Dear Philadelphia Parking Authority,
We have been patiently waiting for you to please start the meter conversion program by bolting metal rings onto the old meter poles that were "de-headed" last fall. The large number of bikes and insufficient number of bike racks on city sidewalks is causing bike owners to park their bikes on us and it hurts! While we like bikes because they help reduce air pollution and soak up greenhouse gases, when parked on us because they scrape off our bark and make our difficult lives even tougher. We are anxiously awaiting your employees or contractors to begin installing the rings any day now. Bring them on!
Sincerely,
Philadelphia's street trees
6 comments:
Here here!
Dear Bicycle Coalition,
I had honestly hoped that after helping Stu Bykofsky write his last two columns and rolling over and playing dead at the live chat that you could have done better than this. I had expected a real update about the status of parking meter conversion plan instead of a cute blog post that tells us nothing.
Please provide everyone with a real update as to when the Philadelphia Parking Authority and its contractors will start this process and how long they estimate it will take to finish it.
In the wake of an earlier post (http://blog.bicyclecoalition.org/2010/03/businesses-cutting-bikes-from-their.html) I did some googling and from what I found it seems that if a property owner has certain paperwork from the Fairmount Park Commission, they would be 100% entitled to unilaterally remove bicycles fixed to street trees at their discretion. Is this true or my mistake? John Boyle didn't return to that discussion after I posted the links summarized below:
* the Fairmount Park Commission is responsible for the "custody and control" of street trees, a power granted by the Philadelphia Code, chapter 15-201 and 15-203; and the Fairmount Park Commission has published the following regulation (here: http://www.fairmountpark.org/TreeServicePermit.asp)
* (f) No person shall fasten or lock a motorcycle, bicycle or any other vehicle or equipment to any Park tree, street tree, tree guard of any Park or street tree, or support thereof, except as expressly permitted by the Commission.
* http://www.fairmountpark.org/pdf/15-201.pdf : the commission has the power to designate contractors and individuals with the power to provide "maintenance, protection and care" of street trees at their expense.
Don,
I completely disagree with your assessment of the the live chat. I think their professionalism and tone blew Stu's arrogance and straw man arguments out of the water. And I think more people might see it my way than yours.
Tom
It's really important to note that while it doesn't seem that locking a bike up to a try does anything...it's the repeated slamming against the tree that eventually damages the bark. The bark is the tree's lifeline, it needs to be protected! Wounds in the bark leave the tree susceptible to infection.
Typical Philly - I love this city, but man everything the Parking Authority touches creates ripples of bad-news consequences. We'll probably never see heads on those poles unless we bolt them on ourselves.
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