“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
Albert Einstein
This proposal is invisible for several reasons. The bike itself is so common it hides in plain sight. Bikes have little roadway displacement and pass through unnoticed. Bicycles are invisible in transportation policy consideration. The concept of bicycles providing significant transportation is invisible. How can we to see and uses bicycles?
This is a plan to flood urban areas with people who are competent bike owners, regular bike users and are from marginalized communities. This will address; poverty, environment, transportation, infrastructure, criminal justice system (twice), health, mental health, commerce and Covid times.
The government committing to this project would produce effective quick relatively cheap positive change. Quick well reflective power usage is a force for change. Flood urban areas with competent bicyclist. This will reduce carbon in transportation while promoting a more civil society. Holland and Denmark intentionally did this in the middle of the
last century.
Fallow bikes in China exist by the tens of thousands. This has been written about in the Atlantic and more recently by the BBC. These bikes were over produced, meant for the bike-share programs. Acquiring these bikes should be cheap.
Bring these bikes to America. With modest refitting, States’ prisons industries will become reconditioning centers for these bikes. The federal government will underwrite these modest investments.
As this starts:
Retasking/refocusing public safety personnel (police officers) is the other step. Transition traffic enforcement to automation. Cameras site violations not demographics.
Large segments of urban public safety personnel will be assigned bike patrols. My research shows higher efficacy for police on bikes in urban areas. Officers on bicycles will be behavioral exemplars. The International Police Mountain Association is at the ready to support training.
Qualified trained bike patrol officers will receive further training to teach members of the community to properly safely bike. Bike training public safety officers, using the prison reconditioned bikes as training tools. Members of the community successfully trained keep the bike they trained. The cost of running a car averages 8K a year, a bike $300!
Commerce and Justice will need to modestly support this. It is a boutique project that can blossom into a substantive transportation change. The Department of Transportation is the best agency to do this environmental paradigm shift.
Listen to Bill Gates, Naomi Klein and our President act now is the time charge. Competent bicyclists in America’s cities and suburbs (even rural areas using e-bikes) empower people. This supportively empowers self-sufficiency.
Chris Menton Ed.D.
Professor Emeritus Justice Studies
Roger Williams University
Hm 401 253 3306
Mobile 617 640 4596
Chris Menton is an author. He is a student of the bicycle. He rides bicycles to get to work, to explore states and countries, to run errands and a number of other activities. He conducted the first research study of police bicycle patrols, is a nationally certified cycling instructor and a member of the Rhode Island Bicycle Coalition board of directors. He has designed innovative cycles and bikeways. Recently completed National Highway Institute Bicycle Facility Design Training Course.