A vision to tomorrow....

Frank Bruni has a nice Op Ed Piece in the New York Times on the leadership of Janette Sadik-Kahn whose bicycle advocacy efforts have been covered before.

Bruni discusses the challenges of not only changing a city, but a mindset and the chicken and egg challenges of putting infrastructure in place to support alternate transportation. He presents some nice statistics on how New York compares to other cities, the enforcement of traffic laws and the availability of bicycle parking. (More on that in a future post). Much of a community identify comes from the symbols that matter. Bruni closes with this fantastic observation:

The Chicago transportation commissioner, Gabe Klein, noted that biking pushed back against a range of modern ills. “There’s the congestion problem,” he said. “The pollution problem. The obesity problem. The gas problem.”

On top of all that, it makes an important statement about our priorities — about our willingness to amend the reckless, impatient, gluttonous ways that have created not only smog and clog in our cities but also a staggering federal debt.

“Bikes are definitely a symbol of what your city stands for,” said Klein.

Overall a good read.