No cars, no bikes

Sitting in a local Baton Rouge coffee house this evening enjoying a rambling post-meeting meeting chat (yes, there was a meeting following a meeting this afternoon / evening) my conversation partner said, "I was in New Orleans on my usual Saturday 50-mile ride with a friend . . . " when I interrupted.

"Man, the streets in New Orleans are pure crap! Except the ones that have been resurfaced recently."

"Yeah," says my friend, "New Orleans lucked out with Katrina."

Huh? Lucked out?? That's not the way I usually think of it. But then, I imagine you, diligent reader, don't think of it that way either so I need not go on.

Except for the conversation, which did continue . . .

"I mean," says he, "all that Submerged Roads money following the storm. They have bike lanes on St Charles . . . "

"What?!? St. Charles? They MUST have repaved St Charles!"

"Yeah, part of it so far but the rest of it is going to be paved . . . and St Claude and even Decatur . . ."

"You mean," says I, befuddled, "a REAL bike lane and not the fake one they put down for the protest?"

"Yes, a REAL bike lane. The city came back and put one in after the protest."

"Well, I'll be damned . . . "

And so it went for a bit. I drifted off into a memory of being in New Orleans a year or so ago when I had to ride from the Bywater to Felicity and Annunciation (a few blocks river-side of Magazine) to meet a friend then book it on down to a park on Carrollton at South Claiborne for the Bike Easy 2nd Line Ride.

The streets in the Bywater were comparatively smooth by New Orleans standards and exhibited a characteristic exaggerated humped aspect to help shed water into the gutters with their 2 to 3 inch drop off from the asphalt onto brick or cobblestone. Narrow but straight, they were easy to ride with clear sight-lines and interesting streetscapes to hold my attention between intersections.

The intersections required all my attention as the buildings were constructed out to the edge of the property line  leaving only the sidewalk between the building and the street. This makes for completely fucked up sightlines for drivers on the intersecting streets with their stop signs. Almost every car comes hurtling out of the side streets about half a car length before stopping (mostly) as the driver checks the cross street for traffic. A bicycle can alter course VERY quickly with what seems a small twitch of the handlebars, especially when motivated by drivers' potentially homicidal behavior.

Crossing into the Quarter heading upriver meant the streets were (mostly) smoother and (mostly) empty given the hour and the day. It really is pleasant riding through the Quarter (relatively) early in the day before the city starts moving in its hangover wrapped shuffle.

The CBD is not bad either but things decay pretty quickly, quite literally, on the other side of the Expressway / Crescent City Connection.

The street I was riding on as I neared Felicity was a torn up, patched up, pot holed piece of shit (so typical of New Orleans streets) that beat me up pretty badly. I turned off it onto another street to take me down a few blocks to a parallel - and hopefully much smoother - street but, to my horror, the street I turned onto was no smoother and its cross streets had their original cobblestone paving exposed. A nice touch for tourism, no doubt, but no delight on a bicycle.

Shaken AND stirred, I gathered up my friend and we headed up the newly resurfaced Magazine Street toward Audubon Park and Carrollton. What a delight! Light traffic, new street surface, pretty weather . . . very nice . . . until the new pavement ended and we were back on the ruinous surface of the old street.

I managed to tune back in to the conversation at this point, picked up the thread of the conversation and said, "It mystifies me why a city like New Orleans, with the crappiest of streets and so much motor traffic, can have so many bicyclists while Baton Rouge, with relatively good streets, has so few."

Add to that the curiously post-Apocalyptic quality of Baton Rouge; post-Apocalyptic in the sense that the streets are curiously empty yet the buildings are intact, the lawns trimmed, the lights on. On a couple of occasions lately, while riding around Baton Rouge with out of state or foreign guests, I got this question, "Where are the cars? You couldn't ride in <their home city> without having to deal with traffic."

Strange indeed.

Stranger still is the view held by natives of the Red Stick that "you can't ride a bicycle IN Baton Rouge!" This is such a strongly held belief that an earlier version of the Adventure Cycling Association map with the spur from the Southern Tier into Baton Rouge used to have a text description saying something like, "The 24-mile spur into Baton Rouge takes riders to the airport in north Baton Rouge. Local bicyclists say you can't ride into downtown but you can rent a car at the airport and drive to New Orleans. [emphasis mine]"

Really? You can't ride into town? But it's okay to dump strangers on bicycles at the airport? Nice, especially since many of the riders coming into town are headed to New Orleans . . . on BICYCLES.  Great way to make sure they not only never come back to Baton Rouge but that they only stop long enough to get a candy bar, a Gatorade, and advice on the quickest way out of town, which is no mean feat from the airport.

So how is it that a place that has really bad infrastructure and lots of motor traffic can have a strong bicycle culture while a place with relatively good infrastructure and almost no motor traffic (IF you know where you're going) can have almost NO bicycle culture?