I’ve been all over America, and where I’ve been in America I’ve been very proud to talk about the fact that people do want alternatives. They want out of their cars; they want out of congestion; they want to live in livable neighborhoods.

Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.

John Davis, editor of Wild Earth, acknowledges that the Wildlands Project seeks nothing less than "the end of industrial civilization.... Everything civilized must go. . ."

In this bizarre scheme, human civilization must be radically reconfigured, mines would be closed, roads torn from the landscape, timber harvesting stopped and human populations relocated.

Odlin said he gets thousands of e-mails a week from people who want to build their own bamboo bikes. Spots for the first workshop in San Francisco, scheduled for October, sold out a day after the class was announced. Overwhelmed by the interest, the studio put together a mail-order do-it-yourself bamboo-bike kit.

Odlin, who is also assistant director of the Bamboo Bike Project at Columbia University, will go to Ghana to help set up a bamboo-bike factory, which could make as many as 20,000 bikes a year, selling to Ghanaians for about $60 each.

The James Dyson Award-winning Copenhagen Wheel from MIT’s SENSEable City Lab instantly transforms any standard bicycle into a “hybrid electric-bike” capable of offering a smart cycling experience complete with real-time exercise analysis, traffic data, and environmental conditions. Market availability expected within 12 months.

Say you own a car. You're shelling out an average of $9,519 this year, according to the American Automobile Association (most other estimates are higher). Some of those costs -- a percentage of gas, registration, licensing, and tolls -- go directly to pay for roads. And it hurts. You doubtless feel every penny.

The thing is, that money only pays for freeways and highways. Or it mostly pays for them -- a hefty chunk of change for these incredibly expensive, high maintenance thoroughfares still comes from the general fund.

Local roads, where you most likely do the bulk of your daily bicycling, are a different story. The cost of building, maintaining, and managing traffic on these local roads adds up to about 6 cents per mile for each motor vehicle. The cost contributed to these roads by the drivers of these motor vehicles through direct user fees? 0.7 cents per mile. The rest comes out of the general tax fund.

This means that anyone who owns a home, rents, purchases taxable goods, collects taxable income, or runs a business also pays for the roads. If you don't drive a car, even for some trips, you are subsidizing those who do -- by a lot. The best primer on this is economist Todd Litman's highly readable 2004 report "Whose Roads." (It's also the source for most of the figures in this column. Download the PDF here). A journalist recently crunched the numbers in Seattle and found the discrepancy in 2010 to be as wide as ever.

There are many reasons for cities to encourage bicycling, and the economic argument is one of the best. Every time somebody gets on a bicycle instead of in a car, the city saves money. The cost of road maintenance is averaged at 5.6 cents per mile per motor vehicle. Add the so-called external costs of parking (10 cents), crashes (8 cents), congestion (4 cents), and land costs and that's another 28 cents per mile! Meanwhile, for slower, lighter, smaller bicycles, the externalities add up to one meager cent per mile.

The average driver travels 10,000 miles in town each year and contributes $324 in taxes and direct fees. The cost to the public, including direct costs and externalities, is a whopping $3,360.

On the opposite pole, someone who exclusively bikes may go 3,000 miles in a year, contribute $300 annually in taxes, and costs the public only $36, making for a profit of $264. To balance the road budget, we need 12 people commuting by bicycle for each person who commutes by car.

The facts and figures aren't simple, and I'll link to them at the end of this post, but one snippet from a report by the US Public Interest Research Group sets the tone: 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 that everyone pays, and which are higher than they need to be in order to pay for drivers' "free" roads.

In fact, Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute has 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.

In other words, the "cyclists don't pay" is simply false. Drivers don't pay, or at least don't pay enough for their use of all that land--land that could be supporting homes, businesses, parks, schools, libraries, farms or other productive or pleasurable uses--most of which would pay property tax.

Those cyclists agitating for bike lanes, bike paths, bike racks (so they can park and spend money at your business)--they just want something back for all those taxes they've been overpaying for over half a century.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) reported:

• Travel on all roads and streets changed by -2.3% (-6.0 billion vehicle miles) for October 2011 as compared with October 2010.
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In the early '80s, miles driven (rolling 12 months) stayed below the previous peak for 39 months.

Currently miles driven has been below the previous peak for 47 months - so this is a new record for longest period below the previous peak - and still counting! And not just moving sideways ... the rolling 12 months is declining.
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This decline is probably due to high gasoline prices and the sluggish economy. Maybe habits are changing ...

First Entrepreneurial Venture

By the age of 13, Buffett was running his own businesses as a paperboy and selling his own horseracing tip sheet. That same year, he filed his first tax return, claiming his bike as a $35 tax deduction.

Amsterdam is trying to keep its hordes of bikes under control. In a city of 800,000, there are 880,000 bicycles, the government estimates, four times the number of cars. In the past two decades, travel by bike has grown by 40 percent so that now about 32 percent of all trips within the city are by bike, compared with 22 percent by car.

A WAR ON FOOTBALL OVER HEAD INJURIES? Why not a war on bikes? Because bikes don’t embody scary masculinity.