Rock Island: on the Lane to Livability

This morning's The Argus contained the following editorial:

Rock Island: on the Lane to Livability

By Chuck Oestreich

Quick, what makes a city a vibrant place for living? What ranks it high on the many "best places to live" lists? What makes its citizens quietly happy about where they have elected to reside?

One quick answer, surprisingly, is bicycling. And it’s more than having a path or two through some parks or along a river. No, what helps to rank a city high is its proactive stance and positive action in making it easier for its citizens to bicycle almost anywhere in the city. It’s what’s happening in Seattle, Madison, and Chicago, among other places.

And it’s happening right now in Rock Island.

As you travel on 7th Avenue after its recent resurfacing, you can’t help but notice the new bike lane striping between 20th and 11th Streets. Five-foot wide lanes are on each side of the roadway, with innovative striping at intersections. With more resurfacing in the future, residents will be able to travel all the way to the Mississippi River from the north center of the city on these lanes.

And this is not the first. Rock Island has the distinction of having the first striped bicycle lanes on a major thoroughfare in the Quad Cities. This is on 17th Street between 31st Avenue and the Rock Island Fitness Center, which is very close to Blackhawk Road.

The benefits of bike lanes are many. At the top is the perception they give that bicyclists – and pedestrians at intersections – are welcome as a part of the transportation flux of everyday life. And that word "transportation" is important. So many times we consign bicycling to recreation, forgetting that much localized travel can be easily and safely accomplished on a bike.

Bike lanes are magnets; they attract bicyclists. In an era of increasing obesity, softening of fitness, and over-reliance on labor saving devices, taking a bike ride to a store for a loaf of bread instead of guzzling up the car is almost a national imperative. And bike lanes make it much easier for that to happen.

The lanes are also helpful for cars because they clearly show the zone of safety on the side of the road that usually is an open blank. With lanes, swerving to avoid a bicyclist and possibly invading another driver’s space isn’t usually necessary. Drivers are used to roadway striping for vehicles, such as the middle double line, and generally they rigorously obey it. Lane striping for bikes is just an extension of that.

I’m happy that Rock Island is leading the way in the Quad Cities with this innovative striping. It makes my city more livable.

Livability and bicycling. They go hand in hand, or should we say handlebar to handlebar. And in Rock Island they’re riding together in tandem.