WHERE BIKES AND GOVERNMENT INTERSECT, BEWARE OF CRASHES
Author: Chris Berdik
Section: City Weekly     Page: 9

Bicycling advocates and local government are a tricky mix. In some cases, trickier than others. A quick comparison of the history of bike committees and bicycle-pedestrian coordinators in Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville shows things can go from cozy to downright nasty.

Just over a year ago, Paul Schimek ended his last day as Boston's bicycle program manager. The city was cutting its budget, and Schimek had to go. Still, he says that even before leaving the city's transportation department his voice didn't travel very far inside City Hall.

"There was just not a mandate," he says of his two years on the job. "I got to the point where I realized, I can do anything I want, as long as it doesn't involve spending money or getting policy changed."

Meanwhile, across the river in Cambridge, bicyclists have enjoyed a close relationship with local officials for more than a decade. The Cambridge Bicycle Committee has been active since 1992, its activities funded by the city's Vehicle Trip Reduction Ordinance.

Cara Seiderman, who manages Cambridge's bicycle-pedestrian program, says the needs of bicyclists are known and attended to across city departments.

"If the water department is fixing a pipe on such and such a street, we'll know about it," she says. "Every time a street is up for repairing or redesign or there's a major infrastructure project, the design will be looked at to see how it can be made more bike-friendly."

Next month, the city will mail every Cambridge household a pamphlet about parking and traffic that will contain a decal for a car driver's side window that says "Watch for Bikes."

Somerville, too, has managed to keep its bicycle committee through lean economic times. What began as a citizens' group in 1992 was made official by the city in 2001. And just this year, with a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Somerville hired a bicycle-pedestrian coordinator to help oversee the planned extension of its mixed-use community path.

The same year Schimek was let go, Mayor Thomas M. Menino decided not to appoint new members to Boston's Bicycle Advisory Committee, the latest incarnation of an idea that had failed more than once before. That parting of the ways paled on the acrimony charts beside last December's split between the Brookline Transportation Board and the town's Bicycle Advocacy Committee, which had worked together for seven years. At a public meeting during which board members and bicycle advocates clashed over the proposed location of bicycle parking spaces, the bike committee was formally voted out of government.

"I was really stunned," says David Friend, Brookline's assistant director of transportation, about the board's split with bicycle advocates. "I think there were some personalities that got in the way of the substance. There are those who think bikes should be the preferred mode of transportation, and they want to personally rearrange everybody's priorities. There was no bullying, really."

The Brookline Bike Committee continues to meet on its own, and co-chair Anita Johnson says the town's transportation board rarely welcomed input from the committee.

"The members of the bicycle advocacy committee are all middle-aged professionals, and yet we were treated by the transportation board as if we were outlaw wackos," says Johnson, a lawyer with the federal government.

But Friend says the town's transportation board does try to encourage bikes, and notes that the town will put new bike lanes in the planned reconstruction of its major cross-town artery, Beacon Street.

"We're trying to promote all modes of transportation, and do so safely," he says.

As for Boston, the director of policy and planning for Boston's Transportation Department, Vineet Gupta, says that he would like to see a bicycle committee reconstituted. "Awareness of [bicycling] issues has to percolate within the entire department," says Gupta.

When pressed as to whether Boston needed a new bicycle-pedestrian coordinator, Gupta says the department had since distributed Schimek's duties to multiple personnel. "Having one person would help," he says, "but we're managing very well in the meantime."

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