AnalogSenses

By ÁLVARO SERRANO

9 Things Drivers Need to Stop Saying in the Bikes vs. Cars Debate | Wired →

November 13, 2014 |

They’re all excellent points. For example, number 2 (roads are designed for cars):

So I looked into it and, as it turns out, roads have been around for many thousands of years. And for much of that time, they’ve carried a wide variety of things: feet, carts, horses, wagons, streetcars, buses, bikes, and automobiles. It’s only in the last six or seven decades that we’ve decided cars should get priority.

The roads don’t control us, we control them. We can design them to carry whatever types of traffic we feel are useful, and provide for safe and convenient passage of those different modes (…).

But for so many years, we’ve auto-oriented our roads and put every single other mode of travel at a disadvantage. More troublingly, we’ve auto-oriented our minds, making it hard to imagine that things could ever be any different.

A healthy urban bicycle culture doesn’t happen by magic; it happens by design.