Attention bikeheads!

ATTENTION: Philadelphia bicyclists!

Most of you are normal people, but for the scattering of pedalphiles among you, I will use small words and short sentences. That will help them understand.

I like Philly Bike Share, coming this spring.

I said I liked it when I first wrote about it in 2012. I had questions about who would pay. They were answered. After $3 million in city taxpayer seed money, the rest costs city taxpayers nothing.

That is good because practically no one in the city uses bikes. (Students, hipsters, deliverymen: Be calm. You will see figures soon.)

Attention: I do not hate bikes.

Attention: City Councilman Bill Greenlee does not hate bikes.

I do not like bike lanes. They are not necessary, except for those afraid to ride in traffic. I do not like bad bicyclists. Bad bicyclists ignore the law. All of you ignore stop signs and almost all of you blow through red lights. Those of you who ride on sidewalks terrorize pedestrians.

Don't get angry with me when I say you break the law. You do.

If you think the law should be changed, get off your saddle seat, your banana seat, your softgel seat, get a petition going. Get the law changed so stop signs become invisible. Then you won't be breaking the law. (Maybe motorists can do the same. We can have a demolition derby on our streets.)

Attention: The percentage of people using bikes to commute is increasing. The actual number remains tiny.

The city has this wet dream of 5 percent of commuters going to and from work by bike by 2020.

The current percentage is 2.3 percent. So says the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.

Think it will more than double in the next five years? Ha, ha.

What's that you say? It would double if there were more bike lanes? Doubtful, but more lanes are unlikely.

Why? Thanks to Greenlee, who represents the 97.7 percent who don't commute by bike. He championed a bill requiring Council's OK before a bike lane can be dropped on a neighborhood. That means community input. Bikeheads hate that. They know the community will say no.

With pedalphiles out of the way, it's back to normal style.

With $3 million in city money sunk in the bike-share program, the rest will come from elsewhere, city bicycle czar Andrew Stober tells me.

The bike-share plan has a name, Indego (for major sponsor Independence Blue Cross). The infant was attacked in its cradle last week by an Inquirer story suggesting trouble because the Indego trademark was already registered to a Cleveland robotic-device manufacturer.

"Didn't the city check?" I ask Stober.

Yes, "and we decided there is no issue," he says. "Indego" also belongs to a robotic lawn mower and an Indian airline. Duplicate use of a name is forbidden only when it would cause confusion.

"We are confident no one is going to join our system and think they are getting a ticket on an Indian airline," Stober says, smiling.

When it launches, Indego will easily accept credit and debit cards, but paying cash will be onerous. It will require going online to register, having a bar code emailed to you, and taking it to a supermarket or convenience store to pay. Then your membership will be mailed to your home.

That's a pain, and discriminates against those who don't have computers.

It's done that way, Stober says, so there's a record of the name and address of the user, to discourage theft of the three-speed bikes. No plan is free of problems.

Here's another: Indego will get people on wheels who are even less familiar with Pennsylvania laws and safe practices than we have now.

The 60 bike docks and bikes themselves, Stober says, will carry signage - such as "Walk Your Wheels" - about where it is legal to ride and where it is illegal. The language is being finalized now, he says.

May I suggest language? "Don't ignore stop signs and red lights." "Don't ride against traffic." "Don't ride on the sidewalk."

Use small words and short sentences. The pedalphiles might understand.