I meant to put this post up earlier, so tell all your friends and drop by. You can catch the show on killradio.org or KPFK. It’s like Car Talk on NPR except its all about bikes. Jim C used to be a regular host and I help out on air from time to time as well. O20 will be donating a few nice items for the raffle and I will give you an inner tube for every 5$ you donate to the show today, tomorrow and Saturday. Plus you can check out Vlad The Retailer’s emporium of oddities.

I’m putting this one up because the neander-cons, emboldened by their midterm election successes (even though midterm elections typically swing away from the party in power, no matter which one it is), have fired up their bike backlash propaganda generator, unleashing waves of dittoheads onto the comments boards of blogs and newspapers nationwide to diss any statement even mildly supportive of cycling, transit, livable cities, or anything else–except shareholder return and more asphalt handouts for private driving.

The irony is that true conservatives should love cycling–it requires very little in the way of government expenditure, builds personal health and self-reliance, conserves resources (how can conservatives hate conservation and love waste anyway?–I don’t get that), builds community, and reduces the impetus to involve ourselves in foreign wars.

The latest wave of anti-bike arguments pounds on the following theme: “If cyclists want bike lanes, they should pay taxes and register their bikes so they can pay their way just like drivers!”

Ignorant cyclists sometimes respond, “Well, I own a car too, so I do pay.”

And actually, neither one pays enough to say that.

The facts and figures are complex, and I’ll post links to them at the end of this post, but to quote a telling line from a report by the US Public Interest Research Group: Since 1947, the amount of money spent on highways, roads and streets has exceeded the amount raised through gasoline taxes and other so-called “user fees” by $600 billion (2005 dollars), representing a massive transfer of general government funds to highways.

General government funds means income, sales, and property taxes paid by everyone, and which are higher than they need be in order to pay for drivers’ “free” roads.

In fact, Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute calculated that since cyclists require so little lane space and parking room, and impose so little wear on roads, we actually deserve a rebate of around $250 a year on our taxes, if we don’t also drive.

So the next time some drooler starts honking on about “cyclists don’t pay” in the comments to a news article on your local bike lane or boulevard, rail trail, or bike corral, you can answer with a few facts from the following papers:

You won’t actually convince the droolers themselves, but you’ll reach the more reasonable folks who are reading the comments.

Give it a go.

Here’s another chance to get involved in making Los Angeles a real bike town, with real bike infrastructure for real-world riding. Because here’s the big news: finally, after years of ignoring bicycles as anything other than a means of delivering sandwiches to sales clerks and office drones, the City of Beverly Hills–yes, that big glittery hole of bicycle-unconsciousness interrupting the fabric of LA like a sequined and embroidered moth hole–is actually considering including bike lanes on Santa Monica Boulevard when it undergoes a massive repaving later this year.

If you’ve ridden between Hollywood and West Los Angeles much at all, you will have noticed that the City of LA added two very good bike lanes to the stretch of Santa Monica between Century City and Sepulveda Boulevard, making for a fast and comfortable (if rather short) ride along an otherwise heavily-trafficked and rather daunting commute corridor.

What you may not know is that those bike lanes were not in the original plan, but that two neighborhood activists worked in close coordination with LADOT’s bicycle division to make them happen.

There are also bike lanes along Santa Monica through West Hollywood, whose council member Abbe Land is a strong supporter of cycling.

Now, a group called Better Bike Beverly Hills is working on its namesake city to have the same treatment added to the gap between WeHo and CenCit–and the BH council is considering it.

But this is still Beverly Hills, a city whose sum total of bicycle infrastructure consists, as far as I can tell, of ten or twelve fancy bike racks around Rodeo Drive. So Mark Elliott, Mihai Peteu, and the rest are going to need what help they can get from the community of riders that uses Santa Monica Boulevard to get around.

Go to their website, get in touch, see what you can do to help. Let’s plug the gap on Santa Monica Boulevard this year, so that BH’s “Golden Triangle” is no long LA cycling’s Bermuda Triangle.

In a few weeks it may be too late. The time is now.