Originally Posted by
genec
Couple of items. First it's Forester... one "r".
Thanks for the correction. I should have double-checked.
Second, I disagree with your cause and effect paragraph... bikes existed before cars, bikes were embraced before cars. Our culture only embraced the automobile after the bike, and infrastructure (and transit) were modified to embrace the automobile. The biggest changes came after WW2, with perhaps the biggest change being the National Highway Act of 1956 which changed cities and our whole landscape to embrace the automobile.
Sure, the car existed before WW2, but it was part of a whole transportation mix which also consisted of horse and buggy, bicycle, local trolleys, buses and trains, after WW2 the automobile displaced most of the transit mix and the attitude of the country changed with that displacement.... true car-culture was born.
Remember, the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics first, then they learned to fly. There was a strong bicycle culture in this country at one time.
I think if we put a bit less focus on the automobile exclusively, we might just discover the bicycle again. And maybe even bring back a diverse mix of transit... such as street cars and trolleys... and heck, maybe people will learn to walk again. But everything can't look "like a highway" for that to happen.
Right, I agree that people would "discover" the bike again if there wasn't so much focus on cars. And I agree that inadequate bike infrastructure is part of that. However, it's not like we had protected bike lanes in this country back when we did have a real bike culture. The big difference was that there weren't cars speeding around everywhere at high speeds. So if we can change that, we wouldn't need a massively expensive and impractical separate road system for bikes. I think the way to do that is to make a clear distinction between highways and human-centered neighborhoods. It should be possible to get from point A to point B without getting funneled onto a high speed arterial where the fancy bike lanes are necessary. In the neighborhood zones, speed limits should be low and heavily enforced.
I agree that infrastructure is part of the problem and the solution, but not the whole problem or the whole solution. Culture has to change, development patterns have to change, attitudes have to change, and people need to look beyond their dashboards. There are many more differences between countries that have high bike use and low bike use than just infrastructure. One big one is that almost all of them tax gasoline much more heavily than we do, which drove many other changes in their societies. Until the US is ready to do that, I suspect the car centric attitudes will remain.