One of the oldest tropes in letters to the editor columns—and more recently, your Facebook newsfeed—is the anti-cyclist screed. Typically arriving in summer (peak riding season), this missive advances Bold Thinking and Incisive Logic in arriving at the obvious conclusion that cyclists should not be on the roads.
If you grind your molars to powder every time a group of credulous rubes and softheaded reactionaries employs this benighted collection of straw-man arguments, this list of handy cut-and-paste responses to anti-cyclist arguments will to save you time and still allow a rebuttal.
Cyclists are a bunch of freeloaders who don’t pay to use the roads!
Response: Road taxes don’t even pay for these roads. My property, income, and sales taxes do.
The Lowdown: The entire “cyclists don’t pay road taxes” argument rests on a gigantic myth: that somehow, cyclists are monolithic automatons who do nothing but ride bikes. In this caricature, we are not also business owners and workers, homeowners, consumers and, often, car owners who pay all the taxes that fund roads.
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