Our Field of Dreams

I’ve been doing a lot of driving this year. We started daycare for our 10-month-old a few months back and were advised to wait until a certain size and age to bike with a little infant, so we’ve turned to the car seat for all but the closest outings. As a nearly lifelong bicycle commuter, I’ve felt out of sorts. After dropping our little boy off at daycare, why not just keep driving to work, and then for errands? I can understand just how easy it is to default to driving for everything, kind of like that scene in L.A. story where Steve Martin drives one house away.

Monday was our first day bicycling to daycare with our little kiddo. We have a front-mounted child seat with a matching neon green cartoon lizard helmet. I excitedly changed the tires and brakes and got everything dialed on the bike. It needed to feel and be totally safe.

And so do the roads we take. I have a totally different perspective than my 20-something fixed-gear bike punk self. As a new and vigilant father, even just getting “buzzed” by a car passing too close sends my heartbeat, adrenaline, and rage soaring. We can only consider biking with our little one if we can select a safe route. That makes us now just like the 60 percent of the population that would consider bicycling if it felt safe.

Enter the new community paseos, providing a crosstown route all the way from the lower Eastside into the Westside where I live. These are unlike anything we’ve seen previously in Santa Barbara. Paseos, aka neighborhood greenways aka bike boulevards, are a solution to the classic bicycle lane dilemma. Should we have bike lanes or parking in the road shoulder? Or is there too much traffic demand, like on Carrillo or Mission? Are the lanes on high-speed streets even safe to begin with? How much protection does a white line provide at 35 or 45 or even 55 miles per hour?

The community paseos are a physical embodiment of thousands and thousands of people-hours of public process, design, more public process, design, then engineering, and then more public process, state grant applications, and … five years later … the paseos.

They aren’t totally self-explanatory. Neighbors are already complaining about “arbitrary” mazes they have to navigate. I believe this will be similar to the temporary backlash around roundabouts, like those on Coast Village and Hot Springs Road. The projects require drivers to turn off their mental “auto-pilot” and pay close attention as they navigate through. What the neighbors aren’t complaining about, however, is a removal of parking. Very little parking removal has been necessary for these treatments, only specifically for the “contraflow” bike lane that provides safe access from Sola to the Micheltorena bridge.

Amid the rainstorm this week, I had to drop off my car for service on the Eastside and bike back to my home. After dropping off the kiddo and rushing to load the bike and rain gear, I realized I had forgotten my helmet. Oof! No helmet and biking in the rain? Definitely violating my safety protocols. But I found that I was on a bike lane all the way to the beach path, then on State Street (with newly painted lanes all the way up!), and I navigated the community paseo on Sola. I’ve ridden Micheltorena thousands of times, but never without concern. I would have walked it on the sidewalk on this occasion, just to be safe in the rain. Instead, I had a protected bike treatment that got me safely over to the bridge and onto my street. I happen to know how hard so many advocates, electeds, planners, and engineers worked to find an acceptable solution that could provide this level of safety and service for people outside of a motor vehicle. I’m here to tell you that they were successful. We — the community together — were successful.

Now, it’s wintertime, and cold mornings and bits of wind or rain might give us pause to go somewhere by bike. But this is our moment. Cue Kevin Costner for the Field of Dreams moment of faith. We as a community said that, “If we build it, they will come.” Well, “they” is us. We are Shoeless Joe Jackson and all the rest. We have the opportunity to improve our health, sustainability, and quality of daily life, right in our neighborhoods. My reminder of the benefit that outweighs the simple convenience of always driving was the smile on the face of my kiddo after successfully seeing the world from the handlebars of a bike on his way to daycare. Oh that grin. It’s ours to have as well, if we choose it.

Ed France was the longtime director of the Santa Barbara Bicycle Coalition and now heads Leading from Within, when not navigating fatherhood.