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.