Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Evanston, the AMC and Wingnuts in San Francisco

The Wolverine Ridge Race in Evanston, Wyoming was nearly two weeks ago.  It was mostly uneventful for me, except that I felt good the whole time, and managed to stay upright and keep the air in both my tires. One memorable instant did occur on the first lap, on the long steep, straight, powdery climb, when I actually caught up to, and passed Bart G.  It was the deepest into a race that I had ever been in front of that perennial winner.  Apparently, he had left his climbing legs in Canada.  Riding in front of him was just an instant though, well two minutes maybe, because he blew past me as soon as the trail turned downhill and I never saw him again.  I gotta learn to descend. 

Speaking of descending, I signed myself up for the American Mountain Classic this weekend.  That means for the next four days I’ll be lining up with Jeremiah Bishop, Ryan Trebon, JHK and, rumor has it, Tinker Juarez.  With a group like that, you can expect to see my name descending rapidly to the bottom of the GC standings.  But how am I ever going to learn to race with the pros if I don’t race with the pros?  Go ahead, call me a wing nut. 

Wingnut
Speaking of wingnuts, Vince called my attention to this article in Today’s Wall Street Journal.  Apparently some nut in San Francisco is saying that allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution.  He’s stymied the City’s construction of bike lanes for two years by demanding an environmental impact analysis before they begin. I’ll surprise many of you by agreeing with him that crowding cars into fewer lanes can result in more pollution since they’re spending more time idling and getting nowhere, but he’s taking a very shortsighted perspective and thus is missing the point.  That’s why I call him a wingnut. 

Motorists have been subsidized by governments for over half a century.  We’ve built roads, parking lots, and entire communities that made it easy to get around by car; all at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists.  It was an incentive to get people to buy cars, and it worked.  (It worked really well for Ford, General Motors and Chrysler for a very long time.) Now we have a better understanding of the symptoms of car addiction—pollution, stress, obesity—so we as a society need to make driving less convenient.  We need to provide some disincentives to driving cars.  Traffic congestion is a natural disincentive.  Parking fees and toll roads are good ideas too, and they’re easy to implement.  Short of rationing gasoline like we did during WWII, taking road space away from motorists and giving it to cyclists may be the best way yet to make driving less convenient.  It’s not an “attempt by the anti-car fanatics to screw up our traffic on behalf of the bicycle fantasy”, as the wingnut from San Francisco so succinctly put it.  Building bicycle lanes in our cities is a sound use of public policy to steer behavior in a healthier, more sustainable direction. 



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