The horror ...

This week, while riding around beautiful Ann Arbor in a car, wasting precious non-renewable resources and being inconvenienced right and left by the idiots, morons, halfwits, and imbeciles that are licensed to operate motor vehicles here, I had a truly frightening epiphany: what if somehow the town was magically transformed into a Dutch - style bicycle city? What if all these dolts were on bicycles?

Consider: you don't frequently see people in cars switch randomly from driving in the street to driving on the sidewalk to driving across lawns and back again, and if you do, it usually shows up on the evening news. Most people driving cars don't strap their young children into car seats placed outside the car, well above the center of gravity, wearing protective clothing that wouldn't protect a squirrel from a bad fall off a bird feeder -- and again, if you do, it shows up on Fox. Although many people in cars (especially mini vans) do drive the wrong way on one-way streets, when they do, it's at least frowned upon by police and passerby. All of these things are practiced daily by our bicyclists, as a matter of course, and the only reason complete mayhem doesn't result is that there are relatively few of 'em.

I don't want to contemplate what it would be like if we all parked our cars and took to two wheels -- the horror, the horror.