Bike Nation
How Cycling Can Save the World
Peter Walker
Having read it
★★★★★
Everyone should read this book, especially drivers of motor vehicles. Compelling and forthright in its points and attitudes to cycling and its benefits for people, places and communities. Our motor vehicle dominated societies are the problem, despite (as the book explains with facts and research about what drivers think and do) and many of the issues we face collectively are because of a societal normalisation (and obsession) with the motor vehicle.
Why do so many people tolerate, even encourage, putting others in danger? Again, it comes down to culture. Those seeking more equality on the roads are battling almost a century of motorist-led propaganda arguing that the deaths of cyclists and pedestrians are not just unavoidable but, in many cases, somehow the fault of the victims.
It was good to learn of attitudes toward cycling safety and that it’s not really cyclists’ problem when the existing infrastructure and urban planning is unfairly weighted and skewed toward motor vehicles.
As is written, it’s was not surprising to learn that cycling is avoided by most people especially when segregated, well-made bicycle lanes are not available; however, when they are, good things start happening, on many levels: fewer resources are required to make and propel motor vehicles; people’s health improves; air quality improves; people interact more; shops trade more; communities become more communicative and interactive.
As the book clearly says and infers, it’s pretty obvious what benefits cycling can bring and yes, I do think it can help save our world (and us humans)!
A good passage
In a world dominated instead by bikes, people can amble, children can play, fresh air can be breathed, conversations can be heard, all without our omniscient, noisy, smelly, lethal modern-day plague. If the sixty-something woman in the visor had been driving along Lower Thames Street, the chances are we could never have exchanged a smile. She would have been another impersonal head and shoulders glimpsed briefly through a windscreen. Cyclists are recognisably human, travelling at human-scaled speeds. As a benefit to urban living, that can hardly be overstated.
So yes, cycling can save the world – or at the very least make it a significant and noticeably more healthy, safe, equitable and happy place.
A second good passage
What is behind this terrifying road environment? The simple answer is normalisation. Even in the relatively cosseted modern world of richer countries, where fatal epidemics are rare and workplace injuries a cause for lengthy investigation, killing or maiming someone on the road is still seen as tragic but inescapable. It is, to use a ubiquitous and linguistically poisoning term, an ‘accident’.
This in turn fuels a complacent, entitled, careless driving culture where millions of people who would describe themselves as moral, kind and careful people nonetheless get into a motor vehicle and routinely, unthinkingly, put others’ lives in peril.
A third good passage
Let’s clarify one thing immediately: I don’t object to helmets or to high-visibility clothing. I wear a helmet most of the time when on a bike. So do most people I know in London. But when it comes to genuine effort to make cycling safer, they’re a red herring, an irrelevance, a peripheral issue that has somehow come to dominate the argument. You don’t make cycling safe by obliging every rider to dress up as if for urban warfare, or to work a shift at a nuclear power station. You do it by creating a road system that insulates them from fast-moving and unpredictable road traffic.
Chris Boardman eloquently expressed his opinion on this when an innocuous appearance on BBC1’s Breakfast show to discuss bike infrastructure became dominated by angry viewer reactions to him being filmed cycling down a street bare-headed. ‘I understand exactly why people feel so passionately about helmets or high-vis,’ Boardman wrote. ‘I understand why people wish to use them. But these actions seek to deal with an effect. I want to focus on the debate on the cause, and campaign for things that will really make cycling safe. That is why I won’t promote high-vis and helmets – I won’t let the debate be drawn onto a topic that isn’t even in the top ten things that will really keep people who want to cycle safe.’