Metal versus flesh

As a cyclist active in advocating for road safety and cycling infrastructure, I know very well the arguments for the inevitability of car use. Indeed, I personally have a somewhat sour perspective on the nature of these two arguments: our opponents seem to me to argue cycling is only possible when the weather is warmer than 22 degrees and cooler than twenty, for people who are younger than twenty-two and older than twenty-four, in the months before July and after June. I have certainly heard someone at a public meeting claim they could not ride a bicycle because they were over forty-five. As I recall, I was fifty at the time, and I still ride my bicycle at 67.

Beyond the excuses of age and weather, the other arguments against cyclists and cycling reflect the dark sides of our culture: the appeal to conformity, the association, now quickly fading, of the automobile with all things "cool" and masculine, or the risks of cycling, meaning, in too many cases, the prevalence of  violence on our roads, in the form of negligent or outright homicidal operation of motor vehicles.

People who make these arguments against cycling and for automobile transportation claim to promote freedom, but they instead promote the opposite. They promote dependence: on a form of transport so dangerous it requires government regulation, government issued identification for vehicle and operator, government mandated insurance coverage, and in too many jurisdiction, corresponding government limits on the ability of pedestrians and other injured by automobile use to collect the damages they need to recover.

We pay a steep price, in many ways and many senses, for our addiction to individualized motor transport. From the hundreds of hours the average worker puts in to pay for car ownership, to the congestion and pollution we inflict on our cities with car use, to the steady toll of deaths exacted by the operation of motor vehicles, we pay for the imagined convenience of the cars in a huge number of ways, most of which most of us never notice. The relentless promotion of automotive transport has undermined our communities by isolating us in separate metal capsules, has promoted incivility and even violence by dangling a convenience cars seldom deliver, and encouraging us to blame other road users for the inability of our cars to live up to the promises in the advertisements. It has brought us all of the physical and mental problems associated with sedentary lifestyles.

Road rage: a common experience

From long observation, I have come to view the belief expressed by so many people that they lack the capacity to cycle as one of the most insidious, and saddest, effect of our dependence on motor transport. Too many people truly do not believe themselves capable of mobility without a two-tonne prosthetic device loaded with high explosive fuel.  Our dependence on the car has has led us to lose trust in the capacity of our minds and bodies to navigate the world without mechanical assistance. One hundred and fifteen years ago, the writer E. M. Forster foresaw the rise of technology: of air transportation, of computers and networking, and of the dangers of isolation and dependence that came with the wonders of technology. To quote the conclusion of his story, The Machine Stops:

...beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as it was a garment and no more, man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body — it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend — glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as  olourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.

What Forster calls the sin against the body begins with our choosing to trust our machines over our bodies, however poorly that choice works for us. Consider the current state of road congestion in Toronto, how many of us speak and write as though the failure of our cars as effective means of transport means we ourselves cannot move. It has taken far less time than the centuries E. M. Forster envisioned for too many of us to entrust our mobility and then our self image to the automobile, and I suggest we begin to untangle ourselves before the toll of automotive technology on our bodies and souls grows any worse.