You can call city drivers ugly, fat welfare queens without conscience and no regard for their wallet or the planet. You can’t call them irrational.
I started biking to work a couple of weeks ago. It’s all good and pleasant, as long as I’m going on designated bike paths along the Hudson River where the only obstacles are slower bikers. As soon as I venture onto city streets—with or without bike lanes—things get a lot hairier.
It’s not pleasant to navigate between cars, cabs, and trucks going at various speeds in all sorts of directions. It’s also not safe. There’s something to be said about protecting yourself with two tons of steel from oncoming traffic that is zooming by in their own protective steel cages.
Sure, biking saves space, pollution, and all sorts of other inconveniences of modern car culture. My bike sports a sticker: “One less car.”
But that’s the point: it’s one less car. No one other than you and the driver right behind you notices the difference. The atmosphere certainly doesn’t.
If everyone switched to bikes, it would be perfectly safe to go up 8th Avenue on your bike. Since few others do it, you might as well take the car and feel assured that you are less likely to end up with a broken bone.
What’s more, even if everyone around you biked—or especially if everyone does—it might still be perfectly rational to take the car, since now you have the street all to yourself.
Godspeed to all the “No Silly Car Journeys” campaigns out there. My suspicion is that it’ll take a bit more than a polite nudge. It certainly won’t take many more close car encounters before I leave the bike at home once again.
