Walking and Biking in Royal Oak

Do you feel safe walking or riding a bike in Royal Oak?  Do you let your kids walk or ride their bikes to school and play?  Or do you drive them everywhere in your car?
 
The answer is obvious in Royal Oak.  Witness the huge traffic jams in front of Royal Oak Middle School every school day, caused entirely by parents driving their kids to school.  The jams also occur in front of every elementary school.
 
These traffic scrums represent enormous waste--wasted gasoline, wasted wear-and-tear on cars, needless stress for parents, school staff working as traffic cops, and needless pollution.  Our kids also lose.  The explosion of childhood obesity is partially caused by children not getting adequate exercise.  For many kids walking or biking to school could be a primary form of exercise.
 
This generation of chauffeured children did not occur by accident.  Our streets are designed to move the maximum number of cars at the highest possible speeds.  Bicycles and pedestrians are an inconvenient afterthought.  We drive our kids everywhere because that is what Royal Oak is designed for.
 
Some Royal Oak crosswalks are so ridiculously unsafe they are almost a lampoon--for example, the pedestrian crosswalk at Woodward and 13 Mile Road.  Hundreds of Beaumont employees live in Royal Oak.  Why do so few of them walk and bike to work? Because, absurdly, the hospital is almost unreachable on foot if you live east of Woodward.  Crossing Woodward at 13 Mile on foot is a harrowing experience, akin to Russian roulette in that if you do it enough times you feel certain that you will get killed.
 
Our area--Royal Oak, Clawson, Ferndale, Berkley--has become a night life destination.  The area is also flat as a pancake, perfect biking terrain.  Why aren't hundreds of people biking to our downtowns to enjoy our bars and restaurants?  If we made it safe and convenient, they would.  Instead we have the absurd situation where we refuse or discourage downtown development because there is "not enough parking."  There may not be enough room for all the cars, but there is plenty of room for bikes and pedestrians.
 
Our streets are not an act of God.  A relatively small cadre of traffic engineers, working over decades, and believing that their sole job is to move the maximum number of cars at the highest possible speeds, has given us streets and intersections that people on foot and bike are afraid to use.  This happened in Royal Oak and across the United States.  
 
We can and should re-engineer our streets to encourage people to walk and ride their bikes.  All of us would benefit, even those of us who never walk or bike.  Consider the benefits:

• Local economic development: if a person heads out on bicycle to a bar or restaurant they are necessarily going to spend their money close to home, improving our local economy.  They also won't spend money on gasoline--keeping money local that would otherwise go to Texas or Canada.
• Public health I: one reason for the explosion of obesity is that most of us do not get adequate exercise.  An excellent way to get exercise is to make it part of the daily routine:  bike to work, bike to school, bike to the grocer, bike to bars or restaurants.
• Public health II: all of us continually inhale car exhaust and particulate matter shed by car tires.  This causes asthma, heart disease, cancer, and a host of other ailments.  Every time we leave the car and use a bike we make the air a little bit cleaner and improve our health.
• Global warming: you may believe that "global warming is a myth," but it does not matter what any of us thinks, the physical reality is that the planet is steadily warming from the burning and mining of fossil fuels, much of it oil to power our cars.  As the global warming catastrophe plays out the public will demand curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.  Cities that have made themselves bike and pedestrian friendly will be ahead of the curve.
• Property values: one of the cheapest ways to improve property values is to make your town walkable and bikable.  People want to live in walkable, bikable neighborhoods.  Numerous public opinion surveys prove this.  Many other cities recognize this and are making changes.  Royal Oak lags far behind.

For these and other reasons there has been an explosion of interest in making Royal Oak walkable and bikeable.  Our city commission authorized a Non-Motorized Transportation Plan which is now in the process of being added to our city's master plan.  But the master plan is just the vision  Now comes the long, hard slog to make it happen.
 
We face many challenges.  Thankfully, the engineering challenge is relatively trivial.  We know how to paint bike lanes, put up "share the road" signs, and make safe crosswalks.

   
The main challenge is political.  Frederick Douglass phrased the problem brilliantly in this couplet:  "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."  Those of us who want change must politically engage.  Elected officials and city staff must see and hear us.  We must make demands and see them through.
 
An ad-hoc group has already formed in Royal Oak, you can join us via our "Royal Oak Non-Motorized Plan" Facebook group (http://tinyurl.com/c5phmwn), or send an email to RoyalOakBikes@hotmail.com to join our list.
 
Cars and roads once liberated us; now they are increasingly imprisoning us in unhealthy and unhappy lifestyles.  We can change this.  We can make Royal Oak a walkable, bikeable community.