Diane, you appear to be denigrating the idea of kids operating bicycles according to vehicular rules. One would be tempted to conclude, then, that you advocate that kids operate bikes in some way contrary to vehicular rules. This of course is a terrible idea, and one that I will try to insulate my own son from when I teach him to drive his bicycle according to the rules of the road.

Perhaps, rather than attacking operation consistent with vehicular rules, you mean to attack changes in the physical infrastructure of communities, or perhaps the culture that seems to have lost interest in bicycling. Well, vehicular cycling advocates have been working for years to maintain pleasant, convenient roadway links between residences and schools, as well as good sidewalks for pedestrians and the occasional off-road greenway link. I have promoted numerous such projects and have friends who now bike to school with their children on streets and off-road bike paths that we approved on our Cary planning and zoning board. An example is the Buckhurst West subdivision, with a short-cut path to Northwoods Elementary school.

We cycling advocates have faced strong opposition from school systems to bike path access to schools, bike parking at schools, school policies allowing bicycling to schools, good low-speed street connectivity to schools, and close proximity between schools and neighborhoods. The school systems believe that children shouldn't be biking to school because they believe cycling to be inherently dangerous, and they don't try to site schools near neighborhoods because they want huge amounts of land for athletic fields and major arterial access for busing and motoring. I have personally worked with parents who have been trying to overturn school bans on bicycling to school. To accuse vehicular cycling advocates of detracting from bicycling to school is wildly innaccurate and needlessly insulting.

Good proximity between schools and neighborhoods, good street connectivity, wide pavement on busy roads, safe speed limits around schools, traffic bicycling education programs, sidewalks for pedestrians, good law enforcement, short cut paths where appropriate - these are vehicular-cycling-compatible strategies that many vehicular cycling advocates promote to encourage cycling and walking to school. The non-VC strategy would be to promote signing sidewalks for bicycling, and adding stripes to roadways to separate bicycle traffic from other vehicle traffic, as an effort to market cycling to those whose travel isn't made any safer by such markings. Well, as an engineer who is bound by a high standard of ethics, I find the superior approach to be abundantly apparent.