'"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 COMPEbreastION, end 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 buttume 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 pebreastions to the Transportation Department's District IV offices in Broward County, including one pebreastion faxed from the U.S. Embbutty 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 Eprivates, an investor who moved to Delray Beach from Philadelphia a few years ago, spearheads the anti-bike lane movement. Eprivates'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, Eprivates took a private jet to Tallahbuttee
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 Eprivates 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 Eprivates'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 buttociates 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
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."
Cyclists are Victims of the Law of the Jungle 4889Jim Yanik registration That's supposing cars abided by any law other than the Law of the Jungle. SIZE MATTERS on American roads, you know. Enforcement is hardly more than a ticket industry, concentrating...
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," Eprivates 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
Eprivates 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, Eprivates said.
Clemente, the county's bicycle coordinator, worried that Eprivates'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 Eprivates 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."
