“Bikes are just a really great way of getting around,” Pashak said. “They’re very efficient. They’re very affordable. They take up very little space. They’re environmentally friendly.” He added that they have been around for 200 years. “
My favorite parts are the snow tires, heat and AC, windshield, trunk space, the fact that I can get from one side of town to the other in 12 minutes!
You know, stuff that people in Michigan care about more?
[“To me, it’s a little weird that you would tax business, take that money, and then redistribute it to certain businesses.” He added that one option would be “maybe don’t take that money in the first place.”]
Do you think he will vote for HILLARY CLINTON or DONALD TRUMP?
I know that’s supposed to be snark, but northerners do in fact ride bikes, sometimes even in the winter. I don’t know if these guys have a fatbike model, but those are often targeted to winter riding. Are you suggesting that bicycle makers should only have factories in states where there’s no winter?
I think he had the right idea, but didn’t do enough due diligence. Absent the Democrat wealth-distribution crap, Detroit could be a good place to open a business. Property values are bargain-basement, and there’s plenty of industrial space available. This guy saw those two things, and thought he had made a good choice; he just failed to look into the root cause of those two selling points.
I don't know where you live, but if you can cross town in 12 minutes in a car, you don't have a problem. But if you live in a city with chronic gridlock, decoupling from cars begins to make a lot of sense.
Every city is different. I live in DC. Our arterial roads are jammed. The prospect for building significant new road capacity into downtown is approximately zero, and there would be nowhere to park if we did. The city is rapidly gentrifying, largely because those older, close-in neighborhoods start to look attractive to people whose alternative is to spend two to four hours a day in their cars.
The truth is, there are great neighborhoods all over the metro area. It is easy to minimize commutes if you open your eyes. (The schools pose a problem, but leave that for another day. Voucher the schools, and gentrification would become a tidal wave.) It is misleading to look at metro-wide statistics on car use; one really has to drill down to neighborhoods. People in the 'burbs are mostly stuck in their cars, unless they can make it to a convenient metro stop. People in the central city core, however, have much more abundant options.
I continue to be astonished at how many suburbanites cannot connect the dots. The bike lobby does not expect commuters in western Fairfax County to get out of their cars. But it would be nice if the people gridlocked on I-66 twice a day would stop to realize that everyone on Capitol Hill or Takoma Park or Bethesda or West Hyattsville who walks or bikes is one less car jamming the roads, and one more available parking space downtown.
The best way to relive traffic congestion here isn't to build another lane on I-66 or I-270 or I-395 (which isn't going to happen anyhow). The best way is to unclog the congestion at the front end of the pipe by getting people in the close-in neighborhoods to use alternative forms of transit. Twelve percent of the people in DC walk to work, and other four percent bike. Bike commuting has increased 445% since 1990, which reflects investment in bike lanes and, where possible, off-road trails. But that's area-wide. The figures are much higher for the close-in areas.