What You Should Know About Biking to Work

May 13-17 is "National Ride Your Bike to Work Week", sponsored by the League of American Bicyclists. Riding your bike to work assumes you have a job to start with. Like millions of other Americans, this guy no longer has a job to bike to.  Many folks no longer have a job, either, but had to sell their bike on Craigslist to buy food when their unemployment benefits ran out. So even if they found a job, they'd have to go out and buy a bike to go with it.
The Organizers of this week, should have thought of that before going around declaring one whole week of Lance Armstrong commuting, sans the steroids. They also assume you live close enough to work you can bike there. Few, if any, Americans have that luxury. Most of us live a good distance from our jobs, unless you're a stay-at-home parent, in which case you could just leave the thing propped against the house for the neighbors to see.
If you live close enough to work to bike there, you might as well just skip the bike and take a bus. Assuming your community has public transportation with user-friendly hours, which is a Big Assumption in modern America.

The whole idea of riding your bike to work would definitely work in places like France, where they ride them around anyway. Besides the cars are smaller and the roads accommodate bikes. French motorists have a disadvantage behind the wheel over Americans because they can't text message so easily. In France you need both hands to text  to get all the accents right on the vowels. The chance of becoming road-kill in France is much lower than here at home. If you really want to bike to work everyday, you should move to France.

America was built around the automobile, so she boasts few bike-friendly cities. Henry Ford himself  believed in a limited kind of equality: an equality based on the motor car; if you didn't have one, you didn't count.  He worked to destroy alternate forms of transportation, which is rather hypocritical seeing his first motorcar was little more than a powered bicycle on four wheels.

American's need to take themselves less seriously. A few thousand folks biking to work will not save the planet. It will, however, cause aggravation on the roads as the rest of us try to get around your lumbering butt. Then we have to put up with your sweaty-smelling, helmet-haired, superior attitude the rest of the day. It will not be a pretty sight. Trust me on this.