“At $2/litre I will fix my bicycle, I will get more exercise, I will lose weight, I will get fitter, I will live longer, I will get more things done, I will sleep better, I will notice more things as I pass them by, I will meet more people, I will be more relaxed and less grumpy, I will take more pleasure in my family as we ride together and, who knows, I may even get lucky.”
…commented Ian Mott at yesterday’s blog post on peak oil.
And he continued,
“When I set out in 1979 to ride a bicycle from Singapore to Bangkok, bicycles had played only minor roles in my life before then. It took me three days to get up to 150km each day and a week for it to become routine. But the key to the adjustment was not fitness, but rather, all in the mind.
At some point I stopped focussing on how big the task was and simply headed off to the local store for breakfast. And instead of going back home I went the same distance further on. I did the same at morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner and I did the same the next day and the next.
I ate at roadside stalls and was welcomed into humble shacks, I slept on moonlit beaches and rubber plantations, I washed in creeks and rewarded myself with hot showers and a comfy bed from time to time. In the heat of tropical day and outrageous humidity, I provided my very own 15km/hour breeze to caress my temples. My lips were chaffed, my neck was sunburnt and my ass felt every single pothole.
But there was never a single moment when I did not feel 100% alive.
Now what, exactly, is all this about peak oil?“
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
What’s this, Greenpeace propaganda;-)?
But I agree, I have the same feeling riding a horse.
The only downside is that in a vehicle collision bikes consistently run 2nd best.
I rode motor bikes for years but would be hesistant to take them up now – I have lost too many friends to accidents.
Here is an account of a (push) bike ride across the US – out of the blue a car appeared and killed one of the participants.
http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/bikeblog/
If Ian gets back on his bicycle he wont have to sign this: http://www.care2.com/ecards/p/8187-7384-10075-6838 .
Stand by for this terrifying message from your sponsor
At $3/litre we will all be on our bicycles and the roads will be much more pleasent places and much safer.
But I suppose the SUV brigade will trade down to a designer quad bike (with nobbly off-road tyres, of course) while everyman will make do with a scooter.
Either way, the adaptive ape will prevail.
My knees are far too old & worn out for any of this push bike stuff.
Your new SUV, will be me on my big stallion.
So watch out, not only will I knock you off that bike, I’ll be leaving lots of smelly, gooey stuff behind for you to splash all over your selves.
Some years back, I rode all around Sydney on my bike and I averaged about 20 km/hr. These days, in the car, I only average 30 km/hr. I think most people are scared off by the Sydney traffic.
The desire for speed and for ‘saving time’ is a motivator for many people in their choice of transport. However, the perceived speeds of transport modes are often false when the full costs of time involved are considered. Effective speed is calculated using the formula: speed equals distance divided by time. For effective speed, ‘time’ includes the total time devoted to transport, including time spent earning money to pay all the costs created by a particular mode of transport. Effective speeds for cars can be lower than a bicycle or a bus, even before taking into account the external costs of transport.
See:http://See:http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/ and search using the keyword “effective speed”.
The best article is “Effective speeds:car costs are slowing us down.”
As my favoured energy source for cycling was the humble Banana it has to be said that, since cyclone Larry, we appear to have hit “peak Banana”. Luckily, we have not reached “peak pasta” or, shock horror, “peak ice-cream” but that shouldn’t discourage someone in government from setting up the appropriate “task force” to investigate these serious threat scenarios.
Hey Hasbeen,
Don’t you aussies have the pooh-bags for horses that are attached to the horse-tails?
All horses around the Royal Castle in Stockholm touring tourists got to have the pooh-bags.
Goodness Ann, you Scandinavians are funny people, must be the long winters and watching all those Ingmar Bergman films ( I read somewhere that Bergman was not popular in Sweden, too much like real life!)
We strive to travel further and faster which is why the development of new transport modes didn’t end with the invention of the bicycle. For most people the bicycle isn’t a viable form of transport. The ‘peak oil’ scare seems to have been around almost as long as oil itself. Demand plus a lack of refining capacity, rather the lack of oil is keeping prices high. Why would oil companies/producers want supply to exceed demand so that the price falls and they make less money? I have no doubts that oil will at least last for another 100 years, probably longer. We moved on from the stone age, not because we ran out of stone, but because we found something better. If anyone finds a bike that is air conditioned/heated, holds a family of 5 plus their shopping/luggage, has a multitude of safety features and can cruise at 70mph, let me know!
Rog,
Pooh-bags for horses! LOL!
Personally, I’m not a big Bergman fan, too deep…
No, I’m more a Crocodile Dundee type!
You know it was very near that we moved to Australia when I was a kid. My father, who is a doctor, was offered a job in a hospital somewhere in Australia. Remember we were looking at Australian maps and brochures.
Paul, some trivia for you. The first car was invented by Karl Benz in 1885 and the first safety or modern style bicycle was invented in 1886. Both came from the same era. Maybe the domination of the car is more to do with people being wealthy enough to purchase them. Perhaps if people were more affluent, we would all be piloting helicopters instead.
Ann, none of our horses ever set foot on a public road, so poo bags were not required. We were competing in show jumping, & eventing. When our horses traveled it was us carting them, not the other way around.
Our horses are now retired, but I have been thinking of breading a few, & training them to pull a wagon, just in case. If things realy do get that bad, I’ll have to catch the poo, as I’ll want it to fertalise the the vegetable garden.
Hasbeen, good to hear that you are into horses as well. I used to train steeplechase horses, had a licence as an amateur trainer and jockey. Never rode the chases myself though, too tough. However, we did a lot of road work as well, and of course the horses poohed, sometimes near the race track some people were angry with us.
Nowadays I just ride a bit dressage and jump only small fences/ we had a little crosscountry competition last week, my horse Kaprifol has just one eye ( she is scary looking with an eye-patch), but is a natural jumper.
You miss the point, Paul. A bicycle would never operate as a stand alone alternative to the auto but as the cost of using the auto goes up then a number of substitution options will kick in. They would or could be bicycles, scooters, (both alone and in combination with public transport) smaller cars, hybrids, moving footways, higher household density (especially at transit nodes) etc.
And your assumption that a bicycle can never be airconditioned and weather proofed is only half true. Indeed, how many people would be willing to ride a bike to work if there was a specially constructed bikeway with cover, aircon and NO CARS. It would be far cheaper per passenger km than any city based motorway and deliver envigorated yet cool/warm/dry commuters, depending on the season. They can also be given a slight slope to ensure a gentle downhill run in one or both diections.
And the car may still be available for longer journeys or night time security etc.
Bicycles are already a faster option for any urban journey shorter than 3km. But due to the cheapness of petrol we have hardly begun to work on the options. But that will certainly change as the price increases above inflation.
Ian:” Bicycles are already a faster option for any urban journey shorter than 3km”.
Read this:
” The NSW Department of Planning has estimated 33% of Sydney’s car trips are less than 3km and 55% are less than 5km”.
The same numbers go for suburbs in the US.
What is needed is increasing funding for cycling infrastructure.
I agree, Ann. This information was being presented to government by The Bicycle Institute of NSW back in 1983 when we shared a dingy cockroach infested office at the bottom end of Pitt St.
The real problem is that operating a bicycle beside cars, trucks and buses is a very, very threat rich environment. They need to be separated so they operate at an appropriate scale and pace. But the biggest problem is Brisbane is actually the heat of summer. Four pedals and one is soaking in perspiration.
Bicycles are also rather condusive to artificial wind assistance. An enclosed pathway (with exits of course) heading in one direction can have a jet of air passing along it to provide a portion of the required motive power at a fraction of the cost of a small electric motor on each cycle. This kind of technology on core bicycle arteries can boost the ‘comfortable’ transit radius significantly in the same way that favourably sloped pathways can.
Wind assistance can also be turned off during off-peak times and the temperature can also be adjusted for the circumstances.
Wonder why there is no big market for electrical bikes, should have a potential?
Ian, the weather or climate sure is a big problem. Your climate is too hot , ours to cold , to make biking comfy all year around. Here it is impossible to bike during the winter months, snow mud and unploughed roads are a nuisance for every biker.
Ian, what you say about separating cars and bikes is a good idea but it is also very utopian. State and local governments have been very reluctant to spend significant amounts on bicycle infrastructure and I can’t see their attitudes changing soon. There are a few good bikeways but most of these are just upgraded footpaths through parkland, designed for recreation, not commuting.
Fat wombat,
No I really don’t believe separating cars and bikes is very utopian. We have done that in many, many parts of Sweden. Hey, there are even separate biking lanes in the middle of the Stockholm city. There are really big plans for bikers. From almost every suburb you can bike into the city on separate biking lanes.
In Stockholm city I think this problem has been “solved” through making the lanes for cars a bit smaller so they have to share the lanes between bikes and cars. No separate bikeway in the inner areas where it is difficult to build new separate bikeways. In this case you have only a white demarcation line.
Of course this could cause problems with car parking.
Last year my road bicycle, with large metal basket on the back, was my principle form of transport when in Brisbane.
There’s a bike path from where I live in Chelmer to Woolworths at Sherwood but I often took the main road because it was quicker. You can only carry so many groceries on a bike, but I managed. The bigger problem is always at the bottle shop … where to put the cartoon of beer.
This year I am teaching my 17 year old daughter to drive and watching her nearly run over cyclists I am losing my nerve.
All the near collisions on my bike, though, have been on the Coronation Drive bikeway with other speeding cyclists, and then there are pedestrians who look both ways and then step into the path of me the cyclist.
Separate bikeways may seem a touch utopian at $1.35/litre of petrol but who knows what sort of hot rod will enter the government orfices when it hits $2.70/litre.
Remember, it was only two years ago that Beattie was telling everyone that dams, for any purpose, were totally unsustainable and off-limits. If the urban swing voters want bikeways they will get them. Even if pensioners have to wait another year for a new hip.
Best way to fix a myopic pedestrian is to run into them. Just lower your centre of gravity, put your elbows out, knee up on the contact side, line them up and splatto. Just another incident in an educationists day. Sure gets the message through but best left to the bozos who ignore the designated walking section to wander about on the cycle track.
It also works well in crowded swimming lanes when there is always some pill going anticlockwise. Just like Zinadene but without the cameras.
I occasionally ride my bike to work, about 17km along country roads and through a couple of small towns. Dedicated cycle tracks would be great, even just an extra bit of bitumen on the edge of the roads. It’s just a bit too wet at the moment, though.
When I left Singapore I was soon joined by a Frenchman, Dominic Senay, who had cycled from Paris to Bali and was then on his way back home. He got that far with the philosophy that cycling should never be hard work or unpleasent. And he had managed to cross the Baluchistan desert without hard work or unpleasentness and he was always the only tourist who had no fear of being mugged.
That is not to say that we never pushed ourselves but the important thing was to always ride within your capacity and remember that every hill you toil to climb has a free ride on the other side. Fools battle the hill on the way up and then miss the pleasure on the other side by seeing how fast they can go and how soon they can put it behind them.
The best place to ride was, and may still be, Burma/Myanmar because the roads had not lost their human scale. Vehicles were few and everyone else was also on their bicycle. And that is probably the best lesson of all.
I started out riding with the aim of doing something larger than life, to stand out from the crowd. But soon realised that there was about a billion of us, all on our bikes, all just making our own way on our own steam in our own time.
OK, some stats on biking and motorbiking accidents in Sweden(9 million):
About 40 persons die every year in biking accidents ( an improvement from the 70’s when about 150 persons died annually)
This is thanks to separate bikeways.
However lethal motorbiking accidents increase mainly thanks to older bikers that are involved in this. According to my paper this is thanks to that the older bikers want a dream come true (to be young again)!
About 400 persons die annually from motorbiking.
Really dangerous!!!
Regarding biking , I will never use one of those ugly helmets Ugh…
Ann ok so we need separate bike lanes for older v’s younger cyclists then, ha.
I’d like to see a test legal case from someone getting fined for cycling on footpaths – to challenge the rules that try to get cyclists killed.
Austn roads are dangerous for cyclists. I wish voters would bring in investment for cycle lanes as Motty has said they could but it’s top of few minds come election time and it’s far from critical mass given the dangers for urban cyclists. Perhaps higher fuel prices will help but I reckon many people are so attached to their cars they’ll fight giving up their car until the end – the 1st adjustment for most would be to trade down engine size to more fuel efficient cars, thenthey’d prob move house before they’d start a daily commute by bike
I could not cycle as far as my nearest shop, to save my life, due to age related physical limitations.
I would be realy pissed off to see any more of my taxes, state, or council, spent on such a limited use item.
Now, if you were prepared to pay for them yourselves, with a cycle registration fee, that would be reasonable.
maybe I was wrong!
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/thousands-buy-cycles/2006/07/15/1152637916782.html
hasbeen are ALL roads & related infrastructure are funded ONLY from petrol excises? Here’s a proposal for ya: people who have mobility issues because they’ve let their health detoriate through neglect and laziness should have to pay additional taxes for roads and public transport and health care. Why should fit people’s taxes and health insurance fees pay for the health limitations of lazy fatties with mobility issues? All of my forebears have been active, healthy, mobile and stronger than oxes well into their 70’s. They go out fighting fit.
Use it OR lose it and pay more tax – that should be the neo-liberal govt granny state motto!!
Wrong angle, Hasbeen. The imperative in urban landscapes is not cost recovery but congestion loss minimisation. And shifting 10,000 cars off a main road for even 5km has a higher return than building an extra lane for the next increment of 10,000 cars.
All major cities have moved beyond the increasing returns to scale part of the cost/volume relationship and are clearly into the avoiding diseconomies stage. And as long as they continue to grow then that will be the case.
Tinxi, has it ever occured to you that some of us have worked very hard physically. We, in the bush, have had to work harder as we more, & more, subsidise the city, with our products, & now our water. We can no longer afford labour, & have to do it all ourselves.
This tends to lead to damaged knees, & backs. Its cities that are full of non workers, & fat people.
Yes, my fuel taxes have paid five times over for our roads. It has also paid for your health system, [we don’t have one in the bush any more], & the welfare system.
Anything we want is now user pays, in fact, we still pay for water, when the river is dry. So for the bush you could say we pay, even when we can’t use it.
Ian, if its so valuable to you city folk, just make sure you pay for it, out of your local rates.
It is only a very small number of city people, basically, the more affluent, who can afford to live in suburbs near areas of high employment. In fact, its probably fair to say, the trendy suburbs.
Most city people live too far from their workplace to be able to cycle, & I can’t see many mums, on their way to day care using a cycle.
We found it impossible to get a cycle path, for our kids to use to ride to school, but I suppose you could not pass the trendy test.
Hasbeen, you appear to be assuming that no-one else but you pays taxes and rates. I am fully aware of the fiscal imbalances between city and bush but the alternative to a $0.5 million/km “luxury” bikeway is another motorway at $50 million/KM that will only operate at capacity for 25 hours a week.
Don’t mix the issues. A reduction in urban costs can only be of broader benefit. And your point about the length of commuting is only valid if there is no public transport interface. That is, ride to the train, ride the train with bike, ride from train to work.
And I see “mums on their way to daycare” on their bicycles every day. In fact, ten years ago I took my first born to pre-school by bicycle.
It now takes me 26 minutes to drive 1.3km to school and back to pick up the kids because of the traffic. Yes, they could walk but due to the fact that we no longer institutionalise our potentially dangerous mentally ill, that is a risk that few parents are willing to take. And bikes, in that sort of traffic are even more dangerous.
But yes, most will not use their own power, some for more valid reasons than others. But they can certainly switch to the designer quad bike (with screen, canopy and kid seats) whenever someone has the sense to market one.
Plenty of nthn Europeans and Asians get to work/school/daycare by bike. In some more progressive European countries they realise the economic benefits that Motty pointed out above of getting more bikes & fewer cars on the roads. They also realise the broad benefits from the health gains. (Also many european health funds and even employers will give financial or other incentives to people who exercise regularly, realising lower costs and higher productivity).
Hasbeen I’m familiar with backbreaking work in the country as that was my upbringing. The trip to school for me was a torturous long indirect bus each way (conditions permitting) or a much quicker direct cycle. I had to bike to the bus anyway, altho I’d prefer to take my horse but I nowhere to leave it while at school all day.
Taxes could be redirected into improvements that ultimately benefit all, eg fuel taxes should be paying to create safe cycleways for daily commutes and improve public transport to reduce urban car numbers & infrastructure pressure for more badly managed, overly expensive road projects that we’ll never pay off.
Having separate safe lanes for bicycle and other non-car traffic could open up opportunities for designer quads & hybrid bikes & kiddy pods & the like. Right now we have too many safety restrictions on the types of vehicles that are allowed for much innovation to occur.