Go for the Money
by Richard Ballantine
In ancient China, indeed as recently as 50 years ago in some parts of that country, acupuncturists were paid a flat yearly fee. If a patient became ill the yearly fee was reduced. The idea was that doctors earned their money by keeping people well. The very best acupuncturists were known by a term that roughly translates as 'Emperor of the Poets'; they spent all their time educating people how to live in good health, and had no ill patients whatsoever.
Health care in our society is arranged in a completely opposite way; doctors are paid when the patient is ill. The worse the illness, and the greater the complexity of the equipment and resources required for treatment, the greater the cost. As a result, health care costs are rising rapidly, and general health standards are deteriorating. This is because the majority of resources are being spent on a small minority of complex, sometimes terminal problems.
There is a practical lesson in this for cyclists.
Perhaps the greatest problem in promoting the develpment of cycling as a widespread means of general transport is that cycling is economical. The low personal cost of travelling by bike, and on a broader scale, the huge investment savings in environmental damage, road construction, hospital and emergency services that come with increased use of bikes, are seen as virtues. Yet it is precisely because cycling is economical that governments do little to promote bicycles.
As with health care, the system for determining transport design and construction (in Britain at least) rewards the wrong priorities. The high capital cost of public transport improvements depends on funding from the national Department of Transport -- and money is available only for roads, not railways. Of the 15,000-odd employees in the Department of Transport, less than one per cent are concerned with railways; all the others are concerned with cars and roads. Britain's Department of Transport is a classic self-serving bureaucracy that makes money by mounting and supporting ever more ambitious road building programmes.
Meanwhile, the problems of traffic congestion worsen, and building more roads only aggravates the problem.
Like doctors who charge seriously ill patients more money, British transport planners are now talking about relieving traffic congestion by making motorists pay more, for example by imposing an extra tax fee on cars used in central urban areas. This would make transport, like private medical care, the province of the wealthy. Making motorists pay more will not solve the problem of congestion, because no matter how wealthy the people riding in the cars are, the cars will not go any faster. What it will do is help make the overall transport situation still worse. Nothing done for the car -- an already terminally ill case -- can equal the usefulness of simple improvements in basic transport.
You have to get priorities right, and know which transport design features will bring the best results. There must be incentives for the lines of development that are really useful.
Instead of taxing motorists, governments should subsidise cyclists. Paying people to ride bikes would be a cost-effective option, and would directly help the people in most need. In Britain and America, and doubtless many other industrialised countries, fully one third of the people live at or below the poverty level, and transport consumes a high proportion of their limited incomes. A transport subsidy at the individual level would have enormous beneficial impact.
But put aside the social benefits or any of the other arguments in favour of the bike. Just imagine: instead of having to pay hard-earned money for unreliable public transport or, worse, for driving a car in traffic, people could ride bikes and get paid for it. It is a deal too good to miss.
At a practical level, implementing a subsidy for cyclists is well within the bounds of possibility. The technology that has placed cash vending machines on every high street and shopping mall can solve the problem of monitoring cycle usage. Ride your bike to work and earn your lunch money. As for where the money would come from, gets portion of the huge budgets for road building would be ample.
Administering subsidies for cyclists would be grist for bureaucratic mills such as the Department of Transport. There would be plenty to do, and so perhaps most important of all, plenty of money to handle. Their 15,000-odd employees could remain, but their work would be directed to more useful ends.
The key concept that justifies a subsidy for cyclists is the right of equal opportunity. State-funded education exists to give one and all the equal opportunity of learning for a sufficient start in life. There is a gap between theory and practice that is sometimes very wide, but nonetheless, the idea is there; education is a basic right. So is mobility, although few governments today would accept this. Equal access to transport is just as fundamental as education, food, accommodation, and work.
What cyclists have to realise, though, is that we are well past the stage of playing Mr Nice Guy. It is no good spending time politely saying how wonderful the bicycle is and hoping that politicians will promote it. Politicians, like governments, run on money. They will pay attention to bicycles only when cyclists are an economic force to be reckoned with. And that will happen only when cyclists assert and hold an inalienable right to first priority in transport planning and budgets.
It is time for cyclists
to become aggressive, and go for the money.
© Richard Ballantine
Bike
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