It's official—front and center in this morning's Globe:


The online version of the article includes a short video featuring a bicycle shop clerk and a courier, two of the most obnoxious species of cyclists in the catalog, talking about what's best for bikers in Boston. It's like asking cab drivers and truckers what's best for vehicular traffic.

I have an idea for the Globe: why not let normal everyday city cyclists chime in every now and again? Somebody like Jeff Rosenblum of Livable Streets, maybe.  Consult ordinary people who are actually involved in the planning process? Just an idea.

Despite what journalists think, couriers are not experts on urban planning, and there are scores of urban cyclists out there on the roads who are not messengers. Many more, in fact, than there are messengers. It shows a typical lack of imagination and energy on the part of reporters to interview bike couriers and completely ignore students and commuters who will actually use bike lanes while couriers will be weaving recklessly in and out of automobile traffic and blowing red lights as always, regardless of whether there are bicycle lanes or not.

But never mind that. The city's big front-page plan: an online bicycle map of Boston, 250 new bike racks, more bike lanes, and sidewalk showers. Menino is even planning to hire a big, glitzy "bicycle czar," former Olympic cyclist Nicole Freedman!

But don't wet yourself with excitement just yet: "So far, the city's most ambitious plans are in a brainstorming phase and could change, officials said. No money has been budgeted for the improvements, and neither Menino nor other officials could offer any commitment on when or exactly what the city will ultimately do."

Pardon me in advance for being completely and utterly skeptical, but as long as we're in the brainstorming phase, let's take a realistic look at Menino's proposals.

Online bike maps would be good. That should've been done long ago.

Bike racks are good, too, but their installation is always a battle. You have Newbury Street, Beacon Hill and Back Bay neighborhood groups who don't want to see racks go in, and will actively fight them. One valid reason they oppose them is that bike racks bring bike thieves, and result in a bike body count: derelict, dismembered bikes sit there for months and years locked to racks, rusting. Go to any T station with a bike rack to see a good example of a bike graveyard.

That's where the stepped-up security comes in, right? I mean, who are they trying to kid? Like Boston's finest are going to guard the city's bike racks. The idea doesn't even merit comment.

Point is, while 250 racks doesn't seem all that ambitious, it's actually a next to impossible goal, given all the outside factors. If they simply want to meet the goal, though, they can put them in out-of-the-way places where no one ever goes, and say they've done it.

Public shower stations are another howler. According to the article, somebody's market research found that all it would take to get people to ride to work is access to showers.

You have to wonder if market researchers are really as stupid as the results of their research so often suggest. If people want to ride to work, they'll find a way. If they need to shower, there are gyms everywhere.

If people don't want to ride to work, on the other hand, but they think it's becoming fashionable to say they'd like to, they will say they do and find an excuse as to why, in actuality, they're just not able to.

And that's not to say that if the city installed some skeazy public facilities that would soon be malfunctioning and would be rapidly converted to housing for heroin addicts, that those folks who said they'd ride to work if they had access to showers wouldn't do it.

Once. Or twice, tops.

Because bicycle commuting is not all Pee-Wee's Playhouse. It's rough out there. With or without a shower awaiting you.

As for over 55% of people being overweight, and that being a good reason to get on a bicycle. Go to spinning class (but beware of spin rage), don't be cloggin' up the bike lanes because you've got some silly notion that you're going to lose weight. Some of us have places to be. We're looking at cycling as a viable mode of urban transportation, like cars. You don't drive a car to lose weight. You drive it to get where you're going.

Recreational cycling is something different, and while it's a great thing, let's understand that the solutions we need are to serious urban transportation issues, not personal body image issues. How can we make bicycle commuting as safe and efficient as possible? Not by clogging up commute routes with recreational cyclists (and that includes the spandex-clad racing crowd).

But the worst promise of all, and the emptiest solution is "more bike lanes." There are actually lots of bike lanes in Boston, but it's just so much wasted paint for the most part.

It's a little like the mean-spirited compliance with the ADA that has resulted in corner wheelchair crossings that are actually impassible a third of the year, because whenever it rains, the water pools in the ramp. There's no reason why every pedestrian crossing in Back Bay should not be a raised crossing.

Likewise, Boston's bicycle lanes are primitive compared to those in truly bicycle-friendly cities. There are lanes on Mass Ave. in Cambridge, but they are routinely blocked, you have to constantly fight with buses, who pull in and out of them, and you can't let your guard down a second for fear of being doored.

And that's the best Metro Boston has to offer.

Especially in large, well-traveled corridors, the three modes of traffic—vehicular, pedestrian, and bicycle—should be entirely separate. That means even parked cars should not present a danger to cyclists. Mass Ave is wide enough to allow this. And yet, lack of imagination and will have, as usual, prevailed.

While the favored way of adding bike lanes—a painted lane between moving and parallel-parked vehicles—is fine for side-streets, main thoroughfares should look like this:


Any other solution might as well be lip-service.

But if the Mayor really wants to make Boston a "bicyclist's dream"...


Whaddya say, Tommy? Wanna go for a ride?