Sunday, April 25, 2010

From the Prescott AZ Daily Courier - a plea for civility

This is a guest column from Lisa Barnes, an alternative transportation activist in Prescott. Many consider that community a kind of paradise but it's evidently bicycle-unfriendly. What a surprise. Barnes tells a few sad and sour stories about motorists who just don't get it, and seems to doubt that they ever will....

Not alone in that pessimistic viewpoint, is she?

Oh, maybe you're not pessimistic. You missed the comments appended to Barnes' piece.

2 comments:

Jim Thurber said...

The comments say a lot. A rider "spit" on a car and the driver was incensed? I hit cars - with the flat of my hand. I kick cars, with my bicycle shoes, and leave a dent. A car gets in my way I slow down and HIT the car with my front tire - leaving a substantial dent in the door.

"Call the cops, you stop line running freak," is my response. So far (three times to date) the driver has rolled up with window and taken off.

And if the police wanna charge me - GOOD. Nothing like a fine Jury trial to awaken the sleeping bicycle giant that resides in California.

The best thing this country can do is to work towards getting the damn cars off the road. Walk down our streets. We are a society of NOTHING but cars - NOTHING at all. We are a waste, a people fond of burning the world's body (gasoline). And we have built an entire society on this waste.

We destroy the air. We kill massive numbers of people (over 50,000 per year in the 1950's - now decreased to approximately 33,000 per year) and consider that death rate absolutely acceptable.

We permitted drunks to drive until the late 1980's when a citizen's group FINALLY pushed the legislature and courts to begin forcing drunk drivers to answer for their violent / death dealing sins.

I look for a future America that isn't focused on cars - a land where cars don't infect the land like a bad case of teenage acne - a place where a person can walk and enjoy the flower and clean air, where people use public transportation and bicycles and their two feet to move from place to place.

Two words for cars and their drivers -- and neither can be printed here.

Khal said...

Like Jim, I don't understand why Americans think that being in a car, which means pissing away a lot of irreplaceable resources, means you are somehow better than everyone else. Motorists need to shitcan the bad attitude.