Bike Power: Sustainable Transportation
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. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim.
Energy and Equity. by Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978.]
Scientists generally agree that fossil fuel combustion is the primary reason for the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and for the phenomena we now call climate warming. Worldwide greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster in transportation than in any other sector.
In addition to global warming impacts, a wide body of literature and scientific data points to the other costs of motorized transport, in terms of human lives lost, pollution and negative social impacts.
According to the World Health Organization in 1998 alone, over 1 million people were killed and 10 million were seriously injured around the world. At least three times as many are seriously injured. Cars make noise, create traffic jams, pollute, which then create more health problems. They require immense amounts of space and massive public investments that can be better used in other ways. The unsustainable nature of car-based transport is illustrated by the fact that the problem gets worse as societies grow richer.
Tour d'Afrique was conceived in part to champion bicycle as an alternative to the automobile. The tour will point out that a group of individuals can even cross a continent such as Africa in 100 days. By biking and by delivering the message for a rational approach to transportation we hope to make an impact both on decision makers and on the people around the world.
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.
Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. 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.
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.
Energy and Equity, Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs.