Cars made bicycles possible
Bikes prosper when they can run on smooth roads
I like bikes a lot
I can't ride them now since my sense of balance is shot
And I'm not strong now
But once I could ride my bike anywhere I wanted.
Once I was in Vancouver and decided to ride to Saint John on the east coast to visit my mother.
I sure did come to appreciate paved roads. In the western provinces all the paved roads had wide paved shoulders.
The further east I went the worse the roads became.
I'd been over those roads before. Back in the day there were paved shoulders. But when the main travelling surface was raised for maintenance the shoulder was just filled with sand and smoothed over. Looked great. Not possible to ride on with a bike.
I'd driven my car through there years before and was like white knuckled - going along a single lane with a 60 mph speedlimit and a nice sandy beach as a shoulder to pull off onto into in an emergency.
I decided to skip that stretch.
I took the train from Winnipeg to Sudbury.
North Bay was hard to pass. The people there built a 60mph road past the town that had no shoulder at all.
Now my map showed that I could have gone down to the city and then climbed up through a a bunch of strange streets to rejoin the highway on the other side.
I was young and into adventure and I took the highway. I made it.
Later in that ride I was on the final leg going from Fredericton to Saint John. Roger Penrose was speaking at UNB on the night I was sleeping in the woods there. His book "The Emperor's New Mind" was my reading material on my ride. I was like DANG! when I learned of it later.
So next day I set off on the main road to Saint John which was the shortest road between Fredreicton and Saint John. I knew that road well. I'd driven it dozens of times easy ride. hah - was I wrong.
The shoulders of that road were not like a beach - they were like a creek bed full of big stones.
And it was way busy with big trucks hauling logs to the pulp mill in Saint John. When I saw one coming in my rear view mirror and saw approaching traffic too I'd stop and drag my bike to the side to let them get by.
That daily tide of trucks passed and I pedalled on. As I got close to Saint John the road was wider and there was a generous shoulder and the trucks were going home. I got lots of toots and waves from them.
My observation here is that bikes are a great means of transport but it took the advent of cars tor create the network of roads that were congenial to bikes.
We may be seeing a dialectic in action. Roads were built to serve cars but once the roads were in place bicycles proved to be a better way of getting around. Well - for the young and fit - I can't ride a bike now.
But I used to ride 5 miles across Vancouver to get to my work and studio in all kinds of weather without giving much thought. I was moving as fast as the cars and faster than the bus. But in the days before they marked bike lanes on roads I learned a simple trick. Most of the time when you have a busy stretch of street there is a non-busy stretch going the same direction a block over on each side.
Lately bicyclists have been looking at abandoned railway lines as potential bike routes across the country. It takes lots of work to upgrade an abandoned train line to a bike trail but the heavy lifting is done. The grade is there. There are tunnels and trestles.
When I knew bicycles they were definitely muscle powered machines - my muscles. Now most of the bikes I see have electric motors. And bikes have big wheels. These days I see lots of people on stand on scooters that are battery powered.
They can go 20-30 mph!!! With tiny wheels like that they need a very smooth road. But the scooters don't need a licence to drive and so free to use them on the sidewalk. I must say that I don't like it when some person is weaving through pedestrians and whiffs past my sleeve.
So I can see a new turn of the dialectic
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.