TOWN SQUARE

Allentown bike lanes raise 'hopes'

Paul Carpenter

3:31 p.m. AKST, January 19, 2012

The first ride down the bike lane on Santa Barbara's busy State Street was disconcerting, to put it mildly.

At the time, I was accustomed to riding in Schuylkill County, where coal trucks and other motor vehicles consider bicycles as something to be used for target practice.

We visited California frequently because our daughter attended UC Santa Barbara and sometimes I took along my bike. We would tease her a lot about "majoring in beach," but she made us proud.

Anyway, once I got over the State Street terror, it was great. Four-wheelers always seemed careful to respect the bike lanes, and there also were miles of paved bike lanes separated from the motor vehicle roads all the way from the city to our daughter's campus in suburban Goleta.

Forget about Los Angeles. It's one of the worst places to ride a bicycle I ever saw, except for the Mulholland Drive/Mulholland Highway corridor. They have bike lanes on the beaches, but they are clogged with in-line skaters and dangerous distractions (bikinis that force innocent cyclists to veer off course and get stuck in the sand).

After I moved to the Lehigh Valley, I discovered it is a cycling mecca, because of the internationally-famous velodrome in Trexlertown and a vast network of serene country roads. Allentown, however, is not the first place that comes to mind when one thinks of a cycling mecca.

That may change, according to an item last Friday by The Morning Call's Road Warrior (aka Dan Hartzell). A plan for new bike lanes in Allentown has been developing for some time, his column reported.

There are some party-poopers who have misgiving about the plan, and I must confess I share their concerns.

The "Connecting Our Community" proposal would convert half of the traffic lanes on Linden and Turner streets into bike lanes, all the way from Fourth Street, through the downtown area, to Cedar Creek Park in the West End.

Both streets are one-way with two lanes of traffic. The COC plan will make them single-lane, which, according to a 2010 COC flier, will mean "traffic capacity on both streets will meet or exceed current traffic volumes," despite lower traffic speeds.

"Even with the lane reduction at some areas," the flier said, "traffic flow will be similar to today, with hopefully less reckless driving and fewer crashes."

I agree with that part about less reckless driving if they cut traffic lanes in half. Reduced traffic speeds? I fear that reckless driving will be subdued only because motorists get stuck in the Turner-Linden parking lot, watching cyclists breeze by.

The key word in the COC plan is "hopefully," because this is a city where officials do a lot of hoping when logic might suggest doing otherwise.

A previous mayor hoped he could solve the downtown crime problem by getting rid of two-lane one-way streets, which allow for reasonably good traffic flow, which in turn (egad) allows robbers, etc. to get away.

Mayor Roy Afflerbach's crime-solving plan was never implemented, so traffic still moves, albeit haltingly, in Allentown.

The Road Warrior's column was in response to a letter from Terry Lindner of Allentown, who foresaw "gridlock when hockey arena traffic is added. I think the city has dramatically underestimated the effects of these bike lanes on traffic flow."

Lindner is one of those pessimists who think that when you cut something in half, you make it smaller. Where would modern politicians be if they thought that way? They might start spending only as much of the taxpayers' money as they take in, instead of twice as much. The entire system of government patronage jobs, boondoggles, juicy sweetheart contracts and other goodies might collapse.

Lindner and I need to try harder to see the silver lining on the COC cloud.

Allentown is one of the worst cities I ever saw when it comes to traffic-snarling double-parking. Officials keep promising to crack down, but police cars routinely cruise by without so much as a horn honk as lazy louts park in traffic lanes even when there is an open parking space at the curb 20 feet away. It seems to be a cultural requisite.

If the city has bike lanes and only single lanes of traffic on Turner and Linden, double-parkers will be able to achieve great happiness by creating complete disasters.

Hopefully (there's that word again), the city will actually start addressing the double-parking problem now, to prepare its legions of lazy louts for the shock of having to learn how to parallel-park.

paul.carpenter@mcall.com 610-820-6176

Paul Carpenter's commentary appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

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