If you love your car, you need to ride a bike. I have a slightly complicated rationale for this position, so you to have to pay slightly more attention than usual for a Recreati story. It begins with Superstorm Sandy and our human need to know the cause of horrible things.
If we have more superstorms and more open water in the arctic and…here you can fill in any meteorological horror…people will decide that all this weather hell must be caused by something. More specifically, they’ll become convinced that it must be caused by something they can identify. We have a long history of naming the causes of things, sometimes accurately and sometimes not. (Banshees. Phlogiston.) Because we hate the terror of not having a known cause.
Already, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (and many others) have said that Sandy was caused by climate change, which means greenhouse gases, which means your car. Also your furnace and many other things, but the car is so…there. So obvious. So hate-able, especially if you live in a densely populated city with reasonable public transportation.
Other people feel the same way, and their hating is going to grow, which means the private fossil-fuel vehicle will soon have big bull’s-eye on it. And that means we have to hide them.
If you like driving a car and think we need them, which we do at least for the next few decades, you need to help make them less obvious. Less there, where everyone can see and hate them and organize to regulate them out of existence.
We need to keep the cars in the garage. Bring them out only at night, or in the deep cold, or when we’re going on long distance drives to other states, or to that mall across town that has the cheap carpets or whatever. The point is, the car needs to become exotic, so people will focus on the energy costs of eating meat, or over-using air-conditioning, or taking transatlantic flights to climate change conferences.
The way we will make this happen is that we will all ride bikes. We need to ride them as much as we can, as often as possible.
People in Europe are doing this already (which is surprising because they don’t love their cars as much as we do). They’ve been busy building dedicated lanes and special racks and bike parking lots. And the culture is changing. We use bikes for about 1 percent of all trips in the United States. In the Netherlands, they use bikes for 26 percent of their trips. That kind of thinking and doing will keep a lot of motor vehicles under wraps.
We can learn a lot from other countries. This excellent AP story by Jan M. Olsen and Karl Ritter explains all that Europe is doing. Europe and China. It isn’t hard. Like everything else, the first days are the hardest days.
So get a bike. And ride it. And, incidentally, if we rode bikes more we wouldn’t be so fat.
Image: Photo demonstrating Oxford students’ blatant disregard for bike parking instructions, by Erikwkolstad, via Wikimedia Commons.
