What frightens me more is the transitioning. Hope it happens in my sleep, and not by getting hit by a car or a bus. Or by being ventilated for snitching.
Cyclist here. I'm a fan of shutting down entire streets (I'm looking at you, Alderman Reilly and the blissful two years of a couple of blocks of Clark closed down during the pandemic), and absolutely think people who use bike lanes for parking, unless they are a physician delivering a baby or rendering life-saving care, should be, ah, de-incentivized
ReplyDeleteThis is a no brainer. How many people have to die because people can't follow a simple law: don't block the f-ing bike lanes!
ReplyDeleteAnd now we have robot delivery vehicles using the sidewalks! Soon there will be delivery drones.
ReplyDeleteWe are an insatiable consumer society.
And I am a part of it. I have so much stuff it's obscene when I look for something I know I bought before and can't find it I buy it again. Ou
I don't know enough about this to render an informed opinion, but I wont let that stop me from musing. I speak as someone who loves data. My question is- "what's wrong with collecting data on this issue?" The citizens who are invited to report violations won't be making arrests, just reporting. Does the city already know where and when the absolute worst traffic snarls occur? Are some days worse than others? With data, some creative solutions might be possible. I"m thinking of Clark St's comment about fire hydrants. Would allowing 5 minute parking in fire hydrants spaces be helpful? (would probably require a motion activated camera that takes a photo/ generates a ticket after 5", though). We have parking restrictions for street cleaning and following snow falls- once you know where the nightmare/hell zones are, perhaps Amazon can be restricted to deliveries once a week on these blocks, with an entire block's delivery made in one truck (think of the benefit to the climate!), and a designated "delivery trucks only" spot for that designated time .
ReplyDeleteChicagoans tend to tolerate "moving days", even though moving trucks block alleys for a lot longer than a delivery. I'm guessing delivery vehicles are more annoying because they happen in the same places on a regular basis. But how often?
I don't think there is harm in collecting the data, but I don't think tickets should be the only solution, either. And even if these citizen reports go nowhere, being able to rant to City Hall may still offer some solace.
If I lived in a nightmare/hell zone, I might launch a "spothero" side business geared specifically for delivery trucks. Then again, no one has yet been able to figure out how to equitably load a plane with passengers and their luggage, so perhaps we are doomed to drown in our self-created nightmares.
I'm gonna come down on the side of the delivery drivers here. They're mostly temp workers desperately trying to slap together a living with multiple underpaid gigs; their jobs, and their lives, are hard enough.
ReplyDeleteBesides, bike riders can be such self-righteous jerks.
I'm seeing that. I forget that, when you stray into the concerns of a tight little subgroup, they come blinking out into the light of the greater world, unfamiliar with the practice of talking to people not entirely like themselves. My first email yesterday was one cancelling his subscription, in high dudgeon, because I suggested Amazon deliveries are part of the current landscape. They really do themselves a disservice.
DeleteGreat column. Just came back from New York, bikes pull Amazon carts. Could be a half solution.
ReplyDeletehttps://share.google/EraZZ1TYSyLD4MJ6Y
How about this one? move to the suburbs-none of the parking messes of the city
ReplyDeleteB. Scribe is right about many cyclists being jerks and your Tues. blog proves it. Wish you'd post more of your email letters at times, rather than old columns, when you are busy.
ReplyDelete