Over the last decade or so, there've been two major changes in Boston's bicycling culture. One is the proliferation of bikeshares. In my completely non-scientific, occasional observation view, bikeshares have been pretty darned successful. With bikeshares, you grab a bike from a location where rent-a-bikes are parked and pedal off for business, pleasure, or good old point A to point B locomotion. I'm not sure what it costs - a few bucks an hour, I think - but I see an awful lot of people (many of them tourists) accessing these bikes from the two rental locations in my immediate 'hood: Beacon Street at the corner of the Boston Public Garden, and Beacon Street at the foot of the Arthur Fiedler footbridge, which leads to the Esplanade along the Charles River.
I'm out walking every day, and I see lots of folks on the blue bikes. Many of them are riding along the Esplanade, on the bike paths, which are a resource shared with walkers, runners, and bladers. And it all seems to work out pretty well.
The only issues I have with the rent-a-bikers is that some of them ride on sidewalks (boo!) and that some of them ignore the sign on the Arthur Fiedler footbridge (which I use most every day) that tells bikers to walk their bikes on the bridge.
Other than that, YAY, RENT-A-BIKES!
As I mentioned, a lot of the folks I see on these blue bikes appear to be tourists, but I do know there are locals that use them, including a friend who buzzes back and forth from the South End and downtown all the time.
I haven't rented one. Yet. I'd need to get myself a bike helmet, since it's BYOH. Maybe some nice weekday this fall...
The other bicycling change, which is more recent, is the creation of bike lanes. These are lanes dedicated to bicycles (or, in some Boston cases, shared by bikes and buses). These lanes are takeaways: they take a lane away from cars.
I'm not a car owner. If I woke up tomorrow and there were no cars in Boston (other than Ubers and Lyfts), I'd be in clover. I'm not a car owner. I walk. I take public transpo. I Uber. And, when I absolutely need a car - which, since Uber, is just about never - I rent one.
Car owners, however, are miffed about the bike lanes. My sympathy is limited. But it's not nonexistent.
So are bicyclists, who are mega-miffed about how few bike lanes there are. And they're getting more and more assertive in their demands for more and more bike lanes. The bicycle activists insist that having more bike lanes will decrease pollution, improve health, decrease stress, save lives.
Perhaps that's all true, but, as someone who's out walking every day, for an hour or two, and as who has a bike lane running on my street, across from where I live, I see damned few bicyclists using them.
Yes, this is more of my completely non-scientific, occasional observation view. But still, this does kinda-sorta make it an informed opinion, doesn't it?
The bicycle activists predict that if there are more bike lanes, more folks will bike, that "if they build it, we will come." Hmmmm.
One of the places they want to build it is on Cambridge Street. This is the main artery leading to the Longfellow Bridge, which connects Boston and Cambridge. I see plenty of bikers on Cambridge Street and on the Bridge, which I frequently walk on and which does have bike lanes.
Cambridge Street has a ton of traffic, including ambulances (MGH is just off of Cambridge Street) and fire engines (there's a large firehouse on the street). To me, it makes sense to have bike lanes.
Another street they have their eye on is Charles Street, the main drag through my neighborhood.
Personally, if there were a way to make Charles Street pedestrian-only, I'm all in. It's a charming little thoroughfare. Nice little gift and twenty-something or hardcore preppy clothing shops - and practical stores like an indie hardware store, an indie drycleaners, an indie drugstore - and restaurants. To make Charles a pedestrian paradise, they'd have to figure out how deliveries could be made to the stores and restaurants, and how movers could move folks into and out of the apartments over all those nice little shops. But making Charles pedestrian only? Woo-hoo! A girl can dream, can't she. (Maybe we could at least do it on weekends...)
Charles Street has two parking lanes and three traffic lanes. Having commuted for a number of years, I learned early on that, thanks to double parking, sometimes it's actually one lane. I always drove down the center. What happens when a driving lane is removed?
Also on Charles: since covid, in some spots, the parking lane has given way to outdoor dining, which is great.
I don't know what a bicycle lane would do. Take away outdoor dining? Take away parking spaces? Anyway, the local merchants are agin' it. But the bicycle activists were out in full force the other day, seizing the center lane on Charles Street.
Admittedly, I'm not wild about non-blue bike bicyclists. In my experience, many of them follow their own personal set of rules, running red lights - and buzzing through when the pedestrian "walk" sign is on - when it's convenient for them to do so. I rarely see them in the bicycle lanes, and when I see them, as often as not, they're pedaling in the wrong direction.
I'm sympathetic to their desire for greater safety. A couple of times a year, some bicyclist is killed because they were in the blind spot of a truck. Just awful. And I'm sympathetic to the fact that we'd be better off environmentally if more people biked and fewer people drove.
But the bicycle activists always strike me as really not giving a damn about anyone other than themselves, and as given to exaggerating the need for bicycle lanes, even when there's no evidence that there are as many bicyclists out there as they claim.
My opinion is, of course, colored by the fact that, as a pedestrian, I'm at some risk from getting plowed into by someone on a bicycle hurtling through a light, going the wrong way, or pedaling away on a sidewalk. (Many years ago, a close friend of a friend was hit by a bicycle messenger who was running a light. He suffered major head trauma and spent months in rehab. He never fully recovered.) Maybe bicycle lanes will result in better behavior on the part of bicyclists. Maybe if they're feeling protected, they'll be more protective of others.
Maybe.
I'll be interested to see whether a) the bicyclists get what they're demanding; and b) whether that results in more folks bicycling - and less pollution, less congestion, etc.
Personally, I'd rather see the money go to public transportation, which is not in great shape in these parts. But I do get where the bicycle people are coming from. It's just that I think that the Boston bicyclists have got to accept the fact that Boston isn't Amsterdam, where pretty much everyone bikes. And it's probably never going to be.
The closest I've come to seeing one of these puppies IRL was occasionally spotting the relatively modest yacht, the Iroquois, of billionaire Red Sox owner John Henry docked in back of Boston's Four Season Hotel. (I think he's upgraded to a larger yacht - 217 ft. vs. 164 ft. - the Elysian.)
