Bicycling safely into the future

It is obvious to anyone who is currently informed about the converging trends of peak oil, declining material living standards in America and much of the rest of the Western world, and global environmental stresses, that one of the major outcomes will be a radical restructuring and down-sizing of our current energy-wasteful systems for transportation.

As predicted by James Howard Kunstler in his visionary book, “The Long Emergency,” everyday life in the future for most people will become intensely localized. Future generations will, of necessity, have to produce and consume essential products on a local basis, economies of scale will greatly diminish, and personal travel will be greatly circumscribed by the rising costs of both petroleum fuels and the vehicles that run on these fuels.

One of the intelligent responses or adaptations to these challenging conditions for retaining a viable local and regional transportation network for people, goods and services, especially in densely urbanized areas, will be the creation and expansion of bicycle infrastructure and traffic management programs. However, given the increasingly desperate condition of state and local government finances, expensive public bicycle infrastructure projects are probably off the table for years to come. This is true even for affluent bicycle-friendly cities like Boulder. Therefore, local communities generally will have to development and implement much better and smarter bicycle traffic management policies and practices.

The need for such policies and practices likely will become both urgent and essential, probably within the next five years. Why this time frame? Because it seems very likely that two trends will converge during the next five years: Hyper-stagflation or, worse, a hyper-inflationary depression, as predicted by economist John Williams of Shadowstats.com; and a growing part of the population, formerly middle class and now pauperized, will simply be priced out of the private motor vehicle market.

Boulder Daily Camera