The Real Reasons for
Not Cycling
by Patrick Field
"But riding a bike is so dangerous," say the people who don't ride -- or avelopes, to use the clinical terminology. This (usually incorrect) statement and the disproportionate awe ("You cycled all the way? Gosh, you must be very fit") that non-cyclists lavish on the most modest of two-wheeled achievements are their two most irritating conversational gambits. Cultural blinds spots can partially explain the typical avelope's chronic exaggerations of cycle travel's difficulties but there are more complex motivations working.
If every time cricket or horse riding were mentioned their hazards were also stressed -- both pursuits contain significantly more risk than riding a bike -- then people who didn't take part in such activities would soon start to exaggerate their 'dangers'. Under certain circumstances riding a bike may be hazardous. It is very rarely dangerous; an important distinction.
The general perception of this hazard has been exaggerated because, in recent history, if you mentioned cycling to a politician, planner or highway engineer the first sentence of their reply was certain to contain the words 'risk', 'safety' or 'danger'. Their favourite excuse, as they relentlessly converted our road network from human-scale arteries into swathes of sterile space, was that cycle travel was declining because it was so dangerous, therefore they had no obligation to consider its needs and indeed would be wrong to encourage it. The British Medical Association has now pushed the Government (in the person of Robert 'I Love Cars' Key) into admitting that although riding a bike may be hazardous, not riding one presents a much greater threat to health -- so the 'bikes are too dangerous' argument is now with the taxidermist. But the legacy of the long-standing, self-fulfilling prophecy of decline through 'danger' remains. Which partly explains the avelopian obsession with safety.
Most avelopes see bicycle travel as an athletic challenge, which we cyclists know it rarely is. The demands it makes on will and imagination are far greater than those on heart, lungs and musculature. When adults take up skiing or windsurfing they expect to spend some time (and money) learning how to do it correctly. Some are demoralized by the initial difficulty but most persevere, realising that the activity will become less arduous when a certain level of competence is achieved. Paradoxically, the cliché that riding a bike is a simple activity ('it's as easy as...'), and therefore unworthy of consideration, means that many adults' last experience of cycling was on a poorly maintained, over-geared donkey of a bike with under-inflated tyres, while wearing wholly inappropriate footwear and clothing. Like everything else riding a bike is easy -- when you can do it. When you can't, it isn't.
Neither the planners' Pavlovian 'bikes = danger' nor the inability to recognise that cycling gets easier with practice and investment can wholly explain the avelope's exaggeration of cycle travel's difficulties. Simple observation should tell them that covering eight kilometres on a level road does not require the fitness of a Channel swimmer and that using the highway without a sheet-steel overcoat does not always demand the daring of a downhill ski-racer. The habit of treating the casual bicycle user as a superhuman star fulfills a ore complex function. It is part of a strategy to protect them from the contagion that cycle travel is a possible, logical and sensible option. To dodge the question: 'If ordinary people do it, why don't I?'
Self-reliance is a rare commodity on our complex society and more lauded in theory than encouraged in practice. Most people limit their behaviour to following instructions and imitating others. Sometime during the 20th century the modern and novel phenomenon of riding a bicycle ceased to be modish. Anyone who engages in it nowadays steps outside the narrow band of normal. It's not pushing the pedals that makes riding a bike hard work; it's summoning up the strength to join an out-group.
Social status is jealously guarded and increasingly, is equated with wealth. To be rich is to be successful, to be successful is to be rich and not to be rich is to fail. In this context the risk of riding a bike is not to life and limb but that your neighbours may suspect that your credit card has been frozen and you can no longer gas up your Mercedes. Avelopes bending your ear about safety are just as worried about the message that riding a bike will give to the world as they are about going under the wheels of a skip lorry.
No one every rode to work along a Government Statement. If past experience is any guide, June's pronouncements from R Key and V Bottomley concerning the value of cycling to the health and efficiency of our nation will result not in a material improvement in conditions for cycle travel but in a frenzied outbreak of buck-passing. These significant changes in Government will, however, put yet more pressure on the bicycle-deficient to justify their bizarre choice not to cycle. By all means endeavour to contradict their irrational twittering, but do it gently. They need our help in this difficult time.
© Patrick Field
Cycling Today, September 1994