Who Pays?

A local bicycle rider has written:

“Every spring I hear the same two complaints from motorists. Cyclists don't follow the rules of the road, and they do not pay to use them.”

Leaving aside the first complaint for the moment, I had some thoughts about the second.

The counter-argument to the false idea of “my taxes pay for the roads” are many. The simplest one is that taxes are taxes and everybody pays them. Saying that this kind of tax is earmarked for that kind of program is a false argument. Its like saying I can’t pay you the $20 dollars I owe, because its in my left pocket....
--Sure I have the $20, but its in my left pocket and that’s for something else.
--See, my right pocket is empty.
--If I had the $20 to pay you, it would be in my right pocket....

It’s all about priorities.

The most elegant one is that if everybody rode bicycles [by using the word “bicycle”, generally I mean any self-propelled, lightweight, emission free vehicle], we’d likely never have to build another road. Ever. Think about that for a moment.

Well maybe that is an exaggeration, but maintenance budgets would drop to a quarter or a tenth of current levels. In the absence of free and easy (read subsidy and society-enabled) motor vehicle traffic, we have already built every road we are likely to ever need.

Ten thousand cyclists a day passing over any given piece of road for a hundred years will not equal the damage done to roads that a year’s worth of motor traffic will inflict.

Currently, the motorist ensures he will be paying high taxes simply by being a motorist. Most car owners have never even considered how much society subsidizes their “right” to drive.

A sane system would demand the demonstration of “cause for use”. In the short term, this would allow a road user such as a contractor who absolutely requires a vehicle to still make a living. But the single use motor driven commuter would no longer be a viable option. It is ridiculous how we preserve some of the most expensive real estate in Canada for keeping our cars happily waiting for us at the end of an office-bound day.

Getting people out of personal use cars will free traffic gridlock and allow once again the efficient use of roads. Dedicated routes could then be maintained for heavy and light truck/service traffic along commercial routes. Other routes would be exclusively for transit--maxi and mini buses, and clean-air taxis. Still others would be dedicated to bicycles. Many neighbourhood streets would gratefully succumb to depaving.

By creating separate traffic streams, one of the three major impediments to getting people out on bikes is removed, as conflict with motorised traffic is limited to infrequent intersections. Imagine how quickly you could get from SFU to ScienceWorld if you only had to stop at lights at Willingdon, Boundary and Main streets, with the Boundary overpass coming online next year!

It’s all about priorities.

Switching to Glide

excerpt by Bill Reynolds in The Walrus

The bicycle, according to scholar Donald Zaldin, revolutionized nineteenth-century culture. Its progenitor was the two-wheeled velocipede, invented in 1817 by Germany’s Baron Karl von Drais. The velocipede looked like a bike, but it had no crankshaft or drive train. The rider was propelled along by foot power alone. Then, sometime in the mid-1860s, a French metalworker figured out how to add a crankshaft. Two decades later, in 1885, England’s John Kemp Starley attached gears to the rear wheel instead of the front. Three years later, John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish veterinarian, improved pneumatic tires and introduced the smooth ride. Suddenly, anyone, rich or poor, young or old, could travel beyond his or her immediate surroundings at no extra cost and with little wear on the body. The past century has seen numerous design upgrades and innovations — the three-speed Raleigh, the ten-speed derailleur, the mountain bike, the hybrid — but the concept remains the same.

And that concept’s irreducible nut is the body defying gravity. Riding is governed by physics, specifically by torque-induced precession. Gravity causes a stationary bike to fall over, but applying torque — using the legs and feet to push down on two pedals attached to a crank — changes the equation. The drive train transfers the rider’s energy directly into movement. The wheels turn and stay upright, and torque allows 182 pounds of human tissue to move on two flimsy pieces of rubber filled with air.

The thinner the bicycle’s frame, the less wind resistance, and aerodynamics only increases efficiency; leaning over the handlebars, especially going downhill, reduces drag and boosts speed. Spoked wheels are almost as strong as solid ones, at a fraction of the weight. Using a derailleur, a transmission system invented by the French in the late nineteenth century, the rider easily switches the chain to a smaller sprocket and — voila! — more torque, more distance in less time. As the rider increases cadence — the number of revolutions per minute — he injects pure power, especially in higher gear ratios. The work is hard but satisfying.

The Party's Over

The automobile is one of the most energy intensive modes of transportation ever invented. This is true not just because of its direct use of fuel, but for the energy embodied in the construction [and maintenance] of so many individual units that require replacement every few years. The rate of car ownership in the US is now 775 per thousand people [2005] --nearly the highest in the world -- and many less-consuming nations, such as China, are foolishly seeking to emulate the American love affair with the [mostly single use (aka three empty seats), personal] automobile. Because increased car ownership results in changed patterns of urban development and resource distribution, it creates [a false and market manipulated] social dependency. Wherever this dependency has taken hold, it will have ruinous consequences in the coming century.

--Richard Heinberg. The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies. New Society Publishers, 2005. p.191 [with ed. additions]