Talk Radio Ranting No Way to Debate Policy

Editorial

Talk Radio Ranting No Way to Debate Policy

Uninformed rationalizing from a set of prejudices might make for entertaining rants on the long commute home from work, but it makes for lousy public policy debate.

By Ryan McGreal
Published September 16, 2009

On my way into work this morning, I stopped at a red light and a car pulled up beside me in the right turning lane. A bulldog in the back seat saw me and went ballistic - snarling, growling, mashing his wet nose against the window and jumping around.

The driver rolled his window down a bit and said, "Sorry, man, he just doesn't like bikes."

Later on, I turned to the op-ed page of today's Hamilton Spectator and experienced an eerie sense of deja-vu.

Yes, I'm talking about Scott Thompson's steaming load of codswallop on the subject of cycling and bike lanes.

Maybe streams of ignorant, self-important riffing are standard fare for talk radio, but we should expect a higher standard in the paper's opinion pages (though perhaps that's too much to ask these days).

Uninformed rationalizing from a set of prejudices might make for entertaining rants on the long commute home from work, but it makes for lousy public policy debate.

But instead of actually appealing to evidence, Thompson trots out all the usual discredited arguments against bicycle infrastructure.

Cars are bigger, therefore they win.

Of course, that's all the more reason to give cyclists their own space on the road, so there's a spatial (and preferably a physical) barrier between bikes and cars. That way, cyclists can ride with less fear of being run over, and motorists can drive with less fear of getting stuck behind a cyclist.

In other words, bike lanes reduce competition and conflict between cars and bikes. You'd think Thompson would be all over a bike lane network, but like most opponents of cycling infrastructure, he's less worried about making sense than about hammering his point home by any means necessary.

That might fly in Europe, but this is Canada, man!

Ah, good old exceptionalism - the refuge of scoundrels. Exceptionalism is tempting precisely because it provides an excuse not to go through the effort of changing. That couldn't possibly work here, because of some fundamental property of this place and its people that is exceptional, i.e. different from everyone else in every other place on earth.

It is generally based on some combination of fear (of the failure and/or the unknown), laziness (change is hard), and old-fashioned CYA (particularly on the part of those who benefit from the status quo).

It also generally takes the form of overt post-hoc reasoning and crude determinism. Exceptionalists reason backwards from the way things are to some arbitrary collection of local properties (Escarpment! Winter! Car Culture!) that are either proven to be irrelevant elsewhere or actually follow from the very social and physical policy decisions that are up for debate.

Bike lanes just aren't Realistic.

Naturally, Thompson claims to support bike lanes in principle, but like all good concern trolls he patiently explains why they can't possibly work in practice:

I am all for adding more bike lanes as I'm sure most of Hamilton is. But you can't do it by eliminating the car or car lanes. That is simply not realistic.

He seems to be suggesting here that we should never reduce the amount of space for cars to accommodate cyclists. If that's the case, where on earth does he think the bike lanes will go? Suspended in the air?

[A] plan that suits all or most of Hamilton ... means trying to introduce bike lanes by educating everyone and finding the best solution - not by eliminating one to satisfy the other.

What does that even mean? How does "educating people" get painted lines on the road? The best way to "educate people" is to demonstrate that bike lanes work, but Thompson clearly isn't interested in factual knowledge - which leads me to wonder just what he means when he talks about educating people.

Of course, his real objective is not to achieve a bicycle network - it's simply to stall and obfuscate a little longer to preserve the status quo. That's clear from the impossible threshold he sets for adding bike lanes:

Bike lanes should be built in addition to existing traffic lanes, not by sacrificing them.

By this reasoning, no existing street will ever get bike lanes, since the space for the lanes has to come from somewhere - either lane space or sidewalk space.

In fact, at one point he actually recommends "sidewalk sharing". This is another clear indication that Thompson has done no research whatsoever, since the absolute most dangerous place a cyclist can ride is on the sidewalk.

The bicycle lobby has too much power!

This line is my favourite:

It seems we are listening to the cyclists ... but no one else.

What an utter crock. I can't believe he wrote this with a straight face. Can anyone claim that the needs of cyclists are over-represented in Hamilton, a city with almost no bicycle infrastructure, almost no cycling budget, and a council that plans to take 20 to 40 years to build a modest bike network - if at all?

He also insists that the renovation of Dundurn St. S., which involves removing a few curbside parking spaces for bike lanes, was planned without proper public consultation. He cites one merchant who didn't know about it.

Adding bike lanes to Dundurn is detailed in the Cycling Master Plan, which was developed with massive public consultation and approved with lots of media coverage earlier this year.

The Cycling Master Plan, in turn, is based on recommendations in the Transportation Master Plan, which was also developed with massive public consultation and approved with lots of media coverage.

A few merchants are upset about this because they're afraid that the loss of a few curbside parking spaces will hurt business. Again, this fear is unfounded: the main problem with business on Dundurn is that the street is not very hospitable.

Making the area more pedestrian- and cycle-friendly will help their business by getting more people out of their cars and into the neighbourhood - especially as the McMaster Innovation Park around the corner continues to grow and develop.

Bicycle infrastructure on Dundurn links a crucial neighbourhood corridor to the new CP rail trail through the Golf Course and across the highway, to the Radial Trail up the escarpment, the planned connection to McMaster Innovation Park, and the alerady-vibrant Locke Street S.

In [insert anecdote here], the cyclist might have been at fault.

You can't make policy based on anecdotes. It must be based on evidence - and the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

In fact, if we start from the evidence and reason toward a conclusion, Thompson's thesis turns on its head. The following facts about cycling are proven again and again in every city in which they've been tried:

The way to reduce the number of cycling casualties is to increase the number of cyclists. Anything that increases the number of cyclists on the road will reduce casualties, and anything that reduces the number of cyclists on the road will increase casualties.

With very few cyclists on the road, every bicycle a driver encounters is therefore unexpected. When cyclists become commonplace, drivers will not be surprised when they have to share the road with a bicycle.

Thompson claims he wants to see fewer casualties. If the US had adopted a Netherlands-style approach to its road system that balances drivers with cyclists and pedestrians, it would save 22,000 lives a year.

Jack Wolters, Amsterdam's chief traffic safety officer, explains the Dutch approach:

The target of the police is not to control cyclists and pedestrians. It is to control **the most dangerous part**, motorcar drivers. [*emphasis added*]

The same pattern holds across Britain; Cycling has nearly doubled in London in the past nine years, but the number of casualties is down by one-third.

It's not just magical Europe, either. In New York City, the annual number of casualties (injuries and fatalities) decreased by half during the same seven-year period in which the number of cyclists increased by two and a half times. The injury rate fell by a factor of four.
The way to get more people cycling is to build a continuous network of bicycle infrastructure. People will ride bikes if you make room for them, no matter the climate, geography, or political culture.
- New York City grew cycling by 35 percent in a single year between 2007 and 2008 and the rate of cycling continues to grow rapidly.
- Portland, Oregon managed to increase cycling to five times the national average in a short time since it began investing in a continuous bike route network.
- Amsterdam has increased its cycling rate from just a couple of percent in the 1970s to 40 percent of all non-walking trips today.
- Copenhagen also boasts 40 percent of trips by bicycle and has a goal of increasing that to 50 percent by 2015. On good weather days, the cycling rate already reaches 60 percent.
- Groningen, Netherlands has already reached 50 percent of trips by bicycle.

Thompson insists, "The competition between the cyclist and the car has to stop. No one wins."

But then he categorically refuses to adopt the one clear, proven measure that would reduce competition between the cyclist and the car - separating them by building bicycle infrastructure.

In all his pretended concern about reducing competition and conflice between motorists and cyclists, his cretinous rant against a balanced transportation network does nothing but pour more fuel on the fire.

Update

You can read a transcript of the subsequent interview between Scott Thompson and Ryan McGreal on Scott's radio program.

Ryan McGreal, the editor of Raise the Hammer, lives in Hamilton with his family and works as a programmer, writer and consultant. Ryan volunteers with Hamilton Light Rail, a citizen group dedicated to bringing light rail transit to Hamilton. Ryan wrote a city affairs column in Hamilton Magazine, and several of his articles have been published in the Hamilton Spectator. His articles have also been published in The Walrus, HuffPost and Behind the Numbers. He maintains a personal website, has been known to share passing thoughts on Twitter and Facebook, and posts the occasional cat photo on Instagram.

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By Brioski8 (registered) | Posted September 16, 2009 at 09:33:35

You forgot to mention the classic case of double speak that occurs in the first part of the Thompson Article. Observe:

"It seems like suicide for a cyclist to hang on to the side of a moving car while it is travelling down the street."

Anecdote of an extremely rare and dangerous maneuver performed by an extremely small number of cyclyst. Assigning blame to all cyclists for the stupidity of a very small few.

"It seems silly to weave in and out of moving traffic to advance your agenda or run a stop light to do the same."

More broad paint brush strokes of blame.

"Yet, when a bicyclist is injured or killed, even by his or her own negligence, it is most often the driver of the car that is chastised."

Assigning more blame to all cyclists. Again.

...

"Of course, there are lots of examples of bad behaviour on the part of both drivers and cyclists. I'm not trying to lay blame here."

Wait.... What? You just spent the previous paragraphs laying all kinds of blame squarly on the shoulders of all cyclists using anecdotes of the bad behavior of the few. It's bizare, he wrote the words but he didn't even notice he was doing it.

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