Environmental Advoacacy - What I Learned from an Opinion Piece on Bicycling Safety

"Cycling on roads can make you lose faith in humanity," by Joelle Renstrom, published in The Guardian, caught my attention.  I hate cycling on roads, and I think the current state of driver respect for pedestrians is atrocious.  I would prefer a world with no cars, and abundant public transportation and space for pedestrian travel.  However, I think the intended audience of this essay would be car drivers, because she makes a convincing appeal for mindfulness and caution when driving near cyclists.  I wonder if the objective of Ms. Renstrom, cyclist advocate, would be successful?  I would suspect that the road-ragers that she describes would also be unlikely readers of The Guardian, and unlikely to move past the title.  But, if the goal is to provide a lively reminder to sympathetic readers that cycling in the US sucks - her writing is a success.

Some strategies that this piece uses that I found compelling include:

• An engaging hook about a terrible story involving a large number of cyclist deaths
• Very interesting stories about her own commuting by bike
• Appeal to being reasonable, by acknowledging that sometimes cyclists are also terrible (not following road rules, etc.)