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Sunday, January 31, 1999 By Brian O'Neill, Post-Gazette Columnist
Ed Masley and I were exercising our God-given right as Pittsburghers, jaywalking back from lunch, when we had to double our pace to avoid an oncoming car.
"Let's face it," Masley said when we reached the curb. "When we're driving, we hate the people we become as pedestrians."
That's so true your grandmother should put it in needlepoint. But drivers' disgust with walkers pales before their contempt for cyclists.
"I feel about them the way I feel about bus drivers," Masley said. "I'm sure there are a lot of good ones out there, but they're not the ones I remember."
The high quotient of cyclist-haters among Pittsburgh drivers is indisputable, though I'm not sure why. Maybe too many Triangle Messengers have flipped the bird Downtown. Maybe all these hills produced too many charley horses when everyone rode sting rays as kids. Maybe drivers suffer from aerodynamic-helmet envy.
There is perhaps no one with a higher disregard for cyclists than my friend Sean Cannon of Shaler, however. He has a quasi-religious belief that bikes are for kids, and kids alone. So to Cannon I went with a possibility that genuinely excites me: a Downtown bike station, modeled after one in California, that might offer free valet parking for up to 150 bicycles, bicycle repairs, bike rentals, a changing station and good coffee.
Build it at the end of the "jail trail," adjacent to the light-rail stop that will be built to serve the new PNC headquarters, and there'd be 150 cycling commuters from the East End in no time.
"It would be an abomination," Cannon said, "a sin against God, and a royal pain to the tens of thousands of hard-working, caffeine-addicted, Quinn-quoting men and women striving to get to their jobs, burning fossil fuels all the way, if goody-two-shoes pedalphiles like yourself can enjoy an activity immediately abandoned by every society that makes second-world status!
"While you're at it, why not build a rickshaw shack!"
At least he is keeping an open mind.
Providing space for Downtown cyclists - thereby reducing auto usage - only makes sense. The concept, pioneered in Long Beach, Calif., is consistent with Mayor Murphy's vision of opening riverfronts, as most bike trails will be riverside.
The city is kicking in $6,000 of a $30,000 feasibility study, with the feds paying the rest. Gateway Plaza, Oakland, the North Shore and Station Square are other potential locations. City Council plans to hear public suggestions March 16.
"One thing that's great about Pittsburgh is parking is nonexistent here," said Mark Shandrow, the Californian hired to see how a bike station might work here, and a man evidently not looking to be named American Automobile Association Man of the Year.
Shandrow tells me 21/2 million cyclists use 8,500 of these bike stations each day in Japan. That leaves Cannon unimpressed.
"I don't want my hard-earned tax dollars - OK, my tax dollars - going to support something new, healthy, environmentally smart and fun," he said. "But if you can get Tom Foerster and Sophie Masloff to re-create the famous scene from 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,' the one with Katherine Ross and Paul Newman on the bike, I might reconsider."
So might cyclists.
Brian O'Neill's e-mail address is boneill@post-gazette.com.
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