I support teaching children to ride bicycles safely. I want to be clear about that at the outset, because modern public discourse requires a person to declare support for childhood before making a practical concern. My concern is that if we teach these children too well, they will enter adulthood with expectations about traffic behavior that this region is not presently equipped to honor.

The third annual Bike Rodeo in Big Sky will teach hand signals, helmet use, stopping technique and general roadway awareness. These are admirable skills. They are also, in a profound sense, aspirational. We are describing to children a transportation culture that exists mainly in pamphlets and on the side of municipal vans.

I have lived long enough to watch a man in a lifted truck wave four different people through a four-way stop until everybody lost the will to proceed. I have also seen a Subaru hesitate at an empty intersection like it had been asked to forgive someone. If a child learns the rules too strictly, the first time they encounter actual adult driving in Gallatin County could feel like betrayal.

“We just want kids to be predictable and confident,” an event volunteer told me. That is a lovely sentiment. It is also not how many of us drive. Around here, confidence arrives in bursts and predictability is often mistaken for weakness.

This is the same valley where one resident recently wrote, with shocking moral calm, that driving the speed limit on North 19th is nothing to apologize for. I respected the honesty. I also understood why it read like a hostage note.

Still, I admit the Bike Rodeo may be our best hope. Perhaps the children, properly instructed among cones and chalk lines, will grow into the first generation able to merge, signal and proceed through a shared public space without turning it into an emotional seminar. Perhaps they will look at our current methods and decline to repeat them.

That possibility is humbling. I was prepared to teach the children caution. I did not expect them to return as reformers.

Darla Crank lives in a subdivision where every cul-de-sac eventually becomes a traffic philosophy.