Anarchocyclist

I got some good questions about my previous article on cars, both on- and off-line, so i thought i’d shoot a few responses out there for consideration. The main response i’ve been getting (and have had on other topics as well) is that i’m not “being realistic”. I think the main thing i’m trying to do here is investigate our moral obligations. I’m trying to discover what we should do. When we have a destination, or at least a direction to travel in, then we can make choices right now that seem to lead us in that direction. It guides us as we try to find our way. I hardly think it’s rational to believe that i can make all cars go away tomorrow…but i do think that we should all be doing things that will lead to that, both through individual choices, and by grouping together to do collective action. And as we do that, we have to provide new options for people if we’re going to convince them to give up the awful old ones. With that in mind, i’d like to respond to the criciticisms that were recently raised, in the hopes that i can supply some alternatives. ok, on with the questions :)

“What if you needed to haul more than 300 lbs?” I like this one. i didn’t address this at all in my previous post, so i guess i’ll start now. So the general idea i’m trying to go with here is that environmental distruction and deaths are bad. Having millions and millions of giant steel gas-powered leisure vehicles is a big cause of both of those bad things. how do we get around that? The short answer is ride bikes….but just giving a short answer doesn’t address the needs of the people who have adapted their lives to the current reality of having heavy gas-powered leisure vehicles everywhere.

Let’s separate out the uses of our heavy gas-powered vehicles. there’s the standard leisure stuff…you’re travelling from one place to another, not really carrying much. Then there’s commuting 5, 10, 20, or 40km to work, or travelling a long distance (like 300km or something, perhaps for a camping trip), and then moving large objects (couches from ikea, or moving to a new house, or perhaps shipping containers of tomatoes from california). There are probably more categories, but these should do for now. This particular question was about big objects, so let’s start there

Currently, it’s conceivable that some people go to a furniture store and buy a table or a couch or something, and put it in the back of their SUV to take home. How would such a task possibly happen if we didn’t all have an individual 3000lb gas-powered vehicle at our disposal? Well, last time i mentioned that you could use a currently-available Bikes At Work Trailer to do this, and i cited the one model that can carry 300lbs (see pic of ryan using it to carry a bulky mattress). According to the Bikes At Work webpage, it’s not too difficult to use bikes to carry loads that are too big for most cars. They’ve got an example where they string 3 trailers together and haul 1000lbs with 1 bike.

Now what happens if you’re not feeling up to hauling a big weight with your bike? Well, start with what would happen right now if you went to ikea to pick up a couch and you couldn’t lift the couch into your Ford F150….you’d probably ask a friend or two to come help. no big deal. Similarly, when you want to move to a new house and you need to get all of your stuff from A to B, you call a few friends, and usually rent a big truck that can carry it all. Instead, you could rent some bike trailers and call the same friends to help. Check out the BAW page on doing a household move by bike. Sure, it might be a bit easier to burn a bunch of gas with a giant steel contraption, but the easiest thing isn’t always the best. But really, the biggest concern i have is using huge gas powered vehicles for every task. If you used one for some special purpose that only occurs once every year, then i don’t think it’s such a big deal.

some people just are not able to ride bikes. I think there are a couple of statements inside this. One might be that there are people in wheelchairs or have advanced cancer, or i don’t know what. It seems to me that they could still take public transit, or they could have some sort of electric vehicle of their own. I’d hope that the electricity is generated through some sustainable method too. Either way, whatever solution they currently use could be easily translated to a more ecologically sound method. Even if they still used the same huge dirty cars, the roads would be much safer if it’s not Everyone using them, and also if the speed limit is knocked down to 35km/h or something else reasonable.

The other part of this statement is that some people are less physically fit than others. This ties in with the next one: I would not be able to ride my bike all the way from here to X. Assuming a person doesn’t have some debilitating injury, i’d say this statement is incorrect. Yes, perhaps it can’t be done immediately, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Most of the things i advocated in my previous article weren’t things that will change in a day, and this is one of those. My personal bike-riding ability is a good example.

I only really started riding my bike about 2 years ago. When i started, I really wasn’t athletic in any way; i was just a skinny nerd. I started biking after my friends nagged me to go riding with them one night. then i started riding short distances to visit friends or go to the store or whatever. after a few weeks of that, it started getting easier and easier. I found that the hills that were really challenging before, were not too bad after all. Once my friends had shown me that i could (slowly) ride a 30km distance without having any previous cycling, i began to think that it wasn’t that hard. This doesn’t mean that i could speed through 30km in an hour, nor does it mean that i could suddenly ride 200km in a day, up several mountain passes. It just means that it’s not that hard to ride a bike in a leisurely fashion, and the more you do it the easier it gets. You get good at riding a bike by riding a bike.

I had this concept demonstrated to me again recently. I gave my old bike to my dad, and he started riding it a little bit. he had a little trouble at first, because it was a road bike that forced him into a more racing-style posture and he wasn’t used to it, but after a week or so he was fine. He started the transformation from a very sedentary lifestyle to one that had regular exercise. Now, after a period of just leisurely rides around town, he sometimes goes out with me on 25km rides at a fairly fast pace (near 30km/h, drafting behind me), and up some hills. He’s no Lance Armstrong, but he can ride easily now. He’s still got some flab around his waist, but i bet he’s lost some of it since he started riding, and his heart and lungs have certainly gotten healthier.

This same scenario could be true for probably 95% of the population. The problem is that when all around you there are these heavy gas-powered vehicles that make it easy for you to go anywhere without expending the least bit of energy, and a culture that tells you that driving is thrilling and it’s The Thing To Do, then (not so amazingly) people tend to do it. If everyone’s only exercise is getting off the couch to walk to the car, then we develop into a sedentary society. This is the real reason that a lot of people don’t feel able to ride bikes.

I do not feel comfortable taking the bus to Stanley Park because my shifts at the aquarium sometimes end at dark & I do not want to be walking through the park at night! This is definitely a very important criticism, but i don’t think it has much to do with bikes. It has to do with our patriarchal society. Men have very little fear of walking through Stanley Park because it’s men who are doing the attacking. A solution to this particular stanley park problem might be some kind of “Safe Walk” program like you find on the campus of many universities. If fear of male violence is preventing women from doing the things that they want or need to do, then we need to organize ways to counteract that. Before a group solution is in place, then perhaps the individual solution (driving instead of busing) is the best thing for now.

It takes longer to get places riding a bike. Plus, so many people now live quite a ways from where they work. I think these are the result of the perceptions we develop when we are immersed in a car culture for so long. After years of accepting that it is possible to drive 80km in one hour, and ignoring all the social consequences that it entails when everyone is doing it, we find it hard to consider that maybe going 80km should take a little bit longer. It’s also part of our always-busy time-conscious society that makes us watch every minute and try to be “efficient” with our time. There are many problems that tie into this.

If we want to have fewer road deaths, fewer deaths from sedentary lifestyles, fewer pollutants in the air, then we’re going to have to change some of the things we do, and one of those things is the massive commuting from the suburbs to the center of the city. We need to work closer to where we live rather than doing the huge car-pilgrimage every day. People live farther from their work when they feel entitled to get in their gas-burning steel cages every day and drive 30 or 40km to work. If they didn’t consider that a viable option, then they’d probably live closer to work and ride their bike. This is a common topic in urban design, where you have to consider population density and all sorts of other things that i don’t want to get into at the moment. But let me just say that there are many other ways to organize the way we get to and from work. It doesn’t have to stay the way it is now, but neither is it going to change overnight. it’ll take plenty of effort, certainly

But another aspect of this is the perception that bikes are slow and it would take “forever” to get around town on a bike. It’s just not true. A good example is Broadway in Vancouver. it’s a nice fat street with 2 or 3 lanes in each direction…should be fast, right? Actually, the cars only average between 30km/h and 35km/h. I know this because that’s the speed i go on my bike when i ride on broadway. What happens is that the cars speed up to 60 or 70km/h until they hit the next red light, at which point i catch up to them. So, when i ride at a steady pace of 30km/h, i can get to my destination just as fast as any car or bus that uses the street. The difference is that i’m happy, getting good exercise, not polluting, and not endangering anyone’s life, while the people in the cars are stressed because they think they’re going to be late for something, but they’re constantly waiting at red lights…so they try to go faster, endangering more peoples’ lives while they pollute our city.

Another example is from when i first started riding my bike. One day i wanted to go from my place in vancouver to my parents’ place in delta, but i decided to take my bike instead of the bus. Normally, i’d walk 5 or 10 minutes from my house to the nearest major street (broadway), then wait 5 or 10 minutes for the bus, followed by 10 minutes on the bus to get to Granville street. Then i’d wait again for the bus and ride it for about 30 minutes to get to delta. The route by bike was much faster….I went straight south over the knight street bridge and passed Ikea in richmond within the first 20 minutes. This would be about the time that i’d normally get onto the first bus. Then, i’d take another 20 minutes to ride through the scenic farm roads in richmond to get to the Massey tunnel. This would be about the time that i’d get on the second bus. so far, i’m about 30 minutes ahead of schedule. all that remains is to take one short bus ride to get through the tunnel (which stupidly has no bike lane) and i’m there. I’m 30 minutes ahead of the bus, over the whole trip. Most people typically guess that the bus would win because it gets to drive 100km/h on the highway, but when you take out the transfer time and the minimal waiting, then the bike trip is faster. Similar time savings occur with trips by car because it often takes at least 20 minutes to find and pay for a parking spot, and then walk from there to where you are really going. Extra time is added for filling the car with gas.

Ok, i guess i should wrap this thing up. It’s easy to show that cars hurt us. We need something different. What that different thing looks like is not set in stone, but we know the direction we should be heading, and that is more human-powered transportation that doesn’t frivolously use up steel and gas. Transportation centered around people instead of cars would improve our lives in many ways. We can’t just sit back and say that it’ll never happen because we can’t immediately think of absolutely every detail of how it’s supposed to happen. We just take one step at a time based on our values that we want to promote. As in all cases of societal change, collective action is more effective than individual action. Just individually riding your bike is great, but it’s not gonna change the world. We need to collaborate with each other and form groups that can act together to enact these changes on a larger scale. Those groups should also be making alliances with other groups that work on different issues, such as working with womens’ shelters on the issues around male violence and night-time safety. Working together, we can change the way things work.

Ride hard, ride free

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 27th, 2006 at 10:13 am and is filed under Cycling, Front Page, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.