The city put in a bike lane on Fulton last year and everyone I know has an opinion about it, which is how I know it's working.

The argument against is that it removed a lane of car traffic and now the evening backup stretches past the hardware store. This is true. I've sat in it. The argument for is that four people used to get hit on that stretch every year, on average, going back a decade the city has the data, and this year so far the number is zero. That's also true.

What interests me isn't which side is right. It's that both numbers are real and they point in opposite directions and no amount of arguing dissolves the tradeoff. You are trading somebody's twelve minutes for somebody else's collarbone. Reasonable people weight those differently. The people who bike weight them one way and the people who drive weight them another and, surprise, most people mostly do one or the other.

I drive. I'll admit the lane annoys me twice a day. I also walked past the little ghost bike somebody chained to the signpost at Fulton and 9th, painted white, with a laminated photo of a kid who was nineteen. So I don't say much at the neighborhood meetings anymore. The math got personal and I lost my taste for winning the argument.

Cities are just a pile of these. We pretend policy is about finding the right answer. Mostly it's about deciding whose inconvenience is acceptable, and then not looking too hard at the people on the other side of the trade.
