Comment: Is a single bike rack mysteriously causing congestion?

Dear fellow motorist friends. As you know, I’ve been tirelessly fighting for the long-suffering, often marginalised, single occupant motorists since I can remember. Lately there’s been a fury of lies and hearsay surrounding us “wicked motorists” and how we, of all people, cause traffic congestion on our city streets.

With funding from the motorist think-tank “Congestion Alleviation Research” (C.A.R), I was able to secure the most brilliant pseudo-scientific minds to understand just what is causing all the congestion. I was able to get the team who helped unravel the mystery of alien Crop Circles and the existence of the Loch Ness Monster and Sasquatch. We worked tirelessly to prove there was something, possibly magical, causing all the traffic to the millions of cars meandering their ways in and out of our streets and highways.

My research team scoured the backed up highways and freeways looking for clues. We studied the car clogged city streets and parking garages. Our team witnessed cars at a standstill, desperate and angry honking, blocking crosswalk desperately trying to move about the city. We just knew something was causing it, but what?

As our hearts were breaking for those unfortunate motorists, idle in their large metal boxes, we began to notice how effortlessly people on bikes moved around with little to no space at all. This is when our team had our “Eureka!”’moment. We just knew these small, nimble, relatively light devices were the cause of so much car congestion. People on bikes were essentially stealing mobility from motorists, somehow.

As our team watched all the bikers gleefully navigate through the streets, we knew these mobility stealing monsters were at the heart of all the car congestion. Our finger pointing led us to a bike rack, nearly the size of a SUV, with dozens of bikes locked to it. Researchers concluded that all the car congestion, from the street traffic, all the way up to the freeways was derived from this very bike rack. The cause was practically hiding under our very own cars! The bike rack was coined “transit zero”.

“Our ~never to be refused~ theory is solid. You can’t prove that bikes don’t cause all car traffic, any more than you can’t not prove that aliens don’t exist. It’s pretty much science,” said one researcher in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic.

So there you have it, my motorist friends. You now know the TRUTH behind all of our motorist woes. Please spread the word that allocating a minuscule space for bikes and bike parking will unequivocally jam up the hordes of car traffic, as if by magic! Now take pride, dear motorist, with the assurance that you’re not the problem on our streets. Enjoy!

For more sound logic on how to improve the flow of traffic on a street near you, follow Bob on Twitter @bob_gunderson, or head over to dearestdistrict5.blogspot.com