Bolinas Ridge Rd. car commercial photo courtesy of Jim Collier
It’s not very often I post other people’s content without adding my own perspective, but I really enjoyed this post entitled “Drive Fast” on Kent’s bike blog:
“It’s not very often that I dispense automotive advice. Today, I am. It is Sunday and I’m going to preach a little. My advice is two words, and those two words are “Drive Fast,” but I hope you stick with me long enough to hear why that’s my advice.
Like pretty much every American, I live in a world designed for driving. My home, like yours I suspect, has a space specifically made for my automobile. My workplace, naturally, has plenty of parking. My bank features a drive-thru teller window, as do most of the coffee shops and fast food places. These fast places are mostly along the wide road, the one just off the swooping freeway exits. In the past hundred years we’ve put a lot of effort into making it easy to go from here to there quickly and while sometimes we can, too often we can’t, so we’ve invented things like traffic reports, and books on tape to help us cope. And even when we do get from here to there and back again without incident or aggravation, the here and there are not quite like we dreamed. The dreams, the world shown us in the car commercials, is the driver on the open road, a lone car driving beneath blue skies, along a rocky coast or twisting through a green forest. In truth, we build rivers of concrete through our cities. We really do pave paradise to put up parking lots. Every day we chop down trees to make thousands of greasy bags to hold the millions of french fries we scarf down on our important trips to important places.”
Read the full article on Kent’s Bike Blog
Kent Peterson lives in Issaquah, Washington and he and his family of 4 have been car free since 1987. Read more about Kent and his family in this Seattle Times article.
James D. Schwartz is the editor of The Urban Country. You can contact James at james.schwartz@theurbancountry.com.
Related Articles:
- Swapping Car Ownership for Car-Sharing (Oct 2010)
- Car Culture Bleeds Our Society (Aug 2010)
- Refusing To Be Herded Like Cattle (Aug 2010)
- China’s Mega 100KM Traffic Jam (Aug 2010)
Good article.
Here you can find a bunch of commercials about the car-bike relationship I collected a few weeks ago, that illustrates the dreamed world mentioned by Kent.
http://bicicletasciudadesviajes.blogspot.com/2011/01/coches-vs-bicicletas-la-guerra-continua.html
Congrats for your blog.
Eneko
Thanks Eneko. Great post with the commercials!
wow such a wonderful site………which place does it belong
wow such a wonderful site………which place does it belong