Green propaganda

I'm in favor of green solutions, where possible. What I strenuously object to is the notion that we need some major technological advances or scientific breakthroughs to have a "green solution". There are very simple and easy things to do right now that would make a huge difference.

Here's a for-instance. I live in a middle-size university town of maybe 150,000 people. Like most towns without geographical features to limit or concentrate its growth, it spreads out over a substantial distance. Maybe it is 5 miles by 4 miles, but it's a little hard to tell because of the way subdivisions sprawl and put out pseudopods. We have some bike riders, but not a lot, because the streets are not safe for bicylists. So we drive everywhere. 8 blocks to the nearest grocery, closer than that to drugstores and cleaners, but it's worth what my life is worth to bicycle consistently.

Why is that, you ask (and well may you ask)? Because our fair city doesn't designate bicycle routes or paint safe lanes. Unlike European cities which are full of bicycles and mopeds and scooters, we have so few of them that we are not used to looking out for them. Some of the more redneck types nearby seem to think it funny to nearly miss cyclists or even just to take them out. So we have a chicken and egg problem; we need more cyclists to increase awareness of safety issues, but we can't have more cyclists until it gets safer.

So the first measure we should take would be to thoroughly designate safe cycling lanes, and then fine the shit out of any motorist crossing into them at any time, cyclists present or not. And keep doing that until we get used to staying out of the safe lanes.

Second measures even for metropolises are not that difficult. Arrange a safe parking area (or many of them) outside of town, make scooters and bicycles cheap and easy to rent, and ban all non-commercial vehicles from within the city itself. Or of course busses could go to and from town center and parking areaa.

How much could all this cost? Well, paying for the rental vehicles (which could also be electric) would cover much of the cost. How much does it cost to enforce safe biking lanes? So why don't we do something like this instead of the incessant yammering about batteries and butane or natural gas-powered vehicles or instantaneous teleporting or whatever? You can find the answer by simply obseving who opposes such moves and who profits by the opposition, and in addition one should note equally carefully the politicians who support them. Not that hard, is it?