Put the fun between your legs

I love riding my bicycle. I recently traded my old bike (which used to be my grandpa's and my aunt's) for one that is much better sized for my height. It's so much more efficient to ride now that I can extend my legs farther. It's a very pretty bike - the brand is Univega, and it's a very cool shade of blue. The handlebars are bare chrome and the wheels are shiny chrome too. It's even got a tiny rainbow flag decal on the vertical post! I traded for it at CAMP's bikeshop.

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Bicycles are basically the best transportation-related technology ever created in terms of energy efficiency, availability to the masses (i.e. cheapness), autonomy, and just general fun, whereas cars are basically the worst. Cars have their place, of course, when you need to travel long distances and bring a lot of cargo with you (why a train can't work for that, I don't know), but I would also question why we should set ourselves up to have to travel long distances on a regular basis (like, say, from the suburbs to the city). Our produce travels an average of 1,500 miles before reaching us. This was only possible because we had cheap energy available to us. When we no longer have that available to us, we need to get used to growing what we need to eat locally again (which means if it doesn't grow in your climate, you're not going to be eating it anymore. bye bye bananas...). Ran has a great excerpt from Ivan Illich up on his site about the effects of cars on a society, and the benefits of bicycle use.

One of my favorite things to do is ride bicycles with a group of people, or even one other person. I've only ridden in a Critical Mass ride once, but it was great fun, and I intend to participate in more in the future.

Some reasons to go by bicycle:

1. Remember when you first learned to ride a bike? Think back for a second. It's just as much fun now as it was then.

2. The bicycle is the most efficient form of transportation ever invented.

3. Half of all transit in the United States is six miles or less round trip, a distance easily made on a bicycle.

4. If you see someone you know while riding, it's easy to stop and say hello. Bicycles create public space, enhance street life and build a sense of community.

5. Ever go for a nice evening stroll down a busy street? Nope, too noisy. The occasional bicycle bell is nothing compared to the constant cacophony of car traffic.

6. There are no parking problems for bicyclists, nor are there parking fees or tickets. Lock your bike to parking meters rather than putting quarters in them. In the space one car takes up, twelve or more bicycles can be parked, which solves parking problems in densely-populated areas.

7. Americans spend 15 to 20 percent of their income on cars. If you ride a bike, not only can you skip car payments, but you can also skip insurance payments, maintenance, dmv stuff and stopping to pay for gas. Carsharing for occasional driving is becoming a more and more reasonable alternative. (A good new bicycle can cost as low as $250. No dmv, no insurance, no gas, very little maintenance.)

8. Millions of Americans want to lose weight, and yet they step into cars everyday, passing up the opportunity to exercise. In addition to weight loss, bicycling reduces the risk of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and high blood pressure. Given the abysmal state of health care in the United States (which is partially due to the cost of treating well over 2 million car accident victims each year), self-prescribed preventative activity is a wise decision.

9. If you stand in a closed garage with a running car, you will die in a matter of minutes. Hundreds of thousands of cars in our cities create dirty, unhealthy air.

10. Terrorist organizations use our gas money. In order to protect political and corporate interests, the United States supports dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, which is the number one producer of oil in the world. 15 of the 19 September hijackers were Saudi. Iraq is the second largest producer of oil, and Kuwait the third. Do those countries sound familiar? The government supported Saddam through his worst atrocities, then Saddam began to disobey U.S. orders. That is precisely when he became our enemy.

11. In 2001, more than 3,000 Americans died of terrorism on our own home soil. In 2001, more than 43,000 Americans died in car crashes on our own home soil, and about 2,200,000 suffered disabling injuries. The American death toll of the Vietnam War, which lasted several years, is about 50,000.

12. States, counties and cities spend billions of dollars fixing roads that cars damage. A Honda Civic, a compact car, weighs about 2,500 pounds. That's about 100 times more than the average bicycle. A typical SUV weighs much more than a Civic, and does more damage to roads. Wear and tear on roads from bicycles is almost nonexistent.

13. Experts estimate that easily accessible oil (in other words, cheap oil) will run out around the year 2010. After cheap oil runs out, the price of gas will shoot up. The economic ramifications of this suggest that the sooner we accommodate oil free transportation into our daily lives the better.

14. Watch any tv show, listen to any radio program, look through any magazine or newspaper and you will come across ads showing how cars will make you cool, sexy, popular, respected, at one with nature, safe, etc. The car and oil industries spend billions of dollars each year to promote a benign image of driving, but the function of all this is to assure profits and manipulate consumers, and nothing more.

15. Staying closer to home to shop and do errands builds communication among residents, which promotes autonomy. This in turn leads to political, social and economic self-determination within communities. City hall ends up truly serving the needs of the residents because residents can tell city hall exactly what they want rather than city hall guessing at what they think would be best for the residents. Besides all this, if you factor in all the costs of driving to mega-warehouses, you end up paying more anyway.

In the Wake has also calculated that he gains two minutes in lifespan for every minute spent biking (scroll half way down the archive page to see the relevant post). It's an adaptation from another study in which a man concluded that he gained three minutes for every minute spent walking. So basically, you are slowly shortening your lifespan by using a car.

I realize that there is a lot of danger in riding a bicycle on these insane streets. I was just riding south on Grand during rush hour (on a Sunday afternoon!) a little bit ago and was nearly run down by a swerving speed-demon asshole. It was scary. I felt very much alive, basically having a near near-death experience. According to a bicylce safety site, "Around 44,000 people die in car crashes in the U.S. each year. About 1 in 54 is a bicyclist." I'll take those odds. Cars kill. I personally consider it more dangerous to ride a car on a highway than to ride my bike through a "shady" part of town.

I love being able to service my bike myself as well. Part of the bikeshop at CAMP is being able to learn from others how to become a bike mechanic. I definitely want to get more involved there this summer. My friend AnDIY helped me get my bike into riding condition (I believe the back wheel is actually from one of his old bikes actually). I want to be able to do the same in the future.

(I saw the title of this post on another friend's patch featuring a bicycle prominently. It's very true. So, please, do so!)

Tags:

• bicycle
• community