Since I am elderly and therefore sensitive to combustion engine degraded air, I plan my day's agenda and travel to avoid carbon monoxide fumes, and when I find myself imprisoned in some friend's expensive automobile, locked in traffic with the windows up so as not to smell vehicle exhaust, I call to mind the freedom and pleasures of bicycling in Beijing, Chendu, Shanghai, Kunming and Zhuhai.
[added in 2010]*
Since writing the above article in 1988, with peak oil and global warming, the planetary absurdity of government dominating petroleum and automobile corporation plans to have Earthlings everywhere enamored or forced to chauffeur their backside to and fro in a car is clear. However this model for the Third World goes forward with road construction funded by the IMF, World Bank and the International Development Bank. Little interest in a space age dream of excellent and efficient mass transportation and facilitating and encouraging the use of bicycles. Western media anchors point to photos of traffic congestion in the former colonially occupied nations as a wonderful sign of progress in development.
But not in Japan, France and Germany, where high-speed trains increasingly replace clogged, slow moving and resource costly travel on highways.
Last year saw the installation of public rent and drop off bicycle stations throughout Paris.
Though the United States is still in the tightest grip of the powerful oil cartel, for more than twenty years many cities have seen some police traveling on bicycles where convenient and legislation is proposed to begin construction of high-speed trains. Sadly however, the U.S. is still is a nation in which a hundred thousand communities have no interconnecting convenient public transportation available, forcing use of individual private automobiles.
There will be a reckoning. America's economic viability will pay a price for its recalcitrance or inability to its lessen its reliance on the private automobile as the primary means of mass transportation.
Mankind will suffer still further for the misuse and waste of its resources, not only for the degradation of its cities but from the rise in temperatures and sea levels due to global warming.
Ah, for the free and fresh sensation of the air on one's face, the quiet scenery passing by, the inside-society feeling and the relaxing cycling motion of the feet in light exercise while traveling somewhere with little interruption.
* original 1989 version of this article was published in China Daily as Bike Brings Health and Touch of Society
[added in 2010]*
Since writing the above article in 1988, with peak oil and global warming, the planetary absurdity of government dominating petroleum and automobile corporation plans to have Earthlings everywhere enamored or forced to chauffeur their backside to and fro in a car is clear. However this model for the Third World goes forward with road construction funded by the IMF, World Bank and the International Development Bank. Little interest in a space age dream of excellent and efficient mass transportation and facilitating and encouraging the use of bicycles. Western media anchors point to photos of traffic congestion in the former colonially occupied nations as a wonderful sign of progress in development.
But not in Japan, France and Germany, where high-speed trains increasingly replace clogged, slow moving and resource costly travel on highways.
Last year saw the installation of public rent and drop off bicycle stations throughout Paris.
Though the United States is still in the tightest grip of the powerful oil cartel, for more than twenty years many cities have seen some police traveling on bicycles where convenient and legislation is proposed to begin construction of high-speed trains. Sadly however, the U.S. is still is a nation in which a hundred thousand communities have no interconnecting convenient public transportation available, forcing use of individual private automobiles.
There will be a reckoning. America's economic viability will pay a price for its recalcitrance or inability to its lessen its reliance on the private automobile as the primary means of mass transportation.
Mankind will suffer still further for the misuse and waste of its resources, not only for the degradation of its cities but from the rise in temperatures and sea levels due to global warming.
Ah, for the free and fresh sensation of the air on one's face, the quiet scenery passing by, the inside-society feeling and the relaxing cycling motion of the feet in light exercise while traveling somewhere with little interruption.
* original 1989 version of this article was published in China Daily as Bike Brings Health and Touch of Society
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