a tax break of $20 per month for bike commuters was included in a new bill.
read about it here:
http://www.streetsblog.org/2007/08/09/congressman-ridicules-bikes-as-19th-century-solution/
Actually the above article is more about how a congressman was calling bike commuting stupid, but the bill is HR2776. I wonder what he would think of unicycle commuting?
I would like to see the congressman’s complete report. While he comes across as a jerk and probably is, there is also probably more truth to what he is saying than the blogger gives him credit for. If we were truly in a free market, where supply and demand truly did determine gas prices, enough bikes or unicycles could impact price at the pump. But I fear that we don’t live in such an economy (in the U.S.). The government has so many controls over gas prices that it is nearly impossible for the consumer to impact the price at the pump.
It would be interesting to see the data from countries in Europe where vastly larger percentages of the population ride bikes and how that has effected the percentage increase of gas prices over the past 20 years, compared to the U.S.