Saturday, February 24, 2007

Abnormal behavior

If you spend enough time reading bicycle-related blogs or talking with bicycle-related people, you may unknowingly slip into a magical fantasy land. You may actually come to believe that riding to work or the store is "normal."

Yesterday I was talking about blogs with a newspaper reporter. Rather than attempt to explain the concept of utility cycling, I described Bike Year as being mostly about bicycle commuting. His response:

"You can do that in Savannah?"

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The trick is to impose one's own definition of "normal". For the vast majority of the world population, practical cycling is, in fact, normal, ordinary, and common. The vocal American mainstream is abnormal in believing that the only to move about is in steel boxes. They are in their own fantasy land, where the style of driving seen in TV auto ads is considered "normal". Sadly, some of them even try it in the real world, and it doesn't work nearly as well as riding a bicycle. Val

Jett said...

I grew up in Savannah and find it to be more suited for commuting by bike than Atlanta suburbs. I'm thinking of the downtown squares, but found even riding out to Tybee along the two-lane to be better than most roads in Atlanta.

Evan said...

That's classic. Maybe you can inspire him to do a story on bicycle commuting.