No Bicycling Allowed

What crosses your mind when you see a sign like this? If you are a skateboarder, you are probably used to it. If there is any active transportation group more persecuted than bicyclists, it has got to be skateboarders. What if you are a cyclist? Does it not just make you want to ride back and forth along the street all day long? Who the hell comes up with things like this? If you are a resident in this community and you decide to head out on a bike ride, maybe to run an errand, to get to work or school, or maybe just for the fun of it, do you walk from the garage to the city maintained street before mounting up? When you are returning home, do you dismount at the border of this, clearly unenlightened, country. Then, of course, there is the whole question of where you are supposed to walk; there is no sidewalk, so you walk in the street. For some reason, which I can't make out, it is okay for that but not the others? There is much bizarre thinking incorporated in that one sign, and in the minds that formulated it.

I am sure this was devised by the community home owners association (HOA), and they probably couch their "rule" in some sort of language touting safety. Can you make out the speed limit sign in the background? It says the maximum speed shall be fifteen miles per hour. If ever there was a place made for bicycles, skateboards, and roller skates it is the place were the speed limit is fifteen miles per hour. Because the streets through this community are not city maintained, the HOA has the "right" to make such backward thinking rules, even when those rules are a disservice to the residents.

Some day, some year in the future, signs like this will only be found in museums. People of the future will be shocked by them, wondering how there could ever have been such a point in human history when a person being mobile under his or her own power was frowned upon, a time when humans allowed themselves to become so soft and lazy that they actually made rules outlawing activity.