With so many people buzzing about biking – none louder than Mayor Tom Menino – could Greater Boston transform before our eyes into a world-class bicycling region like Copenhagen, where a third of the workforce pedals to the office each day? Is the Big Dig, which redefined the city a decade ago, already passe? Transportation planners and bicycle advocates say were on that path but still a long way from achieving such dreams, in part because we havent always pedaled forward.
Take the BU Bridge, for example. When it was being rebuilt in the summer of 2010, David Loutzenheiser, a transportation planner for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, went out for a look. He noticed that workers had excavated a section under the bridge, the perfect opportunity to create a pedestrian underpass for Memorial Drive bikers and joggers so they wouldnt have to dodge cars entering and exiting the bridge. But that wasnt part of the plans: The underpass never materialized, and the section was filled back in. That would have been an ideal connection, Loutzenheiser says. Its just mind-boggling.
Hundreds of opportunities to improve Greater Bostons bicycling infrastructure have likewise come and gone in recent decades, and in 2012, the area has a bicycling network that is hardly a network at all. Filled with interrupted paths and lanes and incomplete trails, its a system of stops and starts. If a bicyclist isnt ensnared by a heavily congested intersection, its only a matter of time before he or she encounters a bridge without bike lanes – or a path that narrows to a point where it becomes impassable, or largely the domain of pedestrians.