My parents cut me of at -10°. That is when I stop riding my bike, -10°; and, if it weren’t for my parent’s I’d ride all year. Well, that’s not true, I’d probably still stop at -10°. Yes, it’s true that I like bikes. It’s true that I need the exercise. It’s true that winter riding gives my already inflated ego another bolster. But the real reason I ride until my parents make me stop? I hate cars.

From a purely ecological perspective we can probably all admit that cars are bad for the environment (unless of course you confuse weather and climate and don’t believe global warming is real due to one snowstorm). Honestly though, the world is the least of my worries. I’ll be dead long before we feel the full effects of our excessive carbon emissions so, although it is a concern, ecology isn’t really the reason I hate cars. No, I hate cars because they kill our living space.

No other invention has contributed to urban sprawl quite like the Model-T. Thanks to good-old Ford, we have moved farther and farther away from our schools, workplace, and each other. Congested highways seem to always be separating point A from point B, and literal walls of plastic and steal separate us from one another when we’re driving. We live in a world where we move from bubble one (our home) right into bubble two (our car) to bubble three (our destination) and then back into two and one. People don’t interact as a society anymore and the car is to blame. Why would anyone want to walk, or ride or have a conversation with someone when we’re having smog pumped down our lungs by the SUV on the road next to us. Why would we want human interaction when we can just seal ourselves up in our cars? There’s a reason Europe has some of the most livable cities in the world, it’s because they have some of the least drivable ones. Let’s catch up. By foot.