http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1130060/index.htm

Excerpt:

“…Miss Prudden, who as the former Mrs. Richard Hirschland herself mothered two children, put it this way: “Many youngsters today have no bodies. To get a body, you’ve got to start way back when the child is still a baby. Keep the babies out of playpens and carriages. Let them go out and move about. Let youngsters climb trees and fences to develop their muscles.” Miss Prudden reflected, ‘American mothers are afraid of their children hurting themselves. This is a Band-aid society. If a child breaks an arm, the arm may be in a plaster cast six weeks. That is not a catastrophe. The catastrophe is that so few opportunities for adventure remain to children—and the few that do remain are often curtailed by overanxious parents.”

“We’re paying the price of progress,” says Dr. Kraus, who states the case in somewhat different terms. “The older generation was tougher because it had to undergo adequate physical activity in the normal routine of living. We have no wish to change the standard of living by trying to do away with the automobile and television. But we must make sure that we make up for this loss of physical activity. In other words, let’s take the sting out of the benefits…”

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/fifahiwy/fifahi05.htm

One can define the national interest in various ways. Back when I was starting school, President Eisenhower had defined the appalling state of our kid’s physical fitness as a national issue worthy of national attention and created the President’s Council on Youth Fitness (later renamed The President’s Council on Physical Fitness). That led to all the Phys Ed classes that whipped our sorry little backsides in shape. So our “epidemic of obesity” is old news to geezers like me.

http://www.fitness.gov/about-us/what-we-do/council-history/council-history-1953-1963/

One can make a similar case that the current state of obesity in the U.S. and our dangerous dependence on huge amounts of imported oil are national issues that must be addressed in part on the Federal level. These can be addressed in part by providing funds for Federal highways and state highways that receive Federal allocations so they accommodate carbon-lite transportation that stresses exercise. In the same way the original Interstate Highway system was justified in national security terms, one can justify both the health and conservation aspects of cycling in national security terms.

That is not to say that cyclists should be powerless to ride their bikes without Uncle Sam constantly handing them Federal training wheels. But one has to be careful about defining national interest: its in the eyes of the beholder. I think Federal funds are but a small part of what should be a national, state, local, and individual effort. But I’d not leave the Federal government out simply because I think there are national level issues to address here.

cheers to all my bicycling colleagues on the Right from this crotchety old socialist,

Khal Spencer

http://www.governing.com/columns/eco-engines/Not-Just-Semantics.html

Bicyclists pay nothing, nothing at all. If they want all these cool facilities for their exclusive use, they should develop a way that *they* pay for it, instead of constantly whining about how everybody else should buy them what they want. Nobody could stop that.