#270 Left of Way

For years and years, ever since we started carving trails through the wilderness, it has been the sometimes problematic responsibility of civil institutions to make the passage of traffic easier. Widen the trails into roads, smooth out the washboards with cobbles, smooth out the cobble with macadam, straighten the hairpin turns, blast out the mountain to get the grade level, and so on. At a certain point, in the cities, curb building became at least as important as road building and with the curbs, sidewalks. “Share the road,” that fine ideal of all social planners, turned out to be like hoping for world enlightenment, Humans are ignorant and selfish cusses, and to ask a guy in a two-ton automobile to share the road with a pedestrian was like asking Godzilla to share the forest with Bambi. So for a while after that, peace prevailed in the cities. Sidewalks and curbs were for pedestrians and skateboarders and wider multilane roads were for cars, hummers, and emergency vehicles. It ought to be a condition of taking office that city council members and road planner committees be required to negotiate a fire truck through a congested city street in time to save a child on the second story of a burning turn-of-the-century building. Anyhow, as I said, a fragile peace prevailed. Then another type of traveler entered the fray—the bicyclist. The goal of the bicyclist is a noble one: Break the yoke of dependency to fossil fuel and the internal combustion engine. All well and good. Unfortunately the infrastructure of the US road system is almost exclusively underwritten by the proceeds of gasoline tax. Youch. That horn you hear honking is from a dilemma. How do you take money from one hand to expedite traffic and then bite it by making roads less usable for its paying customers? Let’s see, this 30-cent a gallon tax you paid for your gasoline, we’re going to take it and restrict your freedom of movement, slow you down so you’ll burn even more gas and make even more pollution, all so we can put in a bike lane for what at last count appears to be about 42 people.
Now I have ridden my bicycle down to downtown. I take the main drag as far as I can and then cut over to the first parallel side street. I do that because I once made the mistake of trying all the traffic in the area south of the Capitol. People turning left and right, and belching busses, and Capitol tour people from out of town looking every which way except where they are about to run me under their bumper. Now the less traveled route is indeed for me. But even back then I put it in perspective. I remembered this picture I saw of a city street in India. One road, barely a middle line. Lots of bicycles. And trucks, cars, motorbikes, rickshaws, chickens, pedestrians, busses, and, oh yeah, cows. Pretty sure I didn’t actually see a bike lane.
America, ya gotta love it.