So why use a bike in the big city?

Caspar Henderson
gives four reasons

From openDemocracy, 25 May 05: Casper is an award-winning writer and journalist on environmental affairs. He has also worked as a consultant on issues in energy, water, regulation, technology, human rights, economics and the environment. He was the Globalisation Editor from 2002 to mid-2005 and writes an occasional blog, JebIn08. Excerpts from his article, The Peach Wins! Why I Like My Bike:

Beauty: like the knife, the sailing boat and the wineglass, the bicycle is among the most efficient and elegant technologies ever devised or that ever could be devised. Propulsion with respect to effort is tremendous. Even in a congested British city such as London, riding a bike is often a pure pleasure – like sailing on a beam reach. Cycling in heavy traffic can be deeply unpleasant, but progressing through a cram of cars, their occupants trapped, fuming and being fumed, is deeply satisfying. It requires intense concentration and careful application of motor and awareness skills – rather like sailing into heavy weather against the wind and current. ‘8 1/2’ eat your heart out.

Thrills and other psycho-dramas: biking is dangerous. The great majority of car drivers are considerate and careful towards cyclists. But thousands are not. To survive, therefore (I’ve been a city cyclist for around twenty years without injury), requires caution as well as luck: one should be endlessly accommodating – the Mr-Nice-guy-who-finishes-last, especially when motorists treat you with total disregard or seem to wilfully endanger your life by poor driving.

But it also requires a certain recklessness and bloody-mindedness. Chasing through the metal and poison, one is both hunter and hunted. Pulling away from a light, human muscle can accelerate a bike faster than an internal combustion engine can move most cars… at least for the first ten feet. One can play at being beyond Thunderdome, the savage in the world of Henry Ford and soma.

Speed and convenience: in a congested British city, a bicycle is often the quickest way of getting around. One has a sense of freedom and of being in charge of one’s own journey – a strong contrast to the rat trap-like conditions of our unreliable and overpriced underground railway system. The jams that immobilise motor vehicles just don’t apply. On a bike, parking is not a problem. And the ability to stop wherever and whenever one wants makes a bicycle ideal for exploring the palimpsest, chimera, maze of London.

The environment: J.H. Crawford is obviously right – cars dehumanise a city. A bike rider is more aware than a car driver of surrounding sights, sounds and smells. As a general but not universal consequence, cyclists are more considerate of their fellow human beings. Thousands of children suffer severe respiratory ailments because of motor vehicle fumes. Bicycles are zero emission vehicles, powered by renewable energy (soup and sandwiches) that can be used as a token, bogus offset by those of us who take long haul flights and contribute to massive greenhouse gas pollution.