From the Roundtable: Bike, Walk and Wheel – potholes, cracks and trash

The Columbia area couldn’t have been blessed with finer weather for the recently concluded Bike, Walk and Wheel Week events. Several days with blue skies, perfect temperatures and low humidity allowed many of us to renew contact with the area’s streets and trails after having slogged through a rather dreary winter.
I cycled more than 200 miles during five weekdays and spent only a fraction of it on any of the city’s dedicated trails. Not daring enough to navigate Providence Road or West Broadway, my itinerary adhered mainly to less-traveled streets. Wherever I went, the conclusion was the same: The streets are not in the best of shape and even dangerous in some places. Any motorist dreads the usual litany of spring potholes, pavement cracks and gutters strewn with debris, but a commuter astride a two-wheeler faces significantly greater consequences: a blowout, a wipeout and a trip to the hospital or even the morgue.

For me, the week of biking was the brutal reminder that the community still has a very long way to go in terms of integrating cycling into the overall fabric of the area’s transportation network. Although others continue the worn-out debate over the deployment of millions of dollars of federal grant money to develop and encourage non-motorized transportation, I’m beyond that. I’m ready to say thanks for many of the small steps already taken, and I’m looking forward to others.
How ironic that Columbia was anointed one of four cities nationwide to receive a bazillion dollars to promote non-motorized use of its streets and sidewalks. A low seven-figure amount has already been committed for promotion. Millions more are still to be spent on projects and improvements. Yet, apparently, we’re on our own when it comes to fixing various fissures on the area’s streets and sidewalks that would make them more inviting to bicyclists and walkers.
After a week of cycling, I wondered about the effectiveness of all this preaching about non-motorized transportation given the condition of streets and sidewalks. The administrators of this laudable project have been spending money on marketing, road striping and reconfiguring and trail construction as they try to recruit two-wheeled commuters, some of them novices who haven’t jumped on a bike in years. They probably aren’t thinking about the probability of some unfortunate cyclist’s dip into a nasty pothole, and an accident shouldn’t be the catalyst for changing the federal government’s rules regarding non-motorized transportation. But those rules should have been written to allow some spending to repair roadside bike paths because the poor conditions likely are causing many people who participated in Bike, Walk and Wheel Week to get back in their cars for the trips to work once it was over.
Obviously mindful of other vehicles while observing the rules of the road, the vigilant cyclist is also forced to pay close attention to the pavement itself for all of its flaws and imperfections. Aside from saving about 10 gallons of precious motor fuel, the close examination I paid to the pavement in front of me brought another dividend: 47 cents in odd change carelessly discarded.