Month: November 2018

Hero (person) versus Villain (automobile)

Mission: To promote driving less so all may live more.

The mission of this web log is to minimize driving, not eradicate it. Many people need to drive until they can experience a change-in-life circumstance, including moving or changing jobs.

But most of our commentary about automobiles is critical because of…

  1. the legislative and commercial privilege they experience,
  2. the frequent dangerous, reckless, and selfish decisions many drivers make,
  3. the effect of the internal combustion engine on the environment,
  4. the effect of big, heavy chunks of moving metal and plastic on the natural ambience of the outdoors,
  5. the automobile culture that encourages us to neglect our bodies, our neighbors, and our communities, and
  6. the thinking engendered by being enclosed in the automobile culture where speed and dominance make right (as in whateveridoisjustified).

It is this last point, the thinking, that provides the stage where the hero and the villain meet. While this will seem irrelevant, we are familiar with one defense of handguns: guns don’t kill, people do. What the statement means on a factual level is that a gun alone in a room seldom if ever has spontaneously fired and killed someone.
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Roads Were Not Built for Cars (Part 2)

Mission: To promote driving less so all may live more.

This post follows the first post that draws upon the book Roads Were Not Built for Cars: How Cyclists Were the First to Push for Good Roads & Became the Pioneers of Motoring, by Carlton Reid, 2015.[1]

The beauty of not knowing a particular history is that we can attach our own histories to the present. For example, if we do not know that roads were built first for pedestrians; second for carriage (stagecoaches and, later, carts and “carriages”); third for bicycles; and fourth for automobiles, we can assume that, outside of a few exceptions, roads-as-a-recognized-right-of-way came with the advent and appreciation of the automobile.

In short, ignorance allows accidents of history to acquire the status of natural law: automobiles, it seems, always have owned and always will own the roads.
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On Riding One’s Bike Up a 2,000 Foot Hill in the Heat

Mission: To promote driving less so all may live more.

This guest post (poem and drawings) comes from Louis Anderson, who, years after running the Boston Marathon in roughly 2:37, picked up bike touring. He rode a 700 mile loop from Richmond, VA to Cumberland, MD, a ride that involved ascending about 2,000 (well, 1,903) feet in ninety degree weather to Afton Mountain, Virginia. A few years later he rode his bike from the Pacific to the Atlantic (which map I include at the bottom, since his artwork merits attention). The poem below captures the mental and physical stress of the ride to Afton Mountain, as well as the inability for those who drive to appreciate self-propulsion. — Louis B.
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Roads Were Not Built for Cars (Part 1)

Mission: To promote driving less so all may live more.

Accordingly, this post (continued in Part 2) will recapitulate some key points from the book Roads Were Not Built for Cars: How Cyclists Were the First to Push for Good Roads & Became the Pioneers of Motoring, by Carlton Reid, 2015.[1]

Roads Were Not Built for Cars, Book Cover
Roads Were Not Built for Cars, Book Cover

Continue reading “Roads Were Not Built for Cars (Part 1)”