Columbia: 1, St. Louis: 0

Admittedly, the sole intention of this blog (thus far) is to disparage Columbia's bike lanes.  However, I must give credit where credit is due.

I went to St. Louis a few days ago for a baseball game.  The girlfriend and I decided that rather than deal with stadium traffic, we'd park at a bar I'm fond of about five miles from the stadium and ride to the game.  You see, I grew up in St. Louis and I was wanting to hit this bar after the game for pizza.  I had also been noticing on my last few visits that some bike lanes had been springing up around town. I was hoping that we would be lucky enough to stumble across a few so that I could review them.  I figured that heading into downtown, we would be bound to see at least one or two.

Well, I saw one.  It was a 15 to 20 foot long strip at an intersection that I didn't take a picture of because I would have needed to stop traffic in order to do so.  That's it.  One single bike lane on five miles of roads stretching from downtown to The Hill.

Oddly enough, we also didn't see many bike racks either.  In fact, the only one we saw was right outside the stadium and it was completely packed.  We cruised around looking for another one to no avail.  We even stopped to ask a police officer who laughed at the idea and told us, "This isn't a very bike friendly town.  The only place that they really put bike racks is in The Loop and U-City.  They don't put 'em downtown where they might be useful."  He kind of trailed off at the end, probably realizing that bike racks are, in fact, also very useful in the U-City area.  He went on to tell us that most of the bike trails and lanes were funded by the Parks & Rec department.  I found this to be a strong indicator that the City of St. Louis does not view bicycles as a viable form of transportation, but merely as a form of recreation. 

All of this was in spite of the fact that we saw signs indicating that St. Louis is a bike friendly town. Wherever we saw these signs, we saw sharrows as well.  These sharrows were all fairly well placed within the roadway, but were all on roads where they weren't really necessary.  They were on narrow, crowded streets with cars parked along both sides and a light but steady stream of traffic. These are the type of streets where a cyclist doesn't need sharrows, we simply ride where we can.  We just don't need the extra guidance.  Motorists don't need them either since traffic isn't moving quickly and there's enough going on that they have to pay careful attention to everything.






So Columbia's bicycle transit system might have shortcomings, but so far it appears to be far superior to St. Louis in bicycle friendliness, even though Columbia is a third the size of St. Louis (taking into account only St. Louis's population within city limits).  Our efforts might be falling short, at least we're making a real, concerted effort.