Breaking away.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Bicycle revolution

On an October afternoon in 1969, a group of University of Minnesota students walked into downtown Minneapolis dragging an automobile engine in a wagon. As a small crowd gathered, the students dropped the motor into a grave, covered it with dirt, and solemnly declared an end to the tyranny of the internal combustion engine over the lungs and lives of civilized people. As traffic rushed past on nearby streets, a young minister read the eulogy:

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, for the sake of mankind, iron to rust...

The gesture might have seemed premature. But in a country where the internal combustion automobile engine is a kind of technological sacred cow, it seems any suggestion of change is taken as "premature" - as demonstrated by the experience of another student, Al Gore, who at the time of the burial was finishing his senior year at Harvard. Gore had studied under Roger Revelle, one of the scientists who sounded the alarm about greenhouse warming. Like the students in Minneapolis, he worried about the effects of auto exhaust on the atmosphere. Gore continued to follow the issue over the years, and last year during his campaign for the vice presidency of the United States, he took up the quarter-century-old banner and made a modest suggestion that the pollution-spewing internal combustion engine be phased out in another quarter century. His opponent, Dan Quayle, attacked the idea as "hysterical."

If the Minnesota students of 1969 hoped that more benign forms of transportation would soon begin to supplant cars, statistical trends at that time were harshly unpromising. Sales of cars - all powered by internal combustion engines, of course - had been rising rapidly throughout the 1950s and 1960s and were about to reach an all-time high of 23 million vehicles that year [see Figure on page 12]. In fact, it appeared certain that by 1970, if the trend continued, cars would take over as the number-one choice of personal transportation in the world - and from then on would largely replace bicycles as "less developed" countries upgraded their transportation systems.

But the trend did not continue. Instead, it was bicycle production that surged in 1970, while auto production actually declined. And that year did not turn out to be an anomaly: for the next two decades, worldwide bicycle sales continued to grow while auto sales slowed and flattened. With the aid of hindsight, it now appears that the summer of that long-forgotten symbolic burial was, in fact, a kind of turning point in the world's choice of personal transportation. Between 1970 and 1990, annual car production increased by 14 million, while bike production grew by 60 million.

In 1992, the number of new bikes produced exceeded that of new cars worldwide by almost 3 to 1. And while cars still dominate personal transportation in the United States and Europe, recent developments suggest that much of the world is not likely to adopt an American-style car culture. Instead, many regions appear likely to leapfrog past the auto-dominated phase of transportation history altogether, to ways of moving people that are less luxurious but more ecologically sustainable and humane. Those ways may include a surprisingly large reliance on bicycles - not only in the Third World but in the affluent cities of the West as well.

The Driving Force

That prospect may seem to defy the conventional wisdom that more "advanced" technologies usually replace simpler ones, and are synonymous with "progress." This idea is so deeply ingrained that we easily assume that the bicycle came first and then was succeeded and gradually replaced by the technologically superior automobile. But in fact, the sprocket chain-driven bicycle and gas-fueled internal combustion engine-driven car were both invented in the same year - 1885. The two technologies as we know them today developed side by side.

While cars didn't replace bikes technogically, they did-in time-push bikes off the road. And as motor vehicles increased in numbers and domination of public spaces, it was easy for planners to consider their vastly greater speed and power a clear improvement over the "earlier, more primitive" mode. Projecting that view into the future, it was equally easy to assume cars would eventually replace bicycles (except for recreational purposes) virtually everywhere people had the opportunity to buy them. This equating of technological advancement with a "better life" went virtually unchallenged for half a century or more, during which American urban space was largely taken over by cars. It was only in the post-World War II era of heavy increases in auto ownership that it began to become apparent how the benefits of auto mobility can have enormous costs beyond those of owning a car.

Those costs are so extreme that future historians may wonder how we tolerated them. A likely answer is that we wouldn't have, if we could have foreseen the modern consequences of auto dependence. Each year, cars kill more children, women, and men in accidents than most armies lose in wars; they imprison millions of people for two to three hours a day; contribute to epidemic levels of lung and heart disease; and threaten the stability of the climate itself.

But cars started out quite differently, creating a myth that captured the American soul and became the envy of the world. The myth is familiar because it is now heavily invoked - and kept alive - by advertising. The ads typically depict an open road, a feeling of speed, a sense of freedom, an ability to control one's own movement. Americans invested heavily in that myth: we built an enormously expensive infrastructure, developed gigantic petroleum, steel, rubber, highway construction and automobile manufacturing industries, and developed both a psychological and an economic dependence on the car. Now, in a sense, we are stuck with it. The roads we use for most trips are no longer open; the speed cars are built for is useless; the freedom is mostly gone. Only belatedly have we begun to consider seriously the need for alternatives.

But bicycles? Despite the huge numbers of two-wheelers being produced each year, it may be hard to take bikes seriously as a major transportation mode for the future. Skeptics might easily dismiss the significance of those impressive bicycle production figures on the grounds that the bicycle is basically a recreational product, not made to do the work cars do. Alternatively, they might argue that the reason the bicycle market is so large is that...