To weigh in on the bicycle debate as related to the Critical Mass thread, I would like to add the words of Ivan Illich from his book "Energy and Equity" published in 1974.
(As a female cyclist I apologize for his extensive use of male nouns and pronouns.) "Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometre of flat road at an expense of only 0-15 calories. The bicycle is the prefect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines, but all other animals as well. The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes two lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using modern trains, four to move them on buses, 12 to move them in their cars, and only one lane for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destination of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred. Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. The monopoly of a ritual application over a potentially useful device is nothing new. Thousands of years ago, the wheel took the load off the carrier-slave, but it did so only on the Eurasian landmass. In Mexico, the wheel was well-known, but never applied to transport. It served exclusively for the construction of carriages for toy gods. The taboo on wheelbarrows in American before Cortes is no more puzzling than the taboo on bicycles in modern traffic. High speed is the critical factor which makes transportation socially destructive. A true choice among political systems and of desirable social relations is possible only where speed is restrained. Participatory democracy demands low energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle.* I speak about traffic for the purpose of illustrating the more general point of socially optimal energy use, and I restrict myself to the locomotion of persons, including their personal baggage and the fuel, materials and equipment used for the vehicle and the road. I purposely abstain from the discussion of two other types of traffic: merchandise and messages. Parallel argument can be made for both, but this would require a different line of reasoning, and I leave it for another occasion." _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
