Bicycle Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The bicycle is a two-wheeled, human-powered mode of personal transportation that transforms muscle power with chain-driven gears into motive force. Numbering perhaps one billion today, bicycles and analogous tricycle rickshaws accomplish a significant component of the world’s commuting and light transport. Bicycle ownership and use is globally very uneven. Western European countries have the most bikes per capita, and in the Nethelands and Denmark, as many as one-third of commuting trips are by bicycle. Japan, Australia, and the United States have about the same number of bicycles per capita, but Japanese commuters use bicycles far more. In some south and southeast Asian cities rickshaws haul more goods and passengers than motorized vehicles. The world’s preeminent cycling society is China, with at least 300 million machines and high rates of urban and rural use.

Bicycles are an efficient and relatively cheap means of transportation. Energy use in cycling averages 35 kilocalories per mile, three times more efficient than walking and 53 times more than an automobile getting 20 mpg. In 1975 dollars, cycling costs for a U.S. commuter covering 2,500 miles per year were (including road construction and maintenance costs) 10 cents per mile, compared to 56 cents for cars, 27cents for trains, and 18cents for buses.

Wheels of Change

Despite its reputation as a green alternative to the automobile, the bicycle is an artifact of the same modernity that spawned the car. The cycling boom in Europe and the United States in the 1890s contributed to and was affected by a belief in scientific and social progress liberating the individual from the constraints of Victorian life. The changes to women’s dress and mobility brought on by cycling articulated with feminism, and the bicycle’s democratization of access to peri-urban parklands allowed more leisure time in the countryside.

At the same time, the boom presaged contradictions of automobile culture like dependence on neocolonial resource economies and the engineering of cities around personal vehicles over pedestrians or public transit. The demand for bicycles contributed to the scramble for rubber, which motivated the savage variety of European colonialism seen in the Belgian Congo. The political action of bicyclists in the United States in the 1890s centered on improving urban roads and reducing the street presence of trolley car lines. This put bicycles at odds with mass transit, and defined fast roads designed for private vehicles as the epitome of progress, an ideology of personal mobility amplified in the automobile age.

The bicycle was embraced by the European working classes for utilitarian purposes in the inter-war decades, but lost out to automobiles in the 1960s. At the same time, cycling rebounded in China, booming especially in the economic liberalization of the 1980s. Mass use of bicycles was a transport solution for rapid urbanization and industrialization without heavy investments in infrastructure, vehicles, or petroleum that the government encouraged through street engineering and support for domestic bike manufacturing. The rickshaw, a Japanese innovation influenced by European carriages, became the cycle rickshaw when fused with Western bicycle gearing and pedals. Human-powered urban transport fueled Asian urban economies with limited animal power or motorized vehicles, and created working class political power through paralyzing rickshawmens’ strikes.

The Critical Mass phenomenon, where cyclists ride together to occupy street space typically given over to cars, began in San Francisco in 1992 and has since diffused to cities the world over. Celebratory and oppositional, Critical Mass challenges automobile culture and its connections to oil wars, global climate change, and the privatization of urban space. The term was coined by American cycling activists visiting China who observed Chinese bike commuters’ tactics of negotiating street space with cars. The recent explosion in Chinese automobile use poses a unique question: What happens when the world’s largest bicycling culture runs into the world’s fastest growing car culture?

Bibliography:

Carlsson, Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration (AK Press, 2002);
Forester, Bicycle Transportation (The MIT Press, 1983);
Herlihy, Bicycle: The History (Yale University Press, 2004);
Lowe, The Bicycle: Vehicle for a Small Planet. Worldwatch Paper #90 (Worldwatch Institute, 1989).