Biking and Sprawl
The Indianapolis Star ran a piece last week on the travails of suburban bikers, faced with steadily increasing suburban congestion. Sprawl means, among other things, that the quiet, scenic road a mile away – you know, the one that passed that old barn – is now a noisy, congested thoroughfare where you ride at great peril among enraged or inattentive drivers. (The barn and surrounding cornfield, meanwhile, is now a 60-house development). Bike-auto wrecks account for 2 percent of all deaths-by-traffic, the article reports, but that doesn’t include the many near misses or unreported incidents that leave bikers injured or terrified.
As a result, biking is becoming more of an excursion-type activity, like a picnic or beach trip – something that requires a drive and prior scheduling. That is, unless you live in a 'burb that's installed a network of trails, where cyclists take out their frustrations on the next-lower-down category in the transportation hierarchy: pedestrians.
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