to take this thread a little more seriously......few political buttons work as well as the car. Some MPs (a small minority) see the car as overbearing, but, for most it's a
fact, not to be messed with. I was persuaded by Ken Livingstone back in 1969 that the car is a pox upon the world, and, since then, whatever the bike, (Holdsworth, Dawes hybrid, Colnago(s), 1953 BSA, Kirk or Brompton), I've been a
political cyclist in that I see the cycle as a counterpoint to and an improvement on the car.
If you've been across to 'Informal Rides' you'll see that cycling is a shining light in my life. It supplies a lot of the poetry. It's brought me friendship on a grand scale. It keeps my waistline in check. All this is good, but there's better to come. Forty years ago I could have cycled the thirteen miles to Epsom or seven miles to Marylebone and seen, perhaps, two or three other cyclists. Now.......they're beyond counting. Lately I've taken to standing on street corners and just marvelling at the sheer number of people, of all levels of fitness and none, riding bikes of every description and some that defy description. My heart soars like a dove.
But.............is there some great purpose being served, something more politically meaningful than my state of mind? Kindasortamaybe. What's apparent is that mass cycling is not the big answer to sustainable transport. It costs us very little (most of the time
http://www.cyclechat.net/threads/dumbass-lcc-bike-lane-on-stratford-high-street.142505/ ) but the numbers do not look so brilliant when you compare it with the bus. There's a rich and unfortunate irony here - in dense cities where cycling works the best, it's not the best answer. Where cycling works least well, it's a small answer to a question that is both vast and just plain wrong.
The real battle is elsewhere. It's in the way we build towns and roads. The UK is cursed by suburbia, that is, increasingly, turning to
exurbia. Now, I like suburbia. I like the front gardens, I like the fake history (sorry @
Archie_tect ), I like the teashops and the sheer absence of a guiding intelligence (or any kind of intelligence). But suburbia/exurbia is choking what was once the countryside and turning our cities in to commuter hell. We, that is to say almost all of us, want our little patch of green but that wanting is going to do us in. And a large part of that doing in will be the ever-increasing reliance on the car for patterns of movement that the bus and the train are never going to be able to serve.
So..........by all means start a Cyclists Party. I'll join - I love a good party. But don't kid yourselves it's the answer. The answer, the revivifying and intensifying of our cities is so far off the panorama of our political horizons that, if I steel myself to think about it, I despair. It's true that this year I've been drawing just over 500 flats to be built next to big public transport (and 240 of those just down the road from where I live) but that's a drop in the ocean when hundreds of towns like Yarm, Sittingbourne and Worthing are being girdled by acres and acres of car-dependent semi-Ds.
As a country we are petrol junkies, and our politics continues to fuel the habit. You are all noble souls, pedalling virtuously, but, sadly, pedalling against the grain rather than toward a new dawn and a brighter day.
).
