The suggestion that a bicycle lane be added to Blue Highway as a way of cutting commuter time is novel. It’s green. It’s healthy. It needs a lot of evidence to establish it is feasible. One suspects its author is a bicyclist; it is clear he is no logician, or even much a man of affairs.
　　To begin with we are told that “commuters complain” that the commuting time has doubled. Commuters always complain. An extra ten minutes added to a half-hour’s commute is too often described as “doubled-at least!” In order to asses their woes we should like to know how many commuters complain. Even better, we should like to have data from traffic engineers telling whether the commuting time really has lengthened, by how much, and over what span of months this has taken place. Is it getting worse? Better? Staying the same?
　　The obvious solution that a car lane be added is dismissed by the author, saying that when Green Highway added such a lane, traffic congestion actually increased. Again, we should like to have access to data more reliable than the impressions of frustrated motorists. Assuming that the claim is true, however, we would like to know where the increased numbers of cars came from. Is the nearby area (or the city) undergoing a population boom? If so, adding a traffic lane might actually have alleviated a problem that could have been a great deal worse. Or, to take another possibility, Green Highway’s new lane might have drawn motorists from other nearby and overcrowded thoroughfares (e.g., Blue Highway). On either supposition, the new auto lane did not “cause” the increase in traffic all by itself. It behooves us to find out where that traffic came from. The solution might turn out to be building many more new lanes, not rejecting their construction out of hand. New population must be somehow accommodated, motorists on other highways encouraged to stay there.
　　The author tells us that “many” local residents are bicyclists. “Many”—a subjective term masquerading in objectivity purloined from the numerical. One man’s “many” is another man’s “meager.” We need some hard numbers here as to how many bicyclists there are. Much more to the point, we need to know how many cyclists are actually willing to ride their mount regularly to work. If the total number will fit in an SUV, they belong there and their special lane be damned.
　　The answer to that question is closely tied to the area’s climate. Is it often rainy? Are the winters bitterly cold and/or snowy? Even assuming sunny weather, is the temperature—like, say that of Phoenix— often so high as to render outdoor exposure unwise or even dangerous? All these are factors that restrict everyone but the few cycling fanatics.
　　Granting that there are numbers of hardy cyclists, one needs some information about local traffic law compliance and enforcement. In Asia and Latin America, for example, bicycle lanes often become simply an extra car lane as drivers flout traffic laws. A few fatalities go a long way toward convincing cyclists to drive that car after all.
　　Even the best-case cycling scenario still needs to clear one final hurdle, this one geographic. Is the city center close enough to the suburbs to permit bicycling as a day to day option? Even if traffic is truly bad, it is a rare commute where the car is not at least slightly quicker. This becomes more and more the case as the mileage increases. Even if the time for the two is a tie, the car wins. Human nature, in many of its instantiations, tends towards inertia. An hour in an air-conditioned auto, or the same time sweating on a bike, out there in the exhaust fumes? Sadly or not, for most people the choice is clear. Strong evidence is needed that the commuting time is short enough for large numbers of cyclists to undertake the trip willingly. That was, after all, the original problem: that “commuting time has doubled.”