The Human Car

The freedom to ride a bike for transportation is what is in the minority, the most at stake issue to be lost and the issue with the least amount of sympathetic supporters (as opposed to riding for fun and exercise.) Most people still don’t get that a bike’s speed efficiency falls somewhere near a car or a bus for urban transit.

Lets say we had some agreement on the bike lane point. The trail riders and Mt bikers would want bike lanes to the trails, the kids would want bike lanes to school, the rodies would want bike lanes on the secondary country roads, the transportation cyclist would want bike lanes on or paralleling major urban arterials and the touring cyclists would want bike lanes on the major highways connecting cities. Basically there is no overlap on the detail even if there is an agreement on a general point.

The general issue is freedom to ride a bicycle. I’ll even take that one step further by adding the freedom to ride your bicycle from your front door without requiring the use of a car to take it some place else that is nice to ride. This is similar too but not identical to using a bicycle for transportation.

Since I personally think the different groups should unite for the most effectiveness and therefore it is the responsibility of the bike advocates to make sure every group gets something. This is somewhat easy as trails are fairly expensive and signed bike routes and bike lanes are relatively cheap. So as long as you can get some money for the transportation side of things you can get a lot of mileage for the buck.

As in a lot of things it is how effectively one can wield public and political support.