Brilliant and concise.

Ms. Keri Caffrey of CommuteOrlando is certainly among "the best of the best" when it comes to bicyclist advocacy and education. Following is an example of her considerable intellectual prowess and keen human insight.

(T)he purpose of CommuteOrlando is to empower people, not enable them. And no, we’re not about getting people out of cars, we’re about helping people who are currently using a bike for transportation, or want to. The difference is, people who want to do something are willing to learn the best way to do it. If someone wants to ride a motorcycle, they take a class and learn to do it safely. If they want to swim, they take lessons. If they don’t want to learn to drive a bicycle in a safe and easy manner, they probably don’t want to use a bicycle. I’m not going to advocate changing the roads for them and make them worse for people who do want to drive their bicycles in the safest manner possible.

Making things better for bicyclists is completely different from getting people to ride. We actively support infrastructure that makes things better for bicyclists. We don’t support infrastructure that makes things worse by using symbolic trickery to pander to the irrational fears of would-be bicyclists.

The notion of enticing people out of their cars and onto bikes is bogus. As long as gas is cheap and parking is free, people are not going to hop on bikes just because there are facilities. Especially in the south where it’s miserably humid in the summer and the travel distances are formidable. If we want to get people out of cars, transit is a far better thing to promote.

The context of her comments can be discovered here in response to a deeply flawed posting from a misguided bicycle transportation planner, who manages to regurgitate whatever has been spoon fed to him from the Bicycle Segregationists with no citation of fact, regardless of plausibility.

Photo by Dan Gutierrez