At Cycling in Wichita, John B. offers a second essay related to bicycling and community, this time partly focused on the idea of self-sufficiency and its role in creating sustainable and self-sufficient communities. Here’s the start of a thread I find most interesting:
The automobile, while it evokes in the American psyche images of freedom and independence, in fact requires a massive, state- and corporate-maintained infrastructure in order to sustain those images on a mass scale; paradoxically, then, car culture has made us more dependent on both government and business, and less self-sufficient.
What happens when we ride a bicycle as basic transportation? You can find lots of lists of benefits. Most of the items on most of the lists are about personal benefits associated with positive effects on health, wealth, and ease of travel. All of these things are good in terms of what riding a bicycle does for the individual rider. But does bicycle riding — especially as a transportation option — offer benefits for the entire community?
Another thing that happens when we ride a bicycle as basic transportation is: We become more aware of what our local areas have to offer. We become more aware of the people we’re living near.
Take another look at this photo I published here recently.
What’s going on here is my wife and I are meeting friends for a casual dinner at a local pizza joint. And by local I mean really local. This place is less than one mile from my house (and about 1.5 miles from our friends’ house). It’s part of a little business district that includes two other small restaurants and a few specialty shops.
Places like these are easy to drive by in a car for those living nearby who may be thinking they have to head to another part of town to dine with friends.
This pizza joint gets our business precisely because it is close to home, easy to get to on a bicycle, and offers a bicycle rack — that green lollipop-rack that’s doing its job there.
Restaurants out on the main drags — such as Glenstone, Campbell, and Battlefield — do not get my business because, frankly, driving a car to those areas is not at all pleasant, not at all conducive to the whole purpose of dining with friends. Patronizing restaurants on the main drags is costly, time-consuming, unhealthy, mind-numbing, dangerous, and dirty.
Now you know a little more about why I write so much about downtown being such a good bicycle destination. It is a community worth sustaining. And it offers much in terms of ease and safety for the bicyclist. I live 2.25 miles from the heart of downtown.
Easy to reach on a bicycle.
Better to enjoy on a bicycle.
And then there’s the whole freedom and independence of it — a reality and self-image countering the image Madison Avenue sells us of ourselves in the American automobile.
Comments 8
Interesting T-shirt
http://site.despair.com/governmentmotors/
Posted 09 Jun 2009 at 12:10 pm ¶Robert… Wow. That site is really cynical
I enjoyed looking at their various t-shirts. They are all over the political spectrum.
Posted 09 Jun 2009 at 12:19 pm ¶I did not look at the site. Only that first shirt.
Someone made the “communism” reference in response to my column yesterday. I’m amazed that they can buy a car, drive it on taxpayer funded roads and that is freedom. We try to spend some tax money on bicycling and its communism!?!?!!?!?
I was never going to purchase an automobile anyway but if I was it would be a Ford. They are the only one of the big three who have so far refused to become nationalized.
Posted 09 Jun 2009 at 12:29 pm ¶Robert… Most people haven’t the faintest clue what socialism and communism are
I am not a supporter of the auto bailout. Stupidity and short-sightedness need to be “rewarded” properly, i.e. not at all.
Posted 09 Jun 2009 at 12:39 pm ¶Andy,
Posted 09 Jun 2009 at 12:56 pm ¶Once again, thanks for the plug and for grasping what I was trying to get at. I’ll soon be putting up a Wichita version of what you’ve written here–the direction I’ve been heading (I’m just taking my time getting there: The Slow-Cycle Essayist).
How is your “car lite” lifestyle working out for you? I suppose your wife drives an automobile daily? How far away from her destinations do you live?
I intentionally used the term, “lifestyle.” : )
Posted 09 Jun 2009 at 1:41 pm ¶Robert… So far so good. My wife works at home, so she doesn’t drive much except to the gym. And she’s cool with riding to destinations downtown. My daughter is the one who needs to be driven places.
John… I’m happy to highlight interesting thinking
Posted 09 Jun 2009 at 2:41 pm ¶As Yogi Berra once said about a restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”
I suspect those strip restaurants (and of course we have the exact same ones in Dayton) still get a lot of business in part because people do not know of options closer to home (if they have any).
Posted 10 Jun 2009 at 11:35 am ¶