A thing might be good. Another thing might also be good. Putting them together, though, is not always a good thing.
An example is chocolate chips in bagels. It seemed to be everywhere about twenty years ago. Thankfully, they seem to have disappeared, at least in this part of the world. Unfortunately, ridiculous pizza toppings like peanut butter, bologna, honey, barbecued chicken, pineapple and--yikes!--chocolate chips have not. Now, I love fresh pineapple and barbecued chicken as much as anybody does, but they don't belong on pizza. Roast chicken is OK, but I guess I'm an old-school New York pizza purist: I prefer to eat my pizza uncluttered.
(I will admit, though, that in Toulouse, France, I enjoyed a pizza made with locally-produced goat cheese and ham. It is, to this day, the best pizza I've eaten outside of Italy or New York.)
So, when I heard the term "bicycle garden," I was skeptical. Bicycles are wonderful. (Why else do I write the blog?) So are gardens. The only way, however, I've ever conncected the two was to ride one to the other.
Of course, "garden" in this context doesn't mean a park full of flowers and trees where people picnic or a plot for growing corn and tomatoes. Rather, it refers to any sort of place where someone or something is grown or developed: Think of the "garten" in "kindergarten."
The "garden" proposed in Antioch, a San Francisco Bay-area community, would look something like this:
or this:
The city council voted in favor of building it in Prewett Family Park. If that location doesn't work out, they also voted in favor Gerrytown Park as an alternative. Prewett, however, is favored for its proximity to schools: the "garden" will be a place where young people will develop bike-riding skills and learn the rules of the road.
The idea sounds like a good one, as long as kids are being trained for "real world" riding, i.e., on streets and roads, and not just on bike lanes that go from nowhere to nowhere and may not be any safer than the streets.
