Seattle Times editor wants to stick it to bicyclists

My wife snipped an editorial out of the Seattle Times for my perusal a couple of weeks ago. James Vesely, the opinion page editor, thinks that Seattle bicyclists should be taxed and licensed. My wife, a bleeding-heart liberal who never saw a tax she didn’t like, was incensed that the Times editorial page editor would waste print space on such a petty issue.

I didn’t pay much attention to it — just your run-of-the mill curmudgeon telling the neighborhood kids to get off his road. I figured he was just trolling for comments on the paper’s website — where about 95 percent of the 88 comments disagreed with him. Newspaper websites are starting to look more and more like blogs, thanks to comment fields. Nowadays I check for a comment field before reading an article. If a paper is not willing to let the peanut gallery critique their infotainment pieces, I’m not willing to waste my time reading them.

Vesely yanked the Seattle cyclist chain again last Sunday. The comments covered most bases. One point not stressed enough was the parking issue. I took the above photo of the giant bicycle rack in front of a popular coffee shop last Saturday. It takes up two valuable parking spaces. The number of bikes parked there waxes and wanes throughout the day. I drove past this rack an hour after I took this picture and it had a dozen bikes on it. I expect it will really fill up when the weather improves.

While checking this rack out I also spotted this sticker. Apparently you can call the Seattle Department of Transportation and have a high quality custom-made bike rack installed. This particular rack can hold enough bikes to replace an entire block of parked cars. Vesely should be paying cyclists for giving him and the 3,000-pound steel cocoon he commutes to work in a place to park.