Gas prices are horrible

...but I am optimistic  they will go and stay higher.  That seems to be the only hope that people will look at the bikes they bought during the pandemic and realize they are useful.  For years people told me that $4 per gallon would be the tipping point and people would drive less.  No, they got over it, accepted it and drove on.  It's hard to say what it will take.

     People have just failed to accept the idea they can go somewhere on their bikes.  That includes cyclists who persist in riding solely for recreation and create a litany of imaginary obstacles that prevent them from doing anything else.  There are an estimated 52,000,000 people in the US who identify as cyclists and only 700,000 who regularly commute (or use bikes for utilitarian reasons).  Changing the cyclists will probably be harder than changing the 250,000,000 auto drivers.  People in the USA still cling to the notion that bikes are children's toys, expensive toys for fitness fanatics or transportation of last resort for the impoverished and disadvantaged.  It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's socially acceptable to dress like a circus acrobat and race around the countryside back to your car as quickly as possible, but riding a bicycle to a destination, with a purpose, is treated as an act of desperation worthy of pity.

      Part of the goal has to be reconciling environmental damage we've done  over the past 70 years.  Enthusiasts claim that electric cars will be the solution, but that is short sighted  and only addresses the immediate emission problem.  EV's will still be tapped into the carbon fueled electric grid, all those batteries require mining heavy metals which will need disposal and there is the concrete problem  The concrete industry is one of, if not the, largest producers of atmospheric carbon.  A scholar recently wrote that if the global concrete producers were combined, and classified as a nation, they would constitute the third largest carbon emitter in the world, behind China and India.  

Then there is the product itself.  All the hundreds of trillions of acres of concrete laid out for parking lots, huge thoroughfares and streets in our cities reflect light and heat back to the atmosphere rather than have it absorbed and converted to oxygen by plants.  50% , or more, of driving is within a 5 mile radius of home, a 25 minute bike ride. There's a good chance we screwed up the past 70 years listening to an ad campaign which promised that our credit rating will provide greater social status by buying a new shiny thing.