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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!tektronix!ucbcad!notes
From: notes@ucbcad.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Bicycles (GRRRR!) - (nf)
Message-ID: <248@ucbcad.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 23-Sep-83 21:37:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbcad.248
Posted: Fri Sep 23 21:37:01 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 27-Sep-83 04:00:44 EDT
Sender: notes@ucbcad.UUCP
Organization: UC Berkeley CAD Group
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#R:umcp-cs:-267300:ucbcad:3000001:000:1225
ucbcad!max    Sep 23 16:52:00 1983

I sympathize with zben over the inconvenience of slow bicyclists. I am
an avid motorist and bicyclist both. Daily I see sleazy and dangerous 
maneuvers in town, like biyclists sailing blithely through four-way
stop signs.

And yet, for all the obnoxiousness of some bicyclists, no motorist 
experiences anywhere near the inconvenience, physical stress and risk
visited on bicyclists by cars. The cyclist may irritate the motorist,
but the motorist threatens, from sheer physics, the cyclist's life.
How many motorists are killed and crippled annually by impacts from bicycles?
When a motorist is forced to slow down on a hill, he or she loses speed
but needs only to press a pedal to make it up again. The cyclist
pays for precious momentum with toil and sweat. Few complaining drivers
show much perception of this perspective; I think some experience of
cycling would make them more tolerant of offenders.

Abroad, where gasoline prices more realistically reflect the long-term
cost of the fuel, and where political pressure has NOT yet subordinated
trains to trucks for freight transport (against the needs of the marketplace),
they have the good sense not to regard the bicycle as a "hobby."

		Max Hauser  (UC Berkeley)