Bicycle Kick (12)
By:
June 15, 2010
To the many utopias swimming in febrile modern imaginations, we must add the cycling utopia: a vision of the clean, quiet metropolis on the move by bicycle. In its current vogue, the cycling utopia proposes a clement infrastructure of biking lanes and ample parking that links coffeshops with creative-class studio spaces. But the vision is anything but new. In his 1899 Address on the Streets & Traffic of London, Sir John Wolfe Barry wrote that
One cannot but recognise that the bicycle, as a means of rapid and cheap locomotion, is a new endowment to mankind, and even now we can see what an advantage it would be to the bulk of Londoners if they could travel safely and at perhaps eight or ten miles an hour, on their bicycles from their homes to their work and back again….
A few years ago I said in an address to the Institution of Civil Engineers that I looked forward to the time when bicycles would be almost as much part of a man’s — and, doubtless, also of a woman’s — equipment as a pair of boots, and from the progress which has already come about, I think that this was scarcely an exaggerated anticipation….
When this takes place, are Londoners to be debarred from the use of bicycles by the fact that the streets are so crowded with vehicular traffic as to be too dangerous for them(?) This will seem hereafter to be as absurd as a proposition that foot passengers ought not now to be accommodated in the streets because of the requirements of the omnibuses and cabs.
Sir John’s spirited, lowbrow-friendly instance was but one version of a dream that would be voiced again and again throughout the twentieth century. And yet the petroleum blowout known as modern life grew unchecked, choking the world with smog and automobile traffic.
The People’s Republic of China came close to fulfilling Sir John’s vision, by way of the Flying Pigeon — a forty-pound, single-speed bicycle which, for a price of four months’ wages during the Cultural Revolution, once provided most Chinese with their chief means of mechanized travel.
But in China today, nearly a million new cars are sold each month, paving over the famous bicycle-only traffic of Chinese cities in the middle of the last century.
In the wealthy West, meanwhile, cycling utopia is resurgent —
In Boston, long one of America’s least-friendly cities for cyclists, we’ve been happy in the last couple of years to see bike lanes springing up on neighborhood streets, along with signs like the one below (examples of which are posted even on the harrowing, crumbling, car-clogged trestle of the BU Bridge):
But utopia, to a greater extent than the future, is always unevenly distributed.
Last in a series of twelve posts exploring the bicycle in HiLo culture.