Yesterday, we told you about the Boulder City Council's decision to scrap protected bike lanes along a four-block section of Folsom Street.
The elimination of a traffic lane had caused commute times in the area to double in some instances, resulting in plenty of complaints from drivers.
Lots of cyclists liked the lanes, however — and approximately 100 of them, including television personality and former Westword blog-post subject Ryan Van Duzer, showed their support yesterday by essentially taking over Folsom for a period of time.
The differing viewpoints about the lanes is epitomized by the comments shared on a Boulder Daily Camera article about the protest. Here are some examples, illustrated with images from yesterday's event:
Ridiculous. Now that the experiment has stopped a bunch of people that did NOT previously use the Folsom bike lanes show up to protest. When I drove the Folsom 'right sizing' stretch for the first time last week I saw about half a dozen cyclists total. And a line of cars stretching into the distance. Boulder is and was a great cycling town before this experiment. We're not going back in time. We're going back to common sense. Come winter the cycling will mostly stop and the line of cars will continue. Stop 'right sizing', stop the MUNI debacle, open up open space!!! Vote in November. A new city council.
Boulder is nearly saturated with bike lanes already, and yet there are reality-challenged comments like this: "It feels like a slap in the face," Becky Higbee said, "to claim that you're such a bike-friendly city, and make one small trial lane, then backtrack on it so quickly."
I know. Who would have guessed that Boulder has catered to cyclists for years, using millions in taxpayer dollars to creat the creek path, a much safer alternative for cyclists getting around town. The backtracking that's going on is in response to the lack of public comment before this lab experiement was put into place, not to mentioned the email stream they used from some national cycling entity supporting this nonsens. Lies and fake metrics were the only reasons for imposing this auto clogging visual regurgitation on the people of Boulder that actually have to work for a living.
Bike lanes are great...and the multi-use paths are great.... No Brainer. It just always amuses me when people who most probably have no need to commute or work get on a high horse and belittle those who do.Lets face it, thats what they are doing for the most part if you read the quotes in the article . It stems from entitlement/eliteism.
It's amazing how Boulder, for trying to be so bike-friendly, hasn't managed to figure-out that the best way to handle the bike-car balance isn't to consider high-value routes for both modes of transportation to be zero-sum. All that's needed is another high-value route that excludes motor vehicles, but still is convenient, much like the Boulder Creek Path, but which goes north-south. All that really needs to be done is to make one of the already partially-blocked residential streets a block or two to the west of Folsom, which can't be navigated by cars as through streets due to bollards, block it to motor vehicle traffic (leaving only small resident access driveways), and make it a bike/pedestrian corridor.
Sorry hipsters, you can't twitter and tweet your way out of reality. Save your funeral black for an actual funeral, grow up and accept the fact that most people cannot use their bicycles as a primary mode of transportation.Clearly, the tensions between cyclists and drivers in Boulder and beyond show no signs of abating.
Nice of Jane Hummer to use the points I've made to her on these boards since this epic fail was put into place and wasting six figures of our tax dollars to boot. Yes Jane, Boulder is the the second most Bike friendly city in our country. Only second because of hills and climate. That's hardy "low bar." Why can't you be happy with the miles and miles and miles of creek path already provided for you? I've used a combination of the creek path and side streets to move N/S in town for years.
Yes, you are selfish. One of your brethern commented above about the tiny minority of people that don't drive. Well Jane, why should the majority of people of Boulder move heaven and earth to accommodate such a tiny fearful minority of people? If you were too afraid of riding your bikes in the the road before, you have no business riding up next to multi-ton vehicles.
It's always been safer to separate cyclists from motorists. I've managed to keep myself alive for over 20 years on my bicycle with the current system in place. If you wish to continue pushing the envelope, here's a suggestion, Why not advocate for extending the creek path North to South?
Here's a Fox31 report about yesterday's protest.
