Are You Part Of The .05%?

Written by Boston Biker on Feb 19

From the BCU:

Bostonians making polite requests for a clear path on one of the city’s key bike routes were met with disdain from the state agency responsible for maintaining the paths.

With a rapid-response social media campaign, Boston residents put a face on the purported “.05%” of cyclists who bike through the winter. Photo: Boston Cyclists Union

Here’s how one unnamed official from the Massachusetts’ Department of Conservation and Recreation responded in an internal email thread to a message from a Boston resident asking for better snow removal on the Southwest Corridor, an important off-street bike path. The leaked email was published on the Boston site Universal Hub (emphasis ours):

Frankly, I am tired of our dedicated team wasting valuable time addressing the less than .05% of all cyclists who choose to bike after a snow/ice event… We should not spend time debating cyclists with poor judgement [sic] and unrealistic expectations, and stick with [the staffer]‘s recommendation that they find other transportation. If someone is completely depending on a bike for year-round transportation, they are living in the wrong city.

read more here.

Oh man, someone either doesn’t know how to do math, or hasn’t been outside lately.  I see literally dozens of cyclists riding EVERY DAY, through all sorts of weather. If I am seeing that many while riding around that means there are likely hundreds of people cycling to work every day even on the most shitty of winter days, and on cold but dry days many hundreds.

Even more would do so if the DCR cleared snow out of bike lanes/paths.  It’s not so much that I get pissed when the paths are not plowed to perfection (although I was on the SWC today and it was in a horrible state), but the attitude of this person is just atrocious, do they really think so little of cyclists?  Would they say the same thing to people driving cars if the roads were not cleaned well enough?  Perhaps people driving a car in Boston are living in a city that just can’t accommodate clearing the roads…maybe this person needs to find a new line of work?

I have started to think that people are not skilled enough to drive cars in the snow and that doing so puts them and others at risk for injury.  I would think the DCR would welcome more cyclists, as it means less cars, and less road damage, and less work for them….not to mention all the lives that would be saved by getting people with only a basic set of car driving skills off the road in the winter.

hit up the BCU website if you want to help fight this kind of silly behavior.

 

Update:

 

Read more here from BCU and here from MassBike

Tags: DCR, path plowing, road rage
Posted in advocacy, Commuting | 3 Comments »