Stop Telling Lies About My Bicycle

P.J. O'Rourke in a particularly silly and lazy anti-bicycle rant inadvertently, I suspect, revealed why Conservatives and fools more generally hate bicycling. And, in so doing, once again revealed that if your ideas are sound lying ought to be unnecessary.  His "argument," in part is that

maybe there's a darker side to bike-lane advocacy. Political activists of a certain ideological stripe want citizens to have a child-like dependence on government. And it's impossible to feel like a grown-up when you're on a bicycle if you aren't in the Tour de France.

How, one wonders, is a mode of transportation that hinges on individual effort like the bicycle able to create a sense of dependence? Remember the day when you first learned to ride a bike without training wheels? Or the time you helped a kid learn to ride a bike without training wheels? Remember the pure exhilaration and sense of freedom? How often, when you ride the bike to work or the store, does the feeling come back? For me it's often.

Think about the absolute independence of anyone on a bike, able to whiz here and there unconcerned with the fuel or oil levels; moving freely from the paved to the unpaved and back again.  Finding parking with no trouble; no need for pipelines, gas stations, or tow trucks. Think about the misery of car ownership, with its constant and continuous need for gas, oil, new tires, brakes, trained mechanics, costly electronic parts, road repair, highway construction, parking garages, limited parking spaces, and the equal misery of a car-centric universe in which all the stores are over there and "good" parking is hard to find and the traffic to work is terrible and etc. 

Which would you rather? The child-like joy and independence of moving yourself from point A to point B or the childish dependence of pasty-faced, self-limiting and expensive following of routes laid out by face-less bureacrats [1]?

One last point, in the course of being wrong about everything having to do with the independence of cyclist and the dependency of motorists, O'Rouke calls the bike, derisively, a donkey car without a donkey. Unknowingly, I assume, he's right. The basic idea behind the creation of a bicycle or, really, all the early human powered vehicles was to replace the expensive, filthy, and unreliable horse, donkey, and oxen with a clean and reliable machine that translated human power into motion. The bike is, in fact, one of the pinnacles of industrial design and techniques.

[1] I kid, road systems are great, although the constant pandering to motorists isn't, because of expert commitment to getting things right.