regardingjohn

I am a biker. And as a biker, I sincerely believe more public subsidies should be spent on public transportation, walking (sidewalks), and biking (bike paths), than should be spent on roads and highways. Why? Because bikes are safer than cars. Doesn’t seem right, does it. It seems to go against common sense. But let’s consider a few things.

1. Cars go faster than bikes, walking, or (sometimes) public transportation. I’m no physicist, but I recall something about the relationship of velocity and impact.
2. Cars weigh more than bikes, walking, (but not public transportation). Another thing I learned in my early science classes had to do with the relationship between mass and impact. When people die in bike crashes, it’s usually because they were hit by a much heavier and faster car. Rarely however, bicyclists will crash without a motorized vehicle’s assistance, and die of head trauma because they aren’t wearing their helmet.
3. Cars use/burn more carbon-based products per user than bikes, walking, or public transportation. And we all know the resulting pollution causes heart and lung disease. Biking and walking, on the other hand are generally considered good exercise. Furthermore, when we walk or bike through a neighborhood, we tend to become more connected to the neighborhood, and if it’s not as nice as we want it to be, we are more likely to do something about it than if we drove through it. The womb-like nature of cars tend to detach (protect) us from what’s outside the windows, so why take the effort to fix it?
4. Cars cost more to make, to use, and to support — per person than bikes, walking, or public transportation. If the country didn’t have to put all this work/money/resources to support a car-based infrastructure (building roads, parking spots/lots/ramps, traffic control and enforcement, snow removal and road maintenence, auto making and repairing industries, fueling stations and infrastructure, refineries, trillion dollar Mid-Eastern wars and troop injuries, and civilian fatalities (most killed by car bombs) to protect supplies, etc. — really, we spend a lot of our time and energy supporting our cars!), we could spend it on parks, schools (2006 US Department of Education budget was ~$70 billion. Sounds like a lot? Bush just requested over $470 billion — almost 7 times $70 billion! — to spend on the Iraq war, bringing the total to over $1 trillion. Imagine how good schools could be if we even doubled their current budget!). We could also make amazing pedestrian-friendly cities, etc. And, we wouldn’t have to work as many hours per week, so we’d have more time with our families, friends, hobbies, churches, etc.
5. Using cars aids and comforts terrorists more than bikes, walking, or public transportation. Besides tending to live in oil-rich countries and thereby profiting directly from our car habit, the terrorists — which I’ll define here as people who hate us for the sake of hating us, rather than those who just want us out of their countries — have us on a home turf advantage as long as we depend on them for oil. Car bombs are also a very effective weapon of terrorism. No cars = no car bombs. Check out this excerpt:

On any graph of urban terrorism, the curve representing car bombs is rising steeply, almost exponentially. US-occupied Iraq, of course, is a relentless inferno, with more than 9,000 casualties – mainly civilian – attributed to vehicle bombs in the two-year period between July 2003 and June 2005. Since then, the frequency of car-bomb attacks has dramatically increased: 140 per month last autumn, and 13 in Baghdad this New Year’s Day alone. If roadside bombs or IEDs (improvised explosive devices) are the most effective device against US armored vehicles, car bombs are the weapon of choice for slaughtering Shi’ite civilians in front of mosques and markets and instigating an apocalyptic sectarian war. (source)

I could actually go on with this reasoning for a while, but since I have other things to do in my life (get on my bike ;-) and head to work), I’d best end it here for now.