Bike Forums - View Single Post - Cycling Backlash Brewing?

09-17-11 | 10:38 AM

#40

Robert Foster

Banned.

Joined: May 2008

Posts: 3,498

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From: Southern california

Bikes: Lapierre CF Sensium 400. Jamis Ventura Sport. Trek 800. Giant Cypress.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bruce19

http://www.ecospeakers.com/speakers/goddards.html

The author of "Getting There", Stephen Goddard, is a friend of mine from Hartford, CT. As a former member of my Town Council and as an advocate for transportation options other than the automobile I have been involved with this issue for decades. It is actually true that publicly financed road building allowed access to cheap land and, at the very least, provided an incentive for people to move out of the cities. People moved out of the cities for the same reason people always move from one place to another......to find a "better" life (as they saw it). They didn't move out for jobs because unless you were working the land there were none. Roads made it possible to live out of the city on cheap land (and made cars necessary) and still work in the city. Thus....suburbs.

That doesn’t make suburbs the fault of the car. In ancient Rome they built roads to get to the city from the country side. No cars had anything to do with it. The concept that cars somehow cause suburbs, urban sprawl and not based on fact. The only thing cars and roads did was allow people to exercise living preferences. Add the car and you add the fears of the Luddite. I am not saying cars don’t add to some of our financial woes or that they don’t add to human pollution. The problem is modern living does the same thing. Jobs moved to where cheap land was as well with the movement towards industrial parks. We aren’t fighting against cars because that is simply a transportation choice our fellow citizen made. But what we do have is a movement that tries to get us to take sides in the issue. Cycling is as you said simply another form of transportation but hardly one for the majority of people living in the USA.

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