BIKE: Most Dangerous Cities For Walking

[Mike Dahmus]

Dennis Abbott wrote:

>I lived and biked commuted in Fort Lauderdale FL for almost a year and
>the place is absolutely unliveable and darn near impossible to bike
>commute in.  A couple of major reasons:
>
>[...]
>
>Absolutely no recreational weekend rides possible, its all houses and
>collector roads from swamp to beach.  Worst place to live EVER.
>  
>
As some of you might know, I grew up in South Florida, and it's my own 
personal motivator to fight sprawl. However, there are some positive 
lessons to learn from South Florida:

1. The Tri-Rail debacle -- they're only NOW starting to talk about light 
rail in Ft. Lauderdale, in a far more liberal area which was ripe for 
it, because Tri-Rail showed people that "rail doesn't work". Just like 
our own commuter rail debacle will do -- you can't put down a crappy 
starter system and expect success - in fact, it will kill your rail 
dreams in the cradle.

2. "It's where you live, not how you live". Unfortunately, while there 
are a few outliers like a former coworker who lived in Plantation (far 
northwest Broward county) and biked to IBM (north-central Boca Raton, in 
far south Palm Beach County), where you live determines what you can do. 
In the years since I moved away, Boca Raton actually built some bike 
lanes (the pattern in PBC at least is that the cities hug the coast; 
there's unincorporated hanger-on sprawl to the west of each, so the bike 
lanes built by the city are of course far to the east). Interestingly, 
the STATE has built a bunch of bike lanes since I moved away - unlike 
here, many of the major roads in the cities are technically state 
highways (although six-lane arterials, not freeways). Imagine if 
Enfield/15th had a state shield on it, for instance. Then imagine if 
TXDOT, of their own accord, restriped it with bike lanes.

Moral of the story: Don't buy a big house in Cedar Park (gloating over 
how much cheaper it was per square foot than a much smaller and older 
house in Austin) and then bitch and moan about how hard it is to bike 
around up there. People who do this in the city limits of Austin deserve 
some help from us, which I'm trying to give, and I wish you luck in the 
far 'burbs, but you punched your own ticket there to a certain extent.

Ironic retort: Unfortunately, you could say the same thing to all of us 
for living in Texas. Our state government has gotten more, not less, 
reactionary -- anybody who didn't see this coming is a fool.

South Florida has it worse today in many respects than the Austin metro 
area - it's comprised of three stunted 'mini-cities' (Miami, Ft. 
Lauderdale, West Palm) and a bunch of sprawlburbs -- it's nonstop 
suburban sprawl from the equivalent of Austin to Dallas with only the 
three tiny city centers (Miami's 'center-city' is less dense than 
Austin's). But they DO have redevelopment happening along the east-coast 
corridor (roughly US-1) without so much neighborhood bullshit allowed to 
get in the way - like the idiots who got in the way of the mixed-use 
development on Riverside and I-35, and the idiots who fought the Villas 
on Guadalupe, [...]. Their future is looking a hell of a lot better than 
ours, given all that and a considerably less reactionary state government.

- MD