On 12/22/2010 3:00 PM, Jay Beattie wrote:
On Dec 22, 11:11 am, wrote:
Duane Hébert wrote:
On 12/22/2010 1:54 PM, landotter wrote:
http://video.tedxcopenhagen.dk/video...ville-andersen

Look at the comments at the bottom. First one is from Fred.

Was that _The_ Fred? The guy with a yellow windbreaker, Bell
Biker helmet and a flippy flag?

Yes it was, and he's the future of American bicycle commuting
according to infrastructure planners.

This presentation is slick, but it is wrong in so many ways --
particularly when applied to American cities (paraphrasing):
"returning to the way things used to be . . . going back to
bicycles." Dude, California was built around the car. Sure, we rode
bikes as kids, but any adult who commuted by bike was considered some
Bohemian freak. Bicycle commuting was never big on the West Coast --
and in fact, it is bigger now than when I was a kid.

True, but the difference in bike culture between the US and Europe (this
was a talk given in Copenhagen) has its roots in economic history as
well as geography. The US, after an initial, but brief, bike boom,
entered the auto age, much earlier and enthusiastically than most of
Europe. Bike culture really never got started here. You can't go back to
what never was.