Enviro-scold speaks out

Two weeks ago the City Council acted on a recommendation of the Transportation and Circulation Committee (TCC) to close a lane of traffic on Chapala between Mission and Constance and turn it into a bike lane. The Council freely admitted in their discussion that there was no need for a bike lane there (there is no connecting bike lane on Mission); the whole point was to slow traffic on Chapala, a major crosstown thoroughfare.

The City had done two surveys of public opinion in the Oak Park/Samarkand neighborhood, and in both cases the people who responded to the surveys were overwhelmingly against the "traffic calming" plan the City was pushing, which included the Chapala Street lane closure. But alternative transportation activist Alex Pujo, who lives on Chapala and who is on friendly terms with many on the Council, was able to convince the City to ignore the wishes of the people. After all, sometimes the people aren't smart enough to know what's good for them (or at least, what's good for influential people like Mr. Pujo). So the city went ahead with the lane closure, and will create a "bike lane" to nowhere, that will rarely be used. This has generated a few acerbic letters-to-the-editor, and today there was a reply from enviro-scold Ken Yamamoto:

Oh no, bike lanes are invading. How are we to put up with healthy, nonpolluting transportation?

Why should we get off our lazy duffs and exercise? And narrowing streets? We need wider streets for our fatter cars, while we drive like maniacs and run over anything in our hyperactively pathetic lives.

We like making things unsafe for insignificant pedestrians, immigrants and children. Our heads are too distracted on our cell phones to recognize any life forms outside of the sanctified automobile.

Ken Yamamoto is a massage therapist and bicycle enthusiast. The June 2002 newsletter of the Santa Barbara Bicycle Coalition characterized him this way:

He has been a vegan for 23 years, composts, has a vegetable garden, recycles, and uses greywater.

Ken's house is filled with skylights. One corner is filled with drums and the walls are covered with books and decorated with Tribal baskets and masks.

Ken expressed fatalism about the way "humans are like a virus destroying the host organism," the earth. "We are an evolutionary mistake because we are not in balance with our ecosystem." He fears we are headed for extinction, an ecological collapse, or a nuclear holocaust.

Cheerful guy. Unfortunately, his prejudices are not that different from those of many of the people on the TCC and the City Council. They have decided that there is a lesser class of humans who must be coerced into abandoning their destructive ways by making the driving experience more and more frustrating.