With the bike now off the road for all intents and purposes as a mode of adult transportation…at home, but content minding the kids, teaching skills of balance and basic first aid, teaching that taking things apart is often easier than putting them back together again, teaching would-be engineers the finer points of ramp building and how to fix a flat tire…the paved streets and the automobile grew up together. Volumes of traffic code and regulations, speed limits, traffic flows, infrastructure, whole towns grew up around interstates…an entire auto-centric culture developed and flourished economically…this cannot be understated nor should it be demonized in hindsight.

During that growth, during that, dare I say, reign…there were no advocacy groups pushing for wider shoulders and bike lanes to accommodate a waning bicycle traffic. The car was affordable now and everybody wanted one and the convenience they offered, the speed, the power–seductive…who gave a crap, who was even thinking about the bike except the kids who owned them?

For decades this auto/road symbiosis went on. Bigger, longer, faster, year after year. Then a few things happened: Rachel Carson had a book published, OPEC was founded and began to exert its power, and America began to get fat.