An eyebrow was raised by a blogger, on a blog where I’m a frequent commenter, on the sensibility of a recently established bike lane in his city. I like bicycles. I like bicycling. I like bike lanes. Striping a bike lane on the shoulder of the road reminds drivers that cyclists are permitted to share the road. I wouldn’t care if the road was striped or not if not for the countless drivers in my fair city who see bicyclists in the roadway as a deserving target of a jettisoned beer bottle.
Unfortunately, however, advocating for bicycles and bike lanes has become associated with being politically liberal. I understand there’s a basis in reality for this. Nevertheless, I am far from politically liberal, and I am not going to stop liking bicycles or quietly advocating for bike lanes in my city simply because it overlaps with a nominally liberal cause. So what?
Attempting, I suppose, to amplify the sentiment of the blogger, a commenter snarked:
Liberalism at work. Let’s create traffic jams in the off chance there’s somebody pedaling a bike.
This got me started. I replied, not disrespectfully I thought:
Where I live car lanes have never been suddenly appropriated for bikes only. And offhand I can’t think of a single city I’ve biked in over the past 30 years (many) where that has been the case. Sometimes when a bike lane is established it may make an existing car lane narrower, but so what, what’s wrong with sharing the road? Plus I’ve never understood why people make the association that if you like cycling and/or support bike lanes you therefore must also be politically liberal.
Instead of booyah!, I was booed. Initially anyway.
Okay, no biggy, I’m a thick-skinned boy, been arguing on and off on the Internet for, oh, going on twenty years now I guess. I cut my teeth on USENET.
But then what really got me going was this:
It’s the use of government force to bring to fruition a pet cause of the elite minority regardless of it’s impracticality or the views of the overwhelming majority.
Good grief. The liberal association smear again. I can’t expect the commenter knew my politics are largely Libertarian, and thus likely to the right of even him/her on many issues, and I should have dropped it, but I didn’t, couldn’t resist the opportunity to point out that both political parties use the force of government to oppress majorities. I replied:
Yes, like the unending commitment by the majority of Republicans to continue prosecuting the WarOnDrugs.
More loud booing. 4 down votes, among my first at the blog!
True, my overall “score” did improve as the day wore on, as more readers weighed in evidently finding merit in my thinly veiled wisdom, but still, I couldn’t fathom how anybody’s Scopeometer could be so out of whack as to think bike lanes are a worthy example of the tyranny of the minority!
No, booing my comment more likely indicates that certain people on the Right are rankled by any criticism of the Republican party, true or not. Too bad. Because it is a feature of Libertarianism, not a bug, to be able to express contempt for the overreach of both parties, where the policies of either merit it.
Moral of the story: It is a mistake to assume that people who advocate for a nominally liberal cause are necessarily liberals.
Rod, as I read through your post, I was struck by the similarities of your support for bike lanes, and my support for reasonable and cautious drilling for oil and/or natural gas in natural areas, i.e. areas set aside in an effort to preserve backcountry type wildness.
Specifically, I thought of the area called the Mason Tract in Northern MI, jest east of Grayling, MI.
The angler group I belong to, Anglers of the AuSable, fought the oil company involved in the venture in court. The Anglers argument was not to stop the drilling, but the placement of the pad required to perform the drilling.
Initially, the oil company wanted to place the pad within the Mason Tract itself, within a 1/2 mile of the river. The Anglers fought this, but they didn’t fight to stop the drilling. They fought to have the oil company move the drilling pad from a 1/2 mile away to one (1) mile away from the river, just outside the boundaries of the Mason Tract, as drilling technology allows such drilling, at an angle, to be performed.
For some reason the oil company considered this an outrageous request, and when they came to court, they fought tooth and nail against the Anglers’ proposal. When push came to shove, the judge ruling on the case simply forbade the oil company any drilling rights, which I thought was counterproductive, and created additional bad blood between those who have environmental concerns, and the oil companies as an industry.
It appears as if bike lane advocates, and those against, have quite the similarities to advocates for protection of wilderness areas from oil/gas exploration, and those who advocate for.
John,
You may be right, there may be similarities in advocacy for/against across the two causes, I don’t know.
One of the loopier reasons I heard against bike lanes was that, well, I never see any cyclists using the bike lanes. And I’m like, oh, so if we don’t see sidewalks filled with pedestrians should we be against them for the same reason? I have to think if these people saw the city ripping up and removing the sidewalks in front of their houses, because they were too infrequently used, these people would be up in arms.