Frankly, I have to say that bike commuters don’t make a good case for commuting on a bike. Do bike commuters really enjoy their rides to work or are they on some Quixotic quest to prove the world wrong? What I’m finding all over the internet – in blogs mostly – is this bitter, angry rhetoric about how terrible cars are. I suppose that applies also to drivers. There is this mean – us vs. them attitude – very evangelical in fact. These people on cars pollute, they destroy our lungs, they tailgate, they insult us, they drive us off the road. Hey, these people even kill us! People die on the road, on bicycles and in cars. Some drivers are negligent, others are criminal. So how do commuters enjoy their trip to work?
It seems to me that what is wrong – deadly wrong – is the society in which most commute to work and live in. People self-righteously talk about choices: about bikes vs. cars. What a joke! That is not making choices. There cannot possibly be so many angry people living in one place at the same time. It is not cars; it is not bikes. It is people. What the hell’s wrong with this picture?
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3 comments:
Just ran through your blog links and saw some of the rhetoric you wrote of in your post.
We each decide where to live, choose our home and our job. We choose our method of commuting, the roads we ride, our attitude.
Life is purposeful. Outlook is deliberate.
For some, it must be that much easier to be angry than to take on control.
Thanks for the lines, OB. Guess I ended up sounding overly facetious. I know that a vast majority of bike commuters do it because they love it. Why else would anyone go through the trouble and oftentimes the difficulty? But at times it is also true that a great deal of negativity comes across from more “combative” commuters. I mean we’ve all driven a car at one time or another so we know the perils of the road, the stress, the mundane to and fro. Any conversion to bike riding is good, if not great, but we ought to beware of certain converts nevertheless.
Alberto
they've got to love it...or like it anyway, but you hit a chord, facetious or not.
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