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Thursday, June 12, 2008
 
BvC (bike v. car)

 There was a Christian Science Monitor article on hybrid envy last week. This is the envy of your friend or acquaintance who has gone out and got a hybrid-engine vehicle.  Hybrid Envy is chic, the article questions, but not bike envy?  As the author states:

...During the month that I drove it, three different people complimented me. And yet, during the seven years we have been carless, only one person has complimented me. Hybrid cars get compliments - why not my bike? | csmonitor.com

He shouldn't hold his breath on this.  Oh here's a word that ought to be out there in someone's dictionary: prius-pism. Use it however you like.

  It got me thinking; though, there are mixed sensibilities at play when people consider the bicycling communities: commuter biking versus messenger biking versus the spandex circus. How people see the first is colored by the latter two. Kamikaze riders who have elicited the slim advantage and economic niche for bike couriers into a personal and impenetrable law of the street. As well recreational riders whose sense of entitlement, probably carries over from their $350 rims to whatever overwrought motor vehicles they actually travel to work in. The commuting biker has to prepare careful negotiations and endure mediation of their choice and ethical stance to get it accepted as a matter of principle at all. I don't drive. I don't own a car. I never have. This is a normative choice which I press against perception of habit or simply 'my way' of being. I weigh getting a car, what type of car I might get, against my need for a car, against continuing without one, all the time. I wouldn't have anyone think I don't. For me it's an old choice but not a settled one. You can't place much stock on gaining credence for what you do, just do it.


 I saw a faint thread running from this to Slate's review of the Planet Green network  The dreadful Planet Green network. - By Troy Patterson - Slate Magazine:. The author, Troy Patterson, declared it an "embarrassment to the earth" and dismissed it as another lifestyle conspicuously consumed. The environmental publication Grist responded with piqued reaction, but fails to deal with Patterson's centrally placed showcasing of the Planet Green's own general manager calling it "eco-tainment," as quoted in the New York Times  A not-so-rosy review of Planet Green | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist:.

 I don't get cable, so this affair will smoothly bypass me. But I'm not as inclined to regard such a channel that harshly. There are stages of going green; which is a consciousness raising process. Affirmation of green as a good, observance of some primary conservation efforts, and finally the one-thing-barrier to true observance of green living. The one-thing barrier is simply a reference to whatever one thing each of us has as individuals where we draw the line and declare that our notion of practicality wins out. In aggregate this keeps any useful green on the other side of acceptance. This will be a multi generational struggle occurring across the American ideological divide. This is a caution towards those who would position green only as a progressive issue, or cease to care about it.


 Meanwhile in another green world I, and thousands like me, continue to negotiate the traffic engineered streets. A Salon Table-talk piece: outlines the raw feelings on the streets The wheel thing | Salon: . That piece's genesis is this Chicago Tribune story  Bicyclist who struck SUV door and was hit by passing vehicle dies of injuries -- chicagotribune.com:. Bicyclers are increasingly apprehensive about commuting on the streets at all. I ride along the Northwest Branch Creek bike path to work in the summer (which however is owned by M.S. xiii), and dread the winters when I must keep to the streets. For pedestrians and bikers the streets are getting wider to cross, narrower to ride on. The walk lights shorter, the yellow trap bigger, and with right turn lanes the cars never really stop coming. One thing I am always aware of on the road is that those in vehicles carry an semi-conscious assumption that there is an operative hierarchy of weight and horsepower on the road into which bicycles scarcely figure. In the automotive world of the United States, the world of carbon tire-prints; less is more, so they say, but none means nothing.

- - -

Addendum:  In my inbox today (18 Jun 08) was an email summary of a new University PR web log. Their idea is if you're not reading it and haven't pinned up the RSS feed, they're still going to email it to you. Information not only wants to be free it wants to insist upon itself. In this case it was worth the drum beat. There was a good article in it on the Universities initiatives on commuting to work by bicycle  Between the Columns, University of Maryland » Making Bicycling a More Popular, Safer Option:. They even are thinking of setting up a committee. Public bureaucracies shed meeting bodies like a cat sheds fur, but they claim this has improved conditions at other universities. There is an accompanying video segment which includes scenes from roads which are part of my daily travel. Where the rider/narrator goes under a bridge, that is the underside of New Hampshire ave. directly ahead of him will be the underside of Piney Branch. This is about three miles from campus and quite close to where I live. A moment later in the video he is on campus heading in the other direction. A bit further he is filmed riding by the Architecture building and Prienkart field house. This is the exact spot I was when I realized the women I was checking out on the opposite sidewalk was actually Trân.


11:16:28 PM    comment [];trackback [];


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