As I prepare to attend next week’s International Towards Carfree Cities Conference in Portland (from which I’ll be doing daily posts on this blog) — traveling up by train with a big group of bicyclists and alternative transportation activists from San Francisco — the newsgroups and carfree living websites have been abuzz over this simple image:
Why go gaga over a presidential candidate on a bike? After all, John Kerry rode one and President Bush reportedly takes regular mountain bike rides. The difference for those who promote bicycling as a viable urban transportation option is that Obama rode in a big city, in street clothes, on an inexpensive bike, and was even hauling something (probably his daughter, although that isn’t clear). And he chose to spend his downtime cycling through Chicago with his family shortly after saying this in Portland: “If we are going to solve our energy problems we’ve got to think long term. It’s time for us to be serious about investing in alternative energy. It’s time for us to get serious about raising fuel efficiency standards on cars. It’s time that the entire country learn from what’s happening right here in Portland with mass transit and bicycle lanes and funding alternative means of transportation.”
Contrast that with today’s news that Senate Republicans have blocked legislation that would have taxed the obscene profits now been reaped by the five big largest American oil companies, which took in a staggering $36 billion in just the first three months of this year. Just imagine how many bike lanes and transit improvements could be funded with the proposed 25 percent tax on unreasonably high profit levels? Or by getting out of Iraq, with its price tag of more than $250 million per day?
Forget the detailed analysis of their economic plans; the differing visions of these two men couldn’t be more clear. We either keep cooking the planet, fighting the world, and begging the rich for crumbs and spare change, or we try something different.
