The following appeared in an editorial in a local newspaper."Commuters complain that increased rush-hour traffic on Blue Highway between the suburbs and the city center has doubled their commuting time. The favored proposal of the motorists' lobby is to w

The editorial of the local newspaper points to the problem of the increased commute time of people due to increased rush-hour traffic on Blue HIghway and possible solutions. The opponents favour adding a bicycle lane to the Blue Highway instead of creation of a extra lane to ease the traffic woes as proposed by the motorists' lobby. However, a number of questions need to be answered in order to ensure argument underlying these recommendation by the opponents is sound.

Firstly, there is question of flawed analogy. The opponents argue the since creating an extra lane in Green Highway has not produced intended decrease in traffic problems and infact only exacerbated it , there is need to dump the proposal in favour of a new bicycle lane. They assume that Green Highway and Blue Highway are similar in all respects. However, if it were found that the increased traffic found in Green Highway was in fact due to diversion of traffic into new lane due to construction activity in another route, the premise falls apart. Then the argument for a new bicycle lane instead, becomes flawed as an extra lane would suffice.

Secondly, there is the question of whether the fact that most of the residents being keen bicyclists would translate into use of bicycle in the newly created lane. If most of the residents in the area are old and suffer from knee related ailments it is largely unlikely that they would use the new bicycle lane if the distance is long. If this is case then there would be no decrease in traffic due to the new lane. Furthermore, it may be that pollution levels are so high in the region that bicycling in the highly polluted stretches of traffic would cause respiratory ailments. Thus, the residents may prefer use their air conditioned cars. There is therefore a need to conduct the survey among the residents to know their desirability to use bicycle lane even before it is constructed. Otherwise it would be waste of resources.

Finally, even though the argument of resident switching to bicycle as the mode of transport holds true, it still has to answer the question of whether it really results in decrease in rush-hour traffic. May be the bicyclists may start much early to work to avoid the rush hour, and seeing the decrease in traffic others may be encouraged to purchase more vehicles for commute, further increasing the traffic woes in long term when these bicyclist switch back due to lack of motivation. There may be need to further ban purchase of new vehicles in region to avoid such problems in future.There is no evidence presented regarding such a proposed ban.

In conclusion, there are a number of questions that need to be answered before the recommendation is found to be sound. There is need for additional information in form of proclivities of the residents to ride the bicycle, survey of similarities between Green and Blue Highways etc.