In a year, I spend about 200 hours sitting on my bicycle. Quite a bit of this is spent considering the state of cycling where I am. Sometimes, I have a bad ride... a driver yells at me to get off the road, there's a large curb, an unfilled pothole, you name it. I'm frustrated when I get to my destination, and it gets worse when I read about cyclists being killed, confusion over driving laws, lack of government funding, etc.
Most of my ideas to deal with this so far have been totally unreasonable: post photos of bad drivers, run for office, midnight pothole filling or writing educational messages on a whiteboard on the back of my bike.
I think the biggest problem is a lack of information. I'm convinced that cyclists, drivers, politicians and voters don't all understand:
- traffic laws
- the low priority we give to biking in urban planning
- how cycling affects non-cyclists
- the investment that the city of Ottawa actually makes in cycling
- that it doesn't have to be this way
One goal I have is to not let this degenerate into random complaining. There's enough of this on the comments sections of news web pages. I'd like the information here to be fact-based and in support of improving the situation.
The hardest part of blogging is keeping them going. Let's see how I do.
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