Bike Snob - Anonymous [30]
Anti-Veloism
Prejudice and Propaganda
I don’t blame people for being afraid to ride their bikes, though. It’s conditioning. As you grow up, no authority figure will ever tell you to ride your bike; they’ll only tell you not to ride it. We’ve been subjected to a campaign of propaganda and lies our entire lives. I’m not sure who’s ultimately behind it, though I suspect it’s the same cadre of conspirators who brought us Forrest Gump, Pizza Hut stuffed crust pizza, and the band Creed. The most important component of this propaganda campaign is convincing people that using a bicycle as transportation is crazy. Why do they want to do this? To sell us the metaphorical cheese!
Driving is by far the most culturally acceptable means of personal transport, and it’s easy to see why. Cars can be extremely convenient, and for millions of us they’re a necessity. Sometimes you’ve simply got to cover relatively long distances quickly without physical expenditure and with control over your route and time of departure. But they’re also really, really dangerous. Roughly the same number of people die in the United States each year from automobile accidents as from guns. Yes, a machine that is designed to transport you and keep you safe is in practice just as fatal as a device that is designed with one sole purpose, which is to kill. Granted, more people have cars than have guns—in some parts of the country. Cars and guns each kill about sixty times more people in this country every year than plane crashes kill in the entire world. Yet fear of flying is considered normal. It’s okay to take a pill before boarding a plane, or to go to a class to get over this fear, or even to refuse to fly at all. People will accommodate you. Yet you rarely meet anybody who’s deathly afraid of car travel, and if you did you’d probably think they were a little crazy. Sure, there are people who never learn to drive, but even they won’t hesitate to be passengers in a car. If you’re going to be afraid of any form of transport, be afraid of cars. They crash into each other, flip over, and even burn up for no reason at all. It happens all the time. Fear of flying is a little crazy, but fear of driving is actually quite rational.
This is not to say that cars are evil, or that we should do away with them. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without cars. Even though automobiles truly do put the “car” in “carnage,” I know that sometimes you have to drive, and if you’re going to live in fear you might as well stay home and knit. No, I have nothing against cars; I only have something against idiots. But I’m also a big fan of using the right tool for the job, and a car is not always the right tool—especially when it comes to safety. Using a car because you have to make a hundred-mile trip with your family makes sense. Using a car instead of a bike because it’s safer is like climbing out the window on a rope ladder because of the remote possibility your staircase might be infested with termites. Meanwhile, bicycles—which require no licensing or training and are used so widely by people of all ages that you can even buy them at Wal-Mart—don’t even manage a four-figure death toll in this country. Sure, it’s still more people than airplanes kill, but you can’t exactly fly across town to go hang out at your friend’s house or go shopping for mittens.
So if people are more frightened of planes than they are of cars—which are as dangerous as guns—then what chance could bikes possibly have? If you regularly use a bicycle as transportation, you’re probably used to people thinking you’re crazy. I’m always amused when I prepare to leave someone’s house by bike on a warm summer