ChiWhoBike #20
I had a car when I moved to Chicago, and it was a miserable experience driving in the city, even as someone who’s driven everywhere. I was just like, this is annoying, I’ll just use a Divvy. And then I took my dad’s bike and then here we are, I just kept doing it.
Neither my fiancé or I need a car to go to work, and when I would need a car it would be for infrequent things. So I think for people in my position it’s important to make the decision to just get rid of our car, because there are alternatives. We rent a car whenever we need one, we take the train, and we have yet to spend the same amount of money. So it’s also a nice savings. I was even doing this math recently, and I would have to rent a car 44 times in a year to just hit the base cost of a really cheap car, not including any crazy maintenance things that might pop up. And I’ve definitely not used a car 44 times in a year.
The painted bike lanes are wonderful, and it shows that the city is starting to look at cycling, but at the same time it relies on drivers operating their vehicle perfectly and bikers also operating their vehicle perfectly. And when someone gets it wrong or someone’s doing something they shouldn’t be, the consequence is too high.
I was thinking about this when there was tragically someone hit by a drunk driver at Damen. He was just riding in the bike lane, and this woman was drunk. That woman shouldn’t have been driving drunk on Damen, there are a lot of alternatives, but also we could have had infrastructure so that this person could still be alive and that person wouldn’t have that guilt. Sending her to jail is not going to help that family.
