"In the unlikely event the bicycle advocates have their way and all means of transportation that use anything other than human power disappear, who will pave their paths?"

The "bicycle advocates" he is referring to is all of us, and we certainly do not advocate the disappearance of busses, trucks, and the cars we need to drive.  This would be an "untruth", as well as a gross exaggeration and arm flailing.

"I admire anyone who can live in a truly environmentally correct manner, not filling our waters or ground with waste or our air with pollution, but who shall pay for the path? Me, in my gas-tax paying, tag- and license-paying, carbon-dioxide emitting truck, motorcycle and SUV pay for the path right now."

The "path" he is referring to are the publicly owned right-of-ways which we ALL own, which have been paved, and that pavement paid for with Federal income taxes, fuel and tag taxes we ALL pay when we drive our cars rather than ride our bikes, sales taxes we pay on everything we buy regardless of how we got to where we bought it, excise taxes built into product prices, and property taxes which we all, renters and owners, pay on where we live indoors.  The claim that ONLY car drivers (I am one of them, 3 cars) are paying for the roads is another ridiculous "untruth" I constantly hear spouted by anti-bike advocates.

"How about anyone who operates a human-powered vehicle on any public roadway pay for a tag every year and be educated, tested and licensed to safely operate the vehicle? Those fees can pay for the special accommodation they need to keep from interfering with my travel on the road I’m paying for. No offense intended."

Since virtually all of us riding our bikes also have drivers licenses and thus have already been "educated" to the same extent as any other licensed driver who drives a car about the road laws in Florida, this is an uninformed absurdity at best and an illogical "emotional appeal" at worst relying upon the ignorance of anyone who reads it to assume that bike riders are totally unaware of "rules of the road" unless they take some additional test, like a motorcycle endorsement, before using the public right-of-ways.  The arrogant claim that we are "interfering with my travel on the roads I pay for" (and by inference that WE don't pay) is another blatant "untruth", implying that we wouldn't be interfering with the writer's travel if we were sitting in stalled traffic in front of him in a SUV, instead of riding parallel alongside him in a bike lane or (some of us) hugging the white line while he proceeds unhampered by us at his own pace.

James may not be the most tactful person when he gets on a roll advocating for us, and yeah, maybe he should at least count to 10 or run his posts labelled with his GCC title by someone else first to "niceify" the rhetoric so as not to step too hard on anyone's toes, but his heart is strong and in the right place, and his point about "untruths" and "emotional appeals" are made by the letter following his own, which is not atypical of the verbal nonsense *I* hear spouted by anti-bike people in such letters and forum posts all the time.  Rather than dampen his zeal in representing us, let's help him get his message out in the most soothing and persuasive manner, so as to win friends in the next election who are sitting on the fence about supporting bike-ped infrastructure, but never backing down when pointing out the fallacies of arguments such as the ones displayed in the letter I have just quoted above.  Just my 2 cents of noise, nothing more, Todd, I promise.   ;-)

Ed Gardner