From the sunday telegraph..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/main.jhtml?xml=/motoring/2005/04/09/mrma
y09.xml&sSheet=/motoring/2005/04/09/ixmot.html
As seen on TV: Get off your bike to save the world
(Filed: 09/04/2005)
Far from being an eco-friendly transport solution, bicycles simply encourage
car ownership, argues James May
The other week I took part in a radio debate about cars, congestion, the
environment, blah blah blah. Inevitably, the talk turned to alternative
transport and, equally inevitably, someone piped up with: "Well, what about
the bicycle?"
Impractical: bicycles just give us a taste of the mobility we crave
Well, what? The bicycle as we know it - that is, with two equally sized
wheels (Chopper excepted) and pedals driving the rear wheel via a chain -
has been with us for 120 years, and its advantages and limitations are well
established.
Far from being an unrealised technology, cycling was, in the late 19th
century, a craze of such massive proportions that whole societies grew up
around it. It was celebrated in woodcuts and etchings that these days, like
Monet's Poppy Field, have made their way on to biscuit-tin lids and place
mats. Cycling is nothing new.
I like a good bike. I own several, and love the purity of their purpose. The
bicycle must number as one of humankind's all-time great inventions, being a
machine to improve the efficiency of the human engine without any extra
input, although if you're going for a really big ride you might want a Mars
bar first.
But they're not perfect. For local shopping trips and light haulage duties,
they're great. But you would struggle to bring home a new coffee table on
one, and while they might be fast over a few miles, getting from Bristol to
Edinburgh by bicycle is not really a viable proposition. And I should know,
because I've done it.
So the bicycle is not the solution to our supposed transport woes. In fact,
I would like to go further than that. The bicycle is at the root of the
problem perceived by the car's detractors. I would like to suggest that
every time a bicycle is minted, the desire for a car is born.
It begins in childhood, when the stabilisers come off and permission is
granted to go, alone, beyond the boundaries of the garden. It is either a
very witless or extraordinarily fit child who does not realise that the
bicycle would be much more liberating with an engine slung in the vacant
diamond of its frame, and from there it is a small step to the realisation
that the whole contraption would be better with a roof, a radio and four
wheels to prevent it from falling over at junctions.
As you grew, you owned bigger and better bikes, rode further afield, fitted
a horn, experimented with centre-pull brakes, built a scrambler, learnt to
do wheelies and generally exhausted the potential of the thing until, at 17,
you were foaming at the mouth in anticipation of that glorious day when you
could chuck the bike in the back of the shed and borrow your dad's car.
More significant, however, is that the bicycle has often been the first
tentative manufacturing step of people who went on, quite naturally, to make
cars. That machine with two equally sized wheels and a chain was the Rover
Safety Bicycle of 1885, designed by John Kemp Starley (whose uncle James is
generally considered the creator of the penny-farthing). The business he
founded went on to become the Rover car company.
In fact, the whole history of the motor industry is littered with bicycles.
Today, many so-called "premium" car makers produce fashionable bicycles made
from pure unobtanium and supposedly inspired by the brand attributes of
their cars. History shows the process generally worked the other way around.
Václav Laurin and Václav Klement, for example, were a pair of fledgling
industrialists who cut their teeth on bicycles and then progressed,
naturally enough, to motorcycles and cars. The company they founded is
better known today as Skoda, so the bicycle can be blamed for the Rapid
Coupé if nothing else.
Peugeot made bicycles before it made cars. It still does. Soichiro Honda
founded his empire by buggering about with bicycle components. Fiat made
bicycles. Nations strapped for cash climb aboard bicycles and use the
mobility they offer to invigorate their economies so they can move on to
cars. Look at China.
So there is something fatuous about rich bankers, scruffy media types and
sanctimonious environmentalists pedalling around believing they're doing the
decent thing and ridding the world of the menace of the car. The bicycle was
never the solution to an existing need.
Rather, it remains the potent symbol of some deep-rooted urge to move
around that will not stop with pedalling any more than it stopped with
primitive man's first dug-out canoe.
Consider this. Little more than 100 years ago, two men living in a crude hut
on a beach in North Carolina gave us the world's first powered and
controllable aeroplane. It should come as no surprise to learn that the
Wright brothers were bicycle makers.