I live in a fairly well to do town. People here are driving luxury SUVs etc and the price differential isn’t going to really make a difference for them. Also most people around here would not give up their car. Myself included, my Jetta is paid off and I’ll keep that thing until it dies. I do need it as viable pub transportation is often a PITA and needs much work.

So I’m thinking for the subset of people I live near- this argument isn’t going to make them do anything different. And perhaps can give them an- eh only poor (er) people need bikes. I have my Lexus and that works great for me.

I’m thinking of a preschool mom I know who has big bucks, she just did a reno of her new victorian house all while living in their other huge house down the block. they put in Geothermal heating and cooling. Def not b/c it will end up cheaper ( in the long run) but probably b/c it was 1. cool ( I’m guessing) and 2. effiecient and earth centric.

Or my neighbor who is trying to get my help in recruiting our neighbors to go in together to buy our own two block radius Windmill. I think it’s a great idea but it’s going to cost thousands of dollars a household hopefully for the chance to get paid back by the grid. But still you’d have to really care about the cause to drop several thousand down for an unknown monthly a month back. And it won’t cover all the utilities… I’m not sure the people on my block will go for it. half of them recycle ( Grr)

I am not sure of my point. But I guess I’m thinking that in trying to get my neighbors to embrace biking, expense is not going to play a role in it. B/c people will maintain their cars and also have to choose to bike. For that subset, I’m hoping to just show it’s easy. And I also need to deflect nicely the pedestal comments as the commenter was right- it distances them from the ability of biking which is so easy and quite frankly fun.

In Lithuania, there were buses all over the place to way out in the middle of farm pastures and fields of nothing. In Germany, I remember getting off of a train literally in a cow pasture with nothing else around.

The kind of infrastructure that only supports personal automobiles is, as you noted, rather prejudicial – it makes any kind of transportation very difficult for certain groups in society.

Of course it _is_ hard to balance that with the “see ya suckers!” smugness I feel when I take off past the stalled traffic on a nice spring day

And Deb — yup, I’m with you. And don’t get me started hybrids … all those batteries and battery byproducts.

As I mentioned in the Twitter reply… Americans like to think we can shop our way out of anything. Climate problems? Let’s buy a new car! If they gotta shop, how about buying a new bicycle instead? Anyone building bikes Cradle-to-Cradle these days?

I agree with all that’s been said about there not really being anything remarkable or inspiring about making most of your trips by bicycle, and that the example I want to present personally as well, is that (nearly) anyone can do it.

I think this is also one of the main reasons that helmets and lycra and giant reflective vests and all that kind of thing are a deterrent to more people cycling – if everyone you see on a bike is wearing a helmet and a lycra suit, you’re definitely not going to get the idea that riding a bike is for everyone.

In the end, I think just being as normal and human as possible is the best way to show people that they can do what you’re doing. The more normal and human you are, the more they will relate to you. The more prepared for danger or athletic you look, the more they’ll feel like that’s something “those” people do.

We’ve been doing the same, and I must admit that I felt some pride on those 17 degree days that the girl got on the bike and we didn’t bag out (right up until I’d get to work and see an entry from a MPLS bike blogger, showing off their awesome balaclava icicle forest, that’s humbling).

The thing that gets the wife and I is when someone says to us, “You guys are amazing!” or “You’re my heroes!” or something along those lines. We’re not amazing, there’s nothing that extraordinary about our choice to bike instead of drive, other than we’ve grown accustomed to it and we like it.

And that’s the thing: if there’s a message we want to send by example, it’s something more like, “this isn’t hard and it’s not extraordinary, it’s pretty fun and if you want to do this you totally can.” So when someone does the whole breathless admiration thing, it kinda feels like we failed to get the message across, and that they’re putting us on a pedestal to justify their belief that it’s not something that they could ever do.

Y’ever get that? Do you know what I mean? How do you respond to it?

One thing that I think can help in these instances is things like electric assists for bicycles. Things like the Stokemonkey, designed by Todd of Clever Cycles in Portland (http://www.flickr.com/photos/cleverchimp/3349677821/), can help a normal, everyday person travel long distances with heavy loads, with a very very minimal energy usage (especially as compared with a car).

I think it makes sense to me to re-zone and retrofit suburbs to be more like small cities in and of themselves, designed similarly to how Portland, Chicago, and other cities themselves are (connected streets, denser development, etc), but if you have to travel in suburbs the way they are, there are solutions that can make it much better for you.

Portland is a great place to live, glad I could bring bits of it to you in Chicago Have you looked at the videos yet?