On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 11/1/2002
Bikes Not Bombs
Stand back folks: I need some room to rant! Forgive me if you came to this column looking for bike chatter instead of political dudgeon. I will try to keep my op-ed ravings to a minimum, and I promise to eventually steer the story line back to bikes.
It’s November of an election year, and that always ratchets up my civic crankiness a few notches....this year more than most. I haven’t felt this much righteous indignation since the depths of the Viet Nam debacle, or perhaps since the wonders of Watergate. I mean, here we have this spurious George--this presidential usurper--attempting to foment a war with Iraq, all as a thinly camouflaged pep rally for his political party on the eve of the elections. It’s such a transparent, cynical, bald-faced farce that it would only be pathetic and laughable, except for the sobering fact that hundreds of thousands of people will suffer and die, and millions--no, billions--of dollars will be bled away down the rat hole of armaments and munitions.
The saber rattling spin doctors insist the war is essential to protect American interests at home and abroad. Excuse me? I believe what that really means is that, as the biggest bully in the school yard, we will do whatever we damn well want to do and need to do to stay on top and to preserve what White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer piously refers to as our “blessed way of life.”
What this trumped up war is really about, in my jaundiced view, is obfuscation and sleight of hand. It’s a sneaky way to keep the populace entertained and diverted--and patriotic!--while a small cadre of plutocratic bandits robs us blind. (Reference: Wag the Dog.)
Fleischer’s “blessed way of life” amounts to this: we are a nation addicted to excess. We are slaves to our conveniences and sluts in our pursuit of material aggrandizement. We are a nation of overweight people driving overweight cars, living in air-conditioned houses, eating processed, packaged, plastic food, while being constantly anesthetized by mega-doses of moron teevee. What’s that statistic about the United States containing 10% of the world’s population but consuming 80% of the world’s resources? I’m not sure those are the right numbers, but they’re in the ballpark, and whatever the right numbers are, the point is still valid: things are way out of balance.
Oh, I could go on and on...I’m hardly getting warmed up here. I haven’t even started frothing at the mouth yet. But I am trying to reign myself in. I am applying a rant-stoppers patch right now, and in a minute I’ll calm down. Then we can talk about bikes.
Bikes? Did someone mention bikes? Hey, it was bikes that got me started along this line of political polemic. I came across two different bike related items recently, and they both reminded me that biking can be not only a delightful recreation, but also an act of social and environmental remediation...maybe even redemption.
Here’s the first item, a press release....
Mountain bike co-inventor Joe Breeze has announced that his Sausalito-based SimpliCity Cycle Company/Breezer will introduce a complete line of transportation bicycles fully equipped with fenders, chainguards, kickstands, integrated lighting systems, built-in locks and reflectorized tire sidewalls.
The other item comes from a column about Amsterdam at the web site of a contemporary design firm called Designs Within Reach. I have extracted a few paragraphs from the column here....
“If modern design is about solving real problems and addressing needs, then Amsterdam’s best design story lies in its myriad bicycles. While the public transportation system is cheap and works like magic, it’s bicycles not gondolas that make this canal city great in terms of design and mobility. With the majority of the population pedaling their way around town, there are a handful of places where one can find the bicycle to suit every need and want. Designer Hella Jongerius directed us to ’t Mannetje on Frans Halstradt, the custom bike shop in Amsterdam where bikes get re-invented and renewed into tricycles, vendor carts, three wheelers and various other road machines. Like the Dutch culture in general, ’t Mannetje’s motivating force is to meet the needs of the individual to better the whole.
“Rather than owning testosterone-loaded, 15-speed, high-tech titanium, off-roading machines like the ones we favor in California, the Dutch keep it pretty basic, though ingenious. ’t Mannetje produces rigs that allow moms and dads to transport their kids, like mother birds carrying nests. They even produce bicycles that have a box in front with a wheelchair ramp for handicapped children. Instead of using trucks, plumbers carry their entire assortment of tools on bikes, not unlike New York City hot dog vendors, burning calories instead of fossil fuel. It’s not about speed in the Netherlands; it’s about function and getting around.
“The high density of bicycle riders in Amsterdam gives the city a special texture and dynamism possibly not found outside of Tianjin, China. Rush hour is humanized by throngs of people swiftly moving on bikes, rather than characterized by cars in gridlock. It truly is a city of contrasts. You have hashish coffee houses, brothels, and smoke-filled bars on every block, but it’s also a population that values daily exercise and sports as a way of life. It’s critical mass, Dutch style.”
What both of these items are about is bikes as transportation rather than recreation. Town bikes. Cruiser bikes. Commuter bikes. Beater bikes. Work bikes. World bikes. Call them what you will, they are the humble workhorses that will serve us well--and maybe save us as well--in the years to come. These clunky lunkers will do the everyday jobs that will get us out of our cars much better and much more frequently than will our hi-tech mountain bikes and whisper-light road racers.
What America needs now is more everyday bikes and everyday bike riders. The motoring public already sees all the recreational riders it needs or wants to. The sight of a dozen more racer boys in neon jerseys with their lycra buns in the air is not going convince the guy behind the wheel of the efficacy of cycling as a transit alternative. He needs to see hundreds of normal looking people on solid looking bikes going about their mundane, daily chores before he will entertain the notion of, “Hey, I could do that!”
There are cities where one can see a hint of how this might look. Not only Amsterdam, but locally Chico, Davis, Eugene, among others. There are some obvious reasons why these towns are rated as especially great cycling towns whenever such surveys are tossed around. They’re all college towns, thronged with thousands of young, relatively impoverished students needing to get to and from classes at odd hours, all day long. Bikes are dandy for this, obviously. (I got my first serious road bike as a college student in Eugene.) Another thing that all these towns have in common--including Amsterdam--is that they’re all about as flat as a fry pan. This makes it a lot easier to get around on a heavy old clunker. And why is an old clunker preferable to something fancier? For one thing, if you’re going to be leaving it in front of stores or classrooms--whether you lock it or not--it’s better to have a homely old bike that no one would want to steal. Or one that won’t be too painful to replace if it does go missing.
I applaud the Breezer for bringing out a line of city bikes. I just hope they’re not so fancy and expensive that no one will want to ride them--and leave them unattended--for everyday chores. That would sort of defeat the whole point of the exercise, seems to me.
Those of us who are already convinced of the efficacy of bikes-as-transit should find more occasions to ride bikes of a utilitarian stripe, while dressed in something approaching conventional clothing. We don’t always need to look cutting-edge cool. I once saw Andy Hampsten riding around his home town on a city bike with a cute little wicker basket on the handlebars. If that’s good enough for this former champion racer, it ought to be good enough for the rest of us. We need to make biking look normal and plausible, rather than outlandish and elitist.
The piece on Amsterdam talks about “critical mass, Dutch style.” This is a cogent comment, but one that might well be misunderstood by many, for the Amsterdam experience is substantively different from what we understand the critical mass movement to be about in cities in America. Here, it most often seems to be about confrontation; about taking back the streets, as if this were a war. There, it is less about confrontation and more about assimilation; less about taking back the streets and more about sharing the streets efficiently....cooperating.
Critical mass cannot be forced. We can add bike lanes and bike paths. We can mandate bike lockers and showers at work. We can make gasoline more expensive. But we cannot get people out of their cars in significant numbers until cycling is seen by society at large to be a commonplace, conventional behavior, accessible to all. That will take time....time and a slow, creeping tide of more and more normal people doing normal things on normal bikes. Maybe, eventually, enough people will use bikes instead of cars for their errands and commuting that finally a natural critical mass will be achieved, and those diehard dinosaurs in their gas guzzling SUVs will at last be made to feel about as welcome at the party as cigarette smokers are made to feel today. Remember how few years ago it was that everyone smoked everywhere, and now how much that has changed? Can we dream of a similar paradigm shift in transit options?
Please go out and vote this month. I don’t care whether your politics are to the left or right of mine. Get out there and exercise your franchise, regardless. If you’re an active cyclist I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt: all that well oxygenated blood racing around in your brain has to give you at least a slight edge in mental acuity over the average couch potato, so whatever your political bent, we’ll assume you’ve thought it through intelligently (and won’t be too distracted by dog and pony shows about wars against tinpot dictators half a world away).
But don’t just vote with your ballots. Vote with your bikes too. Put your feet where your feelings are: on the pedals, all the time, or as often as you can manage it. Help us wean our society from our oil dependency and convenience addiction. Discover what a blessed way of life it would be to live in harmony with all the rest of the world’s peoples and environments. Simplify. Reuse, repair, recycle....ride.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net