| Article 13717 of rec.bicycles
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From: [email protected] (Les Earnest)
Newsgroups: rec.bicycles
Subject: [From Associated Press; posted without permission]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Date: 21 Oct 89 22:49:00 GMT
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EDITOR'S NOTE - Consider the advantages of pedal power: inexpensive
and pollution-free. There are twice as many bicycles as there are
automobiles, yet much of the world is curiously ambivalent toward
them. Are they relics of another century or are they the wave of the
future?
By JOHN BARBOUR
AP Newsfeatures Writer
Here they come, thousands at a time steering quietly down the
streets of Amsterdam and Beijing, or a file of humped silhouettes
etched against the mountain-ocean sunset of California.
Here they come, bicycles and their riders, caught by the dawn's
early light or the headlight's glare, pumping legs, determined faces,
wheeling to work, wheeling home, or just determined to stay fit.
Bicycles. There are 800 million in all, 88 million in the United
States, 300 million in China, a very personal, pollution-free mode of
transportation.
The question is: Are they relics of another century, or are they the
wave of the future?
The competition is the automobile, 400 million in the world. No one
in his right mind would say it's an even fight.
But the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, a think tank, recently
published Worldwatch Paper 90 by Marcia D. Lowe with the title ''The
Bicycle. Vehicle For A Small Planet.''
The message is that bicycles consume less energy per passenger mile
than any other form of transportation, including walking. A cyclist
can cover 3 1/2 miles on the calories in an ear of corn, 10 miles on the
350 calories in a bowl of rice. The average American car covers 10
miles on about half a gallon of gasoline, or 18,600 calories.
Bicyclists do not produce smog or acid rain. They do not endanger
the ozone layer and few cyclists are pulled over for DWI. They do
produce sweat, however.
Marcia Lowe writes that 33 states included bicycle promotion
measures in their plans to comply with the Clean Air Act of 1970. Los
Angeles would make major employers reduce the ratio of commuting cars
to employees. Other Western cities would make employers provide
bicycle parking and shower facilities.
All of this comes 90 years after the bicycle craze crested in
America. In 1899, with automobiles not yet on the road, and public
transportation in the form of trolleys and electric trains just an
infant enterprise, the United States was selling over a million
bicycles a year. In a nation of barely 76 million, those were
impressive figures.
So ubiquitous were those ''safety'' bikes that they altered American
fashions. Knickers kept pants legs out of the way of chain drives,
long Norfolk jackets caught the mud, and women began to wear shorter
skirts and, heaven forfend, bloomers, so they could ride their bikes.
Whole families would go out for weekend bicycle outings.
Fred Zahradnik of the magazine Bicycling points out that the bicycle
was a vehicle for technology as well as people. The Wright Brothers
were bicycle makers, as were hundreds of other tinkerers of the late
1800s. Orville and Wilbur experimented with lightweight tubing that
eventually made their aircraft design possible. Glen Curtis worked on
bicycles and applied motors to them before he concentrated on
aircraft engine design.
If one looks into the past, he may find some hints to the bicycle's
future.
In its heyday, the bike was personalized, individual transportation.
''It didn't have the upkeep of a horse or the expense of a
carriage,'' Zahradnik says. ''If the roads got bad, you could pick it
up and carry it. It was one of the fastest, easiest, simplest forms
of transportation.''
And it built roads. It was the complaints of bicyclists in
Washington and state capitals that led to the first modern surge of
road-building. It paved the way for the automobile.
But, oddly, it wasn't the car that led to the fall of the bicycle.
It was public transportation, steam-powered locomotives and the
electric trolley, which were felled in turn by the car.
In the late 1800s, a good bike cost about $100, which was expensive
in days when the average income was $8 a week. Today some are as
cheap as $100 or as expensive as $3,000. The United States makes
about 5 million bikes a year and imports another 5 million.
Americans, however, remain in love with their cars.
In China, where one person in every 74,000 owns an automobile, one
in four owns a bike. In one study in the northern industrial city of
Tianjin, monitors counted 50,000 bicycles passing one intersection in
an hour.
Bicycle ownership does not mean bicycle use. Forty-one million
American bikes are owned by children.
In Britain, one out of every four persons owns a bike, yet only one
out of every 33 transport trips are made by bike.
Writes Worldwatch Institute's Lowe:
''The United States has seven times as many bicycles per person as
India, but because one out of every two Americans owns an automobile
- compared with one out of 500 Indians - bicycles play a much more
modest role in the U.S. transportation system.''
The Chinese phenomenon began when The Last Emperor, Pu Yi, began
pedaling around the Forbidden City in the early 1900s. Today, China's
annual bike sales exceed 40 million.
''The rest of the developing world lags far behind in bicycle
transportation,'' says the Worldwatch report. ''In much of Africa and
even more widely in Latin America, the prestige and power of auto
ownership has made governments ignore pedal power and led citizens to
scorn the bicycle as a vehicle for the poor.''
Oddly, the cost of fuel for Latin American and African cars
contributes to their national debt and their trade deficits. There
are exceptions. In Bogota, the capital of Colombia, the city's
largest bakery replaced most of its trucks with 900 delivery trikes
to supply 60,000 neighborhood shops.
In Europe, the Netherlands and Denmark have taken steps to make
their roads more friendly for cyclists with the result that bicycles
are used for 20 percent to 30 percent of all urban trips and up to
half in some towns.
In the Netherlands, a recent system of taxes increased the cost of
buying and driving a car by half. An electronic system will monitor
speedometers and excessive drivers will be taxed accordingly. At the
same time, public transit is being given an extra $5.7 billion a
year.
In Denmark, officials claim that gasoline prices are the highest in
Europe, thanks to aggressive taxing. And, says the Worldwatch report,
''the Danish Ministry of Transport describes the 186 percent sales
tax on new cars - compared with 47 percent in the Netherlands and 5
percent in the United States -as paying for three cars and getting
only one.''
A British study showed that if only 10 percent of car trips of less
than 10 miles were made by bicycle it would cut the country's fuel
consumption by 14 million barrels of oil a year, 2 percent of annual
consumption.
The ironies abound. Third World governments concentrate on building
roads for cars in their rural areas despite the fact that their rural
citizens do not have cars or trucks. Worldwatch quotes transportation
expert Wilfred Owen as saying, ''Many miles of roads in poor
countries prove more useful for drying beans and peppers than for
moving traffic.''
And even though bicycle rickshaws are a transportation mainstay in
many Asian countries, and a means of raising the income and status of
poor people, some local governments say they are unsafe or inhumane.
A more likely motive, says Worldwatch, is that the quaint rickshaws
make cities look poor or backward.
So it comes to pass that in Dhaka in Bangladesh, the government
threatened to phase out rickshaws, even though they employ 140,000
people and account for more than half of the city's passenger miles.
And in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, some 100,000 rickshaws
have been confiscated in the last five years and dumped into the sea.
Japan, which makes cars for most of the world, leans heavily on
bicycles and commuter railroads. When railway terminals began to
suffer from bicycle pollution, the government set aside bike parking
lots of which there are now 8,600 with a capacity of 2.4 million
bikes. In urban downtowns where land prices are over $7,000 a square
foot, they have built bike parking towers.
In California, the university towns of Davis and Palo Alto vie for
cycling honors. Davis boasts that a quarter of all trips made by its
44,000 citizens are made by bike. Bike trailers are a common sight
for lugging groceries or children.
Palo Alto pays its employees 7 cents a mile for all business travel
by bike. It sponsors a city wide ''leave your car at home day,'' has
a bicycle squad in its police force and holds a traffic school for
children who break bicycle laws.
Some employers in the city of 56,000 have joined the fray. One
offers bike commuters $1 a day for every day they ride to work. Xerox
provides free towel service in the shower room.
It's been 173 years since the first bike appeared in 1816. A lot has
changed. Bikes have evolved from a crude contraption called the
hobbyhorse, which was propelled by the rider's feet on the ground, to
the enlarged front wheel which covered more ground per each
revolution of the rider's pedals, to chain drives and the safety
bicycle, to today's one-piece lightweight frames.
Bicycles gave the world ball bearings and pneumatic tires.
In the late 1800s, bicycle racers were some of the highest paid
athletes in the country, garnering winnings of between $20,000 to
$40,000 a year.
''They were like today's superstars,'' says Bicycling's Fred
Zahradnik. ''They traveled the world to race.''
Thousands flocked to see the six-day bike races on board tracks or
concrete. At the turn of the century there were some 200 race tracks
in the United States alone.
One racer was Charles (Mile-a-Minute) Murphy. On June 30, 1899, he
pumped up to 60 mph on a board track making use of the suction behind
a fast locomotive.
Another, Zahradnik says, was Major Taylor, ''one of the first great
black athletes to emerge in the United States in the late 1800s. He
was often turned down by hotels on his world racing circuit.''
Bike makers have constantly changed designs to appeal to young
riders. With the balloon tire came Schwinn's Streamliner. There was
the Donald Duck bike by Shelby, sporting a Donald Duck hood ornament
and a quack-quack horn. There was the Huffy Radiobike which had a
radio in the tank on the crossbars. In the late 1950s there was
Bowden Spacelander and a drag racer called the Schwinn Orangecrate.
But now engineers are setting out to improve designs for practical
reasons. Bicycle trailers and three- and four-wheel designs are
increasing the load-carrying capacity.
The Oxtrike, designed at Oxford University, has a platform and gears
capable of moving heavy cargo. In India, designers are working on a
multipurpose bike that can double as a non-transportation motor for
threshing rice paddies, shelling peanuts or pumping water.
It may indeed be that the wheels of the past will power the future.
AP-NY-10-07-89 2132EDT
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