Peak oil, global warming, a planetary absurdity of powerful petroleum and automobile interests retaining the private car as primary mode of mass transportation. IMF, World Bank, IDB fund new roads, but little efficient mass transportation and facilitating the use of bicycles. Corporate media anchors point to photos of 3rd world icy smoky traffic jams as a sign of progress in development. Ah the pleasantries of travel by bike!

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[From 1988]
Once, after a two week working trip in Shanghai, where I had become accustomed to enjoying riding a bicycle all over that enormous city, both in going to appointments and as a means of recreation and exercise, I returned home to New York to find a huge box in my apartment. It was my roommate's new pedal exercise machine.

I thought, gosh, how lonely and sad. I pictured my poor friend pedaling this exercise bike, in order to use his legs and work up a sweat, going nowhere while looking at the four walls of the apartment, when I had just spent weeks cycling along the special bike lanes of the wide colorful avenues, tree-canopied streets and intimate, narrow, life-filled, winding back alleys of Shanghai, outdoors, and in the company of Shanghai residents.

Then I felt even more guilty as I remembered and realized that all my family - my mother, my father, my brother, my sister - all have exercise bike machines (they call them exercise bicycles even though they are stationary devices.) They all bought them to save their knees from atrophy, but no-one uses them every often. It's too boring. What a dilemma. Everyone is a prisoner of his or her car and has weak knees. Only my sons have real bikes - the one who lives in the city sports a scar on his face as a badge of courage.

A lot of good people, especially in the Third World, have been captivated by Western commercial advertising techniques propagandizing the dream of a slick comfortable life on the wheels of a shiny and posh new car racing along a deserted road amid beautiful scenery. They will often consider this anti-car-proliferation attitude of mine impractical, nature-loving, and even selfish, and accuse me of wanting the rest of the world to be quaint, old fashioned and uncomfortably backward on the seats of slow moving leg-powered bicycles suffering in the rain and sun.

Well, yes, I did enjoy the use of a car in a small town in the 1940s when the expression "traffic jam" had not yet been invented. Now, I rent a car if I need to make a long trip with others. I was never healthier than the year I rode a bike even in rain and snow while a student in postwar Germany. I was never unhealthier than during those years of being trapped every day in my pretty Toyota box on wheels moving haltingly along with everyone else, separately, in the tropical sun of Puerto Rico (where there are few buses).

I experienced this mellow, tingling bicycle-bell traffic paradise in Chinese cities (recently a bit compromised by blaring car horns) in my maturity. I consider myself fortunate to have got to know quite a few cities and towns of this wonderful planet not very long after World War II when their old-world charm of wood and brick was available to pedestrian appreciation, well before they were converted into highways and parking places. Those were the days before the lovely streets with pavement cafes on different continents had deteriorated from pedestrian friendly to air-polluted, noisy venues of choked lines of smelling, overheating vehicles and wall to wall parking.

Today, for me most cities and even small towns on the world map are characterized by painted, hot and mostly dirty metal.

I remember in the 1960s, when my when my children were little, on Sundays we would like to make use of the family car to go to the country or beach. Whether we were in New York, Rome, Italy, or San Juan, Puerto Rico, the frustration was the same. While it was still early morning, we'd look out of the window down on the slow moving highway traffic. We'd consider the hours needed to go just a short way out of town and imagine the kids acting up in the car out of boredom, and then the whole scene all over again, coming back in the evening. We usually stayed home and I felt trapped in town by traffic. I began to dislike even my own car as a symbol of this confinement. I never felt that way towards my bicycle, which always seemed like a reliable pony-horse that could slip me through any traffic jam.

Travel by bicycle, though not a universal solution to traffic congestion, pollution and personal health problem, has many benefits:

(1) Inexpensive; (2) Non air polluting; (3) Quiet (no noise pollution); (4) Consumes little of our natural resources; (5) Does no harm to the earth's atmosphere; (6) The exercise promotes one's physical health in air enjoyment (as long as not riding alongside vehicle exhaust pipes); (8) Good for the psyche - keeps one inside society rather than isolated and confined in a private car.

Even such a traffic intensive city as my New York has attempted to encourage bicycle use, painting white stripes down the sides of many busy downtown avenues and posting "bike lane" caution signs.

But world wide, the bicycle has been losing ground. One the plus side are the many northern European cities maintaining their specially cordoned-off bike lanes, and China, which, while prohibiting bicycles even from their separate divided-off lanes during busy hours, also prohibits motor vehicles from using many side streets which become quiet and peaceful for bike riders.

On the down side are Jakarta and Seoul, where the bicycle is almost entirely prohibited. Indonesia clogs its avenues with fine Japanese motor cars while pedestrians outside the city center walk along a narrow dirt path beside traffic so backed up that an extra tariff is charged to cars with fewer than two people during rush hours. Drivers in Seoul will be heavily fined if caught driving a car with the last digit designated to be out of circulation during its no-use number day.

In poorer countries where class differences are dramatic, there is often disdain and scorn by drivers for the bicycles (and their riders) they must be attentive to. In wealthy tourist accommodating China and Vietnam a car can carry false prestige. I once had to speak to the manager of the Shanghai Towers Hotel to get the parking lot attendant to allow me to part my bicycle in the hotel parking lot instead of far out of sight around the back of the hotel where employees stationed their bikes.

I guess everyone is conversant with the car pollution horror of Los Angeles, and the most hellish of them all, Mexico City. Yet both of these cities are basically on level land, ideal for bike transportation.

In Japan, the nation benefiting from the profit of car manufacture, bicycles are prevalent everywhere.

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

Authors Website: http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com

Authors Bio:

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, in Germany & Sweden Einartysken,and in the US by Dissident Voice; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents; Minority Perspective, UK,and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong's Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which contains a history of US crimes in 19 nations. Dissident Voice supports this website with link at the end of each issue of its newsletter.