Staying Cycle-logical
in a World Gone Car Mad
by Josie Dew
Some say that navigating
the highways and byways of these fair-cum-drizzly-cum-drought-like isles of
ours by bicycle is nothing much short of suicide. Not I. I say it's safe. It
may at times be a slightly hazardous form of 'safe', but in my bike-reflecting
eyes it is the safest form of transport within this ever escalating land of
motorized mania.
Some may scoff at this implausible statement but I stand firm and cycle even
firmer. Take, for instance, travelling through a city street in one of those
lovely three-letter words with four wheels. Think how dangerous that is. First
you're encapsulated in a metal box drinking in a worrisome cocktail of pollutants
-- far more hazardous and potentially life-threatening than riding outside with
them. And I haven't just made that up: the British Medical Journal, Transport
2000, the Cyclists' Touring Club, the Friends of the Earth and others in the
know, know so and say so.
Then there's the fact that clogged streets can lead to clogged arteries because,
frankly, sitting in a jam is no cream tart. Speaking from the thankfully soupçon
of occasions that I have had the mispleasure of having to steer a motorized
vehicle along a busy road, going nowhere fast, does tend to make a Road Rager
rage, or even a non-Road Rager rage, by gnawing away at the steering wheel as
if there was no tomorrow (which in their raging state there may not well be
if they keep it up), tearing their hair, blowing their top (as well as the horn)
and basically making life hell on four wheels.
Although my gluteus maximus muscles have been planted firmly in the saddle on
various forms of two-wheels virtually every day for over two-thirds of my life,
it still never fails to amaze me just what a supremely ingenious invention the
velocipede is. How, I wonder to myself, as I fly along on wings of steels, can
something so inherently simple produce such inexplicable joy? And what's more,
the fitness gained from cycling is a pure bonus, and counteracts the possibility
of a major prang that tends to always lurk at the back of your mind.
If you mount up and take to you wheels for even just a whirlwind few minutes
a week, is has been found that the long term likelihood of contracting heart
disease is halved. And that can't help but make you feel good. And if you feel
good you feel happy and if you feel happy you live longer and if you live longer
you have more time at your fingertips (and toe clips) to roll around feeling
buoyant by bike.
There are some things in life that once learnt, you never forget: like whistling
or swimming or tying your shoelaces. Or cycling. The interesting thing though
is that although over ninety percent of British adults can claim to be able
to ride a bike, less than ten percent know how they can manage to keep their
balance. And I'm one of the latter.
OK, so physics may never have been my cherry on the cake, but I know enough
to fathom that momentum must play a fairly hefty part in there somewhere: stop
and you topple, or at least you should do, unless of course you're a bit of
dab hand at balancing the bike without moving or having detached foot from pedals
or toe clip to land prop-stand fashion upon the ground. But scientific reasoning
aside, just the fact that I am able to propel myself along without coming to
grief (too often) on a couple of unstabilized circles of metal and travel from
A to B with a free and breezy ease is good enough for me. And that, in essence,
is the joy of cycling. It's cheap, it's easy, it's invigorating, it's efficient,
it's simple to maintain, and as it's been proved, it's good for the heart.
According to popular opinion among those who don't cycle, riding a bike in urban
areas is automatically presumed to be a hazardous pastime but it's a hazard
most city cyclists will agree is truly overestimated. There are now so many
vehicles cramming our streets that one of the benefits of such massive congestion
is that nothing is moving -- or scarcely moving (the speedfor daytime central
London traffic averages 11mph, roughly the same as it was this time last century
with horse power) cyclists can move around not only a lot faster than the vehicles
they're weaving among but relatively safely.
Of course it's easy to become self-complacent when sitting in the hotseat-cum-sore-saddle
on your mighty metallic steed, cocking-a-snoop at the cooped up masses restricted
to their inching- onwards cars. But confidence and caution is the name of the
game. Just because a vehicle is scarcely moving doesn't mean to say that it
can't behave erratically. Many motorists and passengers alike seem to be particularly
adept at gaily throwing open car doors into the path of your wheels. Others
who are finding that the stop-start traffic is getting up their backside are
capable of making rash moves and unsignalled U-turns.
Then there are the pedestrians who presume that just because two or more lanes
of traffic are locked in fuming stagnation that it's quite safe to step off
the pavement and able nonchalantly around the noses of cars and the rears of
buses without so much as a flicker of thought that gridlock for four or more
wheeled vehicles does not mean gridlock for all.
Riding through traffic attached to a trailer that's loaded to the gunwales with
ten-tiered gateaux or multiple containers of slopworthy soup (as I have done
since I was sixteen when I set up a somewhat haphazard catering business) add
even more mixed spice to your life. It may be exuberant fun but it's not always
plain sailing: many has been the occasion for spills and thrills: i.e., shedding
half a lorry load of devilled drumsticks in the midst of Marble Arch; jack-knifing
in Whitehall, and, thanks to a bottomless pothole, losing all contact with my
curried carrot and cashew nut soup in Piccadilly Circus.
But don't get hung up about little hiccups like this and allow the relatively
remote possibility of an incident or an accident to deter you from the joys
of living life awheel. After all, it makes no sense to fret about coming-a-cropper
on a bicycle when you might just as easily fall up or down stairs (last year
there were 14,460 such injuries in Greater London alone), or swallow chemicals
by mistake (1330), or fall off ladders (4356) or slip or scald yourself in a
bath or shower (179), or mishandle a screwdriver (471), or trip over your ill-fitting
slippers (149), or misbehave in bed (486), or choke on cheese (96), or bang
your head on the glass partition in a post office or bank (8) or over-rock a
rocking chair (2).
© Josie Dew
On Your Bike, July 1997
(This was the original, pre-Emap OYB, edited by Carlton Reid)
see also Fear Culture and Safe