The 1970s kick-back against the Almighty Motorcar

I’m in the research phase for Bike Boom which, one day, will be as forgotten and as dusty as the books I’m buying on eBay and Abebooks. If you’ve got any suggestions of books I should dig out do let me know. 1970s bicycle advocate Robert Silverman of Montreal suggested I take a look at Autokind Vs. Mankind by Kenneth R. Schneider.

This was published in 1971 and is sub-titled An Analysis of Tyranny, a Proposal for Rebellion, a Plan for Reconstruction. It’s a hard-hitting polemic that predicted “autocracy” would have either eaten itself by 1994, or would have flattened so many cities and killed so many people motoring would have evolved into a religious cult.

The illustrations in the book were equally hard-hitting and I include three of them below. They were produced by Richard Hedman. The last one – with a limp child held up as a sacrificial lamb to the Almighty Motorcar – is particularly poignant. Double click to open the illustrations in hi-res.

By Richard Hedman, 1970
This would explain a lot …

By Richard Hedman, 1970
Autokind Vs. Mankind was produced for an American audience but this illustration would have piqued the interest of those fighting to keep cars out of medieval towns and cities.

By Richard Hedman, 1970
Notice how the people seem to be on the porky side. The offering of a limp child to the motorcar God is gut-wrenching.

Modern Moloch by James, 1923
Perhaps Hedman was familiar with a similar cartoon from the 1920s? This cartoon by “James” was from the St Louis Star, 6 Nov, 1923.

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How the bicycle beats evolution and why Steve Jobs was so taken with this fact

Chart from Scientific American, 1973
Chart from Scientific American, 1973

Apple’s late leader Steve Jobs loved to liken the computer to the bicycle (“the computer … is the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds”) and there are two films of him recounting a fact he’d picked up from Scientific American. Below I’ll quote from the article Jobs was referring to – which showed that a person on a bicycle was more energy efficient than a condor in flight and many times more energy efficient than a person in an automobile – but first here are the films, clearly shot some years apart:

“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
Steve Jobs

The “somebody” at Scientific American was S. S. Wilson and the eleven-page article in question, on bicycle technology, was printed in the March 1973 edition of the magazine. Wilson was a lecturer in engineering at Oxford University and a fellow of St. Cross College. S. S. Wilson said: “My interest in bicycles dates back to school days. I have always owned and used a bicycle; during World War II, I several times cycled more than 100 miles in a day as a means of transport.”

scientificAmericanMarch1973

Wilson was also an enthusiast of human-powered flight and, had he been alive today, he would have no doubt worked on solar-powered flight. For all of the bicycle’s efficiencies, as stated by Wilson, the bicycle is nowhere near as efficient as Solar Impulse, the aircraft currently attempting to fly around the world.

[Wilson is not the Wilson who wrote the seminal Bicycling Science of 1974, that was David Gordon Wilson. Both Wilson’s were at the very first Velocity conference, held in Bremen, Germany in 1980.)

It’s worthwhile reading what S.S. Wilson had to say about the efficiencies of cycling:

“It is worth asking why such an apparently simple device as the bicycle should have had such a major effect on the acceleration of technology. The answer surely lies in the sheer humanity of the machine. Its purpose is to make it easier for an individual to move about, and this the bicycle achieves in a way that quite outdoes natural evolution.

“When one compares the energy consumed in moving a certain distance as a function of body weight for a variety of animals and machines, one finds that an unaided walking man does fairly well (consuming about .75 calorie per gram per kilometer), but he is not as efficient as a horse, a salmon or a jet transport. With the aid of a bicycle, however, the man’s energy consumption for a given distance is reduced to about a fifth (roughly .15 calorie per gram per kilometer).

“Therefore, apart from increasing his unaided speed by a factor of three or four, the cyclist improves his efficiency rating to No. 1 among moving creatures and machines.

“For those of us in the overdeveloped world the bicycle offers a real alternative to the automobile, if we are prepared to recognize and grasp the opportunities by planning our living and working environment in such a way as to induce the use of these humane machines.

“The possible inducements are many: cycleways to reduce the danger to cyclists of automobile traffic, bicycle parking stations, facilities for the transportation of bicycles by rail and bus, and public bicycles for “park and pedal” service. Already bicycling is often the best way to get around quickly in city centers.

“If one were to give a short prescription for dealing rationally with the world’s problems of development, transportation, health and the efficient use of resources, one could do worse than the simple formula: Cycle and recycle.”

Wilson’s article was later picked up by philosopher Ivan Illich who, in his 1978 pamphlet Toward a History of Needs, wrote:

“Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.

“Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored.”

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88 of the very best quotes about bicycles and cycling

Poets, presidents, prime ministers and prime-time newscasters have said great things about cycling. No doubt I’ll put a fair few of their quotes in my book – due in 2016 – but in the meantime here’s a selection … 

einsteinquote

“Riding bicycles will not only benefit the individual doing it, but the world at large.”
Udo E. Simonis, Emeritus Professor of Environmental Policy at the Science Centre, Berlin, January 2010

“Truly, the bicycle is the most influential piece of product design ever.”
Hugh Pearman, Design Week, 12 June 2008

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”
Sherlock Holmes author, Arthur Conan Doyle, Scientific American, 1896

“Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride.”
John F. Kennedy

Audrey Hepburn, cycle and dog chic, 1957

“Ever see Audrey Hepburn on a bicycle? No, me neither. Catherine Deneuve? Nope. The very notion of either of them, surely two of the most elegant women the world has ever known, getting into the gear and clambering on board a bike is a full-frontal assault on beauty.”
Roslyn Dee, columnist, Irish Daily Mail, February 2nd 2008

“Nothing compares to getting your heart rate up to 170-something, riding hard for an hour-twenty, getting off and not hurting, as opposed to 24 minutes of running, at the end of which I hurt. When you ride a bike and you get your heart rate up and you’re out, after 30 or 40 minutes your mind tends to expand; it tends to relax.”
[Former] President George ‘Dubya’ Bush, May 2004

“When you ride hard on a mountain bike, sometimes you fall, otherwise you’re not riding hard.”
Former US president George ‘Dubya’ Bush, July 2005, following a crash into a bike cop at the G8 summit, Gleneagles, Scotland

“Cycling has encountered more enemies than any other form of exercise.”
19th-century author Louis Baudry de Saunier

“[Commuting by bicycle is] an absolutely essential part of my day. It’s mind-clearing, invigorating. I get to go out and pedal through the countryside in the early morning hours, and see life come back and rejuvenate every day as the sun is coming out.”
James L. Jones, former US Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Barack Obama’s former national security advisor

“Cycling is possibly the greatest and most pleasurable form of transport ever invented. Its like walking only with one-tenth of the effort. Ride through a city and you can understand its geography in a way that no motorist, contained by one-way signs and traffic jams, will ever be able to. You can whiz from one side to the other in minutes. You can overtake £250,000 sports cars that are going nowhere fast. You can park pretty much anywhere. It truly is one of the greatest feelings of freedom once can have in a metropolitan environment. It’s amazing you can feel this free in a modern city.”
Daniel Pemberton, The Book of Idle Pleasures

 

“Meet the future; the future mode of transportation for this weary Western world. Now I’m not gonna make a lot of extravagant claims for this little machine. Sure, it’ll change your whole life for the better, but that’s all.”
Bicycle salesman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969

“The finest mode of transport known to man.”
TV boffin and folder enthusiast Adam Hart-Davis on the bicycle. Source: numerous.

Ned Flanders: “You were bicycling two abreast?”
Homer Simpson: “I wish. We were bicycling to a lake.”
The Simpsons, ‘Dangerous Curves’ (Episode 2005), first broadcast, November 10th 2008

“An engineer designing from scratch could hardly concoct a better device to unclog modern roads – cheap, nonpolluting, small and silent…”
Rick Smith, International Herald Tribune, May 2006

“I began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world, upon whose spinning wheel we must all earn to ride, or fall into the sluiceways of oblivion and despair. That which made me succeed with the bicycle was precisely what had gained me a measure of success in life — it was the hardihood of spirit that led me to begin, the persistence of will that held me to my task, and the patience that was willing to begin again when the last stroke had failed. And so I found high moral uses in the bicycle and can commend it as a teacher without pulpit or creed. She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life.”
Frances E. Willard, ‘How I Learned To Ride The Bicycle’, 1895

“One of the most important days of my life, was when I learned to ride a bicycle.”
Michael Palin

“If I come back from a ride That Way I have to go along That Road…but the surface is rough pocked blacktop, pothole scabs…Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, kerthunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. Thunk. Which after 4 hours in the saddle is rather weary. But somewhere between the last time and the now that stretch of road has all been mended. Beautiful smooth brand new fast deep thick black tarmac. No more thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, kerthunk, thunk, but shoosh. Just Shooooooooooooooooooooooosh.”
Jo Burt, Road.cc, January 2011

“I used to work in a bank when I was younger and to me it doesn’t matter whether it’s raining or the sun is shining or whatever: as long as I’m riding a bike I know I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
Pro racer Mark Cavendish, after the second of his four stage wins in the 2008 Tour de France.

“Riding a bike is everything to a cyclist. The friendship and camaraderie you have with other cyclists …to a cyclist, it was the be-all and end-all of your life.”
Tommy Godwin, double bronze medal winner in the 1,000m time trial and the team pursuit in the 1948 Olympics in London.

“It’s a risky business being a cyclist in the UK, there are a lot of people who really dislike us. It’s the Jeremy Clarkson influence – we’re hated on the roads. We just hope people realise we are just flesh and bones on two wheels.”
Victoria Pendleton, gold medal winner in the women’s sprint at the Beijing Olympics, 2008.

“At that age, it’s one of the worse things in the world to wake up and not see your bike where you left it.”
Hip-hop star 50 Cent, real name Curtis Jackson, on the theft of his childhood bike

“People love cycling but hate cyclists.”
Peter Zanzottera, senior consultant at transport consultancy Steer Davies Gleave, to Scottish Parliament’s Transport Committee, November 24th 2009

“There is something about the miscreant cyclist that seems to get people more exercised than they are about the misbehaving motorist…When people get into cars, their metal encasement turns them into robots in our minds, and we’re grateful to them for any act of courtesy. We’re grateful that they don’t deliberately kill children, then laugh a rasping, metallic laugh…[Cyclists] are more civic-minded than anyone else travelling in any other manner, bar by foot. If they do run into someone, they at least (like the bee) do their victim the favour of hurting themselves in the process, which is why, if you had any sense, you’d save your hatred for the motorist, who (like the wasp) injures without care.”
Zoe Williams, The Guardian, 4th February 2006

“I’m lazy. But it’s the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn’t like walking or carrying things.”
Lech Walesa

“The cyclist is a man half made of flesh and half of steel that only our century of science and iron could have spawned.”
19th-century author Louis Baudry de Saunier

“The place of cycling in our society is set to grow, and I am committed to doing everything possible to encourage that.”
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, June 26th 2008  Hmmm…

“Cycling to work is an important issue for business – the more who do it, the more our communities will support it. Healthy and green, cycling is worthy of the support of every business in the land.”
Sir Digby Jones, former director general of the Confederation for British Industry, February 2006

“[On] Valentine’s Day, I’ll present my beloved with a shiny bauble I bought from our favorite store. Next I’ll take my honey out for a sunset cruise, maybe to the spot where we first got acquainted. Later, back home, I’ll give my baby a bath. Then I’ll gently dry my sweetie and turn out the lights…I’m talking, of course, about my bike…I humbly submit that my bike and I make a better team than most relationships I’ve seen…Your bicycle invigorates you, strengthens you, relaxes you, lets you vent your frustrations without interrupting, nodding off or making judgments. Your bicycle helps you meet other people. Your bicycle always goes where you want to go. And if you buy your bicycle a box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day, you get to eat them all.”
Scott Martin, roadbikerider.com

“To possess a bicycle is to be able first to look at it, then to touch it. But touching is revealing as insufficient; what is necessary is to be able to get on the bicycle and take a ride. But this gratuitous ride is likewise insufficient; it would be necessary to use the bicycle to go on some errands…Finally, as one could foresee, handing over a bank note is enough to make a bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.”
“Being and nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology”? By Jean-Paul Sartre

“Devised almost 200 years ago by a practical German baron, the bicycle has evolved into an urban staple. Beloved of children, prized by inner-city commuters, it can be a lifesaver when summer smog chokes the nation.”
Globe and Mail, Canada, 6th June 2006.

“Few articles ever used by man have created so great a revolution in social conditions as the bicycle.”
US Census Report, 1900

“[Jeremy Clarkson] always moans on about drivers being attacked. We should be hounding them even more – cars have no place in an urban environment.”
John Grimshaw, founder and chief engineer, Sustrans, The Guardian, June 8th 2005.

“I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle; I want to ride my bicycle; I want to ride my bike; I want to ride my bicycle; I want to ride it where I like…; I don’t believe in Peter Pan, Frankenstein or Superman; All I wanna do is bicycle, bicycle, bicycle…”
Freddie Mercury, Queen, 1978

“Bicycling…is the nearest approximation I know to the flight of birds. The airplane simply carries a man on its back like an obedient Pegasus; it gives him no wings of his own. There are movements on a bicycle corresponding to almost all the variations in the flight of the larger birds. Plunging free downhill is like a hawk stooping. On the level stretches you may pedal with a steady rhythm like a heron flapping; or you may, like an accipitrine hawk, alternate rapid pedaling with gliding. If you want to test the force and direction of the wind, there is no better way than to circle, banked inward, like a turkey vulture. When you have the wind against you, headway is best made by yawing or wavering, like a crow flying upwind. I have climbed a steep hill by circling or spiraling, rising each time on the upturn with the momentum of the downturn, like any soaring bird. I have shot in and out of stalled traffic like a goshawk through the woods.”
Birdwatching author Louis J Halle ‘Spring in Washington’, 1947/1957

“I’ll tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a bike. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammelled womanhood.”
Susan B. Anthony, 1896

Street Space For 60 People: Car, Bus, Bicycle

“Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.

“Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man’s radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.

IvanIllich“The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred.

“Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored.”
Ivan Illich, Toward a History of Needs, 1978

“You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.”
Playwright Alan Bennett, Boston Globe, June 2006

“Light. Strong. Cheap. Pick two.”
Engineer and brand champion Keith Bontrager on bicycle and accessory manufacturing choices.

“When my legs hurt, I say: “Shut up legs! Do what I tell you to do!”
Jens Voigt

“Bicycles are the indicator species of a community, like shellfish in a bay.”
P. Martin Scott

“The more I’ve been mountain biking, the more I see myself as a female. In letting your femininity go to become a mountain biker, you actually find it more.”
Niki Gudex, ‘FHM magazine’, February 2005

“To me the bicycle is in many ways a more satisfactory invention than the automobile. It is consonant with the independence of man because it works under his own power entirely. There is no combustion of some petroleum product..to set the pedals going. Purely mechanical instruments like watches and bicycles are to be preferred to engines that depend on the purchase of power from foreign sources….The price of power is enslavement.”
Birdwatching author Louis J Halle ‘Spring in Washington’, 1947/1957

“There may be a better land where bicycle saddles are made of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard.”
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, 1900

“The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”
Iris Murdoch, ‘The Red and the Green’

“Affordable, reliable transportation is no doubt one of the most valuable, but unrecognized tools of relief and development work there is. A bicycle is an industrial revolution in an individual’s life.”
F. K. Day, founder and president, World Bicycle Relief, 2012

“The bicycle was a perfect way of getting a lot of fresh air. We noticed that it was an anti-stress sport because it concentrated totally on the bicycle. When you ride a bicycle, you don’t think about the new album, about how we are going to launch it. We realised that during three or four hours on the bicycle, we were discussing things like, ‘Oh, you have new brakes’, ‘Oh, where did you get your handlebars?’, ‘Is the saddle well adjusted?’, or ‘What about the pedals?’, things that were only connected with cycling.”
Maxime Schmitt, Kraftwerk friend and collaborator, ‘Kraftwerk: Man, Machine, Music’ (SAF Publishing, 2001)

“Such historians as record the tides of social manners and morals, have neglected the bicycle. Yet would it be difficult to deny that [the bicycle] has been responsible for more movement in manners and morals than anything since Charles the Second … Under its influence, wholly or in part, have wilted chaperons, long and narrow skirts, tight corsets, hair that would come down, black stockings, thick ankles, large hats, prudery and fear of the dark; under its influence, wholly or in part, have bloomed week-ends, strong nerves, strong legs, strong language, knickers, knowledge of make and shape, knowledge of woods and pastures, equality of sex, good digestion and professional occupation.”
John Galsworthy, author of *The Forsyte Saga*, wrote of the bicycle’s social significance in the explanatory *On Forsyte Change*, 1930, which described the influences on his famous book’s characters, an upper-middle-class English family, similar to his own. Many of the upwardly mobile characters in the three Forsyte novels took to cycling: “Cicely and Rachel and Imogen and all the young people – they all rode those bicycles now and went off Goodness knew where.” Later, they took to motor cars, but it had been bicycles that had afforded them their first experience of freedom, said Galsworthy.

“One Less Car” & “We are not blocking traffic; we are traffic.”
Cycle advocacy slogans

“Government must help to eliminate cars so that bicycles can help to eliminate government.” Anarchist slogan from the Netherlands, 1970s.

“A Zen teacher saw five of his students returning from the market, riding their bicycles. When they arrived at the monastery and had dismounted, the teacher asked the students, “Why are you riding your bicycles?”

The first student replied, “The bicycle is carrying this sack of potatoes. I am glad that I do not have to carry them on my back!” The teacher praised the first student. “You are a smart boy! When you grow old, you will not walk hunched over like I do.”

The second student replied, “I love to watch the trees and fields pass by as I roll down the path!” The teacher commended the second student, “Your eyes are open, and you see the world.”

The third student replied, “When I ride my bicycle, I am content to chant nam myoho renge kyo.” The teacher gave his praise to the third student, “Your mind will roll with the ease of a newly trued wheel.”

The fourth student replied, “Riding my bicycle, I live in harmony with all sentient beings.” The teacher was pleased and said to the fourth student, “You are riding on the golden path of non-harming.”

The fifth student replied, “I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle.” The teacher sat at the feet of the fifth student and said, “I am your student.”’
Zen proverb

“When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man’s convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man’s brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle.”
Elizabeth West, ‘Hovel in the Hills’

“The bicycle is a curious vehicle. Its passenger is its engine.”
John Howard

“Ordinary things merely annoy people. Inspired hatred is one more bit of evidence that bicycles are something great, something beyond the mundane – something worthy of grand animosity.”
Bill Strickland, The Quotable Cyclist.

“When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.”
Emo Philips

“A bicycle does get you there and more And there is always the thin edge of danger to keep you alert and comfortably apprehensive. Dogs become dogs again and snap at your raincoat; potholes become personal. And getting there is all the fun.”
Bill Emerson

“When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.”
H.G. Wells
Note: this quote, used on a gazillion email signatures and topping a ton of articles about cycling, may not be from the pen or the lips of H.G. Wells. Many are those who have tried to find the original source, myself included; all have so far failed.

“The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.”
Ann Strong, Minneapolis Tribune, 1895

“I took care of my wheel as one would look after a Rolls Royce. If it needed repairs I always brought it to the same shop on Myrtle Avenue run by a negro named Ed Perry. He handled the bike with kid gloves, you might say. He would always see to it that neither front nor back wheel wobbled. Often he would do a job for me without pay, because, as he put it, he never saw a man so in love with his bike as I was.”
Henry Miller, ‘My Bike and Other Friends’

“I won’t pretend I’ve read much Heidegger (or any, in fact), but I’d like to think Martin had just spent a happy half-hour in Freiburg’s bike shop when he was struck by “the thinginess of things”. There it is, a cornucopia of exquisitely machined alloys, lustrous carbon-fibre frames, and innumerable form-fitting garments in hi-tech fabrics. Things don’t much thingier than this.”
Matt Seaton, The Guardian, September 14th 2005

“The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.”
Sloan Wilson

“The bicycle is already a musical instrument on its own. The noise of the bicycle chain, the pedal and gear mechanism, for example, the breathing of the cyclist, we have incorporated all this in the Kraftwerk sound…When your bike functions best, you don’t hear it – it’s silent, there’s no cracking, just shhhh – you’re gliding. It’s the same when you’re in good shape and you’re in form and you’re riding your bike, you hear nothing – maybe just a little bit of breath.”
Maxime Schmitt, Kraftwerk friend and collaborator, ‘Kraftwerk: Man, Machine, Music’ (SAF Publishing, 2001)

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”
Ernest Hemingway

“When Cameron’s Conservatives come to power it will be a golden age for cyclists and an Elysium of cycle lanes, bike racks, and sharia law for bike thieves. And I hope that cycling in London will become almost Chinese in its ubiquity.”
Boris Johnson, The Guardian, March 18, 2006

“Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.”
George Bernard Shaw

“If you brake, you don’t win.”
Former racer Mario Cipollini

“How about if we all just try to follow these very simple Rules of the Road? Drive like the person ahead on the bike is your son/daughter. Ride like the cars are ambulances carrying your loved ones to the emergency room. This should cover everything, unless you are complete sociopath.”
Letter to VeloNews from David Desautels, Fort Bragg, California

“[A bicycle is] an unparalled merger of a toy, a utilitarian vehicle, and sporting equipment. The bicycle can be used in so many ways, and approaches perfection in each use. For instance, the bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon. A person pedalling a bike uses energy more efficiently than a gazelle or an eagle. And a triangle-framed bicycles can easily carry ten times its own weight – a capacity no automobile, airplane or bridge can match.”
Bill Strickland

“The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.”
William Saroyan, ‘The Noiseless Tenor’

fish“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
Irina Dunn, 1970


“I live and breathe bike transportation. Does that make me a granola-crunching, world-saving utopian? Actually, my riding has a lot to do with what’s good for me. Riding makes me healthy. It saves me time. It makes me feel good and gives me energy to do more in life. Of course, getting around by bike is a green thing to do. And altruism does have its rewards. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind saving the world. Makes one want to crunch some granola.”
US bike builder Joe Breeze, VeloNews, 2005

“I’m a cyclist not simply in the sense that I ride a bike, but in the sense that some people are socialists or Christian fundamentalists or ethical realists – that is, cycling is my ideology, a system of thought based on purity and economy of motion, kindness to the environment and drop handlebars, and I want to convert others.”
Journalist Robert Hanks, The Independent, 15th August 2005

“Bicycles are almost as good as guitars for meeting girls.”
Bob Weir, Grateful Dead

“A bicycle is a bit like a guitar in that they are both inert objects that only come alive and flourish when put in contact with a human being. Both have the ability to concentrate the mind. Just as when you are performing, you tend to lose yourself when you are on the bike. For those precious hours that you are in the saddle, nothing else matters except the bike and the road ahead.”
Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, The Ride Journal, issue 3, November 2009

“I had an interview this morning at the BBC, and I was a bit early. I walked around the block and there’s a bicycle shop there. And I just started looking at these bicycles, and then I thought, What am I doing? I already have a bicycle. But I like bicycles … They’re beautiful bicycles … And I’m just standing there, edging around this window, just the way I would in a guitar shop … it’s because I like them. I’ve always liked bicycles, and I’ll probably go on liking bicycles.”
Mark Knopfler, ex of Dire Straits, Salon.com, March 2015

“I relax by taking my bicycle apart and putting it back together again.”
Michelle Pfeiffer

“After a long day on my bicycle, I feel refreshed, cleansed, purified. I feel that I have established contact with my environment and that I am at peace. On days like that I am permeated with a profound gratitude for my bicycle … What a wonderful tonic to be exposed to bright sunshine, drenching rain, choking dust, dripping fog, rigid air, punishing winds! I will never forget the day I climbed the Puy Mary. There were two of us on a fine day in May. We started in the sunshine and stripped to the waist. Halfway, clouds enveloped us and the temperature tumbled. Gradually it got colder and wetter, but we did not notice it. In fact, it heightened our pleasure. We did not bother to put on our jackets or our capes, and we arrived at the little hotel at the top with rivulets of rain and sweat running down our sides. I tingled from top to bottom.”
Paul de Vivie, “Vélocio”, Le Cycliste, France, 1911

“People like to travel: that is why the grass is greener over the fence. We are walkers – our natural means of travel is to put one foot in front of the other. The bicycle seduces our basic nature by making walking exciting. It lets us take 10-foot strides at 160 paces a minute. That’s 20 miles an hour, instead of 4 or 5… It is not only how fast you go – cars are faster and jet planes faster still. But jet-plane travel is frustrating boredom – at least the car gives the pictorial illusion of travel. Cycling does it all – you have the complete satisfaction of arriving because your mind has chosen the path and steered you over it; your eyes have seen it; your muscles have felt it; your breathing, circulatory and digestive systems have all done their natural functions better than ever, and every part of your being knows you have traveled and arrived.”
John Forester,’Effective Cycling’ (I won’t quote any other Forester materials here …)

“In the past two decades, thousands of miles of trails have been paved in the United States, but many of them look as if they were designed by someone who’d never ridden a bike. By consulting more with the people who do a lot of travelling under their own power, transportation planners ought to be able to come up with imaginative schemes for making roads, paths and sidewalks more usable to them, and maybe help cut down a bit on our reliance on the automobile.”
Trouble on the Trail, Washington Post op-ed, May 18th, 1993

“In politics, one can learn some things from cycling, such as how to have character and courage. Sometimes in politics there isn’t enough of those things.”
Guy Verhofstadt, Prime Minister of Belgium, 2004

“Whoever invented the bicycle deserves the thanks of humanity.”
Lord Charles Beresford

“Marriage is a wonderful invention; but then again, so is a bicycle repair kit.”
Billy Connolly

“My wife…thinks cycling is great way to spend time as a family while burning a few calories. For her, the family ride is quality time. Then again, she does not have the trailer with 50 or so stuffed animals and the 2-year-old singing “Old McDonald” attached to her bike as we climb what must be Mont Ventoux. Hmm … now that I think about it, cycling is the best way to burn a bazillion calories and hang with the family.”
US bike shop owner John Kibodeaux, VeloNews, 2005

“I live on a bicycle…I live in central London, probably 90 percent of my travel is done on a bicycle. I love bicycles.”
Film director Guy Ritchie, former hubby of Madonna, telling Jeremy Clarkson about his fleet of expensive vehicles but admitting he prefers to cycle.

“[Cycling] is easily the quickest way around central London, faster than bus, Tube or taxi. You can predict precisely how long every journey will take, regardless of traffic jams, Tube strikes or leaves on the line. It provides excellent exercise. It does not pollute the atmosphere. It does not clog up the streets.”
Newscaster Jeremy Paxman

“My whole day is built around meetings that can be achieved around bike rides. My contract actually offers me a free car from my home to my office and back, but I suppose I am addicted to cycling.”
Newscaster Jon Snow

“In the context of the great debates about identity politics – are you gay or straight, nationalist or republican, British or English and so on – I would ask, “Do you ride a bike?” I love everything about the machine – the sensation of the tyres on the road, the mobility – and I love the fact that you have this intimate relationship with the elements, and the landscape.”
Beatrix Campbell

“Cyclists…are the gods of the road.”
Actor, Nigel Havers, ‘The Daily Mail’, 13th June 2006

“Bicyclists…are heroes of the highways.”
Petrol A Wyatt

“Highway engineers are responsible for the nation’s obesity. They’re obsessed with roads that just encourage a sedentary lifestyle…The police want us in cars because they say there is less chance of being mugged, but if you encourage more people on to the streets, either walking or cycling, they will be safer.”
John Grimshaw, founder and chief engineer, Sustrans, ‘The Guardian’, June 8th 2005.

“MOTORISTS: Cyclists are not another species – most of them drive cars at least some of the time – and they’re not, by and large, wilfully stupid or reckless. But they experience the roads differently from you…So be patient. After all, it’s not as if getting rid of cyclists is a realistic option now – there are too many of them, and the numbers are growing all the time. And a few years down the line, as petrol gets more expensive, you might well end up as one of them yourself.”
Robert Hanks, ‘The Independent’, 12th June 2006

Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.”
H.G. Wells

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”
This is from the last line from a short piece by Mark Twain called ‘Taming the bicycle’. He wasn’t referring to a Safety bicycle, he was talking about an Ordinary, a high-wheeler. Twain’s account of learning how to ride an Ordinary is very funny.

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Forget Kestrel and Peugeot, carbon composite bicycles started with Carlton, in 1971

Most histories say it was Peugeot of France or Kestrel of America which made the first carbon bike, sometime in the 1980s. In fact, the first carbon-framed bicycle was made in Britain, and in 1971.

Many of today’s top bicycle makers – including companies such as Trek, Specialized, Giant and Cannondale – were founded in the early 1970s, thanks to the bicycling boom that started in 1970, and which is the subject of my proposed book, currently on Kickstarter. All make carbon-framed bicycles, all owe a debt of gratitude to Carlton. No, not me, the bicycle brand operated through the Specialist Bicycle Development Unit of Raleigh bicycles. The SBD may have been owned by Raleigh but it was operated independently by Gerald O’Donovan, a bike designer and engineer who was head of Carlton Cycles, a bespoke lightweight bike manufacturer. Raleigh had absorbed Carlton Cycles in 1960 at the behest of 1950s track star Reg Harris.

In 1970, ten years before Formula 1 would do likewise, O’Donovan started experimenting with carbon fibre. The new wonder material had been first demonstrated in 1958 by Union Carbide researcher Roger Bacon of the US but it took until 1963 before a production process was patented. This was granted to the UK’s Ministry of Defence via the National Research Development Corporation, a Government body established after the Second World War by the British Government to transfer technology from the public sector to the private. Scientists at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, Hampshire, perfected the production process of polyacrylonitrile, a material first described by Japan’s Agency of Industrial Science and Technology. The NRDC licensed the production process to three British companies, including Rolls-Royce. Rolls-Royce used the material in jet engine compressor blades but these proved vulnerable to damage from bird strikes, and development of the wonder material stalled.

The NRDC then sought other uses for carbon fibre and offered to help O’Donovan research the material for use on bicycles. He commissioned some tubes made from carbon composites and used aluminium lugs to bond them together. This carbon composite bicycle was displayed as a prototype machine on the Carlton Cycles booth at the Cycle and Motorcycle show in Harrogate in 1971. O’Donovan also commissioned carbon cranks and these were used by track riders, but production problems meant they disintegrated under the strains of track use.

Carlton carbon-fibre bicycle steals York-rally show, 1971

Dave Walsh of Universal Cycle Centre, a Rotherham bike shop, used to work at Raleigh’s Specialist Bicycle Development Unit. He said: “O’Donovan was a genius. He was well ahead of his time.”

O’Donovan’s experiments with carbon composites showed promising results. A report produced by the National Research Development Corporation said the Carlton bicycle was “so light it could easily be picked up with one finger,” adding that “carbon fibre reinforced plastic is twice as stiff as steel, yet weighs only one quarter as much.” This, the first ever carbon framed bicycle, was said to have had undergone extensive tests and was “soon to go into production.” However, this was not the case and the next leap forward for carbon came not from the UK but from the US.

Frank Appel, Richard Katner, Bill McCready and Jeffrey Lindskoog of the F.H. Appel Company designed a carbon fibre bicycle frame in 1975. This was produced for Graphite USA, a manufacturer of fishing rods. At roughly the same time, oil company Exxon, then a sponsor of a US road bike team, paid for the development of a carbon fibre frame bike from Graftek, a manufacturer of fishing rods and golf clubs. The Graftek G-1 had a aluminium frame wrapped in carbon fibre. The bike was used by the 1976 US Olympic team and was later sold to the public.

Jack Schmidt, who worked at Graftek in the 1970s, recalled:

“The Graftek carbon fibre tubes were an aluminium-carbon fibre hybrid. The epoxy impregnated pre-preg was cut and rolled onto the tubes in the proper fibre orientation. This Al-CF sandwich was wrapped with Tedlar tape under tension to compress the composite, then the tubes were put into an oven for curing. Both the ends of the corresponding tubes, the lugs and dropouts were coated with epoxy, then assembled in a holding fixture.”

European companies started working with composites in the early 1980s. French tube manufacturer Vitus produced carbon-wrapped alu tubes that were used on lugged bicycles by Peugeot. These bikes were used in the 1982 Tour de France. In 1986, Look built a lugged carbon frame which Greg Lemond rode to victory in Le Tour.

Also in 1986, Kestrel USA, a company founded by ex-employees from Graphite USA, produced the Kestrel 4000, a bike based on an all-carbon composite bike frame with smooth, aero lines. It’s this bike which most resembles those produced today, but it wasn’t the first.

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Women have been at the cutting edge of cycle advocacy since 1971

In Roads Were Not Built For Cars I had to sheepishly admit that the major characters in my book were all men – women played little part in the cycle advocacy movements of the 1890s. In the sequel (Bike Boom is on Kickstarter until mid-March) I can happily report there will be many women featured. In fact, women are now at the forefront of cycle advocacy; women such as Claire Prospert and Katja Leyendecker of Newcycling in Newcastle, Lizzie Reather, former chair of Leeds Cycling Campaign, Rosie Downes, campaigns manager for London Cycling Campaign, Dr. Rachel Aldred, the go-to academic on cycling, and Sally Hinchcliffe of Cycling Dumfries and the Cycling Embassy of GB.

And heading up Delivery Planning at Transport for London is Lilli Matson. She is responsible for the strategic planning and development of surface modes of transport including cycling. Formerly a member of the Government’s Commission for Integrated Transport she has also run her own transport consultancy and prior to that was in charge of transport policy at the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. Also at Transport for London is Sarah Burr, the senior strategy and planning manager for Surface Transport – she’s in charge of TfL’s Cycling Strategy and worked on the £914 million Mayor’s Cycling Vision for London.

However, in this posting I’d like to focus on five cycle advocates from North America, two well-known, three far less well-known. I’ll be fleshing out their biographies in Bike Boom but here’s some bare bones to be getting on with.

MIA BIRK
Portland, Oregon, didn’t become one of America’s top cycling cities by accident. Much of Portland’s bicycle culture grew up thanks to the inspiration, hard work and cajoling of Mia Birk. She was Portland’s Bicycle Program Manager from 1993 to 1999. She is now President of bicycle-friendly Alta Planning + Design of Portland, leading a huge team of planners and engineers.

“I fell in love with bicycling in 1990 while attending graduate school in Washington DC. Having grown up in suburban Dallas Texas, I was used to driving everywhere. Informed that there was no parking available near school, I borrowed my brother’s 10-speed Schwinn. Within a few weeks, I was in the best shape of my life. At the same time, I began researching transportation issues around the world and quickly saw that most successful cities plan well and invest in smart growth, complete streets, transit, and bicycling and walking infrastructure and incentives. I decided to focus my career on transforming communities into ones in which walking and bicycling are safe, normal, healthy and fun daily activities.”

CLAIRE MORISSETTE
Writers Eugene Sloan and Richard Ballantine famously plugged into the popularity of bicycling that erupted seemingly out of nowhere in 1970, and they helped cycling in the US and the UK to become even more popular. Less credit is usually given to women bicycle advocates yet figures such as Claire Morissette of Montreal were highly influential. Morissette was also influential globally, and her “cyclodrama” ideas – such as die-ins and other stunts to goad transportation officials and grab media attention, first used in Montreal in the 1970s – are still popular today.

Morissette was one of the co-founders of La Monde à Bicyclette. Bicycle access to the metro and the cycling link between Île Notre-Dame and the South Shore were campaign aims of MAB, campaign aims which were achieved. Montreal now has 600kms of cycle lanes, another achievement of Morissette and MAB.

Morissette wanted people out of cars, but also wanted fewer cars on the road, something she aimed to achieve by founding Montreal’s car-sharing program Communauto. This was formed decades before other cities went down the same route. The Claire-Morissette bike path in Montreal was named for her in 2008 – this is a protected cycle lane in the CBD.

JANETTE SADIK-KAHN
New York may not be Amsterdam yet but it’s the poster child for how a major world city can instal people-friendly infrastructure at low cost, quickly and radically. Sadik-Khan was the commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation from 2007 to 2013. A decade before her appointment she had worked on New York City’s Bicycle Master Plan. In her first year as commissioner NYC’s bike lanes tripled in length to 63 miles and in the following five years an additional 254 miles of bike lanes were painted. She was also in charge of installing a parking-protected bike lane on 9th Avenue, the first since Mayor Koch had ripped out his short-lived kerb-protected lanes in the 1980s.

Sadik-Kahn is now Chair of the Strategic Advisory Board of the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

“We brought [a] quick-acting approach to our cycling program, and in six years turned cycling into a real transportation option in New York. I think it’s fair to say it used to be a fairly scary place to ride a bike, and now New York has become one of the cycling capitals in the United States.

“We protected bikers by floating parking lanes, and it’s been great. Bike volumes have spiked. Injuries to all users, pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, are all down 50 percent. And we’ve built 30 miles of these protected bike lanes, and now you’re seeing them pop up all over the country.

“Not everybody liked the new bike lanes … One Brooklyn paper called [a] bike lane that we have on Prospect Park West ‘the most contested piece of land outside of the Gaza Strip.’

[But] if you dig below the headlines, though, you’ll see that the people were far ahead of the press, far ahead of the politicians.

“Nothing gets 100 percent support in any city. You’re not looking for unanimous approval, otherwise you wouldn’t build a thing—8.4 million New Yorkers, 8.4 million points of view, and everybody considers himself a traffic engineer. It is a matter of negotiation and we do tailor our projects to meet the local needs of the communities, but there’s never going to be 100 percent buy-in.

“If you want a street that’s safer to walk on, safer to drive on, safer to live with and play on, build a bike lane. And I think that cities across the country are getting that, and I think the city of New York got it long ago. I really do think the people are ahead of the politicians when it comes to their streets.”

BARBARA McCANN
The American Complete Streets movement was suggested in 2003 by Barbara McCann, then working for America Bikes, a coalition of bicycle advocacy groups, including the League of American Bicyclists. Complete Streets quickly became about much more than bicycles. The National Complete Streets Coalition, founded in 2005, was led by America Bikes and roped in a number of influential and mainstream non-cycling organisations.⁠ McCann became Executive Director, before moving in January 2014 to become a Director at the US Department of Transportation.⁠

Ellen Fletcher

ELLEN FLETCHER
Born in Germany to Jewish parents and evacuated to England on Kindertransport in 1938 Ellen Fletcher emigrated to America in 1946 and settled in what would become Silicon Valley, California. In Palo Alto in 1971 she became a vocal bicycle advocate after seeing the danger her son faced when travelling to school. She died in 2013, ten years after a Palo Alto road had been named in her honour – the Bryant Street Bicycle Boulevard became the Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard. Between 1977 and 1989 Fletcher was a Palo Alto City Council member, and rode to all meetings.

Ellen Fletcher's bike

“I was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1928 and was sent to England 10 years later. I don’t remember seeing anyone ride a bicycle in Berlin, but almost everyone, or so it seemed, rode a bicycle in England.

“So I started riding, too. As I grew up I enjoyed riding my bike so much I took many pleasure rides, as well as the regular rides for various errands.

“I moved to New York City in 1946 at the age of 17. The extreme crowding on public transit soon enticed me back on a bike, a rarity in the City in those days. I was the only one using the bike racks at Hunter College “uptown” in the Bronx all year round.

“Moving to the California suburbs in 1958 with a baby, I thought my biking days were over. But it wasn’t long before I was again back on the bike, at least for short trips. But those short trips expanded greatly, partly for ideological reasons during the Arab oil boycott.

“When my son entered elementary school here in Palo Alto I volunteered to be “Safety Chair” for the PTA. That got me started in bicycle advocacy. Bike lanes, under and over crossings at major obstacles, bikes on trains and buses and the Nation’s first bicycle boulevard.

“At one point when the City Council balked at adopting some bike improvement policies in its General Plan, I decided to run for a seat on the City Council myself and served on the Council for twelve years, from 1977 to 1989.”

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There will be many more women cycle advocates featured in the book.

Photo credits: Richard Masoner

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DfT poster: “You can never give a bike too much room”

In 1985, the Department of Transport (when it was still “of” and not “for”, and long after it had been the Ministry of Transport) erected a poster in London with a real elongated bicycle, telling passing motorists that “You can never give a bike too much room.”

But as is clear from this piece on BBC1’s John Craven’s Newsround, the rest of the campaign was filled with standard fare, much of it victim blaming: “If you’re going to use the road, use your eyes” and “Dead. Obvious.”

Try and ignore the fact reporter Roger Finn said 100 cyclists were killed each day (he should have said about 100+ were killed each year) and listen to what Tim [Feeby?] of London Cycling Campaign said:

“We need cycle lanes on main roads, crossing of the major roads, and [the Department of Transport] has to stop building massive motorways in urban areas which will make conditions worse for everybody, not just cyclists.”

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Ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive, ee-lee-min-ate the negative

“Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.”

From Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry, 1973.

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[tw_dropcap]W[/tw_dropcap]hy am I writing Bike Boom? Listen to Jack Thurston’s The Bike Show. I may have said “stay positive, keep pushing” more than once. This is not to say Bike Boom will be happy, clappy, everything’s rosy – it will be gritty, realistic and always factual. But if planners and politicians are to “buy” in to cycling we can’t just give them messages of doom and gloom. We won’t get meaningful amounts of bicycle infrastructure by saying how dreadful cycling is, and how the modal share is pitifully low. Pity won’t bring cycleways. (Nor will optimism alone, of course, and there are times when protesting is right and proper – what’s almost certain to bring about diddly-squat is unrelenting pessimism.)

Getting new people to use bicycles for everyday, normal journeys will require more than infrastructure. It’s important to campaign for safer streets but if we demonise the use of bicycles on the unreconstructed streets of Britain and America – and everywhere else that’s not the Netherlands – we risk pushing away, for ever, the very people we could be attracting. Undoubtedly, some of the £1bn promised for cycling in London came about because of negative campaigning but it mostly came about because more people are cycling in London, despite the dangers. Dangers which are real on far too many roads, and, clearly, the fear of having to mix with distracted/speeding motorists is a huge deterrent to cycling, but not every road is like that and it’s counter-productive to claim that every single road is a death-trap.

Cycle advocates must never stop arguing for better and safer facilities for cyclists (for sure, they’re needed) but advertisers and marketers have known for a very long time that positive messages far far out-sell negative ones. In his classic 1923 book, Scientific Advertising, advertising guru Claude Hopkins, wrote:

“Show a bright side, the happy and attractive side, not the dark and uninviting side of things. Show beauty, not homeliness; health, not sickness. Don’t show the wrinkles you propose to remove, but the face as it will appear. Your customers know all about wrinkles.

“We are attracted by sunshine, beauty, happiness, health, success. Then point the way to them, not the way out of the opposite. Picture envied people, not the envious. Tell people what to do, not what to avoid.

“Compare the results of two ads, one negative, one positive. One presenting the dark side, one the bright side. One warning, the other inviting. You will be surprised. You will find that the positive ad out pulls the other four to one.”

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Speed sells

Cycling has many well-understood health and economic benefits but a key benefit is often overlooked – urban nippiness. Motorists slow to a crawl in “rush” hour; those on bicycles don’t. Many people perceive cycling to be a slow form of transport, which it is, if you have to undertake a long journey. Short hops are swift on a bike. There’s a chapter on the history of speed in Roads Were Not Built For Cars, and I’ll explore the subject again in Bike Boom.

UmbertoBoccioniDynamismofaCyclist1913

The illustration above is by Italian Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni. The sketch was used for Boccioni’s “Dynamism of a Cyclist”, below, painted in 1913. I prefer the sketch because it’s a more graphic illustration of cycling’s dynamism.

dynamism-of-a-cyclist-1913

Raleigh bicycle poster 1932

Raleigh stressed speed in the 1932 advert above, even though it was selling utility bikes to women.

Speed doesn’t have to mean head down, sweat and Lycra. Cycle routes which steer away from the fastest A to B routes may direct cyclists away from motorised traffic but it’s not just MAMILs who want to follow ‘desire lines’, the shortest and more desirable routes.

In the UK, dedicated cycle routes are often circuitous, interrupted by junctions where cyclists do not have priority. They can add precious time to journeys. For cycleways to be effective, they must be not only made safe for hesitant cyclists, they must be made fast. By fast, read direct.

Copenhagen traffic light greenwave

Copenhagen does this well. Traffic lights propel cyclists on a ‘Green wave’: pedal at 20kmh and you hit green for much of your journey. The green wave is set to work best towards the city centre in the morning rush hour; and away from the city centre at 12 to 6pm.

Those who use their bikes to get to work want to arrive in the least time possible. When cycleways are provided, they need to be very wide, and well designed. For many of today’s advocates this means one, Dutch-style network rather than a fast network for MAMILs and a slower network for 8 and 80 year olds.

This hasn’t always been the preferred option. In 1996, the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, writing about bike paths, said:

“The fast cycle commuter must not be driven off the highway onto a route that is designed for a 12-year-old or a novice on a leisure trip, because if that happens, the whole attempt to enlarge the use of the bicycle will have failed.”

While the “dual network” approach is now largely discredited it’s worthwhile looking at that phrase “fast cycle commuter”. It does not just have to mean a young, fit, male cyclist on a carbon road bike. Dutch roadsters can be pedalled fast, and so can “Santander Boris Bikes”. For some people, bicycles might be “aids to walking” but if bikes travelled no faster than pedestrians, why cycle at all?

Joe Breeze with Breezer #1 (built 1977)

In 2011 I chatted about speed with Joe Breeze, one of the founding fathers of mountain biking. He may have built the first designed-for-the-job clunker (it was Gary Fisher who helped popularise the name ‘mountain bike’) but Breeze got into the bike biz to spread his love of utility cycling, cycling from town to town. His father built race cars in California, but rode to work on a bicycle. Breeze Jnr started racing bikes to prove what Raleigh and others had been promoting: that bicycles are fast.

“In the 1970s, I saw road racing as a stepping stone. Bicycles in America were seen as a children’s sidewalk toy, for riding round your neighbourhood only. I saw cycling, through my father, as a way to get somewhere. And through racing you could show people how quickly you can get from A to B. Maybe there’d be a little squib in the newspaper about it the next day and people would go ‘oh, you can get from A to B in a short amount of time.’”

Speed – to and from work – remains important. A survey of Copenhagen bicycle users found that the number one reason people ride is because it’s faster than any other mode of transport. Fifty-five percent of Copenhagen riders said they bike because it’s fast. Only 9 percent of Copenhagen bicycle users ride because it’s deemed good for the environment.

So, when pushing for dedicated bicycle infrastructure we must always bear in mind that today, and in the past, speed has always gone hand in hand with convenience. Make cycling slow and it loses a big part of its appeal.

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There are no measures that will get me to cycle, say 40% of respondents to YouGuv survey

Over on BikeHub.co.uk I’ve published an article on a new YouGov survey, commissioned by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. The RoSPA press release states that the overwhelming majority of people in Britain would support greater provision for people on bicycles. The research was done online over two days at the end of February and involved 2,169 people, 58 percent of whom said they never ever cycle. 40 percent said no amount of road safety campaigns, slower motorists or separated cycle infrastructure would encourage them to ride bicycles.

I asked RoSPA for the YouGuv survey questions and results, and here they are.

Oi, Gov't, don't build more roads! But do reduce rail fares. 34 percent of those asked want cycle networks created.
Oi, Gov’t, don’t build more roads! But do reduce rail fares. (People also want reduced congestion and cheaper petrol – right hand, meet left.) 34 percent of those asked want cycle networks created.
58 percent of those asked never cycle. Nine percent cycle at least once a week.
58 percent of those asked never cycle. Nine percent cycle at least once a week.
36 percent of those asked would like to cycle more often. 44 percent said "about the same" (which can mean "never", too).
36 percent of those asked would like to cycle more often. 44 percent said “about the same” (which can mean “never”, too).
When asked what's stopping you from cycling the top answer concerned safety on the roads. But 32 percent of people said cycling "isn't a realistic option for the type of journeys I take." 24 percent complained about poor weather (remember, the survey was done in February). "I lack the motivation to cycle," is perhaps one of the key answers, if that could be linked to the same sort of laziness that sees the majority of people stop walking when they use escalators.
When asked what’s stopping you from cycling the top answer concerned safety on the roads. But 32 percent of people said cycling “isn’t a realistic option for the type of journeys I take.” 24 percent complained about poor weather (remember, the survey was done in February). “I lack the motivation to cycle,” is perhaps one of the key answers, if that could be linked to the same sort of laziness that sees the majority of people stop walking when they use escalators.
If there were safer roads and motorists paid more attention would this affect how often you cycle? No, said 52 percent of those asked.
If there were safer roads and motorists paid more attention would this affect how often you cycle? No, said 52 percent of those asked.
When asked how unsafe cycling felt in their localities, 41 percent of people said it was "fairly safe". A third said it was "fairly unsafe" and only 15 percent of those asked said their localities were "very unsafe" for cycling.
When asked how unsafe cycling felt in their localities, 41 percent of people said it was “fairly safe”. A third said it was “fairly unsafe” and only 15 percent of those asked said their localities were “very unsafe” for cycling.
While 52 percent of those questioned never cycled, the majority of all respondents said more should be done to cater for the needs of cyclists, including "cycle lanes, changing the route layout, etc." Only 16 percent were opposed.
While 52 percent of those questioned never cycled, the majority of all respondents said more should be done to cater for the needs of cyclists, including “cycle lanes, changing the route layout, etc.” Only 16 percent were opposed.
Those who said they supported more provision for cyclists were highly in favour of separated cycle infrastructure. Surprisingly, and perhaps pointedly, only 20 percent wanted to see car speeds reduced.
Those who said they supported more provision for cyclists were highly in favour of separated cycle infrastructure. Surprisingly, and perhaps pointedly, only 20 percent wanted to see car speeds reduced.
Haters are gonna hate, and of those opposed to provision for cyclists 59 percent said they want money to be spent on other road project. 52 percent don't like the idea of road space reallocation. 38 percent said such provision would create "crowded roads."
Haters are gonna hate, and of those opposed to provision for cyclists 59 percent said they want money to be spent on other road project. 52 percent don’t like the idea of road space reallocation. 38 percent said such provision would create “crowded roads.”
38 percent of those asked would cycle more often if there were safe cycle routes, but 40 percent said no measures could make them cycle more often.
38 percent of those asked would cycle more often if there were safe cycle routes, but 40 percent said no measures could make them cycle more often.

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