> One pet peeve of mine are folks who insist biking
> itself is a solution to reliance on cars, when it
> clearly isn't, except, *possibly*, for strapping
> young, early twenty-somethings. The elderly, the
> infirm, the otherwise-unhealthy -- asking them to
> bicycle around Texas in the summer is one of the most
> sadistic plans I could imagine. It is a preposterous
> solution in Texas and in much of the Sun Belt.
Do you have a lot of cycling advocates insisting on it for everybody, all the time? I've spent years around people who do it professionally and don't think I've ever heard such an extreme argument.
> Right now, fossil-fueled mass transit is the only
> alternative I can see being somewhat succesful. Asking
> that the very ill, the elderly, and etc., bicycle
> around in 105 degree weather in Austin for miles &
> miles is just ludicrous. Additionally, the urban
> sprawl-ization of the DFW megalopolis is hard to see
> suddenly becoming a haven for bicyclists -- or even,
> in many cases, riders of that town's paltry mass
> transit. Cat needs the vet at 2:00 AM because of an
> emergency at that time? Let me check the bus schedule!
> Oh -- the bus doesn't start for another 4 hours, and
> then I have to make transfers totaling 2+ hours. 3
> hours later I might get to the vet, with the corpse of
> a cat.
The bit about the cat reminds me of a girlfriend of mine who wanted to get a 4x4 pickup, for practical reasons, in Chicago. Because she'd move often (as in every 1-2 years), plus the snow. A truck full time on account of her needs maybe a day or two out of the year. There's no curbside cab service in Austin? I hear you can hitch a ride on a boat-car.
> "Denser cities" describes Austin -- right now. You
> don't have to go far to get what you need. Thank God.
> That is changing almost weekly as the place becomes
> trendier, though. But asking someone in the
> Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex to adopt a transportation
> lifestyle like that in Eugene, Oregon, for example,
> should be met with laughter.
So somebody argues: "you know, having better mass transit would address a host of problems, but one of the obstacles is our massively subsidized and legislatively mandated low-density land use. Plus, bicycles could fill in for at least some of the majority of trips that are under 5 miles, though the same forces tend to make a hostile environment for that in many cases."
To which the reply runs, "Pfft. Can't work here, our mass transit sucks, and you want stroke victims to bike 20 miles to the ER? In a heat wave?"
It seems like a near-ubiquitous reaction even by people I know to be otherwise thoughtful, and I'm almost too fascinated by the phenomenon to be annoyed. Almost.
-- Andy