The public spoke
Here's an interesting survey that the car haters in the Portland "transportation" bureau (motto: "This is how you must live") probably won't be crowing too much about. It's about bicycle usage in Oregon. It reveals that a clear majority of Oregonians, something like six out of ten, never get on a bicycle for any reason.
And the people who do cycle are doing so less, not more. Mostly because it's dangerous. “Because I don’t feel safe on the roads. There are a lot of crazy drivers.” “More road rage in town and less alertness from drivers.” “Too many tourists and cars our population has grown so I don’t feel as safe riding my bike around town.”
The Bend Bulletin wrote the survey up in a story reprinted here.
Not that this will deter the car haters any. They'll tell you that it means that even more roads have to be signed, striped, speed-bumped, sticked, curbed, or just plain closed to motorists. It's all the bureaucrats know how to do.
Their fondest hope is that someday all the people with kids and jobs and lives will move away, and the bikes will overcome. The problem is that there'll be no economy in town to bike to. Maybe that's the idea.
There’s a practical problem for the car haters. Bicyclists who want to get to and from work have, mostly, an easier time of it, because of the increase in bike paths on major streets. Recreational bicyclists have it much worse, because the city and county have encouraged drug-addicted campers to block the recreational bike paths. The nearest clean recreational bike path is in Vernonia.
ReplyDeleteHow much of an economy do you need to be a part time co-op barista?
ReplyDelete🤣🤣🤣
DeleteI kind of blame the bike advocates for creating an environment that makes biking less safe.
ReplyDeleteI got to know several members of the "Bicycle Mafia" when I worked for the City of Portland. They were "True Believers" in the worst sense of the term: fanatics who were utterly convinced that their lifestyle (bicycling, eating organic, recycling, leftist politics) was the ONE CORRECT PATH; any person who deviated needed to be "re-educated" (by force, if necessary). These environmetalists were fervid evangelists for a new religion, based on apocalyptic visions of "climate change" destroying their deity Mother Earth.
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