Our son, Hawthorne M. Josephi, while a student at Stanford, was working during his vacation for the Portland Electric company. He was 18 years old. On August 16, 1899, he rode his bicycle home and was caught in a hard rain. He went to the bathroom to take a bath and found the electric light was not working properly. Standing on an iron register in his wet clothes, he attempted to fix the light and was instantly killed. My wife and I have never recovered from the grief at his death.

Wealthy people often tend to see cyclists as losers and indigents; after all, if cyclists could afford cars, they would drive them (hence the positions, perhaps, of some developers and shop keepers). Poorer car-dependent people dislike cyclists either because they feel mistrust for people even lower on the class hierarchy, or they are frightened by people who disrespect class rules which hold that cyclists are a priori inferior: hence the constant rants about “elitist” cyclists. After all, if you’re less wealthy and have to maintain a car, it’s a huge financial drain: if these know-it-alls are right, your enormous sacrifice for your car(s) has been for nothing. That’s irritating, to say the least.

And lots more…

Most of them want cars. The government has been obliging. In 2009, in part to combat the global economic collapse, the national government halved the sales tax on the small-engine cars that most first-time buyers choose, and it spent billions on subsidies for rural car purchases and upgrades to new vehicles.

Through November, car purchases were up 34 percent over 2009, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said. And 2009 sales were 46 percent greater than those in 2008.

“Fifteen years ago, hardly anyone could afford a car. Today, everyone can,” said Wang Li Mei, secretary general of the China Road Transport Association. “History just evolved in its own way. Each day we’re getting more cars, and each week we’re building more roads.”

US bike racing in the 1960s and 1970s was associated with another fringe, Ivy-League-styled sports such as lacrosse and rowing. Yet this was not the case in Europe where it was a working-class outlet….People who raced “ten speeds” in the US were not part of the mainstream youth or collegiate sports grouping….The guys who had racing bikes with gears and a leather seat stayed inside, shaved their legs, and learned Italian. Most of them came from wealthy or at least petit bourgeois families.

This is the dynamic in the film Breaking Away, isn’t it?

Greenberg is just the most recent film in which a character’s non-automobility—whether for lack of a car or for lack of the ability to drive—is used for comic effect, whether as a metaphor for a deeper personality flaw or as a token of marginality and/or plain creepiness. As the humorist Art Buchwald once observed, “People are broad-minded. They’ll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn’t drive, there’s something wrong with him.”

This attitude seems to flourish in Hollywood.

Again, the excluded middle.

[PDX is becoming] EPCOT for cyclists. I hope they bring their American Express Cards.

and

Bikes are a 19th century technology. They aren’t going to solve our problems. People have real things to do. They have children. They have large things they need to haul for work or home. They place a certain value on their time.

Portlanders who are constantly goobing over their bikes are a priviledged class. They have the time and flexible lifestyle to bike everywhere. They can afford to live in the inner neighborhoods that make biking viable.

Recently, the cycling community was asking “why aren’t more black people and other groups out biking?” Because it’s for single 24-year-old yuppies, you nimrods. Open your eyes.

Graves says three main themes emerged as barriers to biking: the cost of bikes and their upkeep, concerns about safety, and the logistics of riding (where to do it, what the rules are, and so on).

The bad news, reported Graves, is that many people do not feel safe riding in their neighborhoods. Related to that is fear of bike theft (due to a lack of secure parking areas). She also pointed out that much of the information produced by the City of Portland, Metro, and advocacy groups is not getting through. “Many of them didn’t even know Portland was a bike city, or that bike maps exist”.

There were also very strong cultural perceptions working against bikes. “Only kids rides bikes” and “bikes are for white people” where among the statements the CCC recorded from the interviews. Bikes were also considered symbols of gentrification — a painful subject for many residents of North and Northeast Portland.

In one of the more interesting findings, 43% of Hispanics interviewed said they wouldn’t ride a bike because they were afraid of getting pulled over by police.

A more over-the-top example of shameless pandering you won’t find anywhere in the halls of our current government. The transportation system of the United States is set up to accommodate one thing and one thing only: the automobile….we’re Americans and we drive.

There is however a highly affluent and technologically savvy contingent out there that wants bikes to finally get their moment in the sun. People have ridden bikes in American for a long, long time. It’s worth noting that perhaps out greatest transportation pioneers, the Wright Brothers, ran a bike shop before they got airborne. But never before has there been such a vociferous concatenation of aggressive biking subcultures, all agitating to give bikes a status equal to that of cars.

Which is of course a terrible idea. When bikes and cars share road space, it increases the risk to bikers. A couple of tons of sheet metal, rubber, and glass will generally win in a collision with a relatively spindly Trek. And the annual U.S. market for motorized tons of sheet metal, rubber, glass is currently more than 12 million units per year….

In other words, we’re diverting tax dollars into the quixotic crusade of people who will probably not use federally-funded roads for production increasing economic activity, but for recreation. The bike lobby will argue that these DOT initiative will enable people to discover the manifold joys of biking to work, and encourage businesses to encourage people to embrace those joys. But there are solid counterarguments.