Given our community’s paltry infrastructure for bicycle commuters, driving commuters who insist on keeping four lanes for cars are basically keeping things inconvenient for bike-riders. If you think about it, drivers wouldn’t like it very much if they were forced to use side streets with all the extra stop signs and corner-turning.

A couple key points about people who use bicycles for transportation. First is an issue of fairness: some of them don’t have the option of driving—because they can’t afford a car or have had their license revoked. For the majority of voluntary bike-riders, though, it’s a generational thing. Millennials have proven themselves dramatically less car-reliant compared to earlier generations and clearly want to live in communities with good bicycle infrastructure. Luckily, Stevens Point recently has done well in luring young people to live here, partly because of University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. However, letting cars continue to rule our roads will not help with this crucial challenge.

How Toxic Public Discourse and Opposition Within City Hall Nearly Derailed the Project

By early-2018 an official decision about Stanley Street was getting closer, but public discussions had skewed toward a very strident opposition. A good illustration was the contrasting views of a Stanley Street homeowner and a business manager about the safety of bikes on sidewalks versus bike lanes. At a public session, the homeowner said he dreaded someday having his kids watch him cleaning blood off his curb from someone who’d been hit in the bike lane. I met the businessperson on an early round of local shops, and he responded enthusiastically to my visit. It turns out that for years he’d been afraid of backing out of his blind alley and hitting a bike-rider on the sidewalk. And rightly so. Bicyclists are in more danger on sidewalks for precisely this reason. Even without a blind alley, it’s harder to see bicycles coming from the sharper angle of a sidewalk than from a bike lane a little further out. When I first met the businessperson, he said he’d be happy to weigh in publicly. Eighteen months later, he felt it wasn’t worth drawing the ire of opponents. The toxic public discourse was becoming a real problem.

Compared with higher elected office, we local officials tend to be very accessible, which last year meant getting plenty of calls and emails about Stanley Street. My interchange with opponents of the road diet split into two clear categories. I spoke with many opponents willing to have genuine dialogue, which I greatly appreciated. We didn’t change each others’ minds, but we treated it as an honest disagreement. In the second category were people who saw no room for disagreement. To them, any council member who defied the supposedly overwhelming anti-road diet sentiment was pursuing some kind of private agenda. The level of rancor reached its peak at a March 2018 public information session presented by the mayor and our new public works director. Two other alders heard from pro-road diet constituents who came intending to speak but ultimately felt uncomfortable.

Meanwhile the substance of the mayor and department head’s new proposal threw a wrench in the works—catching me off-guard and putting me at odds with City Hall. For 18 months, discussions had focused on a 4-to-3 lane conversion. In my one-to-one conversations with the new public works director, the only question was how far the project would span. To show my willingness to compromise, I agreed to shorten it and back away from an entrance/exit to the interstate. Now suddenly we had an official proposal straining to avoid a lane conversion. Instead of bike lanes, there would be sharrow symbols to gently remind drivers to look out for bike riders. For the intersection where our neighborhood shops are, flashing beacons would be installed for pedestrians to ask permission to cross.

As I prepared for the Council to make our decision, the counterproposal complicated matters. For one thing, I could no longer look to the staff professionals in our Department of Public Works for the kind of advice elected officials typically rely on. For another, the threat of a mayoral veto literally changed the political calculus. Instead of a simple majority of six Council members, now we’d need a supermajority of eight.

Rallying the Needed Support

On the problem of expert professional advice, we caught a lucky break. Each April our community hosts the World’s Largest Trivia Contest, and that weekend a councilmember saw on Facebook that a highly credentialed traffic engineer was among those drawn homeward for “Trivia.” The engineer had been following the press coverage of Stanley Street from Indiana, joined us for coffee before leaving town, and for the next several months provided invaluable counsel.