Ingram’s January 2023

B E T W E E N T H E L I N E S

for a donkey cart. By the time we reached our destination, I needed a beer, and my wife needed counseling. Just a few years back, I was driving with a French friend in the south of France when we found ourselves stuck behind a cycling cluster utterly indif ferent to the drivers behind them. “Fascistes!” my friend shouted at the cyclists, a word whose meaning even those who don’t speak French should be able to decipher. During my cycling days, I was as sanctimonious as the next guy, smug in the knowledge that I was purifying my body and reducing pollution. Had I known then that I was also keeping polar bears afloat and preventing Martha’s Vineyard from sinking into the sea, I would have been unbearable. Self-selected to save the world from climate change, today’s cyclists make demands whose unbridled “classism” will embarrass their ancestors if they bother to have any.

So self-righteous are they in their ascending power that bicycle advocates somehow convinced the city of Kansas City to carve out seven miles of protected

On, say, Shawnee Mission Parkway or 119th Street, you won’t see busi nesses like Kansas City Screw Products, SignmanKC, Atomic Collision Shop, or Blue Valley Machine and Manufacturing. Those are pure Truman Road. People don’t bike to businesses like these. Ever. And the owners who run the businesses on that thoroughfare would just as soon keep it that way. To their credit, they have forced the City Council to rethink the project. Like J.C. Nichols, bike-lane advocates are “products of their time,” but Nichols, at least, left behind something more valuable than green pavement, busted pylons, and the occasional squashed “cockroach.”

People don’t bike to most businesses on Truman Road. Ever. And the owners who run those same businesses would just as soon keep it that way.

bike lane on Truman Road, the most blue-collar thoroughfare west of the Mississippi. If proof were needed, there is not a single Starbucks on the whole homely length of Truman.

The views expressed in this column, which is also published online in the Heartlander, are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram’s Magazine. Jack Cashill , Senior Editor, Editorial @ Ingrams.com

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January 2023

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