D
donquijote1954
Guest
'"In Delray Beach we have killing zones, absolute killing zones," said
Smith, who walks every day along the road near his oceanfront
condominium, the same building where McCurdy collapsed after his
accident. "It should be a slam-dunk that we recognize the needs of
pedestrians and bicyclists."'
If you think that the Law of the Jungle is only an issue in Africa or
in international politics, think again. Get on a bike--to try to do
what's right--and you are as safe as a young antelope or a nasty
tyrant--with plenty oil to boot... WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE!
THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE
Once upon a time, in the deep jungle, lived a Lion and a Monkey... One
day the Monkey, tired of the Lion always taking the LION'S SHARE, and
seeing that such injustice represented a danger to all, demanded
JUSTICE... The HUNGRY LION, yawning and stretching, said, "You would
have to have paws and sharp teeth..." Then the Monkey, who was very
clever, devised a plan: He would go to the costume store, and look like
a lion...
When the Lion saw him, noticing that the new lion wasn't a match for
him, and fearing COMPETITION, killed him on the spot --before the
indifferent look of the little animals of the jungle... And that's how
the Law of the Jungle was re-established one more time...
Note: The demands of the monkey started like this: "We need Bike Lanes.
Period."
***
Nowhere to ride: Decision awaits for A1A bike lanes
By Meghan Meyer
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 16, 2005
DELRAY BEACH - Broken and bleeding, the man staggered into the lobby
of
the oceanfront condominium and collapsed.
A security guard called 911. Someone had been shot, the guard said.
No, said 42-year-old John McCurdy, lying on the floor. He hadn't been
shot. He had been hit by a car.
The police never found the van that hit McCurdy as he rode his bicycle
along State Road A1A, leaving him with broken ribs and a punctured
lung.
Since that September morning in 2003, the reclusive McCurdy has become
a
half-willing champion for building bike lanes on the seaside highway.
He and other bicyclists have flooded public meetings with stories about
being run off the road or hit with cans and chewing gum.
They've begged the Florida Department of Transportation to go through
with its original plans to build sidewalks and bike lanes on A1A.
The state has enough land along most of the road to add bike lanes from
Boca Raton to Palm Beach.
But over the years wealthy oceanfront homeowners have planted trees and
built ornate driveways and privacy walls in the state's right-of-way,
and they don't want to give them up.
They fear that widening the road will bring more traffic and more
annoying cyclists blocking that traffic. Beach residents quickly
marshaled their formidable political clout to keep the bike lanes away.
The enmity between the factions deepened over the nearly two-year
fight.
As state transportation officials prepare to decide in the coming weeks
whether to proceed with their original plans for $22 million in new
asphalt, sidewalks, paved shoulders and bike lanes on the road, the
fight has attracted the attention of bicyclists across the country.
"It is a national issue," said Patrick McCormick, League of American
Bicyclists spokesman. "Other state departments of transportation will
look to Florida and see what Florida does in this case. So it's very
important for safe bicycling and for highway safety in general that
Palm
Beach does the right thing."
As far back as the 1970s, Florida has made it a priority to accommodate
bicyclists and pedestrians in transportation projects. The state's
groundbreaking policy helped shape federal guidelines in 2000. Florida
law and the federal guidelines assume that bicyclists have just as much
right to use the road as cars do and should be considered when
engineers
design roads. The League of American Bicyclists worries that if Florida
allows an exemption to its policy by not building bike lanes on A1A,
exemptions could make it into the federal guidelines too.
"Other states will say, 'Oh, look at what they did in Florida. If they
don't have to build bike lanes we don't have to either,' " McCormick
said.
Bicycling advocates say policies like Florida's help curb obesity and
fight pollution. League Executive Director Andy Clarke became concerned
enough to send a letter to the Palm Beach County legislative delegation
in November.
"The eyes of the nation's bicyclists are upon Florida DOT and Palm
Beach
County as this project progresses," he wrote. "... It is inconceivable
that bike lanes and sidewalks would be deliberately left out of a
project of this importance."
Fierce opposition
Delray Beach resident Jim Smith founded the group Safety As FDOT
Envisions, known as SAFE, to push for sidewalks and bike lanes. On
Thursday he delivered more than 6,000 petitions to the Transportation
Department's District IV offices in Broward County, including one
petition faxed from the U.S. Embassy in Sudan by a Delray Beach
resident
posted there. State legislators are considering introducing Smith's
"Pedestrian and Bicyclist Bill of Rights" this year.
"In Delray Beach we have killing zones, absolute killing zones," said
Smith, who walks every day along the road near his oceanfront
condominium, the same building where McCurdy collapsed after his
accident. "It should be a slam-dunk that we recognize the needs of
pedestrians and bicyclists."
A recent study ranked the metropolitan area from Boca Raton to West
Palm
Beach fourth-deadliest in the nation for pedestrians. Delray Beach has
had more bicycle crashes than any other city in Palm Beach County every
year since 1998, according to accident reports cities filed with the
county Metropolitan Planning Organization.
Boca Raton added bike lanes eight years ago without any problem. The
scenic ride runs past parkland and offers glimpses of surf through gaps
in the trees. Purple signs proclaim Boca Raton a "Bicycle Friendly
Community," a designation Delray Beach applied for during the height of
the bike-lane controversy. Delray Beach dropped its application after
cyclists called it hypocritical.
The state also had no trouble widening the road north of Boca Raton
through Highland Beach. Officials caught their first whiff of fierce
opposition on May 12, 2003, as DOT Project Manager Sonny Abia made his
first public presentation in Delray Beach. As Abia begged for order in
front of a crowd of about 100 in a hot, standing-room-only auditorium,
booing bicyclists shouted that homeowners should learn to share the
road, and homeowners retorted that the cyclists didn't even live in
town
or pay taxes. Business owners complained that a bike lane would wipe
out
parking spots near popular beachfront restaurants.
"You don't want to mess with something that has been successful and is
clearly working," said Bill Wood, director of the Greater Delray Beach
Chamber of Commerce. "Parking is a significant issue. When you move
parking away it has a very scary impact on those businesses."
The shouting match reflected the long-festering tension between drivers
and the packs of cyclists who train on A1A. It would be replayed over
and over as the department held public forums up and down the coast.
Letters to the governor
Rick Edick, an investor who moved to Delray Beach from Philadelphia a
few years ago, spearheads the anti-bike lane movement. Edick's
not-for-profit organization, Save Our Seacoast, or SOS, mailed out
glossy brochures saying the state should do nothing more to the road
than repave it.
With a few other board members, Edick took a private jet to Tallahassee
in October 2003 for a meeting with state Transportation Secretary Jose
Abreu.
As the department made similar presentations to the smaller towns along
the barrier islands, residents in Ocean Ridge turned to Edick for help.
Although the DOT owns enough right-of-way to build 5-foot-wide
regulation bike lanes there, it proposed building only 3-foot-wide
paved
shoulders because of opposition from the community and a problem with
trees in Gulf Stream to the south. Following Edick's lead, some
residents now oppose any widening of the road at all.
Just north of Delray Beach, tiny Gulf Stream knew it would be next.
City
officials put out the call to anyone who had pull with Gov. Jeb Bush to
write letters opposing bike lanes. They responded in force. The
letter-writers included a Connecticut state senator who represented the
district where the Bush family once lived and several friends and
former
business associates of the governor's father, former President George
H.W. Bush. Many addressed the governor with a collegial "Dear Jeb."
Gulf Stream didn't really need the support of the politically
connected.
The town already had a trump card: State law protects invasive
Australian pines that line A1A there. Officials elsewhere have tried to
uproot the nuisance trees, which crowd out other plants and trap baby
sea turtles in their roots. But Gulf Stream had the trees declared
historic years ago. There's no room to expand the road without cutting
Australian pines.
Preservationists and A1A residents in Delray Beach pursued a similar
tack, hoping historic buildings along the road could help block wider
bike lanes. DOT is reviewing a study of those properties, and that too
could affect the design in some sections.
Private meetings
By June 2003, Edick and his wife sat on a six-member committee -
stacked, cyclists complained, with oceanfront business owners and
homeowners - that met privately at Delray's chamber of commerce to
come
up with a citywide consensus. The committee decided to recommend
building paved shoulders along most of the road in Delray Beach instead
of bike lanes. A bike lane would run only along the east side of the
road near the public beach.
In June, the county Metropolitan Planning Organization recommended that
the Transportation Department adopt the Delray Beach consensus plan,
reversing its earlier policy of including bike lanes and sidewalks
wherever possible. The state rarely goes against the organization's
advice.
Bicyclists were flabbergasted. Bike lanes have stricter maintenance
standards than paved shoulders, where fallen leaves and debris pile up.
If a road has bike lanes, cyclists must ride there, just as cars must
stay in the travel lane. They couldn't understand why homeowners
wouldn't want bike lanes.
"Investment bankers and restaurateurs should not be engineering a
road,"
county bike and pedestrian coordinator Raphael Clemente said. "Just
like
I'm a bike/ped coordinator and I can't go into (oceanside Delray
restaurant) Boston's and start telling the chef how to cook steaks."
A bicyclist and songwriter from West Palm Beach, Mike Tague, later
filed
a complaint with the local state attorney's office alleging the Delray
committee violated the state Sunshine Law by not opening its meetings
to
the public.
Wood, the chamber of commerce director, said the chamber invited all
interested parties to participate.
"I would say this has had the most emotion of any of the issues we've
dealt with," Wood said. "On the other hand, I would tell you we kind of
think we did this right."
Wood said he expects the Transportation Department to adopt the city's
consensus plan. The only issues left to discuss are details such as
street lighting and number of parking spots, he said.
"Everything was aboveboard so far as I saw," Edick said. "We're leaving
it to the city and FDOT to work out any problems with the consensus
plan, and we'll support that. The reality is neither the city nor FDOT
would allow an unsafe project to be completed."
Alphabet of groups
Edick and his Save Our Seacoast group have stayed out of the limelight
since throwing their support behind the consensus plan. The group
remains "very much alive," with a goal of preserving the coastline and
scenic nature of the highway, Edick said.
Clemente, the county's bicycle coordinator, worried that Edick's
success
could set an example for other opponents of bike lanes across the
country. Homeowners groups could start challenging state engineers,
wiping bike lanes off the map in affluent areas from Florida to
California.
"Historically, Florida has been pretty good with the state Department
of
Transportation policies, even though it has a high crash rate,"
Clemente
said. "That's why A1A is such a standout case. It's so obvious what's
happening here."
The bicyclists have formed their own groups to counter SOS, including
Jim Smith's SAFE and the not-for-profit Safe Bicycling Coalition of
Palm
Beach County. Amid the growing tension in Delray Beach, cyclists there
organized a social club. The Delray Beach Bicycle Club has joined the
popular West Palm Beach and Boca Raton bicycle clubs in organizing
regular group rides on A1A.
Decision expected soon
Transportation officials plan to make a decision on whether to build
bike lanes in Delray Beach soon and present the decision at a town
meeting next month, DOT project manager Abia said.
"We've gotten quite a lot of input," he said. "There are some people
who
don't understand the advantages the project will give to them. This is
an opportunity for them to see that what we are proposing has an
advantage to them in comparison to what we have now."
If the department does not build bike lanes wherever it has enough
room,
some cyclists said they might sue.
If someone has an accident that a bike lane could have prevented, that
could prove even more costly to taxpayers. In Broward County, a cyclist
who was badly injured in an accident on A1A won a $7.7 million judgment
against the state because it failed to build wide enough travel lanes.
If Delray Beach had a bike lane, injured cyclist McCurdy said, he would
have ridden there instead of in the travel lane on the morning of his
accident. He had no choice but to ride in the road because the law
prohibits him from riding on the sidewalk.
At 6:30 a.m. on that Sunday in 2003, there was no traffic. But the van
found him, and he never saw it coming. His injuries have healed for the
most part and he's returned to riding his bike on the road, bike lane
or
no bike lane. But now he looks over his shoulder constantly. He never
did that before.
"If there had been a bike lane this accident wouldn't have happened,"
McCurdy said. "Everyone should have the right to ride on beautiful A1A
if they choose, not just the people who live there."
Anti-lane activist Edick said the bicyclists should move on.
"They need to get over it," he said. "We didn't get repaving, what we
wanted. Bikers didn't get 5-foot-wide lanes, what they wanted. They
just
can't accept it."
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/south_county/content/south_county/epaper/2005/01/16/m1a_dbbike_0116.htm
http://committed.to/justiceforpeace
Smith, who walks every day along the road near his oceanfront
condominium, the same building where McCurdy collapsed after his
accident. "It should be a slam-dunk that we recognize the needs of
pedestrians and bicyclists."'
If you think that the Law of the Jungle is only an issue in Africa or
in international politics, think again. Get on a bike--to try to do
what's right--and you are as safe as a young antelope or a nasty
tyrant--with plenty oil to boot... WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE!
THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE
Once upon a time, in the deep jungle, lived a Lion and a Monkey... One
day the Monkey, tired of the Lion always taking the LION'S SHARE, and
seeing that such injustice represented a danger to all, demanded
JUSTICE... The HUNGRY LION, yawning and stretching, said, "You would
have to have paws and sharp teeth..." Then the Monkey, who was very
clever, devised a plan: He would go to the costume store, and look like
a lion...
When the Lion saw him, noticing that the new lion wasn't a match for
him, and fearing COMPETITION, killed him on the spot --before the
indifferent look of the little animals of the jungle... And that's how
the Law of the Jungle was re-established one more time...
Note: The demands of the monkey started like this: "We need Bike Lanes.
Period."
***
Nowhere to ride: Decision awaits for A1A bike lanes
By Meghan Meyer
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 16, 2005
DELRAY BEACH - Broken and bleeding, the man staggered into the lobby
of
the oceanfront condominium and collapsed.
A security guard called 911. Someone had been shot, the guard said.
No, said 42-year-old John McCurdy, lying on the floor. He hadn't been
shot. He had been hit by a car.
The police never found the van that hit McCurdy as he rode his bicycle
along State Road A1A, leaving him with broken ribs and a punctured
lung.
Since that September morning in 2003, the reclusive McCurdy has become
a
half-willing champion for building bike lanes on the seaside highway.
He and other bicyclists have flooded public meetings with stories about
being run off the road or hit with cans and chewing gum.
They've begged the Florida Department of Transportation to go through
with its original plans to build sidewalks and bike lanes on A1A.
The state has enough land along most of the road to add bike lanes from
Boca Raton to Palm Beach.
But over the years wealthy oceanfront homeowners have planted trees and
built ornate driveways and privacy walls in the state's right-of-way,
and they don't want to give them up.
They fear that widening the road will bring more traffic and more
annoying cyclists blocking that traffic. Beach residents quickly
marshaled their formidable political clout to keep the bike lanes away.
The enmity between the factions deepened over the nearly two-year
fight.
As state transportation officials prepare to decide in the coming weeks
whether to proceed with their original plans for $22 million in new
asphalt, sidewalks, paved shoulders and bike lanes on the road, the
fight has attracted the attention of bicyclists across the country.
"It is a national issue," said Patrick McCormick, League of American
Bicyclists spokesman. "Other state departments of transportation will
look to Florida and see what Florida does in this case. So it's very
important for safe bicycling and for highway safety in general that
Palm
Beach does the right thing."
As far back as the 1970s, Florida has made it a priority to accommodate
bicyclists and pedestrians in transportation projects. The state's
groundbreaking policy helped shape federal guidelines in 2000. Florida
law and the federal guidelines assume that bicyclists have just as much
right to use the road as cars do and should be considered when
engineers
design roads. The League of American Bicyclists worries that if Florida
allows an exemption to its policy by not building bike lanes on A1A,
exemptions could make it into the federal guidelines too.
"Other states will say, 'Oh, look at what they did in Florida. If they
don't have to build bike lanes we don't have to either,' " McCormick
said.
Bicycling advocates say policies like Florida's help curb obesity and
fight pollution. League Executive Director Andy Clarke became concerned
enough to send a letter to the Palm Beach County legislative delegation
in November.
"The eyes of the nation's bicyclists are upon Florida DOT and Palm
Beach
County as this project progresses," he wrote. "... It is inconceivable
that bike lanes and sidewalks would be deliberately left out of a
project of this importance."
Fierce opposition
Delray Beach resident Jim Smith founded the group Safety As FDOT
Envisions, known as SAFE, to push for sidewalks and bike lanes. On
Thursday he delivered more than 6,000 petitions to the Transportation
Department's District IV offices in Broward County, including one
petition faxed from the U.S. Embassy in Sudan by a Delray Beach
resident
posted there. State legislators are considering introducing Smith's
"Pedestrian and Bicyclist Bill of Rights" this year.
"In Delray Beach we have killing zones, absolute killing zones," said
Smith, who walks every day along the road near his oceanfront
condominium, the same building where McCurdy collapsed after his
accident. "It should be a slam-dunk that we recognize the needs of
pedestrians and bicyclists."
A recent study ranked the metropolitan area from Boca Raton to West
Palm
Beach fourth-deadliest in the nation for pedestrians. Delray Beach has
had more bicycle crashes than any other city in Palm Beach County every
year since 1998, according to accident reports cities filed with the
county Metropolitan Planning Organization.
Boca Raton added bike lanes eight years ago without any problem. The
scenic ride runs past parkland and offers glimpses of surf through gaps
in the trees. Purple signs proclaim Boca Raton a "Bicycle Friendly
Community," a designation Delray Beach applied for during the height of
the bike-lane controversy. Delray Beach dropped its application after
cyclists called it hypocritical.
The state also had no trouble widening the road north of Boca Raton
through Highland Beach. Officials caught their first whiff of fierce
opposition on May 12, 2003, as DOT Project Manager Sonny Abia made his
first public presentation in Delray Beach. As Abia begged for order in
front of a crowd of about 100 in a hot, standing-room-only auditorium,
booing bicyclists shouted that homeowners should learn to share the
road, and homeowners retorted that the cyclists didn't even live in
town
or pay taxes. Business owners complained that a bike lane would wipe
out
parking spots near popular beachfront restaurants.
"You don't want to mess with something that has been successful and is
clearly working," said Bill Wood, director of the Greater Delray Beach
Chamber of Commerce. "Parking is a significant issue. When you move
parking away it has a very scary impact on those businesses."
The shouting match reflected the long-festering tension between drivers
and the packs of cyclists who train on A1A. It would be replayed over
and over as the department held public forums up and down the coast.
Letters to the governor
Rick Edick, an investor who moved to Delray Beach from Philadelphia a
few years ago, spearheads the anti-bike lane movement. Edick's
not-for-profit organization, Save Our Seacoast, or SOS, mailed out
glossy brochures saying the state should do nothing more to the road
than repave it.
With a few other board members, Edick took a private jet to Tallahassee
in October 2003 for a meeting with state Transportation Secretary Jose
Abreu.
As the department made similar presentations to the smaller towns along
the barrier islands, residents in Ocean Ridge turned to Edick for help.
Although the DOT owns enough right-of-way to build 5-foot-wide
regulation bike lanes there, it proposed building only 3-foot-wide
paved
shoulders because of opposition from the community and a problem with
trees in Gulf Stream to the south. Following Edick's lead, some
residents now oppose any widening of the road at all.
Just north of Delray Beach, tiny Gulf Stream knew it would be next.
City
officials put out the call to anyone who had pull with Gov. Jeb Bush to
write letters opposing bike lanes. They responded in force. The
letter-writers included a Connecticut state senator who represented the
district where the Bush family once lived and several friends and
former
business associates of the governor's father, former President George
H.W. Bush. Many addressed the governor with a collegial "Dear Jeb."
Gulf Stream didn't really need the support of the politically
connected.
The town already had a trump card: State law protects invasive
Australian pines that line A1A there. Officials elsewhere have tried to
uproot the nuisance trees, which crowd out other plants and trap baby
sea turtles in their roots. But Gulf Stream had the trees declared
historic years ago. There's no room to expand the road without cutting
Australian pines.
Preservationists and A1A residents in Delray Beach pursued a similar
tack, hoping historic buildings along the road could help block wider
bike lanes. DOT is reviewing a study of those properties, and that too
could affect the design in some sections.
Private meetings
By June 2003, Edick and his wife sat on a six-member committee -
stacked, cyclists complained, with oceanfront business owners and
homeowners - that met privately at Delray's chamber of commerce to
come
up with a citywide consensus. The committee decided to recommend
building paved shoulders along most of the road in Delray Beach instead
of bike lanes. A bike lane would run only along the east side of the
road near the public beach.
In June, the county Metropolitan Planning Organization recommended that
the Transportation Department adopt the Delray Beach consensus plan,
reversing its earlier policy of including bike lanes and sidewalks
wherever possible. The state rarely goes against the organization's
advice.
Bicyclists were flabbergasted. Bike lanes have stricter maintenance
standards than paved shoulders, where fallen leaves and debris pile up.
If a road has bike lanes, cyclists must ride there, just as cars must
stay in the travel lane. They couldn't understand why homeowners
wouldn't want bike lanes.
"Investment bankers and restaurateurs should not be engineering a
road,"
county bike and pedestrian coordinator Raphael Clemente said. "Just
like
I'm a bike/ped coordinator and I can't go into (oceanside Delray
restaurant) Boston's and start telling the chef how to cook steaks."
A bicyclist and songwriter from West Palm Beach, Mike Tague, later
filed
a complaint with the local state attorney's office alleging the Delray
committee violated the state Sunshine Law by not opening its meetings
to
the public.
Wood, the chamber of commerce director, said the chamber invited all
interested parties to participate.
"I would say this has had the most emotion of any of the issues we've
dealt with," Wood said. "On the other hand, I would tell you we kind of
think we did this right."
Wood said he expects the Transportation Department to adopt the city's
consensus plan. The only issues left to discuss are details such as
street lighting and number of parking spots, he said.
"Everything was aboveboard so far as I saw," Edick said. "We're leaving
it to the city and FDOT to work out any problems with the consensus
plan, and we'll support that. The reality is neither the city nor FDOT
would allow an unsafe project to be completed."
Alphabet of groups
Edick and his Save Our Seacoast group have stayed out of the limelight
since throwing their support behind the consensus plan. The group
remains "very much alive," with a goal of preserving the coastline and
scenic nature of the highway, Edick said.
Clemente, the county's bicycle coordinator, worried that Edick's
success
could set an example for other opponents of bike lanes across the
country. Homeowners groups could start challenging state engineers,
wiping bike lanes off the map in affluent areas from Florida to
California.
"Historically, Florida has been pretty good with the state Department
of
Transportation policies, even though it has a high crash rate,"
Clemente
said. "That's why A1A is such a standout case. It's so obvious what's
happening here."
The bicyclists have formed their own groups to counter SOS, including
Jim Smith's SAFE and the not-for-profit Safe Bicycling Coalition of
Palm
Beach County. Amid the growing tension in Delray Beach, cyclists there
organized a social club. The Delray Beach Bicycle Club has joined the
popular West Palm Beach and Boca Raton bicycle clubs in organizing
regular group rides on A1A.
Decision expected soon
Transportation officials plan to make a decision on whether to build
bike lanes in Delray Beach soon and present the decision at a town
meeting next month, DOT project manager Abia said.
"We've gotten quite a lot of input," he said. "There are some people
who
don't understand the advantages the project will give to them. This is
an opportunity for them to see that what we are proposing has an
advantage to them in comparison to what we have now."
If the department does not build bike lanes wherever it has enough
room,
some cyclists said they might sue.
If someone has an accident that a bike lane could have prevented, that
could prove even more costly to taxpayers. In Broward County, a cyclist
who was badly injured in an accident on A1A won a $7.7 million judgment
against the state because it failed to build wide enough travel lanes.
If Delray Beach had a bike lane, injured cyclist McCurdy said, he would
have ridden there instead of in the travel lane on the morning of his
accident. He had no choice but to ride in the road because the law
prohibits him from riding on the sidewalk.
At 6:30 a.m. on that Sunday in 2003, there was no traffic. But the van
found him, and he never saw it coming. His injuries have healed for the
most part and he's returned to riding his bike on the road, bike lane
or
no bike lane. But now he looks over his shoulder constantly. He never
did that before.
"If there had been a bike lane this accident wouldn't have happened,"
McCurdy said. "Everyone should have the right to ride on beautiful A1A
if they choose, not just the people who live there."
Anti-lane activist Edick said the bicyclists should move on.
"They need to get over it," he said. "We didn't get repaving, what we
wanted. Bikers didn't get 5-foot-wide lanes, what they wanted. They
just
can't accept it."
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/south_county/content/south_county/epaper/2005/01/16/m1a_dbbike_0116.htm
http://committed.to/justiceforpeace
