Editor:
Re: Two-wheeled gangs continue to plague other road users, Community
Comment, July 27
Dan Southard's anticycling article offends me less as a proud member of a local "two-wheeled gang" than it does as a writer.
Not only does Southard clearly have no idea what cycling is about, he has no concept of unity, a fundamental principle of writing. Unity is an author who puts a reader in a bike trailer and pulls her from idea to idea towards a single destination. His passenger should make no effort; her feet should never touch the pedals.
More importantly, she should be so comfortable and confident in her driver that she never worries once about where she is going. She knows she will get there and be richer for the experience.
Reading Southard's piece, I felt like I was on that last kilometre of Robertson Road on Westham Island, that part the leads to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary.
The pavement is pocked with tire-busting potholes and the shoulder (what little there is) slopes precariously into a ditch and has caused more than one of our littlest club riders to wipe out and cry to turn back. This literary scofflaw made me want to turn back more than once.
Southard's worst offence is his transition from "cyclists as a scourge" to his thoughts on the Evergreen Line, the SkyTrain extension from Clark station to Lougheed. This is where the road forked multifariously and I went from being offended as a cyclist to being even more offended as a writer.
What is this piece of writing about? Cyclists? SkyTrain? The municipal election? Household and government budgets? Provincial politics?
By scoffing at the principle of unity, Southard makes this reader anxious, uncomfortable and impoverished - and that's too just much pedaling.
Laura Thomas
