Shek's Footprint

Riverside has spoilt me. With its pedestrian scale street layout and popular bicycling culture, it has kept me in a world of illusion. The bicycle is revered here and one on a bicycle feels like Guliver in Liliput. Bicycles have several adventages like easy front door parking, easy access to parks, less or negligible car expense etc. like Gilliver was a giant in Liliput and he had several advantages due to his size.

I rode down to Mandarin to meet some friends and ride bicycles. I started the ride with the evening’s storm chasing me. I pedaled furiously to stay out of the wrath of the showers and San Jose Blvd took me out of the path of the storm quickly. I didn’t realize that I was steadily riding into another planet. A parallel planet. The planet of ranch styled homes built for cars.

To the credit of the ‘planning’ department, the parking lane provided along Hendricks between San Marco and Baymeadows is quite nice. Other than the few times you have to move into 50 mph traffic to pass the cars parked on this lane, it pretty much keeps a cyclist out of traffic. Once you reach Baymeadows, it is a different story.

The parking lane becomes a car lane. It is less than 14 feet wide and infested with motorists who haven’t seen a bicycle there before. Everything built here is to the scale of cars. The six lanes of traffic, the numerous strip mall shopping centers with driveways jutting out into the main road, the people stranded on one side of the road looking for ways to cross etc. Even the traffic lights are made for the speed and acceleration of cars. The five of us on bicycles started to cross several traffic lights when they turned amber while we had just stepped into the intersection of a six lane road. Needless to say, the intersecting traffic got their green light while we were still in the intersection.

A bicyclist feels like Gulliver in Brobdingnag where he was the size of a thumb and at a serious disadvantage.

The real problem is in the planning done decades ago. There is no blaming anyone for it now. It has been done and over with. The question is what could be done today to ease transportation issues. When people have to make a choice between car related expenses and food for their kids, it is not a healthy society. This is not a developed society anyone wants to grow up in. This is not a society anyone wants to leave behind. A frequent and well networked bus service and street cars supplementing some form of rail infrastructure comes to mind. Rail not only makes it easier to travel the length and breadth of a large city, it also brings economic development.

Yehuda Moon has the right attitude for riding in this traffic. This comic strip and the company of my friends is what kept me sane during my trip.