You may have heard of Elly Blue.

In August, she came to Spokane with husband Joel Biel for Bikestravaganza: Off The Chainring Tour. It was an energetic traveling road show of bicycle talk, movies, zines, and transportation activism and advocacy. They presented short videos and a slideshow about the success of Portland’s bike culture and infrastructure. Blue also was the managing editor of bikeportland.org and and coordinator of Towards Carfree Cities in 2008. My favorite: She publishes the feminist bicycle zine, Taking The Lane.













Photo of Blue and Biel, courtesy of momentumplanet.

Now she can add the big green monster Grist to her resume, where she'll have a column called "How We Roll" about, you guessed it, all things bicycle.

Her first piece: "Why An Additional Road Tax For Cyclists Would Be Unfair." She examines the great myth that us bicyclists do not pay our share. In fact, we overpay. Especially for freeways and highways.

Local roads, where you most likely do the bulk of your daily bicycling, are a different story. The cost of building, maintaining, and managing traffic on these local roads adds up to about 6 cents per mile for each motor vehicle. The cost contributed to these roads by the drivers of these motor vehicles through direct user fees? 0.7 cents per mile. The rest comes out of the general tax fund.

This means that anyone who owns a home, rents, purchases taxable goods, collects taxable income, or runs a business also pays for the roads. If you don't drive a car, even for some trips, you are subsidizing those who do -- by a lot.

Her first column provoked 125 comments.

The latest goes for the "safety in numbers" theory.

In U.S. cities, there are a lot more people out bicycling than just a few years ago. You might reasonably think that the bicycle crash rate would skyrocket as more people, from wobbly new riders to the outright safety-averse, take to the streets on two wheels.

It's a fine, common-sense assumption -- that happens to be wrong.

Research has been steadily showing, actually, that the more people are out there riding bicycles, the safer bicycling becomes. As ridership goes up, crash rates stay flat.

It's a convincing argument because she makes the case that it's the motorist behavior that changes with more bicycle (and pedestrian) facilities. I think she's right and hope Spokane takes note.

More wisdom:

When there is a serious bicycle crash, it almost always involves someone driving a car. There are any number of ways drivers become involved in these crashes, primarily involving speed, turning, and the myriad distractions that are common behind the wheel.

But when there are a lot of bicyclists on the road, according to this theory, drivers take notice. They become more attentive, slow down, pass more cautiously, double-check their blind spots, expect the unexpected. They sense that the road has become a more complicated place, and adjust their behavior accordingly. As a result, the road becomes safer, presumably for everyone.

---

---