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When I am riding my bicycle, all motorists are potential muggers.
On quiet country lanes, I don't have enough eyes. Cars sneak up on me. They weigh a ton or two more than the bike and I do. You don't have to study physics to know who's going to move on and who's going to spend the next four months in traction.
If you move over to let the behemoth roar by, you lose control in the gravel -- if there's even a shoulder. Often there's just a ditch lined with broken bottles and disposed diapers.
On city streets, cars turn toward you without warning, open their doors when you're five feet away, squeeze you between them, clip you with their mirrors and bumpers, and otherwise make your life short, brutish and nasty.
Every time a car just misses me as I'm toiling up the
courthouse hill, I wish I had enough breath to scream
Look, you jerk, don't treat me like that. I'm a better
citizen than you are. This machine doesn't pollute. I'm
fulfilling an important civic obligation; Gov. Lamm said we
all had a duty to be healthy. I hope you die of a heart
attack next week.
The world looks different through a windshield.
On city streets, most bicyclists pedal because they are too stupid to pass the test for a driver's license. They can't read enough to recognize a stop sign, they can't tell red from green at a traffic signal, they don't know left from right when they signal turns -- if they bother at all.
Out in the country, they're as suicidal as lemmings. A herd of cyclists was coasting down Trout Creek Pass Saturday afternoon, veering and swerving all over the driving lane. They were out there for mere personal pleasure; I was on the road because I had work to do.
These hedonists were keeping me from my productive
labors. When I passed them, no matter how gingerly or
widely, they shot condescending glares of moral
superiority. I wanted to shout Look, you arrogant
freeloaders, get out of my way. And it is my way. When I
buy gas, I pay highway taxes to build and maintain these
roads. You don't pay a nickel, and yet you bums act as
though you own the road.
Cars and bikes don't mix on most thoroughfares. Wider shoulders are one solution, although impractical in the tighter mountain canyons and crossings. Separate bike paths are another, and they'd be quite practical in many places because most of the work was done a century ago when railroads laid tracks to every promising mining camp, sawmill and cattle chute.
Trout Creek Pass, for instance, holds two railroad beds abandoned 65 years ago. Across Colorado, there are hundreds of miles of similar roadbed which would make excellent bike paths because their maximum grade is 4 percent. They'd also make good foot and horse trails while providing cross-country skiing in the winter. Restoring their bridges and transforming them into suitable trails would also preserve an important part of our history -- the work of the surveyors who located these routes, and of the men who wielded shovels and wheelbarrows for $2 a day to prepare the roadbeds for rails.
But such paths cost money to install and maintain, as would something so simple as wider shoulders on our highways. It wouldn't be fair to make motorists pay. Besides that, the highway users' fund is sorely pressed for such necessities as plowing snow and filling chuckholes. So where might the money come from?
Why not collect a 10 percent excise tax on the sales and rentals of bicycles, hiking gear, cross-country ski equipment and the like? On just bicycle sales, this would raise $2 million a year in Colorado. A rough estimate for the total would be $10 million annually. The money could be administered by a state agency, set up similarly to the highway commission, which would develop a statewide system for non-motorized transportation.
The result would be uncharacteristic for an act by our state government -- Colorado would be a safer and more pleasant place to live, and a dangerous problem would be solved.
Our leaders, however, probably won't act. They know that the final solution will come in due time. Colorado's bicyclists will be killed off. Then there won't be a problem.
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