2 Down 10 To Go!

I am two months into the year without cars. The project, which started back on July 13th, is headed into winter but on a day like today it's hard to imagine the foul weather to come. To date  I have had to use my car 3 or 4 times to get to work and a couple of times at home to accomplish chores but I have used my bike more often than not. So what does it all mean? I have no idea! Why am I doing it? The answer seems to keep changing on me. At a basic level I just love riding my bike so I'm doing it because it's fun. But there are other things going on here that I don't even fully understand. In the past two months a lot of things have happened. Lot's of folks passed away--Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, and today, Jody Powel from the Carter administration and Patrick Swayze among others. The whole health care storm has been dominating the cable news shows and the political climate is  making civility  a quaint notion from the past. 

Closer to home, in an occurrence that seems to be happening with more frequency, one of our customers recently suffered a traumatic brain injury and broken back as the result of being struck by a landscaping truck while riding her bike in Pennsylvania. The driver did not stop. It is one of those things that makes me scared to ride my bike but it also energizes my passion to change our culture. How sad is it that we live in a society where one person will carelessly hurt another person and then run away to avoid being held accountable for their actions. It seems like a growing trend. In the country at large it seems that civility, compassion and just plain good manners are no longer valued. What's happened to us? Childish, ill-mannered behavior is not just tolerated, it's encouraged. When public leaders and celebrities misbehave they offer insincere apologies but suffer no real consequences and sometimes even benefit from their indiscretion. "I was overcome by passion", "I was drunk", "I was mad because I disagreed with the official". You can run someone over with a truck and destroy a life. Just say "oops, my bad" and you're off the hook. 

When it comes to the safety of cyclists and pedestrians on the road, folks to seem to not have any idea that there is a problem. Distracted drivers on the phone and texting drift around the road totally unaware of the peril they are creating. When you point it out to them they don't really seem to care. At my favorite breakfast place, a 19 year old kid that works there was joking about losing his license for the third time. The third time! He's only 19 for crying out loud! One of his co-workers, a young lady, was making fun of him but admitted that she texts while she drives all the time. People seem to feel that driving is a right and not a privilege and they are permitted to abuse that right any way they want. Don't get me wrong, I am not unaware of the trouble that cyclists create for themselves with their own bad behavior. I will have a post on that subject very soon. So I guess one of the reasons that I am doing this is to try in some way to get people to change the way they think just a little bit. Would it kill you to be a little more careful?