Bacon's Rebellion

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Serious Talk about Bicycles in Lynchburg

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by

James A. Bacon
in

Following the death of Dr. John Bell in a biking accident last month, Carrie Sidener with the Lynchburg News & Advance has written a thoughtful article examining the competing rights of automobiles and bicyclists on the road.

When automobiles first entered the American scene a century ago, they shared streets and roads with horses, horse-drawn carts, electric-powered trolleys, bicyclists and pedestrians. It took a couple of decades of conflict before automobiles emerged on top, their supremacy buttressed by a combination of city ordinances and roadway design. Since then, two or three generations of Americans have lived in an environment in which the primacy of automobiles on streets and roads is taken utterly forgranted.

But times are changing. Although automobiles dominate transportation more than ever, there is increasing recognition that society cannot rely upon a single transportation mode. While automobiles have undisputed advantages — route/time flexibility and wide-ranging mobility foremost among them — they also impose once-unappreciated costs on society: They pollute, they create congestion, and they require roads and parking spaces that consume vast amounts of land that could be applied to other uses.

Currently, only a trivial percentage of the American population uses bicycles to ride to work. But other countries, mostly notably the Netherlands and Denmark, have shown that the potential cycling population is much larger. As automobile congestion worsens in Virginia and the rest of the United States, there is increasing interest in redesigning communities to make them more bicycle friendly. Above all else, bicycling must be made safe.

In most communities, that debate has hardly begun. As Sidener observes, Arlington is the only city in Virginia recognized by The League of American Bicyclists as a bicycle-friendly community. Lynchburg is beginning to have that conversation. Other communities in Virginia should broach the topic before tragedy strikes them as well.

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6 responses to “Serious Talk about Bicycles in Lynchburg”

  1. Darrell -- Chesapeake Avatar
    Darrell — Chesapeake

    The largest importer of bicycles is… Class?

    The USA.

    There are millions of bicycles in this country, most stored in garages awaiting the next moving sale or trip to the landfill.

    With so many bicycles, how come few people ride them? Well, commutes tend to be tens of miles long for one thing. So that rules out home to work trips.

    We could ride them to the local store, but trying to carry groceries isn’t too safe.

    Kids are the biggest users. They roam around the neighborhoods, but those aren’t really trips are they?

    Used to be they could ride them to school, but now the schools are nothing but huge barns many miles from most kids homes. And even if they lived near one of these complexes, school rules do not allow walking or riding bikes. Everyone must be on a bus or the parents bring them.

    So I guess some fundamental change is in order if bicycles are to be useful for something other than Dad’s bad idea of Jr’s birthday present. Yep, we should work out a deal with China. They want cars, we want bikes. No No No, that’s not it. We already have too many bikes and Japan has the market on China’s cars.

    Dang, short of bulldozing everything down and starting over, or banning the sale of gasoline to private autos, I guess we are stuck with what we have.

  2. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Annapolis has established free bicycle stands. Just sign out the bike and return it.

    They will accept bicycle donations if you have one in the garage.

  3. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Every morning I see a woman jogging along a boulevard through a bunch of housing subdivisions. The subdivisions are all joined by a nicely landscaped bike/walking path, but she doesn’t use it and jogs alongside four lanes of traffic.

    ????

  4. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    I’ve seen this also.

    I’ve seen folks out jogging on the main drags instead of the much less busy subdivisions off of them.

  5. iconoclasst Avatar
    iconoclasst

    Sometimes using established paths feels a bit like self-marginalization. As a cyclist, the road belongs to me, too. On the trail, I’m out of sight AND out of mind. I want a bicycling presence in the streets, to remind motorists that cyclists have rights, too.

  6. Erik Avatar
    Erik

    Darrell in Chesapeake suggests that, short of “starting over,” we’re “stuck.” I say we can make incremental progress. Let every new roadway/pathway design, or every reworking of existing roads, be undertaken to be mindful of, supportive of, bicycling. The car-dominated design was not created overnight and cannot be dismantled overnight, true, but progress can be made. Given that gasoline is now on a one-way upward price slope toward impracticality, it should get easier over time.

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