"[A person...] on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. Equipped with this tool, [a person...] outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. " --Ivan Illich
My father never owned an automobile because a vision impairment in his right eye prevented him from obtaining a driver's license. My mother never drove either. I grew up in a family without a car. This made the family a bit of a statistical anomaly in a country built around the automobile. My siblings did not learn to drive until they were well into their twenties. That's enough to make you an odd ball in America, but odder still is the fact that I, approaching the age of forty, still do not know how to drive.
Where I grew up, many teenagers seemed more concerned about obtaining a driver's license than they were about graduating from high school. The automobile industry would have us believe that not owning a car is practically a mortal sin. What is not even having a driver's license then? It is tantamount to never even having been baptisted, never having one's sins washed away with gasoline on the greasy banks of the petroleum river. One is forever forbidden from entering the heavenily state of acceleration, and condemned to walk along the litter filled shoulders of life's highways while everyone else roars off toward the smoldering grey horizon.
While all my siblings have married and succumbed to the two car family dream, I have yet to commit myself to spending two hours a day to commuting by hurtling down the highway neatly encased in steel while smogging up the atmosphere. Personally, I would hardly ever think about my lack of "automobility" if it were not for the fact that it raises so many eyebrows when it comes up in conversation. My students, in particular, seem to be absolutely astounded whenever I mention it. When I explain to them that I do not need a car because I ride a bike, the statement is met with much rolling of the eyes and a certain amount of snickering. Some even insinuate that I am too cheap to by a car. Hmm...true as that might be, there are other reasons as well.
For many years, I could not afford a car. Owning one was out of the question so I went for almost twenty years without even thinking about the finances involved in having one. Imagine my astonishment upon learning that today a person can spend as much on a car as it cost to put a nice down payment on a house. Today, I am told that the yearly upkeep of a car almost exceeds what I currently pay for rent.
It puzzles me that the average person would pay such an large percentage of their yearly income to own and maintain a car. In New York City you can expect to pay as much as five thousand dollars or more to keep it running. In contrast, the used bicycle I own cost me forty five dollars. Over the last two years, I have spent less than two hundred dollars maintaining it.
In the urban environment that I live in, given the range of my travels, a bike is as fast as an automobile, and more convenient. Factor in the health benefits I receive from the exercise (cardiovascular health, and reduction of stress), and I think the modern automotive lifestyle looks like a pretty bad deal in comparison. No wonder the industry has to spend such enormous sums of money convincing people they should own a car.
Who hears the regrets of the thieving automobile? --Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions
Bicycling saves me close to a thousand dollars a year I would otherwise spend on public transportation, and it is much more convenient, and much faster. In New York city, if your commute is less than ten miles you can beat or match the speed of a subway train, and leave a bus far behind. On a bike you can be halfway to work in the time it takes to walk to your local transit station.
Ivan Illich has been a long time advocate of reasonable solutions to life's problems. He gives a set of very interesting facts and figures when he discusses his concept of convivial transport with respect to bicycles:
"The United States puts between 25 and 45 per cent of its total energy (depending upon how one calculates this) into vehicles: to make them, run them, and clear a right of way for them when they roll, when they fly, and when they park. For the sole purpose of transporting people, 250 million Americans allocate more fuel than is used by 1.3 billion Chinese and Indians for all purposes."
The USA is a gluttonuos nation, and more often than not its gluttony is at the expense of other people who do not own such an astounding array of military hardware. Forgive me if I begin to preach for a moment but consider this:
Another tasty fact from Ivan Illich:"The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy...."
Whoa! Do the math for yourself. Right now I pay for all my transportation needs, including the mass transit I use, in less than two days. If I owned a car, I would have to hand over at least two month's salary to pay for it.
Finally Ivan would tell us: "The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time."
Illich is a guy that likes to kept things simple. So do I. Ladies and gentlemen, I ride a bike. Maybe you will give it a try. If you see me shooting up the road while you are stuck in traffic, don't get mad, get out! Retire that overused hunk of lethal metal called a "car" to the junkyard. Try using a bicycle for your daily commuting and running about.
For those few times when you feel you really need or would like to use a car, follow the example of the late Buckmister Fuller who did a great deal of traveling in his time. He found it cheaper to rent a car when he needed it than to own one. Though personally, for really long trips, I prefer trains. On a train, I can even bring my bicycle!
John Korber, August 1997. Links updated May 2004
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