Cars and capitalism.

• Author: Engler, Yves

"Let's make sure we get the business and economic message out first. Bikes mean business."

--Gary Sjoquist, Bikes Belong spokesperson.

If you care about safety, livability or fresh air it's hard to criticize someone pushing for bike infrastructure. But compared to what do "bikes mean business?" A pedestrian's socks and shoes? Bikes can't compete with buses or trains let alone personal cars as a source of profit. In fact, part of the bike's appeal is that it is a relatively simple and inexpensive product, even if the manufacturers and travel companies funding Bikes Belong want to promote high-end recreational cycling.

Those who promote cycling should be careful about reinforcing the idea that business interests ought to direct public policy. Bikes, feet and trolleys play a subordinate role in the North American transport hierarchy largely because transit policy has been designed to serve business interests.

An anecdote about the lobbyists who launched the Good Roads Movement helps illustrate the point. Begun by bike makers in the 1890s, the Good Roads push for government-funded roadway failed to gain much momentum until bike magnates (and others) started producing automobiles and lobbying for roads for cars. (Early US carmakers Pope, Peerless, Rambler, Winton and Willis all began as bike makers.) Financed by the world's leading bike magnate, Albert Pope, the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) promoted road building for cyclists. Yet LAW's political clout was limited and change came slowly. In 1902 the American Automobile Association, which included former bicycle manufacturers, emerged as a successor to LAW. Many lobbyists remained, but they were far more influential lobbying for roads to serve cars than they had been in the bicycle movement.

The bicycle lobby achieved relatively little because it could not attract a host of associated industries. Unlike the car, a bicycle is a simple product. Just two skinny tires and a frame. While some bike companies were profitable, they did not generate near as much economic activity as the auto industry.

Stephen Goddard describes the attitude during the 1910s resource boom spurred by the car: "To the industrialists, who were now selling glass, rubber, steel, concrete and their end products in numbers beyond their wildest dreams, whatever needed to be done to sustain the boom and to build pressure for good roads simply had to [be] accomplished."

Today, the economic might of the automobile is hundreds...