Now that we're back after two and a half months without a car, we're reassessing all our daily transportation - can we walk? can we bike? Can we do this without using fossil fuel? A lot of the time we can't, but a lot of the time we can.
As gas gets more expensive, biking becomes more of an option for other people as well. But why are some people so torqued by bicyclists? I've thought about this a lot. I think people get irritated for different reasons - about anything, not just bikes. Sometimes it's legitimate because someone has done something rotten. Often though, the anger is more about the angry person than the target. Here's my list of reasons people don't like bicyclists.
- Problems with the cyclists
- Cyclists driving in traffic without regard to the dangers they are causing to themselves and others - this is especially a problem in the winter when drivers have enough trouble with slick streets already
- Smug, arrogant cyclists who use their cyclist status as a holier than thou platform
- Problems with the angry person suggesting deeper emotional reactions to cyclists
- For some people, having a car is a symbol of success. Perhaps they had hard times growing up, perhaps it was pounded in by parents, but a car shows you've made it. Cyclists are seen as losers who haven't made it, or cyclists' talking about the merits of cycling seem to be attacking them as drivers.
- For some people cars are a symbol of progress and development and cyclists are seen as greenies who would stop progress. This can be tied up with one's faith in capitalism as the only true path. People on bikes are thus seen as childish and preventing the economy from developing the way it should, essentially they are attacking the American way in these folks' minds.
- People with health and weight problems may feel mocked or slighted by slim bikers zipping along in their tight shorts.
- Some people are just mad at the world and bikes just make one more target - it's easy to play bully to a cyclist when you're in a Dodge pickup
In addition, people have all sorts of reasons why they can't use a bike to commute to work.
- Reasons people can't commute to work by bike
- need to stop along the way to shop, pick things up
- takes too much time
- no place to shower at work
- too far away
- too dangerous
- too cold
- need to wear nice clothes at work
- what if my kids got sick at school and I had to pick them up?
- I have to carry things that I can't fit on a bike
The danger parts are legitimate in many cases - but if more people got serious about biking, bike lanes could get bigger and could be kept free of debris and could be well plowed. Cold is sometimes an issue, but if people can be out all day skiing or snow machining, they can bike 30-60 minutes each way to work.
When we are faced with something new, the normal reaction is to think about how it is going to cause problems. What we won't be able to do. The list above gives some reasons people offer why biking to work is impractical. But there are also benefits which are unseen. Things that make me feel great when I can use my bike instead of a car.
- The benefits of biking
- Individual
- Little or no traffic on the bike trails (of course that's a good reason not to encourage too many people to start biking to work)
- Get exercise on the way to work or on an errand (and Anchorage is cool enough, and biking allows one to move forward while coasting, and biking always creates its own breeze so one needn't get all sweaty)
- Great scenery along the bike trails - I'm literally in the woods part of the way instead of on city streets
- Great parking - free parking close to where I need to be
- Time to think and reflect
- No gas bills when I ride
- It just feels good
- Community
- One less car per cyclist on the road (carpoolers excepted)
- One more parking space per cyclist (carpoolers excepted)
- Less oil used
- Less pollution
- Healthier population - lower medical costs
- Happier population
a mean or expected value of 10.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable undiscovered oil in the ANWR coastal plain
and that there are 42 gallons of gas in a barrel of oil (it's more complicated than that, but that will do for now)
That comes to about 432,600,000,000 gallons of gas from ANWR. Divide that by those 30,000,000 a day saved by the hypothetical bikers and you get 14,420 days. Divide that by 260 workdays per year (we'll forget about all the people who work on weekends) and you get 55 years. So, just having 10% of the US population save 1 gallon of gas a day by biking to work would save the equivalent of ANWR's mean estimated oil in 55 years. (And that's estimated, it could be less. And it could be more.) That cumulative amount of savings is not insignificant.
(On the other, according to the Department of Energy's Weekly Petroleum Status Report for the Week Ending May 9, 2008 (page 6), in the US
Over the last four weeks, motor gasoline demand has averaged nearly 9.3 million barrels per day.
While barrels of motor gas and barrels of crude oil appear to be slightly different, if everyone - including commercial drivers - took a one day driving holiday per month, we'd save the equivalent of ANWR's estimated mean value of 10.3 billion barrels of recoverable crude in about 10 years.
Humans are amazing. We're amazing in how easily we get used to the status quo and don't want to change. But we're amazing in how we can solve problems and come up with totally unexpected solutions to problems.
So bike to work at least once this summer. Or bike part way to work and take a bus the rest of the way. And if you can't bike, find some other way to move your muscles and save gas.
Steve, thank you for such a thoughtful post on bike-commuting.
ReplyDeleteLooking at the "Reasons people can't commute to work by bike", I see several that have an underlying cause (or issue): we are generally living too far from the places we work, shop, and recreate, and too far from each other.
When residential, recreational, civic, office, commercial, retail, and light industrial uses are all allowed to mix within neighborhoods, people's commutes become much shorter. This is especially true if the mixing is vertical rather than strictly horizontal: for example, retail on the ground floor, office on the second floor, residential on the third and fourth floors.
We have a lot of public policy that makes suburban, car-intensive living seem like the sensible thing to do. Setbacks and lot lines force people to have larger lots than they need or want, which fact pushes people outward; taxation of buildings rather than land value encourages vacant or unused land, which also pushes people outward; conventional zoning prohibits mixing of land uses; putting engineers in charge of street design makes streets friendly to cars but not to bicycles and pedestrians.
Gasoline prices will put more bicyclists and fewer drivers on the road. But without some major shifts in urban planning, we cyclists are still going to find it awfully difficult to get to work.
Paul, thanks for filling in some of the structural, social, political reasons that I only hinted (if even that) in "too far away". I focused on individual issues, but certainly the way we as a society think about how and where we should live and work plays a huge role in why cars are necessary for so many people. Thanks.
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