I am one of very few Americans who can honestly say they’ve never driven to work.  Day in and day out, through the worst wintery crap or humid, stinking disgustingness New England can muster, I’ve pedaled into and out of the office.  But weather notwithstanding, the time of year that gets to me the most—by far—is May. Why, you may ask? Because May is National Bike Month, and this week is Bike to Work Week.

The idea that one needs a special month to bike to work is absurd. Relegating cyclo-commuting to a single thirty-day period, and in most cases, a single week within those 30 days contributes the public impression that cycling is a novelty means of transportation. Why does the most efficient form of transportation ever created need a perverse Saturnalia to convert it from an arcane eccentricity to a normal means of getting about?

Municipalities and businesses should be taking the funding they waste on Bike to Work week promotions and turn them into actual incentives for cyclists. Things like additional bonuses for employees with energy efficient vehicles (it’s hard to get more efficient than zero-dollars-pero-gallon is it not?) and adequate locker and shower facilities at worksites, to keep people from worrying that they might get too sweaty on the ride in.

Bike to Work Week also brings out the usual obnoxious claptrap about how cyclists are such menaces on the road.  Never mind the fact that such urban inconveniences as the one-way street, traffic lights, stop signs, and gridlock are necessary byproducts only of automotive transportation—that cyclist just passed me while I was stuck in traffic and then barely paused at that stop sign because her field of vision is roughly three times what mine is! Why hasn’t she been pulled over!?

By and large, I get the feeling that most people are relieved when Bike to Work week is over. The pathetic little car holiday lets them crawl back to their gas-guzzling, asphalt-crushing, road-jamming, carbon-spewing cars, content that they’ve done a good deed by greening up for a mere five days (fewer if it’s rained). And that is perhaps the biggest problem: Bike to Work Week sells itself as a solution to a grave and deeply-ingrained problem, when it’s little more than a sloppy, Band-Aid fix. 

Urban planners, environmental activists, and community leaders are all constantly asking themselves how they can get more people on bikes. They might find an answer in a famous political adage: it’s the economy, stupid. Bring the price of car use into line with its costs on the city as a whole through taxes on things like gasoline, the use of congested roadways, parking in crowded areas, and on owning less efficient vehicles.  Spend the proceeds on more bike racks, tax incentives for cyclists, dedicated bikeways, better enforcement of traffic laws, and improved mass transit.

People like to pin the gap in bike ridership between American and European cities on the vagaries of “cultural differences” on opposite sides of the Atlantic.  But take a look at the numbers, and it’s pretty obvious that cash, not custom—and certainly not “Bike to Work Week”—is what gets commuters to trade their Toyotas for Treks.

Photo by bicyclesonly

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