Transition Whatcom

A warning to all those bicycle commuters: (Self included):

This article trashes the idea of any personal transportation device as being acceptable in the traditional city (where humans have lived for the last 10,000 years. for the most part traveling by means of their own two feet).

Author Nathan Lewis argues that a network of trains connecting pedestrian designed neighborhoods negate any reason to resort to elitist "personal transportation devices"--whether they be empty Hummers consuming egregious amounts of fossil fuel per mile or ten-speeds towing a bike trailer full of one's worldly possessions.

I ask what about my late model Honda sedan which I try to drive as little as possible?

The author's response is brutal but succinct: until I consign my specific Honda automobile to the trash-heap of over-consumption (this fate also includes my road bike, purchased used) and start walking, I am seemingly a member of a soon-to-be-extinct, energy-wasting, over-indulged urban hipster elite who wastes precious energy calories trying to race from the place I don't want to be, to the place I should have been at all along.

Lewis challenges us in our assumptions. We need to re-assess our notions of how to move within our personal worlds. How big should that world be?


http://www.energybulletin.net/53665

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