I like to bike. \u00a0My current commute is 16 miles each way, if I do the whole thing (and I usually don’t; most days, I’ll throw my bike on the rack and drive to a park-and-ride and bike the last 8-10 miles,although my goal by the end of bike season, November-something with any luck at all, will be to ride the whole thing at least once a week).<\/p>\n
Jason Lewis’ accusations notwithstanding, bikers pay all sorts of taxes; for starters, very few of us bike\u00a0exclusively<\/em>; most of us drive cars, and pay gas taxes, and as\u00a0I showed some time ago<\/a>, those of us who mix biking and driving actually benefit the rest of you taxpayers and gas-buyers.<\/p>\n I mention all of this purely to set up the fact that I’m not one of those conservatives who thinks bikes are in and of themselves a communist conspiracy, and that bikers have been sucked, wittingly or not, into some “progressive” vortex. \u00a0It’s just not true.<\/p>\n But like most conservative bikers, I do the odd theatrical facepalm when I see the institutionalized arrogance of the Bike\u00a0\u00fcber Alles<\/em> crowd. \u00a0And we have just such a case on display in St. Paul’s Mac-Groveland neighborhood. \u00a0A “non-profit”, “Transit for Livable Cities”, is proposing a “bicycle boulevard” – not much unlike the one on 39th Street in south Minneapolis, which I accidentally discovered this past weekend, and which seemed oddly devoid of bikes when I saw it – straight down Jefferson Avenue. \u00a0And to do it, they want to make Jefferson, especially at Cleveland Avenue, virtually impassable to cars<\/a>.<\/p>\n St. Paul Public Works plans to move forward this year with a grassy, bicycle-friendly median along Cleveland Avenue at Jefferson Avenue that has drawn both praise and criticism from residents in the area who are weighing the merits of a narrower crossing.<\/p>\n The median would force northbound and southbound traffic along Cleveland Avenue to slow and traffic along Jefferson Avenue to make right turns.<\/p>\n Public Works has tentatively proposed that the median go before the St. Paul City Council on Aug. 17. If approved, construction could begin in October or November.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Cleveland is the main way of getting north and south from Highland to the Midway. \u00a0Having a big gnarly bottleneck at Jefferson will not just be a huge pain, but it’ll squeeze traffic into the side streets or bump it over to Fairview, which is already overtaxed; with light rail contruction, getting north and south through Saint Paul anywhere west of Lexington (so far) is a sisyphean nightmare.<\/p>\n The\u00a0citizens against the Jefferson Avenue Median have a facebook page<\/a>. \u00a0And Joe Soucheray – who benefits from being one of few mainstream conservative commentators who don’t froth against biking for no reason\u00a0takes the proposal apart<\/a>.<\/p>\n More later…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I like to bike. \u00a0My current commute is 16 miles each way, if I do the whole thing (and I usually don’t; most days, I’ll throw my bike on the rack and drive to a park-and-ride and bike the last 8-10 miles,although my goal by the end of bike season, November-something with any luck at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biking","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21649"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21665,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21649\/revisions\/21665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}