Remember to Listen

I get so caught up in my certainty about what's wrong with the way things are, and how they should be fixed. It pays to stop and listen to the perspectives of others now and then.

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At the Santa Rosa Bike and Pedestrian Advisory Board meeting I attended a few weeks ago, I learned there was an application in process to have Santa Rosa named as a Bicycle Friendly Community by the League of American Bicyclists. "Bah!" I thought. "Santa Rosa asking to be called a bicycle-friendly community is like an alcoholic asking to be honored as a champion of sobriety for going dry for a week." My impression of Santa Rosa in my first half-year here is that it's a city that willfully turned its back on bikes and pedestrians for the better part of a century and has only very lately begun to re-think that.

So I asked somewhat cynically to have a review copy of the application, expecting to see something rather half-baked. I finally last night made time to read through the whole thing...and I was quite impressed. Santa Rosa city staff clearly worked their butts off to respond to the enormous number of questions on the application, and in the process they show off quite an arsenal of strategies and measures the city has taken or is currently working on to really tip the balance in favor of bikes. Little did I know the city has an ordinance on the books requiring all new non-residential buildings to include showers and locker rooms for cycle commuters! (Is this really being enforced?) Go Santa Rosa!

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Yesterday I had a chance conversation on the street with a couple a few years my senior. Surrounded by lanes of speeding traffic at Steele Lane and Cleveland Avenue, I asked them if they thought Santa Rosa was a bike-friendly city. "As much as any other city," they answered. Maybe they're right, and the place just seems hostile to bikers and walkers to me because I've had the good fortune to spend my life in relatively bike-happy places. They told me as recreational cyclists, they were pretty satisfied with the physical layout of Santa Rosa for bikes, and they thought the main thing missing was education for motorists on how to share the road with riders. "But cyclists could use some education, too," they added. "We practically got knocked over the other day by a guy zooming down the sidewalk on his bike." True enough - Santa Rosans on bikes seem just as likely to scoff the law as drivers are...though even the most careless cyclists typically are not putting others at as much risk as are those wielding the speeding tons of steel...while texting, no less!