You need to start small, and not just start pushing for separated bike lanes on a street like geary. Maybe test in in areas that could actually benefit from it, areas that do not have a calm street with a bike lane a block or two away? Ask the SFBC about separated bike lanes and sidewalks that are separated for peds and bikes. They will tell you “it works in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, but it will never work here!”. When you have a bike advocacy group saying things like that you know something is terribly wrong.

Yes - I’m intensely angry.

Can’t you just offer a proposal and not try to ramp up the conspiracy-theory B.S.?

There’s not much of a conspiracy theory going on that I know of. There is plenty of B.S. being peddled, though.

Can’t you just advocate and not degrade yourself?

The real way to degrade oneself is to pretend that everything is OK, when everything is not, in fact, OK.

Perhaps you think that this advocacy business is better left to ‘learned gentlemen’ who know how to act ‘reasonably’? These critiques would not be too dissimilar from those used the people who tried to stop the women’s rights and civil rights movements, as well as the myriad mass popular movements throughout history. ‘Be calm,’ they tell us - we are only ‘degrading ourselves.’

Talk about trying to generate hysteria…

Hysteria, no. Awareness, yes.

but do you really need to devolve into calling your opponents Bush-administration appeasers?

I’ve never done such a thing, nor would I, unless of course people were trying to ‘appease’ the Bush Administration in some way - whatever that would mean.

Cut it with the histrionics and maybe you’ll actually get somewhere.

Yes, sir. Anything else?

I mean I think your idea is great. Should definitely be a part of the plan — but do you really need to devolve into calling your opponents Bush-administration appeasers? Cut it with the histrionics and maybe you’ll actually get somewhere.