E-Mail This Article to a Friend Spinning their wheels (continued)

LIKE CHARLOTTE, Boston drew up an ambitious bike plan five years ago. With help from the Boston Bicycle Advisory Committee, the BTD created a map of the city that included a vast network of bike paths, all connected together. But so far, the network exists only on paper. Other suggestions went into effect only temporarily. The BTD hired a bicycle-program manager — Schimek — who came and went. It also created an Interagency Bicycle Task Force, which brought together representatives from eight city and state offices to discuss bicycle-related planning. The task force didn’t survive a year — Schimek, who headed the group, says he stopped calling meetings because departments were sending only low-level staffers with no authority. More surprising, the BTD did not renew the Boston Bicycle Advisory Committee itself, which helped write the bicycle plan; the body no longer exists.

"I think that’s all we needed, a guy inside," says City Councilor Michael Ross, who received an "Influence Peddler" award from MassBike in 2001 for promoting cycling. "Now I think we run the risk of becoming complacent."

"You always have to overcome a lot of inertia whenever you start a new program," Tippette says.

Institutional inertia wasn’t the only thing that stood in the way, however. There was also a great divide among cycling advocates over what it means to make Boston bike-friendly. Schimek is solidly in the "road rider" camp, people who believe that cyclists should ride in the street, just as the law says they should. "Path riders," for their part, say the city should build separate paths, or at least designate bicycle lanes, to accommodate those who are uncomfortable riding on the street.

To Schimek and other road-rider advocates, a bicycle-friendly city is one with wide, smooth right lanes — he is perfectly happy with the current greenway design — and aggressive public-awareness campaigns to promote safety. One of his biggest efforts as bike czar was to put up "Share the Road" signs along the newly renovated Hyde Park Avenue — a plan that was ultimately nixed. Another Schimek goal, getting the Boston Police Department to train officers in cycle laws and cycle-relevant motorist laws, also went nowhere.

People like Anne Lusk, a visiting scientist at the Harvard University School of Public Health, think that promoting safe and pleasant road-sharing is ultimately a dead end for the goal of encouraging bike use — most people just won’t ride where they feel endangered by traffic. "We can create a new realm for bicycles" that shares neither the road with cars nor the sidewalk with pedestrians, Lusk says. She has all kinds of compelling ideas that might someday transform the city, like putting up aesthetically pleasing jersey barriers that create safe bike lanes for children cycling to and from school, and creating 150 miles of interconnected multi-use paths.

Birk is on Lusk’s side, which she calls the "effective-cycling movement." She refers to road-cycling advocates as the "superiority-complex movement." "To create more livable cities you have to build the facilities," Birk says.

She has an ally in Cambridge: Seiderman has used Birk as a consultant on the city’s bicycle plan. And this summer Seiderman will publish the results of a survey showing that Cambridge cyclists overwhelmingly prefer bike lanes and bike paths. The study’s findings apply to Boston, too, Seiderman says. "I don’t know why Boston hasn’t moved more on that," she says. "Every study I’ve seen that asks people the obstacles to commuting to Boston, says it’s no [bike] lanes, and potholes, and not being comfortable in traffic."

Debates over how to incorporate bicycling on the new greenway offer a good example of how the conflict among cycling advocates is playing out. To Schimek and many others, the plan for a 14-foot-wide right traffic lane is perfect. For others, it is a tragic failure.

Among those who believe the latter is Peter Furth, who chairs the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Northeastern University’s College of Engineering. Furth assigned his class a spring project to design options for bicycle accommodation on the greenway. The BTD plan "was rejected quite early in the process," he says. The city needs a "Central Artery of trails," Furth explains, that provides the same comfort level as the trails being connected, such as the path along the Charles River and through the Fenway. Forcing cyclists onto the roadside in heavy traffic "would be like having all those expressways north and south of the city, and then connecting them with a dirt road."

SADLY, THIS disagreement within the local bicycling community is further retarding Boston’s sluggish progress. In a city that, cycling advocates feel, does so little for them, the two camps compete for already limited attention and resources. This problem, at least, is a point of agreement. "One of the reasons we have failed to get our message across is because we have different messages," Schimek says.

"Most people in government don’t want to get involved in a war in the alternative-transportation community," says Save the Harbor Save the Bay’s Berman. "They want to back projects on which there is consensus."

Yet the goals of each side of the debate are not mutually exclusive — indeed they should be complementary, especially given the current political environment. Boston is neither physically capable of accommodating nor sufficiently motivated to support what either side wants — to create a complete network of paths or to maintain impeccably rideable streets. The best the city can do at this time — and the least it should do — is to build whatever works to help people cycle from point A to point B.

The bicycling network pictured in the five-year-old BTD report could help matters considerably. Such a network would "include bicycle lanes, wider shoulders, reorganized lane widths, intersection improvements, signage, or other recommendations," according to the report. What this means is that a whole bunch of small projects could eventually be patched together to create a large network of bike paths.

The one project that seems closest to succeeding, the South Bay Harbor Trail, has gained traction, one could argue, by stringing small projects into a marketable big project. If and when completed, it could be a continuous 3.5-mile trail from Ruggles Station, in Roxbury, to Fort Point Channel. "Connect the inland part of the city to the sea," says Berman, whose group is developing the plan.

Up close, the trail would look a lot more like software engineer Lew Lasher’s eclectic commute than what you might imagine as a trail. The project is all about identifying gaps in the route and figuring out the most appropriate and feasible ways to cover those gaps.

Berman readily admits this, but you won’t catch him talking about the trail that way. Perhaps he bears in mind that Schimek also pushed for small projects, but couldn’t gain political support: Mayor Thomas Menino can’t get much mileage from opening a two-block connector path. Berman, taking a different approach, talks about things like bringing inner-city taxpayers to the harbor they paid to clean. "It is really important to connect the people to the facilities that they have paid for, and to the jobs and economic opportunity on the Harbor," he says. Now that’s something an elected official can get behind.

Berman point out that the trail has full support from Menino, who appeared at a dedication event, as well as from business leaders and key agencies like Mass Highway. "There is no question that the mayor himself is proud of the effort. He wants to accelerate it and keep it moving forward," Berman says.

The greenway and its attached crossroads could use this kind of big-picture promotion. So could the other little projects that are just as critical to making Boston a genuinely bicycle-friendly city. At this crucial moment, however, few seem able to focus on that vision.

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com