Can you be “pro-bike” and not also be “anti-car”?

I’ve never really thought of myself as anti-car — I just like to ride my bike. But some thoughts about encouraging bike use have been swimming around my head. These thoughts are still trying to gel, but the gist is that it doesn’t really matter how many millions we spend to encourage cycling if we as a society continue to spend several orders of magnitudes more to make solo driving easier.

The paradigm is slowly changing in a few urban centers, but almost all traffic engineering in the United States is tied to “Level of Service” or LOS. The success or failure of a road transportation system and justification for future projects is tied to how many cars you can push along the road or through an intersection per day.

The most successful freeways are those with free flowing traffic, which you only get when the lanes are empty. When people see empty buses or empty bike lanes, though, the public decry these as a waste of money. Go figure.
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