Taken for a Ride
by Patrick Field
The bicycle is often treated as some kind of antidote to the machine-age. The bicycle is not an antidote to the machine-age, it is its pinnacle. The amount of freight and people you can move with jumbo-jets is clearly greater than the amount of freight and people you can move with pedal-cycles; but if we compare output minus input the bicycle wins. In peacetime (which is the only time worth planning for) poor people don't often consider using a jumbo-jet. For rich people -- the kind with enough luxury to read or write cycling magazines -- physical work is 'exercise' which is not a costly input but another beneficial output. In absolute terms the bicycle is the most powerful mechanical tool that humanity has produced.
Avelopes, persons who perversely don't cycle, typically take a jaundiced view of the bike. If the subject of cycle-travel crops up they start talking about problems and hazards; the threat posed by reckless cyclists or the likelihood of death that faces anyone foolhardy enough to venture onto the road without an empty sofa, heater and digital-tuner and cassette player for moral support. They pepper their discourse on the subject with 'nearly's and 'almost's and see imminent catastrophes everywhere.
The bicycle is not a problem it is a solution. Avelopic culture is irrationally prejudiced against bicycles. If you doubt this consider the contradictory clichˇs with which cycle-travel is dismissed. Firstly any bicycle costing more than £99.99 is overpriced and anyone who wears special shoes or clothes for cycling is a freak. Bicycling is a facile endeavour, easily mastered by any child and unworthy of consideration by adults. Secondly cycling is an activity about as hazardous as parachuting off office blocks, those who undertake it must be super-fit, with nerves of weapons-grade steel and probably insane.
One in three women and one in ten men in Britain have never discovered how to ride a bicycle. Many of these are convinced that they have a deficient sense of balance, even though most have mastered much more complicated physical routines such as running or walking. Riding a bicycle requires much less finesse than running.
When riding a bicycle you are sitting on a seat, holding a handrail with your feet resting on two platforms that have a strictly limited range of movement. When running you spend most of your time jumping through the air, out of contact with the ground. The difference between bicycling and running compares with the gap between the skill needed to strike a single key on a mechanical instrument like a piano and the demands of making a single, clear tone with a fiddle or a horn. The first is revealed in a moment, the other needs hours of careful practice. People who have never learned to bicycle have a low opinion of their sense of balance because the idea that riding a bicycle is 'easy' has penetrated so deep into the collective consciousness of industrial humanity.
Most human accomplishments are easy, if you can do them, and difficult if you can't. Reading is easy. You look at this print and the ideas come into your head; but reading has not become a cliché for an easy skill. While the hackneyed simile '...as easy as riding a bike' is unhelpful to those who have been unfortunate enough to grow into adulthood without discovering how, the oft repeated, 'once you have learned you never forget' is a truth that helps explain the moment of revelation. The process of finding out how to keep the unstable equilibrium of a bicycle from crashing is discovering a principle not learning a skill.
I have taught hundreds of adults how to ride a bike. The eureka moment, is often strangely surprising; as if someone who had never seen a piano before inadvertently leant on the keyboard. Before most pianists can play an arrangement that shows-off their instrument's potential they must study slow and simple music. Bikes are different - unlike most other physical skills - you have to do the hardest part first.
Unless they have a reckless confidence that some people never possess and most loose with maturity, adult beginners must learn to go slowly on a bicycle before they dare try moving faster. Riding at the kind of dawdling pace that most adult beginners can cope with is much more difficult than bicycling at or above jogging speed. If a piano behaved like a bicycle the first few notes would require boldness but once they had sounded the player would find rippling scales fairly easy and then bass-line, harmony and melody flowing effortlessly leaving the rest of their career for experiments with the nuances of interpretation and the challenge of composition.
A couple of years ago I was hired by the Channel Four, transport magazine 'Ride-On' to appear in an item about urban cycling. The film crew had me riding round the Elephant and Castle, a busy double roundabout that forms the hub of South London's road network. They shot me from various locations on the kerb, then from the roof of a shopping centre, they clamped a mini camera on the handlebars and framed my face from below, they clamped the mini camera on the forks and shot forward into the moving traffic.
Keen to set a good example to the viewers and taking professional care of my temporary employers equipment I rode purposefully but with deliberate care using the lane markings on the roadway and the patterns made by the files of motor-traffic to hold an empty zone around me. After each run they retired to their mobile home to view the latest sequence and confer in hushed voices. They weren't happy with what had been recorded. They were running out of options. It began to seem that darkness might fall without them capturing the moving-pictures they wanted. Finally the director took me aside and in a conspiratorial tone asked 'can't you make it look more difficult?'
© Patrick Field
Cycling & Mountain Biking Today, 1997