Biking in the Car Culture

By DON ROLLINS

“Transportation is almost going through a Copernican revolution. There’s a tremendous change in understanding that our streets are incredible assets, and that they’ve been underutilized for generations. The potential is really hidden in plain sight.” — Janette Sadik-Khan, former commissioner of the New York Department of Transportation

“Mike” is the bicycle whisperer at the North Carolina social service agency where he volunteers a few days each week. The drill goes something like: 1. A patron donates a ramshackle bike; 2. Mike works his magic out in the repair shed; 3. He meets the designated client to adjust the fit, and 4. Somebody who walked two cold miles to the agency’s door is leaving with a safe bicycle.

In his 2017 book “How Cycling Can Save the World,” The Guardian correspondent Peter Walker makes the case that small-scale bike programs like Mike’s need to be duplicated on a much larger scale. And quickly.

Walker cites some of the negatives of car culture — pollution, purchase costs and maintenance, injuries and deaths, inequalities between those with and without independent transportation — and offers some European examples of how things might be different were there political critical mass in this country.

For Walker, a full break with car culture may never be possible, but the researched upsides are worth the effort, especially, but not exclusively, in urban settings: fewer gasses in the atmosphere, less noise pollution, lower obesity rates and improved mental health. In short, reason and research tell us the more able-bodied Americans use a bike (including an e-bike) in place of an automobile, the better for us and the fragile planet we seem determined to destroy.

But these days reasonable greater-good solutions are not exactly in political vogue, least of all within the ranks of Big Oil and Big Auto conservatives. Still, there is encouragement to be found, albeit not at the federal nor many state levels. Large municipalities such as Memphis — spurred on by coalitions between service agencies and faith communities - have decided to fund studies, meanwhile putting in place city-level positions tasked with to creating new bike lanes and parking, multi-use trails and providing bicycles and repairs for those who can’t afford them.

Seattle’s is a more developed model for how locales might create safe and sustainable environments for cycling. Riders have access to 60 relatively low-effort miles of trail, many linked with public transportation that accommodate multiple bikes. The city also emphasizes bike-sharing programs, which allow riders to borrow or rent bikes on a point-to-point basis.

The examples are many, though fewer for small towns and rural settings. Folks in those confines will need to sort through for what might be useful, and organize accordingly. Scale and resources matter, but no less local connections and funding sources.

It would be easy, even for climate-change progressives to discount the value of putting more bikes and fewer automobiles on the road. We’re rightly fixed on turning back conservatives who’ve lost their souls along with their minds, so why is the cause for more bikes so urgent?

Peter Walker’s straight answer is biking remains a highly underestimated means to address a cluster of vexing problems, human and environmental. For the able of body, its a for-real way to advance progressive values in a single activity.

Postscript: If you haven’t mastered the fundamentals of riding in public settings, definitely wait until you do. Hope is not a plan when three tons of truck are three feet away …

Don Rollins is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister in Jackson, Ohio. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2023

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