It’s bike month–again. Oh joy. The usual brouhaha is made over how wonderful bicycles are. How kids should bike to school and workers should bike to work. Everyone should ditch the car and bike to the grocery store, etc. Bike bike bike. There are group rides and media and sponsors and beer and fun and so on ad nauseam. And that’s all well and good. More butts on bikes means less pollution, less traffic, and less overfat people such as this dude. There’s nothing really wrong with having a month dedicated to bikes. I could have used the encouragement to do it years ago myself. I guess it just all feels a little fake. So  this blog is gonna be a bit of a rant. Again. Nothing too crazy. I promise you’ll be alright.

Nah, I’m just joking. Bike month is awesome! You should totally get involved especially go get the free snacks on Bike to Work day. Then go to the after work party and have brewskis and hang out with your biking pals. It’ll be a vibe. So chill. But you’ll also be stoked. Enthused, even. All at the same time. There no problem. Anyone who is a little sus about Bike Month is so cringe. Haters gonna hate. Shake (or bike!) it off!

Ok, I was joking about joking. Let’s be real. A very small percentage of people commute to work by bicycle. Most parents don’t let their children grow up to be cowboys or girls, much less bike to school. And they certainly aren’t hopping on their bike to run to the store for a load of groceries for a family of four. So what is the city of Austin really doing to promote bicycling year round? Well, recently a bunch of neighbors complained and City capitulated and REMOVED some bike Lanes in far south Austin–at a cost of $80,000! Here’s the link to that story. There are two sides and it was a problem, plus most of the project remains. But it illustrates a bit about the minefield that is Austin politics.

In other areas, the City is so far behind building out the bike lanes that we may never see them in this dude’s lifetime. That’s the lack of money and political will and enough cyclists to really care enough to lobby for it. It’s a catch 22. If the streets aren’t safe enough for people to feel comfortable cycling, they’re not going to cycle. End of story. They’re going to drive their cars or some might take a bus or walk or work from home or carpool or take their billionaire helicopters. (Yeah, we’ve got the world’s richest person living here part-time. Ugh.) I realize I raised some of these gripes in a post done exactly a year ago, but they bear repeating.

In the film the Field of Dreams, a character says, “If you build it, they will come.” Would that apply to protected bike lanes? Not just a line of paint or bollards or turtles that disappear after the first pick-em-up truck drives over them,. No, we need those curves like they have in Amsterdam. Even with those a big truck could drive over and fly into some unsuspecting and cyclists. But most of the time they do the trick. Or you could have an elevated sidewalk that’s wider than normal for both people walking and biking called a shared use path. Or a bike lane next to a sidewalk. Whatever it takes to separate cars and vulnerable road users.

Case in point: While we’ve had no fatalities in Austin thus far in 2025, up the road in Williamson County, in a town called Round Rock, a cyclist was just killed in late April. We don’t know the details, but according to the news reports, it happened at the intersection of a side road and the Interstate highway, IH-35. Dollars to doughnuts (which I’m still not eating in my seventh year of no grain flour), there was no bike lane at all. I’d also be willing to bet the driver will say one or more of these clueless gems: “I didn’t see them! They came out of nowhere! You seldom see cyclists in Round Rock! These roads weren’t designed for bikes. They should drive or take the bus!” Whether the cyclist or driver screwed up is unknown, but since the cyclist isn’t around to defend him or herself, we may never know the truth.

Some people ride their bikes are out of necessity–utility cyclists aka the carless or the poor. Some hardcore cyclists think drivers should learn to share the road, and cyclists should just be courageous enough to take the lane. Problem is you have slower, older cyclists like myself, or young children, or just people who aren’t that fit going up hills or that fast in general. Without proper training of both cyclists and car drivers, that’s never going to work. Inexperienced cyclists sharing the roads at high speeds with inattentive, distracted, drunk, or bad drivers is a bad idea. You’re going to need a lot more ghost bikes for the dead cyclists.

But it’s always about money. Thanks to the current regime in DC, federal finding is being cut across the country. In Austin, the Sith Lords at the Texas Department of Transportation managed to ramrod a project through, evading a major environmental impact statement (EIS) by splitting it into three projects. It’s going to take a full decade to dig up and bury interstate 35 that goes through the middle of town. The $135 MILLION needed to “cap and stitch” that (put parks, bike lanes, and other amenities to dampen sound) is likely being canceled at the federal level thanks to the new regime.

That means raiding the war chest for homelessness prevention, parks and recs, health clinics, libraries and much more. And with the hundreds and hundreds of miles of streets without bike lanes, even the thin line of paint that does nothing to protect cyclists, it’s likely we’ll never see a city that’s safe enough for people on bikes. No matter how by how bike-friendly you calls yourself, Austin, don’t break your shoulder patting yourself on your back. There’s always room for improvement.

And don’t get me wrong, there have been improvements. The 2016 bond election that I helped drum up support for was successful. It has made many such improvements. But sometimes bike lanes pop up for a mile or so and then they disappear. At least one mile is better than none. In other cases it’s a longer stretch. So I’m grateful for that. It’s just never enough, in my opinion. Given the almost 50,000 miles I’ve biked, mostly in Austin since 2016, I am enough of an expert on the roads to say this: We need to do better.

I haven’t read it yet but there’s a book called White Lanes, which obviously talks about the racial and class privilege of building bicycle lanes that mostly white people use. I’m sure there’s a good argument in there. I can’t really rebut it until I read it. But for me bike lanes have saved my life countless times, so you’re going to have a hard time convincing me to give them up. If that’s even what the book says. Certainly making underprivileged, disadvantaged, underfunded parts of town by design perpetuated racism. Specifically that same highway, IH-35, cut through the center of town by design. It helped segregate the city. Banks used it to redline (refuse) loans to African Americans who lived on the east side. That practice may have ended, but its aftershocks, along with gentrification, continues to this day.

In the meantime, you can have all the Bike Month rah rah rah that you want. But what happens on June 1st? We go back to the usual, pissed off, distracted, shitty drivers, having to ride on sidewalks or take the lane on Autobahn-like roads, or risk dying while biking in the middle of the lane. When the main choice is getting on a bike or driving a comfortable, protected, weather-proof steel cage, most people will choose the cage. Biking has to be safer for All Ages and Abilities. No amount of lip service can put lipstick on that pig.

Call me crazy, but I want to stay alive while biking. At least for a little while longer. Protected bike lanes make that more likely. I don’t have any easy answers for coming up with funding but it probably has something to do with taxing car drivers more. Smarter minds than this dude’s I’m sure (I hope) are working on it. In the meantime, if you’re a driver, please be kind to cyclists, follow the law, and don’t text, drink, put on makeup, or whatever else you do besides watch the road and drive defensively. For fuck’s sake, use your signal light EVERY TIME! And if you’re a cyclist, follow the road rules, be predictable, use lights and turn signals, and don’t be a jerk.

Thus concludes this year’s rant. Maybe 2026 will be better. Hope spring eternal in a not-so-young dude’s heart.