Freedom from fear
Mighk Wilson
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
–- protagonist Paul Atreides in the Frank Herbert novel Dune
Undoubtedly, one of the most common deterrents to bicycling is fear. Fear of motorists. Notice I said "motorists," not "cars" or "traffic." When people talk about bike safety, especially those who are afraid to bike on the roads, they aren’t much concerned about potholes or dogs or sand on the corner or their ability to control the bike. They fear the motorist they can’t see and who supposedly can’t see them. This fear is based on the belief that a significant number of motorists are likely to hit bicyclists while overtaking them. Does it happen? Yes. Is it common? Not at all.
Beliefs are survival tools our brains use when we don’t have sufficient direct sensory information to make a decision. Good beliefs can protect us from potential dangers. Bad beliefs mislead us into being fearless when we should be wary or fearing the wrong things. While I sit at my desk in my office I believe my bike is sitting in the bike locker where I locked it and left it, even though I have no evidence to support that belief. It’s not until I go out there, open the locker and look inside that I know my bike is actually there. I couldn’t function sanely if I spent the day believing my locker was being broken into. Conversely, if I believed no one would wish to steal my bike, I wouldn’t bother locking it and would again sit at my desk believing it was still there.
What kinds of events contribute to our beliefs about bicycle safety? First and most common is sensory information -- observation of the motorists and bicyclists around us. Such observations often convince people that bicycling is unsafe. It only takes a few incidents of carelessness or rudeness by motorists to convince some that cycling is a dangerous activity even though most interactions with motorists are non-threatening. We humans are easily startled when something big comes rushing up from behind us. Think -- predator! Even after 25 years of cycling an overtaking car still occasionally startles me.
Second are the lies that motorists tell when they have treated cyclists poorly. Catch up to a motorist after one has nearly sideswiped you and you’ll most likely hear one of the following lies: A) "I didn’t see you." B) "You belong on the sidewalk." C) "You’re supposed to ride all the way to the right."
Third are stories about crashes. The media does not report "20,000 people rode their bikes today and none of them were hit by motorists." They usually report that someone has been killed while cycling and make little or no effort to explain why the crash occurred.
The fourth way is through statistical data on bicyclist-versus-motorist crashes. Here again the information is skewed toward the negative. The statistical data people receive through the media is vague and misleading.
My purpose on these pages is to show you why proper cycling on roads is quite safe and can be accomplished by normal adults. I’ll be covering a few statistics (okay, a lot of statistics) my own experiences, the skills and practices necessary for safer cycling, and some reasoning about the motorist’s perspective.
The Crash Data
I collect a good deal of information about cycling crashes. It’s part of my job as a bike coordinator. Regrettably, what most people get to see are just raw numbers and media reports. (Some are even echoing these reports in their arguments to get cyclists removed from the roads.)
For example: in Orange, Seminole and Osceola Counties there were 644 bicyclists-versus-motorist crashes in 1994; 11 resulted in death. Scary thought, huh? But how many of those involved a cyclist driving on the right side of the roadway (not on the sidewalk) during daylight hours and obeying the signs, signals and rules of the road? Only 74, and of those not one was a fatality. Of those 11 deaths, 8 occurred at night, and 5 involved cyclists hit from behind. (How often do you see a cyclist out at night without lights?) The other 3 daytime deaths involved kids who failed to yield (ages 10, 15 and 16). These are the proportions of crash types you’ll see in most Florida cities.
Of those 74 crashes, 24 involved an overtaking motorist, and that’s the type of crash people fear most. That’s 24 daytime, non-fatal, motorist-overtaking crashes for an entire year for an area with more than 1.1 million licensed motorists (not including tourists). That means only one motorist out of 46,000 (0.002%) in our area in 1994 was so incompetent as to hit a bicyclist from behind in broad daylight. Only 13 resulted in significant injuries and only 4 in incapacitating injuries. Only 2 of the 24 motorists claimed they "did not see" the cyclist.
So what’s happening? A very small number of motorists are unsafely and unsuccessfully passing cyclists and the ensuing crashes are sideswipes that result in mostly minor injuries. Fortunately there is a way that you can reduce the tendency for motorists to pass unsafely. None of these overtaking crashes occurred on roads with wide curb lanes, bike lanes or paved shoulders. They happened on narrow lanes. And the law says that when the lane is narrow you are allowed to leave the right-most side and ride toward the middle.
"What of the other 50 crashes?" you ask. They resulted in 27 significant injuries; 4 incapacitating. They mostly involved motorists who failed to yield at intersections and driveways, and neither bike lanes, sidewalks nor paths offer protection from such crashes. Indeed, on sidewalks and sidewalk-style bikeways you will be more susceptible to such crashes, not less. On the roadway you’ll be more visible. The same defensive driving skills you use as a motorist will normally keep you out of such crashes.
And what of those scary media reports of cycling deaths? The old newspaper adage goes: "’Dog Bites Man?’… that’s not news. ‘Man Bites Dog,’ now that’s news." The commonplace goes unreported; the unusual gets the coverage. Furthermore, we like to have our beliefs reinforced and media producers share the belief that bicycling is dangerous. No one likes being told their beliefs are wrong.
If I owned a radio station I would broadcast a daily bicycle crash report. The most common report would go like this: "Twenty-thousand people rode bikes today. Only one was involved in a crash with an automobile. He was slightly injured while riding on the sidewalk facing traffic and was struck by a motorist exiting a driveway."
Individual Risk
What are the odds of one individual (like you or me) getting hit from behind by a careless or incompetent motorist? The experiences of a handful of other cyclists do not determine your personal risk of being hit by an overtaking motorist. What determines your risk are your behaviors and the behaviors of the passing motorists.
I’ll use my own experience here; I encourage you to work out your own numbers.
First let’s look at my old commute to work. For about 3 years I bike-commuted 6.5 miles each way to our old office in Winter Park about 3 times per week. (Today the office is only 1 mile away in downtown Orlando.) None of the route had bike lanes. About 2.5 miles had wide curb lanes, but the remainder had narrow lanes (11 feet or less) and about a mile of that had parallel parking. Not what most folks would call "bike-friendly." It took about 35 minutes, with about 5 minutes spent waiting at red lights. I would say a car would pass me on average every 15 seconds, 4 passes per minute. That works out to 720 passes per week; 108,000 passes over 3 years.
I’ve been cycling for over 25 years at about 5,000 miles per year. Probably 2,000 of the 5,000 were urban and suburban, and mostly here in the Orlando area. The vast majority of those miles have been on roads without bike lanes or paved shoulders, and few had wide curb lanes. At 15 mph that works out to about 3,300 hours of urban cycling. At 4 per minute (a very conservative estimate) that comes to about 792,000 passes. Out of over three-quarters of a million passing motorists, not one has hit me. (I haven’t experienced any type of motorist-versus-bicyclist collision in 25 years, unless you count the time I ran into the trunk of a parked car while adjusting my toe strap as a teen.) If 1 out of 10,000 motorists (one-hundredth of a percent) who passed me failed to see me, and 10 percent of those who didn’t see me didn’t avoid me I would have been hit 7 or 8 times in the past 25 years. Did I mention I also ride regularly in rain and darkness?
What about "luck?" Luck is a superstitious belief system some use when they don’t understand statistical odds. Remember, only 24 cyclists were hit from behind during daylight hours in our area in one year. If luck had anything to do with it, then there are thousands of "lucky" cyclists in our area. Millions of bicycle trips are made each year but only a handful result in injuries or death. Those who use the sidewalks seem to be less "lucky" since 198 of them were hit at driveways and cross-streets (eight times as many as those hit from behind).
I'm a normal person with normal skills. I make no claim of invulnerability. To claim invulnerability from the risk of passing cars is comparable to claiming it from lightning or tornadoes. While these forces are undeniably lethal, none are very likely to happen to me, or to you.
Training, Skills and Practices
Speaking of skills, another erroneous belief is that to ride safely in traffic one must be an "expert" or have "special skills and training." Strangely, people who believe special skills and training are necessary don’t bother to suggest what those skills or training might be. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know what they are.
Using myself as the example again, I ask, "What particular special skills have I mastered to consistently keep overtaking motorists from hitting me?" None that I know of. I’ve used a rear-view mirror attached to my helmet, but don’t look at it every second. Besides, I don’t think looking in a mirror is a special skill; motorists do it all the time. My mirror broke a while back and I got along fine for a few months until finally replacing i.
What about training? In elementary school in the 1960’s I got the usual "Officer Friendly" presentation on bike safety. His message? Always stop and look both ways before entering the road, ride on the right side of the road, stop at stop signs and red lights, and signal your turns. That was my sole bicycle safety training until I was into my early 20’s. My parents didn’t (and still don’t) ride any significant amount. (Dad was surprised to learn you’re required to ride on the right side of the road, not the left.) As a kid I rode an enormous amount of mileage compared to most. Every day during summer vacation I was out on the suburban streets and country backroads, traveling farther and farther each year. At age 14 I rode my first century, solo. I was doing self-supported, multi-day touring before I graduated high school. The bike continued to be my primary mode of transportation after I got my motor vehicle operator’s license. For about 10 years I rode entirely on roads with no more training than the police officer’s simple presentation. This did not occur in some sleepy small town, but in the bustling suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. I did not see my first bike lane until I was 27. In my early 20’s I started reading Bicycling Magazine, and picked up some pointers there. I didn’t ride regularly with a club until 1988. I didn’t read John Forester’s tome Effective Cycling until seven years ago. So much for the argument that safe cycling requires elaborate training.
I will not deny that I am an "expert" cyclist today (guilty as charged!), but I wonder when it was that I graduated to that level. I suppose one could say I was an "expert" cyclist at age 14 since I rode that solo century and regularly rode in heavy traffic. But I somehow achieved that level with no more training than the "Officer Friendly" pitch.
What skills and practices do I use while cycling? Let’s break those skills and practices into two types, General Driving Skills and Practices and Cycling-Specific Skills and Practices. General driving skills and practices are those you use when driving any vehicle. Ask yourself if you are capable of all of these:
traveling on the right
stopping for stop signs and red lights
yielding when entering the street
scanning for and negotiating with overtaking traffic before moving left
scanning for threats from cross-streets, driveways and turning vehicles
keeping out of the right turn lane when going straight
turning left from the left or left turn lane
If you practice all of the above you will eliminate the vast majority of motorist-versus-cyclist conflicts and crashes.
Cycling-Specific Skills include balance and steering, braking, shifting, and scanning over your shoulder. Three emergency maneuvers are taught In the Effective Cycling curriculum and other bike courses: the "rock dodge," the "quick stop" and the "instant turn." In 25 years I’ve not used either of the last 2 except when teaching Effective Cycling courses. At bike rodeos we teach 10-year-olds how to do the "rock dodge" in a couple of minutes. If you’ve been cycling a while you probably do it instinctively. There were 2 crashes in 1994 that involved an overtaking motorist and a cyclist avoiding an obstacle, one of them at night and neither involving serious injury.
Obviously you’re not going to head out onto a busy road without having mastered balance, steering and basic braking. Many novice cyclists don’t understand shifting, but I don’t see any evidence that that leads to a significant number of crashes. That leaves scanning over your shoulder. Now it’s not the scanning that’s the skill, but scanning without making the bike swerve. We can teach this skill to 7-year-olds in a few minutes. Most readers of this article are already capable of it. In 1994 there were ten cases in which an adult cyclist supposedly veered left in front of an overtaking motorist. Four of them were riding in the dark or at dusk and one was intoxicated. It’s critical to understand that this skill is necessary whether one is in a bike lane, on a sidewalk, or on a road without any special accommodation for cyclists.
(I say supposedly because "He just veered out in front of me!" is almost as common as "I didn’t see him!" Experienced cyclist Duke Breitenbach was hit and injured in Lake County by a motorist who had just passed three other cyclists on a four-lane highway on a bright, sunny day. The driver said, "He just veered out in front of me!" and the Florida highway patrolman believed him. Duke told the patrolman he most certainly did not veer, but the officer treated the cyclist with a Ph.D. as though he was a juvenile delinquent.)
Now we come to cycling-specific practices. Taking the lane is the most important cycling-specific practice because the ones mentioned above won’t discourage motorists from passing you in an unsafe manner. If the lane you’re in is too narrow for a motorist to pass you safely and you keep all the way to the right, some motorists will try to pass you within the same lane. This is both dangerous and unpleasant. Dangerous because you will have no room to maneuver around a road hazard and the motorist may even sideswipe you. I guess I don’t have to explain "unpleasant."
Another very important practice is keeping at least three feet from the driver-side doors of cars parked on the roadway. This very similar to taking the lane. In big cities like New York and San Francisco "dooring" is a very common and serious crash.
Taking the lane is something I’ve only been doing since I read Effective Cycling about six years ago. I’ve noticed a few important things since then. First is that I have far fewer close calls with passing cars. My roadway position forces motorists to give me a wider gap. I’ve found it to be less stressful cycling this way. No, I do not experience more annoyed or aggressive motorist behavior. But when a motorist does get annoyed and passes aggressively I have much more room to maneuver. As for the threat of the inattentive overtaking motorist, all I can say is I’ve yet to hear the sound of squealing brakes coming from right behind me. Horns? Yes, but no more than before.
Behind the Eyes and Between the Ears of the Big, Bad Motorist
A while back I mentioned lightning and tornadoes. Reasonable people strive to understand the true nature of such forces so they can learn to avoid harm. In the same way, a cyclist must learn the true nature of motorists.
We can break motorists into four classes: competent ones who don’t want to hit us, incompetent ones who don’t want to hit us, intimidators who don’t want to hit us, and those who want to hit us.
If you bike in a vehicular manner, follow the rules and use lights at night, the competent type will not hit you. Why? Because you are both acting in a predictable manner and following traffic rules based on logic.
The intimidator will honk, scream, and even maneuver in such a way as to threaten you, but won’t hit you unless you escalate the conflict.
There is very little you can do to avoid being hit by the psychotic fourth type. Neither a wide curb lane, bike lane nor paved shoulder will stop them. But worrying about them is like worrying that ball lightning will come bouncing into your house and smack you in the head. Cycling only on paths separated from the roadway might work, but keep in mind that cycling on sidewalks increases your risk of being hit at a cross-street or driveway two- to ten-fold regardless of your level of experience. Stories of motorists who hit cyclists with intent to harm or kill fall into the "Man Bites Dog" category. In over 125,000 miles and 25 years of cycling I’ve had only one motorist attempt to hit me. He did so because I made him pass me twice on a narrow roadway. I recommend you not do that. Now we’re left with the incompetent motorist.
Even incompetent motorists care about self-preservation. The primary threat to a motorist is another big vehicle coming from the side or front, so that’s where his attention will be. On urban and suburban roads there are many driveways and cross-streets, so motorists are always on the lookout for what’s ahead of them. In order to be avoided you must be seen. The best way to be seen by a motorist is to put yourself where he’s normally looking – right in front of him. The one serious exception is the intoxicated driver. I avoid cycling after dark on major roads on Friday and Saturday nights. Of course intoxicated motorists put everyone at risk; motorists and pedestrians as well as cyclists.
Taking the lane forces motorists to move into the adjacent lane and gives you the space you deserve. I recently wrote an article about roadway positioning and one reader said he disagreed with my recommendation to take over a narrow lane. He said he always rides "right on the white line," is frequently passed too closely by motorists, has been run off the road a few times, and that when he gets a chance to confront them they inevitably say, "I didn’t see you!"
Both he and I have biked for many years. I’ve been taking the lane for more than five years. (Before that I my experiences were quite similar to his.) Why did those motorists "not see" him yet consistently see me? The answer is simple; they did see him. Of course they’re going to say they didn’t see him, they just startled or threatened him through rudeness or carelessness and probably believe he doesn’t belong on the roadway. The motorist will blame only one of two people, the cyclist or himself. The cyclist on the roadway – even the one riding on the white line – is in plain view of motorists. If motorists routinely missed seeing bicyclists riding straight ahead of them it would be the most common type of motorist-versus-cyclist crash, but it’s one of the least common. "I didn’t see you" really means, "I intentionally passed you in an unsafe manner but I don’t want to admit it." They might as well say, "I cannot be held responsible to avoid hitting you because you are virtually invisible."
Here’s a story to illustrate the silliness of the "I didn’t see you" line. My wife Carol and I were on our tandem at dusk in downtown Orlando. We were signaling a left turn and moving into the center of the lane. A motorist passed us on the left, crossing the double yellow line, again, as we were signaling a left turn. After the unsafe pass I decided to go straight instead of making our left and see if we could catch her. We caught up with her a few blocks later as she was exiting her SUV to enter a house and I asked for an explanation for her action. She said she hadn’t seen us. We were on a tandem with a trailer with a yellow flag and a flashing red taillight on a slow-speed, well-lit street and she crossed the centerline to avoid us... but she "didn’t see us." What were her response choices? A: "I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that" or B: "I didn’t do anything wrong; you did something wrong." But since she couldn’t identify anything we had done wrong she could only say, "I didn’t see you."
If so many motorists don’t see you, how do they avoid you? They are very likely to hit you if they don’t see you, even if you’re riding on the white line. If they do see you, why do they pass you in an unsafe manner? Because you let them or they are extremely rude or maybe a combination of both. If someone’s going to be rude to you, where do you want to be, up against the curb with nowhere to go or out in the lane where you have room to maneuver?
Unfortunately there is an important difference in behavior between urban/suburban roads and rural roads. Out on rural roads motorists often let themselves get distracted. This is especially true when the road is very straight and there are long distances between intersections. High-speed, fatal, motorist-overtaking crashes are the ones that draw the notice of the club cycling community and the media, since they usually happen to "one of our own" and to someone who does a lot of cycling. These deaths are relatively rare, but their emotional impact is far-reaching. Our only recourse to reduce these is to push for strengthened motorist training and accountability, for paved shoulders, and for the removal of dangerous motorists from the roads.
We all have our stories about aggressive motorists, but most result in just that – stories. Many of us have friends or acquaintances who have been hit or even killed (I’ve lost two). But then, those of us in bike clubs know a lot of cyclists. These deaths are always on high-speed rural highways. Florida has more than its share of long, straight, boring rural roads where motorists can nod off or distract themselves with radios, cell phones, cassette players and whatever else. Out there you have to make yourself as conspicuous as possible; a solid and brightly colored jersey is best.
The more bicyclists people see the more they will look for them and the more they will believe that bicycling is a reasonable means of travel.
National Risk Analysis Rates
There’s no such thing as absolute safety. Risk is a relative thing. In 1993, Exponent Corp. (then Failure Analysis Associates, Inc.) published fatality rates for various activities. Here is how some of the activities scored, in Fatalities per Million Hours of Activity:
Motorcycling 8.80
Life Overall 1.53
Automobile travel 0.47
Bicycling 0.26
School bus travel 0.22
Airline travel 0.15
Cyclist Ken Kifer validated Exponent’s rate using data from the Bicycle Institute of America on his Web site, Ken Kifer’s Bike Pages (see Sources).
That 0.26 rate applies to all bicycling fatalities. Here is some recent data from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to further break them down. There were 117 cycling fatalities in Florida in 1999; 91 were adults (18 and over); 54 of those adults were riding at night.* Only 5 (4%) were sober adults riding during daylight hours on the roadway and obeying the rules of the road. Four percent of that 0.26 rate comes to 0.01. One should also keep in mind that only about 44% of motorist fatalities involve 2 or more vehicles (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), so we could drop the risk of being killed as a motor vehicle occupant by another motorist to 0.21. So proper daytime vehicular cycling for sober adults (even on those "dangerous" rural highways) is about 15 times less fatal than airline travel, which is widely considered to be one of the safest forms of transportation available, and 21 times less fatal than being an occupant in an automobile.
(*I am not saying that people should not ride at night, only that cyclists should make themselves conspicuous.)
Fatalities aren’t the only crashes we worry about, of course; what about injuries? In a study of trampoline safety, Exponent included comparisons of bicycling and automobile injuries (as Hospitalizations per Million Hours of Activity):
Football 12.4
Bicycling 7.5
Automobile 3.0
Trampoline 2.5
Swimming 1.9
Don’t let that 7.5 number mislead you though. Once again, the above includes all bicyclists and all types of crashes. We’re concerned here with just the motorist-versus-cyclist crashes. Professor William E. Moritz at the University of Washington surveyed experienced cyclists in 1996 on their activities and crashes. He found only 11% of their crashes involved motor vehicles. Experienced cyclists also experience one-fifth as many crashes per mile as "novice" cyclists. So the risk of being injured by a collision with a motorist is certainly much less than the 7.5 per million hours shown above.
How much less? We may not have enough data to calculate that. The rough cut estimate would be to take just the 11% that involve motorists from the 7.5 hospitalizations per million -- that drops us to 0.83. But we really need to know how many hours of on-road exposure cyclists experience, plus the number of injury-producing crashes with motor vehicles in which the motorist was at fault. (While it’s not appropriate to apply the data from fatalities to injuries, remember that only about 4% of Florida cycling fatalities involved a sober adult cyclist obeying the rules of the road and riding during daytime hours.) Moritz estimated that his survey respondents experienced crashes (of all types) on major roads without bicycle facilities at a rate of 66 per million miles (or one crash per 15,000 miles). Those same cyclists traveled only about 7,000 miles per crash on multi-use trails and about 700 miles per crash on sidewalks.
Don’t Forget the Good Stuff
I could spend many pages describing the benefits we get from cycling that more than balance out the small risk. Here’s one recent example. A 1999 study from Sweden on physical activity and health found, "Even after adjustment for other risk factors [and that includes crashes], including leisure time physical activity, those who did not cycle to work experienced a 39% higher mortality rate than those who did."
What Does All of This Say About Cyclists and Society?
Very young children will cover their eyes when playing "peek-a-boo" with their parents. They believe that because they can’t see their parents, their parents cannot see them.
Most of us believe what we want to believe. Those who want cyclists out of the way because they see them as a hindrance will certainly use ignorance, lies or sophistry (plausible but fallacious argument) to convince us that bicycling on roadways is dangerous. They use the false-danger argument because society tells them it’s wrong to say they’re superior to others. It’s socially acceptable to say bicycling is inherently dangerous, not that a fellow citizen is a nuisance when exercising a basic liberty. But the most effective way in which motorists convince cyclists that they don’t belong on the roads or that they will be in great danger is through intimidation and harassment. Such behavior reinforces the scare stories and bad statistics in the media. That is why I encourage cyclists to take legal action when motorists commit assaults. (Assault does not require physical contact, only threat.) Such incidents are rare, but ripple through the community as a wave of intimidation.
Being afraid of real risks and threats is healthy. But the belief that bicycling is dangerous is based on intimidation, scary stories and vague statistics. The bicycling community must attack the true threat to bicycling – the attitude that cyclists are intruders, second-class road users or sacrificial lambs. We cannot and will not change that attitude by saying, "Please give bicyclists a place to ride." Indeed, such pleas reinforce the belief that bicycling on roads is dangerous.
We change it by saying, "Bicyclists are human beings, citizens and vehicle drivers, and have the inalienable right to liberty. Travel on our shared public roads is an essential element of this liberty. Treat us with respect."
And by encouraging one another to claim our rightful piece of the road.
Sources:
"Is Cycling Dangerous?" From the Web site of Ken Kifer -- http://www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/health/risks.htm
Effective Cycling, John Forester, MIT Press
Why Bad Beliefs Don’t Die, Gregory W. Lester, Ph.D., Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2000
Exponent Corp. Web site, http://www.fail.com/index.html
"All-Cause Mortality Associated With Physical Activity During Leisure Time, Work, Sports, and Cycling to Work," Lars Bo Andersen et al, American Medical Association, http://www.archinternmed.com
http://www.floridabicycle.org/freedomfromfear.html
viernes, 27 de julio de 2012
viernes, 13 de julio de 2012
Bicyclists, motorists and the language of marginalization, por Mighk Wilson
Racism, sexism and mode-ism
Some might be offended by the idea of comparing the hatred and violence directed at bicyclists with the hatred and violence directed at people due to race, culture or gender. Yet, I believe it is entirely appropriate.
In his book The Culture of Make Believe author Derrick Jensen shows how violence in our culture is tied to three factors. First, is the person significantly different from me; do I see him or her as less human, or less important, than myself? Second, does this person seem to have something I want, like resources (as the American colonists saw the native tribes) or labor* (as Europeans and colonists saw Africans), or do I see this person as a threat to the resources I hold (as the Nazis saw the Jews). Last, will my culture support, accept or choose to ignore my hatred or violence? If the answer to all three is yes, violence is all but inevitable in our culture.
One can be significantly different not only by being born to a certain race, culture or gender, but also by choosing to live in a different way. The problem is broader than racism or "mode-ism." It is a way of thinking that is pervasive in our culture; the belief that power and privilege deserve the highest regard and the lion’s share of the rewards.
To some in our culture, bicyclists are strange people who wear odd clothes and act childishly. Native Americans were described in those same terms by colonists. But what do we take, or seem to take, from motorists? It’s time, the ultimate abstract resource. We are perceived as being a "hindrance" to motorists. We supposedly steal their precious time. (Never mind that the vast majority of motorist delay is caused by motorists.) And where does our culture stand on hatred toward cyclists? I can’t say it’s supported, but it is often ignored and accepted as "natural."
African-Americans can’t change their skin (without a lot of money) (and shouldn’t have to) to improve their lot in life. Women can’t change their gender (without a lot of money) (and shouldn’t have to) to improve their lot in life. Most bicyclists, after all, choose to be bicyclists. But it wasn’t many years ago that a white person could be attacked or even killed for choosing to befriend an African- or Native-American.
The bulk of this essay will address the many injustices, and elements of those injustices, that bicyclists experience.
Bicyclists as Minorities
Jensen describes how Irish immigrants had to struggle in the U.S. during the 19th Century to rise from being "minorities," hated almost as much as African-Americans, to members of the ruling class. For the purposes of illustration and comparison, one could say there was a hierarchy of "Whites," Irish, and African-Americans in those days (though of course there were many other minority groups). Today we could draw a similar hierarchy of street users: motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians. Just as the Irish could take advantage of the fact of their Caucasian skin to help themselves overcome prejudice, bicyclists can take advantage of the fact that most states classify them as vehicle drivers (or the equivalent) to get along on our roads.
What happens when you’re in the position of the being that middle minority is you can get pushed or pulled in either direction. The Irish could have aligned themselves with the African-Americans since they were both terribly discriminated against and hated during those years, but they really weren’t given the choice. When it comes to putting food on the table and somebody else holds the key to the pantry, you do what you can to befriend the key holder.
Bicyclists are in a similar situation, but we have not collectively decided who we wish to ally with. This is because, for most people, bicycling is a discretionary activity. Many cyclists can choose to become motorists. The vehicular cycling proponents argue against special accommodation for cyclists such as paths and bike lanes, claiming that these facilities are like "bicyclist ghettoes," making us into pedestrians-on-wheels (POWs?) At the other end of the spectrum are bicyclists who wish to be completely separated from motorists at all times. Most of us fall somewhere in between. No wonder planners, engineers and elected officials inexperienced with cycling have such a difficult time figuring out how to "accommodate" bicyclists.
Much in the way whites have made erroneous assumptions (some well-intentioned) about racial and cultural minorities, non-cyclists have made erroneous assumptions about cyclists. These assumptions are evident in their language, and lurking in this language are hints of paternalism and ridicule. We’ve all grown up with this language, so to many of us – cyclists and pedestrians -- these assumptions are accepted as natural laws.
The primary belief, held by most non-cyclists and even many cyclists, is that bicycling with motor vehicle traffic is difficult and dangerous. It’s believed to be so difficult that it is beyond the abilities of the average person. Try this: if someone tells you that bicycling with traffic is difficult, ask him or her to explain why. Ask them to explain the knowledge and skills necessary for cycling with traffic that are beyond the abilities of the average person. Chances are good they will give you a blank stare, because they don’t know. Yet somehow they "know" it’s difficult. (The answers: knowledge – the same rules of the road as for motorists; skills – balance/steering, braking, scanning for and assessing speeds of approaching vehicles, hand signals, looking over your shoulder for other traffic without swerving.)
The danger part is also rather peculiar. The assumption is that operating your bicycle as a legal vehicle on the roadway is what’s dangerous. We all know that it is not the roadway that is dangerous, but time and again that is the statement made. "I won’t bike on that road; it’s too dangerous." Setting aside the matter of just how relatively risky a pursuit cycling in traffic is – after all, every human activity carries risk, including being a couch potato – the responsibility to reduce this danger is rarely placed in the hands of those who pose it. The road does not present the risk. A solo bicyclist on a road does not experience much risk (aside from steep mountain descents and other extreme situations). A bicyclist following the rules of the road in traffic does not pose a risk. The main thing that poses life-threatening risk is the human being operating the motor vehicle on that road.
What you are most likely to hear from a novice (or non) bicyclist is that it’s scary. Who or what is making it scary? The design of the road? Of course not. The bike itself? Of course not. It’s the speed and volume of the cars on the road and the behavior of the operators (and sometimes passengers) of those cars.
Manifest Destiny
"Traffic," in the language of bicyclist (or pedestrian) safety, takes on the characteristics of a force of nature. It’s as though a stream of motor vehicles was a herd of bison or a flash flood, and not conscious, individual adult humans with morals and decision-making ability. There’s no point in trying to control a wild herd or a flood, right?
Why this tendency to translate human responsibility into an uncontrollable force of nature? It should be obvious. They are the majority; they hold the power. It’s in their interest to portray traffic – in the context of the motorist/bicyclist/pedestrian hierarchy – as something natural that cannot and should not be "unreasonably" controlled. It’s quite reminiscent of the concept of Manifest Destiny.
We often describe criminal behavior as "sick." I believe this implies that such behavior is unnatural. After all, if such behaviors were natural, how could we in good conscience punish people for them?
Humans have been drinking alcoholic beverages and getting drunk for thousands of years. Animals have also been observed getting drunk on fermented fruit. So alcohol use is quite natural. Motor vehicle use has been prevalent for less than a hundred years. A high percentage – at least a third -- of pedestrian traffic fatalities and injuries involve intoxicated pedestrians. Many traffic engineers and law enforcement officers use this as an excuse to do nothing for pedestrians. Only if a motorist is himself intoxicated is he severely punished for killing a pedestrian. Dennis Costello, a regular contributor to the Pednet internet list wrote:
The thing that the anti-drunk-driving people fail to understand is that the problem is not the drinking, it is the car! In the past, there was much less drunk driving because most people in urban areas lived within walking distance of a bar. Excessive drinking only produces drunks, while drinking and driving kills people.
7,326 fatality crashes were caused by intoxicated motor vehicle drivers in the U.S. in the year 2000, killing 16,653. 1,594 intoxicated pedestrians and cyclists were killed the same year. 25,168 people were killed in auto crashes that didn’t involve drunk motorists; 5,429 of those were pedestrians and cyclists, and 3,835 of those were sober. So even though 50% more people are killed by sober motorists, and 40% more pedestrians and cyclists are sober than drunk, we focus on intoxication as the problem. If we’d totally eliminated alcohol use we still would have had over 25,168 driver and passenger deaths (over 3 per hour) and 3,369 pedestrian and cyclist deaths (over 9 per day) for the year.
If we’d totally eliminated motor vehicle use instead, we might have had a few dozen cases of drunken bicyclists killing pedestrians, and a few drunken bicyclists and pedestrians dying through their own incompetence. Drinking and walking, which has been done since man discovered alcohol, is characterized as irresponsible. Drinking while operating a motor vehicle is clearly much more dangerous to other people than drinking while bicycling, but the latter carries the same penalty as the former. Somehow drinking is the bigger problem than motor vehicle use. I can only surmise that people believe motor vehicle use is more natural and safe than drinking.
In June of 2002, Robert Noel, a lawyer whose dogs killed a woman in his San Francisco apartment building, was sentenced to the maximum four years in prison for involuntary manslaughter. He was not even present when the dogs attacked. They were under the control of his wife, Marjorie Knoller, who was convicted of the same crime that July. What kept Ms. Knoller from being convicted of second-degree murder was the lack of evidence that she knew her actions would have resulted in the other woman’s death. In October of 1998, cyclist Ray Howland was struck and killed by a motorist who carelessly took a turn too wide and hit Ray as he stood on the paved shoulder waiting for his friends during the Mount Dora Bicycle Festival. The motorist, who saw the other cyclists approaching and knew that cyclists would be common on area roads that weekend (he was an area resident), was found guilty of careless driving and fined eighty dollars. Both the dog owner and the motorist had the responsibility to control things they knew had the potential to harm others. Both were being careless with those things. Comparing these two cases one might conclude that carelessness with a massive, powerful dog is a more serious crime than carelessness with an even more massive, even more powerful motor vehicle. Owning and operating a motor vehicle must be more "natural" than owning and walking a large, aggressive dog.
Much as 19th Century American leaders terrorized and killed Native American tribes, justified their actions through Manifest Destiny, and then blamed the tribes for contributing to their own downfalls, motorists terrorize cyclists and pedestrians (especially when we get in their way while obeying the written laws), justify encouragement of still more and faster motor vehicle use through the construction of enormous parking lots and wider, more frightening highways (which bicyclists and pedestrians help pay for), and them blame cyclists and walkers for acting – out of fear for their lives -- in ways contrary to the rules of the road. Just as it did not require a majority of Colonists to terrorized and slaughter the Native American tribes, only tens of thousands of troops, it only takes a minority of motorists to terrorize bicyclists and pedestrians and discourage them from using the public roads. If only one-in-a-hundred motorists are rude to bicyclists, it will not take long for a cyclist to experience harassment.
If there were any Colonists who objected to the slaughter of native tribes, they kept fairly quiet and certainly had no impact on policies. Or if they did promote a policy it was one of shoving tribes into reservations; soothing their conscience while freeing up prime land for agriculture and logging. The same can be said for motorists. Bike lanes and paths allow motorists to feel they’re being benevolent lords while at the same time getting cyclists out of the way so they can drive faster.
What’s more, there are many cyclists who believe in this segregation. Why? Because they’ve been won over by motorist propaganda that says cycling with traffic is dangerous and have been threatened one-too-many times. Consider this quote from a post to the Florida Bicycle Association list:
"Claim the Lane" annoys motorists and further discourages people from bicycle commuting as it fosters further fear. If I owned a bicycle shop, I would be very concerned about the negative images this form of bicycle advocacy portrays….I will only donate to those organizations (like the Rails to Trails Conservancy) that promote safe, sane, responsible bicycle advocacy and who listen to the needs of the public. They want bike trails, lanes, and other conveniences.
Evidently one of our primary purposes as cyclists is to avoid annoying motorists. I replied, in part:
How does a citizen obeying the law while traveling on a public road portray a negative image? I wonder why one's liberty and safety should take secondary status to the desires of some motorists to pass.
Don’t get me wrong. I like paths. They’re often very pleasant places to ride. But they simply do not and will not solve the huge, over-riding problem – that motorists threaten bicyclists on a regular basis. Neither will bike lanes or paved shoulders remove the hatred. My brother was hit by a beer can thrown from a passing car as we rode on a paved shoulder. Evidently the occupants did not think it prudent to confront us directly. It was easier to drive off at 55 MPH, like Klansman driving off into the night after a cross burning.
It’s also relevant to note that, like the Native American tribes, we were here first. Bicyclists were responsible for the first paved roads in America, and many inventions developed for bicycles were later incorporated into automobile design. Most European colonists would have died soon after arriving in North America if it hadn’t been for their help of native tribes. As soon as the colonists got a large enough population and learned how to take advantage of the environment, they quickly over-ran the native population. As soon as manufacturers learned how to build a reliable vehicle (but still far less reliable than a bicycle) the rich started buying them. The rich of course always have the best access to political power, so motorists – in spite of operating a vehicle that was clearly a danger to others – were quickly given precedence over pedestrians, cyclists and equestrians. As this transfer was being made, some questioned the wisdom of allowing such vehicles to be sold and used. Here is an excerpt from The Magnificent Ambersons, the 1918 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington:
"I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles ... With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward changes in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him that automobiles 'had no business to be invented.'"
(The character George, referred to in the excerpt, was killed by a motorist at the end of the story. The Magnificent Ambersons was made into a movie, starring Joseph Cotton, in 1942.)
Eighty years later, the London organization "Take Back the Streets" echoes the Ambersons quote:
The street is an extremely important symbol because your whole enculturation experience is geared around keeping you out of the street. "Just remember: Look left, look right, look left again… No ball games… Don't talk to strangers… Keep out of the road." The idea is to keep everyone indoors. So, when you come to challenge the powers that be, inevitably you find yourself on the curbstone of indifference, wondering "should I play it safe and stay on the sidewalks, or should I go into the street?" And it is the ones who are taking the most risks that will ultimately effect the change in society.
The car system steals the street from under us and sells it back for the price of gasoline. It privileges time over space, corrupting and reducing both to an obsession with speed or, in economic lingo, "turnover." It doesn't matter who "drives" this system, for its movements are already pre-determined.
We can ride four-abreast on the reservation paths and the motorists won’t care; we’re out of their way. But ride four-abreast on the road and we become law-breakers and targets for harassment. If you leave the reservation you will be compelled to live within the terms of the colonists, but will still be harassed and ridiculed while you do so. Participate in a non-violent Critical Mass ride and you risk being beaten by law enforcement (this has happened and is documented) for the crime of delaying the important people in motor vehicles. Their time is more important than your time, your happiness, and your freedom to associate with your friends and neighbors while you ride.
Subspecies of Bicyclists and Where to "Put" Them
Earlier I said that cyclists have adopted (or been taught to accept) many "truths" about the nature of traffic and of bicycling with it. This is also true of bicycle planning, design, and education professionals. We speak in terms of "Type A, B & C Cyclists."
"A" cyclists are "advanced, proficient or professional" (does that mean you get paid to ride?) and can ride confidently in most traffic situations. "B" cyclists are novice adults who presumably have little more ability to ride with motor traffic than children. And "C" cyclists are children. "A" cyclists are sometimes characterized as "aggressive." We supposedly shouldn’t design for aggressive "A" cyclists because they are such a small percentage of the cycling population. When I protested to a local consultant that I prefer the term "assertive" he dismissed my argument as "semantics." Really? "Aggressive" implies that I behave in a way that threatens others; "assertive" that I peacefully assert my basic right to mobility. Being aggressive when on a 30 lb. vehicle surrounded by faster multi-ton vehicles does not sound like a sane course of action. For a planner, engineer or politician, calling someone "aggressive" gives them justification to ignore that person’s needs and rights.
Supposedly these three "types" of cyclists need different types of accommodation. Funny, we teach the basic skills and traffic principles mentioned earlier to 9-year-olds. All cyclists need only one type of accommodation: the accommodation of all motorists to be polite, sympathetic and cautious.
I’m repeatedly told – by law enforcement, other motorists and other cyclists – that this change in cultural attitude toward cyclists will never happen. Or that it will happen after we’ve built a system of separate bikeways. How do we expect motorists to learn to get along with cyclists if at every opportunity we strive to segregate the two modes? Separate-but-equal didn’t work in the 1950s with race. As the Supreme Court noted, separate-but-equal was really only separate. Some bike advocates believe that bike lanes give "legitimacy" to cyclists. I don’t know about you, but I respect Native Americans as a group because they have a rich culture that we could all learn from, not because they live in reservations. And the many people who still hate Native Americans do so with the same intensity as those who did 150 years ago, in spite of this segregation into reservations. Why should motorists who hate bicyclists change their minds because the government gives bicyclists a special place to ride?
If I’ve got you riled up so far, hang on…
Duh Laws
There are two laws that govern the relationship between cyclists and motorists. We all know of both of them, though only the written one is consciously recognized. The written law was created by the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Laws & Ordinances and adopted by most states, including Florida. It’s called the Uniform Vehicle Code (UVC). Many states have made modifications to this uniform code over the years, but it’s mostly the same essential concept. This law is enforced by officers of the states, counties and municipalities. The other is the unwritten law enforced by many motorists as well as by some officers.
The written law was developed primarily by people – traffic engineers -- who wanted bicyclists out of the way. John Forester documented this very thoroughly in Effective Cycling. Florida is generally credited as having one of the more bicyclist-friendly statutes in the country. Our law (FS 316.2065) defines bicycles as vehicles and says we have all the same rights as the drivers of other vehicles…"oh, aside from all these exceptions here in paragraphs five and six." The law, based on the UVC, uses vague language in explaining how far right one must ride, so vague that it takes five minutes to explain to someone what "as far right as practicable" means. Then it goes on to list some circumstances in which a cyclist may leave the right side. It’s quite a paternalistic law when you think about it. I have a simpler version everyone could understand without legal translation:
Bicycles are vehicles. Every person propelling a vehicle by human power has all of the rights and all of the duties applicable to the driver of any other vehicle under this chapter, except as to provisions of this chapter which by their nature can have no application. A bicyclist shall move as close as is safe and practical to the right edge of the roadway to facilitate the passing of overtaking vehicles when the bicyclist considers it safe to do so.
If the law were written in such a simple manner, Kimberly Cooper and her attorney would not be spending hundreds of dollars in legal fees to appeal convictions for citations written for taking the lane on a St. Petersburg street. The lanes in question are 10 to 11 feet wide, clearly too narrow to be shared by motorists and cyclists. Yet the St. Petersburg Police Department and the Pinellas County court believe otherwise. The police never made the case that the lane was wide enough to share safely. (The burden of proof is supposed to be on the prosecution, right?) Who is better qualified to determine when it is safe for a motorist to pass a bicyclist: the motorist, a law enforcement officer, or the bicyclist? The answer is "the bicyclist" for two reasons. First is that the bicyclist is the more vulnerable roadway user; vulnerable not only to the impact with a motor vehicle, but also to potholes and other dangerous things on the pavement. Second is that the cyclist has more experience with being passed than the motorist (or officer) has with passing. In an average hour of cycling I’ll probably be passed by over 100 cars, while during the average hour of auto driving I might pass at most one or two cyclists.
The rationale for the written law as it stands is that interactions on public roads occur between classes of vehicles and pedestrians, not between individual persons. Faster-moving travelers are presumed to be more important than slower-moving travelers. And of course bicyclists are also assumed to be "out for recreation" (not contributing to the economy). For the sake of "efficiency" it "makes sense" to limit bicyclists (a minority) in their use of the roadway so that motorists (the majority) are allowed to travel faster. Remember your grade-school civics lessons: matters of basic liberties are not decided by majority rule. I don’t know about you, but I interact with other road users only one or two at a time. All the bicyclists using the roads on a day do not interact with all motorists who use them on that day. Each cyclist interacts with a dozen or so motorists during each mile of her trip, and each motorist (in the Orlando area anyway) interacts with at most two bicyclists during an hour.
Like Native Americans who can no longer hunt on land that their ancestors hunted for generations because they were evicted from it by the United States government in the 1800s, bicyclists lost the ability to freely use an entire lane during the 20th Century. Just as Native Americans were described as children, so were bicyclists. It was for their own good, right?
The "two-abreast" part of the law is also discriminatory. (Imagine implementing it in China.) But there’s a logical loophole in it that allows two-abreast cycling, or even more than two-abreast cycling, in most circumstances. The law says we are not required to keep as far right as practicable if the lane is of substandard width. (By the way, FDOT has clarified for the record that it considers lanes less than 14 feet in width to be substandard for the purpose of sharing between motorists and cyclists.) It doesn’t say, "You can ride four feet from the curb instead of two feet when it’s substandard." So you can ride two feet from the left side of the lane if you wish. We all know it is illegal for a motorist to pass on the right in this circumstance, so tell me, what does it matter from a practical perspective if there are one, two, or even three other cyclists to the right of the first cyclist? The motorist’s ability to pass is unaffected. On most of the rural roads club cyclists and racers use the lanes are only 10 to 12 feet wide, fitting the criteria for a substandard width lane. So any individual cyclist has the right to use any part of the lane. Let’s say a pack of 50 cyclists is traveling such a road. Which is safer: for the cyclists to all hug the white line, single file in a paceline that would stretch at least 400 feet, which would take a motorist about 10 seconds to pass (risking a sideswipe all the while because he’ll try to squeeze by even when there are oncoming vehicles); or for the pack to ride four-abreast, taking up only 100 feet of length and requiring only about 3 seconds to pass? And please don’t tell me we shouldn’t travel in large packs:
"Congress shall make no law … abridging… the right of the people peaceably to assemble."
Hundreds of employers can choose to open and close their businesses at the same time, encouraging thousands of motorists to individually take to the roads during the same period, causing widespread congestion, deaths, and billions of dollars in injuries and property damage, and the community responds by throwing millions and billions more at the "problem" to enable even more businesses and motorists to continue an insane system. But if thousands of cyclists think it would be fun and would make a neat political statement about the way our public streets are used, and to gather one Friday evening per month and ride in a large, non-violent mass for a couple hours, adding minor delay to the street system – it’s time to call out the cops in riot gear and bust some heads.
Then there’s the unwritten law. It’s based on ridicule, an attitude of superiority, ignorance or disparagement of the written law, and the ability to flee the consequences of antisocial behavior. If it were written it would say:
Stay out of our way or we will scare the crap out of you, hit you, or maybe even kill you.
This unwritten law is the one that has the greatest impact on bicyclist behavior. As I said before, this law does not have to be enforced by many officers or self-appointed deputies to be effective. My wife was a victim of this vigilante justice system. A motorist threatened her, hit her with a lit cigarette that burned her arm, tried to get her to run into the rear of his vehicle by slamming his brakes, and finally got out of his vehicle, stepped in front of her, grabbed her handlebars, stopped her and threatened her some more. Fortunately an off-duty sheriff’s deputy saw the incident and gave the motorist a stern talking-to. He didn’t call the city police department to come pick this guy up for assault, though (it happened in the city and was out of his jurisdiction). Why not? He told my wife that, while he understood that cyclists have the right to use the roadway, such treatment was to be expected.
Imagine if she had been a black woman walking down the sidewalk and assaulted by a white man walking the same sidewalk. Is such treatment to be expected?
Florida Bicycle Association board member Duke Breitenbach was struck from behind by a motorist a few years ago in Lake County. The driver had already passed three other cyclists not far behind him. The motorist claimed Duke had swerved in front of him (of course) even though there was no reason for Duke to have done so; no crossroad, no driveway, no debris. It was a four-lane road; the motorist had an entire second lane in which to pass. The Florida Highway Patrol officer who worked the crash visited Duke in the hospital and told him he believed the motorist’s story, not that of the four cyclists. Furthermore, he told Duke he felt that bicyclists were a nuisance.
Let’s make a fictional comparison to Duke’s story with a different cast of characters. A white man trips a black man as he’s walking out the door of a store because the black man had the nerve to buy the last six-pack of Budweiser at the only open store in town. The black man falls hard (his hands are full) and breaks his arm. The white guy tells the police it was an accident, while three friends of the black man saw it happen and describe it as intentional. The cop visits the black man in the hospital and says he won’t arrest the white man because he believes his story. "Why don’t you just leave town, boy."
A Florida Highway Patrol officer once told me, when I suggested that the pedestrian’s right-of-way should be respected and enforced at marked and unmarked crosswalks at unsignalized intersections (as spelled out in Florida law), that that must not be done because, "I’m not going to stop all the traffic on SR 436 because some guy wants to cross the street to get to the Wendy’s for a Frosty."
Most traffic engineers believe pedestrians should walk hundreds of yards (along sidewalks barren of trees, in the sweltering Florida summer) out of their way to cross at signalized intersections. Why? Because in order for motorists to realistically be able to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks at unsignalized intersections (as the law already requires), they must travel at 25 to 30 MPH. The Motorist’s Manifest Destiny belief says this is unnatural.
Let’s also remember that the engineer’s rationale that the majority should be given priority gets tossed out the window when bicyclists become the majority. This is true not only on rural roads, but on shared use paths and in cities where bicyclists far outnumber motorists, such as in China.
In the early 1990s, then Florida DOT pedestrian and bicycle coordinator Dan Burden was invited by the Chinese government to go there and help address some of the problems they were experiencing with the huge numbers of bicyclists in their larger cities. Thinking their purpose was to find better ways of accommodating cyclists, Dan went eagerly. When he arrived he learned that the "bicycle problem" was that there were too many of them and that they were impeding the handful of motorists. Dan said, "Sorry, I can’t help you." (Meaning "I won’t help you.") Of course this would not happen in the U.S.; that many cyclists would exhibit a clear block of voting power.
Or would it? Take a trip on the Pinellas or West Orange Trails and you’ll see that the paths, which can carry 1,000 to 5,000 vehicles (bicycles) per day, are made to stop for cross streets that carry only a few hundred vehicles per day, and even for driveways. This is in clear violation of the engineering community’s own manual on traffic control. The message is clear: people in cars are more important than people on bicycles, even when they are the minority.
Act Up
We are ignored and despised and threatened and injured and sometimes even killed because we are "different," because we are believed to "take resources" from motorists, because we are believed to be doing something childish, or worse, inherently dangerous and therefore foolish, because those who despised and threaten us are not held accountable, and because carelessness behind the wheel of a motor vehicle that results in the death of another is not considered to be a serious crime because it is "inevitable."
We need to destroy the belief that bicyclists are "different." We can do this by celebrating bicyclists as individuals, telling our stories, and showing how we contribute to our communities.
We need to destroy the belief that bicyclists take time and resources from motorists. We can do this by showing that we contribute more than we "take" -- through our stories.
We need to destroy the belief that bicycling among motorists is inherently dangerous. We can do this by cycling conspicuously among motorists.
We need to destroy the belief that despising, harassing, or threatening bicyclists is acceptable. We can do this by shaming and ridiculing those who express such thoughts. Tell them, loudly and in public, "You should be ashamed of yourself." Then tell them why.
We need to destroy the belief that deaths and injuries of cyclists due to motorist carelessness are inevitable. We can do this by characterizing such carelessness as the equivalent of being careless with a gun, careless with poison, careless with dynamite, or careless with a large, vicious dog.
We have made some progress with cycling in this country over the past ten years. Money is flowing toward bicycle programs and accommodation. Our public health agencies are beginning to recognize cycling more as a solution to our sedentary lifestyles than as a safety problem. But we also have fewer children cycling to school, we still hear stories of motorists who intentionally injure and kill cyclists, and we still are harassed by motorists on a regular basis. Even though our interest is in an activity that many Americans enjoy and that also imparts many benefits to those who choose not to bike, we still are treated by many policy makers as a "special interest group." Those of us who drive bicycles know it is special, in a very good way.
Fuente: http://www.bicyclinglife.com/EffectiveAdvocacy/Marginalization.htm
Some might be offended by the idea of comparing the hatred and violence directed at bicyclists with the hatred and violence directed at people due to race, culture or gender. Yet, I believe it is entirely appropriate.
In his book The Culture of Make Believe author Derrick Jensen shows how violence in our culture is tied to three factors. First, is the person significantly different from me; do I see him or her as less human, or less important, than myself? Second, does this person seem to have something I want, like resources (as the American colonists saw the native tribes) or labor* (as Europeans and colonists saw Africans), or do I see this person as a threat to the resources I hold (as the Nazis saw the Jews). Last, will my culture support, accept or choose to ignore my hatred or violence? If the answer to all three is yes, violence is all but inevitable in our culture.
One can be significantly different not only by being born to a certain race, culture or gender, but also by choosing to live in a different way. The problem is broader than racism or "mode-ism." It is a way of thinking that is pervasive in our culture; the belief that power and privilege deserve the highest regard and the lion’s share of the rewards.
To some in our culture, bicyclists are strange people who wear odd clothes and act childishly. Native Americans were described in those same terms by colonists. But what do we take, or seem to take, from motorists? It’s time, the ultimate abstract resource. We are perceived as being a "hindrance" to motorists. We supposedly steal their precious time. (Never mind that the vast majority of motorist delay is caused by motorists.) And where does our culture stand on hatred toward cyclists? I can’t say it’s supported, but it is often ignored and accepted as "natural."
African-Americans can’t change their skin (without a lot of money) (and shouldn’t have to) to improve their lot in life. Women can’t change their gender (without a lot of money) (and shouldn’t have to) to improve their lot in life. Most bicyclists, after all, choose to be bicyclists. But it wasn’t many years ago that a white person could be attacked or even killed for choosing to befriend an African- or Native-American.
The bulk of this essay will address the many injustices, and elements of those injustices, that bicyclists experience.
Bicyclists as Minorities
Jensen describes how Irish immigrants had to struggle in the U.S. during the 19th Century to rise from being "minorities," hated almost as much as African-Americans, to members of the ruling class. For the purposes of illustration and comparison, one could say there was a hierarchy of "Whites," Irish, and African-Americans in those days (though of course there were many other minority groups). Today we could draw a similar hierarchy of street users: motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians. Just as the Irish could take advantage of the fact of their Caucasian skin to help themselves overcome prejudice, bicyclists can take advantage of the fact that most states classify them as vehicle drivers (or the equivalent) to get along on our roads.
What happens when you’re in the position of the being that middle minority is you can get pushed or pulled in either direction. The Irish could have aligned themselves with the African-Americans since they were both terribly discriminated against and hated during those years, but they really weren’t given the choice. When it comes to putting food on the table and somebody else holds the key to the pantry, you do what you can to befriend the key holder.
Bicyclists are in a similar situation, but we have not collectively decided who we wish to ally with. This is because, for most people, bicycling is a discretionary activity. Many cyclists can choose to become motorists. The vehicular cycling proponents argue against special accommodation for cyclists such as paths and bike lanes, claiming that these facilities are like "bicyclist ghettoes," making us into pedestrians-on-wheels (POWs?) At the other end of the spectrum are bicyclists who wish to be completely separated from motorists at all times. Most of us fall somewhere in between. No wonder planners, engineers and elected officials inexperienced with cycling have such a difficult time figuring out how to "accommodate" bicyclists.
Much in the way whites have made erroneous assumptions (some well-intentioned) about racial and cultural minorities, non-cyclists have made erroneous assumptions about cyclists. These assumptions are evident in their language, and lurking in this language are hints of paternalism and ridicule. We’ve all grown up with this language, so to many of us – cyclists and pedestrians -- these assumptions are accepted as natural laws.
The primary belief, held by most non-cyclists and even many cyclists, is that bicycling with motor vehicle traffic is difficult and dangerous. It’s believed to be so difficult that it is beyond the abilities of the average person. Try this: if someone tells you that bicycling with traffic is difficult, ask him or her to explain why. Ask them to explain the knowledge and skills necessary for cycling with traffic that are beyond the abilities of the average person. Chances are good they will give you a blank stare, because they don’t know. Yet somehow they "know" it’s difficult. (The answers: knowledge – the same rules of the road as for motorists; skills – balance/steering, braking, scanning for and assessing speeds of approaching vehicles, hand signals, looking over your shoulder for other traffic without swerving.)
The danger part is also rather peculiar. The assumption is that operating your bicycle as a legal vehicle on the roadway is what’s dangerous. We all know that it is not the roadway that is dangerous, but time and again that is the statement made. "I won’t bike on that road; it’s too dangerous." Setting aside the matter of just how relatively risky a pursuit cycling in traffic is – after all, every human activity carries risk, including being a couch potato – the responsibility to reduce this danger is rarely placed in the hands of those who pose it. The road does not present the risk. A solo bicyclist on a road does not experience much risk (aside from steep mountain descents and other extreme situations). A bicyclist following the rules of the road in traffic does not pose a risk. The main thing that poses life-threatening risk is the human being operating the motor vehicle on that road.
What you are most likely to hear from a novice (or non) bicyclist is that it’s scary. Who or what is making it scary? The design of the road? Of course not. The bike itself? Of course not. It’s the speed and volume of the cars on the road and the behavior of the operators (and sometimes passengers) of those cars.
Manifest Destiny
"Traffic," in the language of bicyclist (or pedestrian) safety, takes on the characteristics of a force of nature. It’s as though a stream of motor vehicles was a herd of bison or a flash flood, and not conscious, individual adult humans with morals and decision-making ability. There’s no point in trying to control a wild herd or a flood, right?
Why this tendency to translate human responsibility into an uncontrollable force of nature? It should be obvious. They are the majority; they hold the power. It’s in their interest to portray traffic – in the context of the motorist/bicyclist/pedestrian hierarchy – as something natural that cannot and should not be "unreasonably" controlled. It’s quite reminiscent of the concept of Manifest Destiny.
We often describe criminal behavior as "sick." I believe this implies that such behavior is unnatural. After all, if such behaviors were natural, how could we in good conscience punish people for them?
Humans have been drinking alcoholic beverages and getting drunk for thousands of years. Animals have also been observed getting drunk on fermented fruit. So alcohol use is quite natural. Motor vehicle use has been prevalent for less than a hundred years. A high percentage – at least a third -- of pedestrian traffic fatalities and injuries involve intoxicated pedestrians. Many traffic engineers and law enforcement officers use this as an excuse to do nothing for pedestrians. Only if a motorist is himself intoxicated is he severely punished for killing a pedestrian. Dennis Costello, a regular contributor to the Pednet internet list wrote:
The thing that the anti-drunk-driving people fail to understand is that the problem is not the drinking, it is the car! In the past, there was much less drunk driving because most people in urban areas lived within walking distance of a bar. Excessive drinking only produces drunks, while drinking and driving kills people.
7,326 fatality crashes were caused by intoxicated motor vehicle drivers in the U.S. in the year 2000, killing 16,653. 1,594 intoxicated pedestrians and cyclists were killed the same year. 25,168 people were killed in auto crashes that didn’t involve drunk motorists; 5,429 of those were pedestrians and cyclists, and 3,835 of those were sober. So even though 50% more people are killed by sober motorists, and 40% more pedestrians and cyclists are sober than drunk, we focus on intoxication as the problem. If we’d totally eliminated alcohol use we still would have had over 25,168 driver and passenger deaths (over 3 per hour) and 3,369 pedestrian and cyclist deaths (over 9 per day) for the year.
If we’d totally eliminated motor vehicle use instead, we might have had a few dozen cases of drunken bicyclists killing pedestrians, and a few drunken bicyclists and pedestrians dying through their own incompetence. Drinking and walking, which has been done since man discovered alcohol, is characterized as irresponsible. Drinking while operating a motor vehicle is clearly much more dangerous to other people than drinking while bicycling, but the latter carries the same penalty as the former. Somehow drinking is the bigger problem than motor vehicle use. I can only surmise that people believe motor vehicle use is more natural and safe than drinking.
In June of 2002, Robert Noel, a lawyer whose dogs killed a woman in his San Francisco apartment building, was sentenced to the maximum four years in prison for involuntary manslaughter. He was not even present when the dogs attacked. They were under the control of his wife, Marjorie Knoller, who was convicted of the same crime that July. What kept Ms. Knoller from being convicted of second-degree murder was the lack of evidence that she knew her actions would have resulted in the other woman’s death. In October of 1998, cyclist Ray Howland was struck and killed by a motorist who carelessly took a turn too wide and hit Ray as he stood on the paved shoulder waiting for his friends during the Mount Dora Bicycle Festival. The motorist, who saw the other cyclists approaching and knew that cyclists would be common on area roads that weekend (he was an area resident), was found guilty of careless driving and fined eighty dollars. Both the dog owner and the motorist had the responsibility to control things they knew had the potential to harm others. Both were being careless with those things. Comparing these two cases one might conclude that carelessness with a massive, powerful dog is a more serious crime than carelessness with an even more massive, even more powerful motor vehicle. Owning and operating a motor vehicle must be more "natural" than owning and walking a large, aggressive dog.
Much as 19th Century American leaders terrorized and killed Native American tribes, justified their actions through Manifest Destiny, and then blamed the tribes for contributing to their own downfalls, motorists terrorize cyclists and pedestrians (especially when we get in their way while obeying the written laws), justify encouragement of still more and faster motor vehicle use through the construction of enormous parking lots and wider, more frightening highways (which bicyclists and pedestrians help pay for), and them blame cyclists and walkers for acting – out of fear for their lives -- in ways contrary to the rules of the road. Just as it did not require a majority of Colonists to terrorized and slaughter the Native American tribes, only tens of thousands of troops, it only takes a minority of motorists to terrorize bicyclists and pedestrians and discourage them from using the public roads. If only one-in-a-hundred motorists are rude to bicyclists, it will not take long for a cyclist to experience harassment.
If there were any Colonists who objected to the slaughter of native tribes, they kept fairly quiet and certainly had no impact on policies. Or if they did promote a policy it was one of shoving tribes into reservations; soothing their conscience while freeing up prime land for agriculture and logging. The same can be said for motorists. Bike lanes and paths allow motorists to feel they’re being benevolent lords while at the same time getting cyclists out of the way so they can drive faster.
What’s more, there are many cyclists who believe in this segregation. Why? Because they’ve been won over by motorist propaganda that says cycling with traffic is dangerous and have been threatened one-too-many times. Consider this quote from a post to the Florida Bicycle Association list:
"Claim the Lane" annoys motorists and further discourages people from bicycle commuting as it fosters further fear. If I owned a bicycle shop, I would be very concerned about the negative images this form of bicycle advocacy portrays….I will only donate to those organizations (like the Rails to Trails Conservancy) that promote safe, sane, responsible bicycle advocacy and who listen to the needs of the public. They want bike trails, lanes, and other conveniences.
Evidently one of our primary purposes as cyclists is to avoid annoying motorists. I replied, in part:
How does a citizen obeying the law while traveling on a public road portray a negative image? I wonder why one's liberty and safety should take secondary status to the desires of some motorists to pass.
Don’t get me wrong. I like paths. They’re often very pleasant places to ride. But they simply do not and will not solve the huge, over-riding problem – that motorists threaten bicyclists on a regular basis. Neither will bike lanes or paved shoulders remove the hatred. My brother was hit by a beer can thrown from a passing car as we rode on a paved shoulder. Evidently the occupants did not think it prudent to confront us directly. It was easier to drive off at 55 MPH, like Klansman driving off into the night after a cross burning.
It’s also relevant to note that, like the Native American tribes, we were here first. Bicyclists were responsible for the first paved roads in America, and many inventions developed for bicycles were later incorporated into automobile design. Most European colonists would have died soon after arriving in North America if it hadn’t been for their help of native tribes. As soon as the colonists got a large enough population and learned how to take advantage of the environment, they quickly over-ran the native population. As soon as manufacturers learned how to build a reliable vehicle (but still far less reliable than a bicycle) the rich started buying them. The rich of course always have the best access to political power, so motorists – in spite of operating a vehicle that was clearly a danger to others – were quickly given precedence over pedestrians, cyclists and equestrians. As this transfer was being made, some questioned the wisdom of allowing such vehicles to be sold and used. Here is an excerpt from The Magnificent Ambersons, the 1918 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington:
"I'm not sure he's wrong about automobiles ... With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization -- that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward changes in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him that automobiles 'had no business to be invented.'"
(The character George, referred to in the excerpt, was killed by a motorist at the end of the story. The Magnificent Ambersons was made into a movie, starring Joseph Cotton, in 1942.)
Eighty years later, the London organization "Take Back the Streets" echoes the Ambersons quote:
The street is an extremely important symbol because your whole enculturation experience is geared around keeping you out of the street. "Just remember: Look left, look right, look left again… No ball games… Don't talk to strangers… Keep out of the road." The idea is to keep everyone indoors. So, when you come to challenge the powers that be, inevitably you find yourself on the curbstone of indifference, wondering "should I play it safe and stay on the sidewalks, or should I go into the street?" And it is the ones who are taking the most risks that will ultimately effect the change in society.
The car system steals the street from under us and sells it back for the price of gasoline. It privileges time over space, corrupting and reducing both to an obsession with speed or, in economic lingo, "turnover." It doesn't matter who "drives" this system, for its movements are already pre-determined.
We can ride four-abreast on the reservation paths and the motorists won’t care; we’re out of their way. But ride four-abreast on the road and we become law-breakers and targets for harassment. If you leave the reservation you will be compelled to live within the terms of the colonists, but will still be harassed and ridiculed while you do so. Participate in a non-violent Critical Mass ride and you risk being beaten by law enforcement (this has happened and is documented) for the crime of delaying the important people in motor vehicles. Their time is more important than your time, your happiness, and your freedom to associate with your friends and neighbors while you ride.
Subspecies of Bicyclists and Where to "Put" Them
Earlier I said that cyclists have adopted (or been taught to accept) many "truths" about the nature of traffic and of bicycling with it. This is also true of bicycle planning, design, and education professionals. We speak in terms of "Type A, B & C Cyclists."
"A" cyclists are "advanced, proficient or professional" (does that mean you get paid to ride?) and can ride confidently in most traffic situations. "B" cyclists are novice adults who presumably have little more ability to ride with motor traffic than children. And "C" cyclists are children. "A" cyclists are sometimes characterized as "aggressive." We supposedly shouldn’t design for aggressive "A" cyclists because they are such a small percentage of the cycling population. When I protested to a local consultant that I prefer the term "assertive" he dismissed my argument as "semantics." Really? "Aggressive" implies that I behave in a way that threatens others; "assertive" that I peacefully assert my basic right to mobility. Being aggressive when on a 30 lb. vehicle surrounded by faster multi-ton vehicles does not sound like a sane course of action. For a planner, engineer or politician, calling someone "aggressive" gives them justification to ignore that person’s needs and rights.
Supposedly these three "types" of cyclists need different types of accommodation. Funny, we teach the basic skills and traffic principles mentioned earlier to 9-year-olds. All cyclists need only one type of accommodation: the accommodation of all motorists to be polite, sympathetic and cautious.
I’m repeatedly told – by law enforcement, other motorists and other cyclists – that this change in cultural attitude toward cyclists will never happen. Or that it will happen after we’ve built a system of separate bikeways. How do we expect motorists to learn to get along with cyclists if at every opportunity we strive to segregate the two modes? Separate-but-equal didn’t work in the 1950s with race. As the Supreme Court noted, separate-but-equal was really only separate. Some bike advocates believe that bike lanes give "legitimacy" to cyclists. I don’t know about you, but I respect Native Americans as a group because they have a rich culture that we could all learn from, not because they live in reservations. And the many people who still hate Native Americans do so with the same intensity as those who did 150 years ago, in spite of this segregation into reservations. Why should motorists who hate bicyclists change their minds because the government gives bicyclists a special place to ride?
If I’ve got you riled up so far, hang on…
Duh Laws
There are two laws that govern the relationship between cyclists and motorists. We all know of both of them, though only the written one is consciously recognized. The written law was created by the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Laws & Ordinances and adopted by most states, including Florida. It’s called the Uniform Vehicle Code (UVC). Many states have made modifications to this uniform code over the years, but it’s mostly the same essential concept. This law is enforced by officers of the states, counties and municipalities. The other is the unwritten law enforced by many motorists as well as by some officers.
The written law was developed primarily by people – traffic engineers -- who wanted bicyclists out of the way. John Forester documented this very thoroughly in Effective Cycling. Florida is generally credited as having one of the more bicyclist-friendly statutes in the country. Our law (FS 316.2065) defines bicycles as vehicles and says we have all the same rights as the drivers of other vehicles…"oh, aside from all these exceptions here in paragraphs five and six." The law, based on the UVC, uses vague language in explaining how far right one must ride, so vague that it takes five minutes to explain to someone what "as far right as practicable" means. Then it goes on to list some circumstances in which a cyclist may leave the right side. It’s quite a paternalistic law when you think about it. I have a simpler version everyone could understand without legal translation:
Bicycles are vehicles. Every person propelling a vehicle by human power has all of the rights and all of the duties applicable to the driver of any other vehicle under this chapter, except as to provisions of this chapter which by their nature can have no application. A bicyclist shall move as close as is safe and practical to the right edge of the roadway to facilitate the passing of overtaking vehicles when the bicyclist considers it safe to do so.
If the law were written in such a simple manner, Kimberly Cooper and her attorney would not be spending hundreds of dollars in legal fees to appeal convictions for citations written for taking the lane on a St. Petersburg street. The lanes in question are 10 to 11 feet wide, clearly too narrow to be shared by motorists and cyclists. Yet the St. Petersburg Police Department and the Pinellas County court believe otherwise. The police never made the case that the lane was wide enough to share safely. (The burden of proof is supposed to be on the prosecution, right?) Who is better qualified to determine when it is safe for a motorist to pass a bicyclist: the motorist, a law enforcement officer, or the bicyclist? The answer is "the bicyclist" for two reasons. First is that the bicyclist is the more vulnerable roadway user; vulnerable not only to the impact with a motor vehicle, but also to potholes and other dangerous things on the pavement. Second is that the cyclist has more experience with being passed than the motorist (or officer) has with passing. In an average hour of cycling I’ll probably be passed by over 100 cars, while during the average hour of auto driving I might pass at most one or two cyclists.
The rationale for the written law as it stands is that interactions on public roads occur between classes of vehicles and pedestrians, not between individual persons. Faster-moving travelers are presumed to be more important than slower-moving travelers. And of course bicyclists are also assumed to be "out for recreation" (not contributing to the economy). For the sake of "efficiency" it "makes sense" to limit bicyclists (a minority) in their use of the roadway so that motorists (the majority) are allowed to travel faster. Remember your grade-school civics lessons: matters of basic liberties are not decided by majority rule. I don’t know about you, but I interact with other road users only one or two at a time. All the bicyclists using the roads on a day do not interact with all motorists who use them on that day. Each cyclist interacts with a dozen or so motorists during each mile of her trip, and each motorist (in the Orlando area anyway) interacts with at most two bicyclists during an hour.
Like Native Americans who can no longer hunt on land that their ancestors hunted for generations because they were evicted from it by the United States government in the 1800s, bicyclists lost the ability to freely use an entire lane during the 20th Century. Just as Native Americans were described as children, so were bicyclists. It was for their own good, right?
The "two-abreast" part of the law is also discriminatory. (Imagine implementing it in China.) But there’s a logical loophole in it that allows two-abreast cycling, or even more than two-abreast cycling, in most circumstances. The law says we are not required to keep as far right as practicable if the lane is of substandard width. (By the way, FDOT has clarified for the record that it considers lanes less than 14 feet in width to be substandard for the purpose of sharing between motorists and cyclists.) It doesn’t say, "You can ride four feet from the curb instead of two feet when it’s substandard." So you can ride two feet from the left side of the lane if you wish. We all know it is illegal for a motorist to pass on the right in this circumstance, so tell me, what does it matter from a practical perspective if there are one, two, or even three other cyclists to the right of the first cyclist? The motorist’s ability to pass is unaffected. On most of the rural roads club cyclists and racers use the lanes are only 10 to 12 feet wide, fitting the criteria for a substandard width lane. So any individual cyclist has the right to use any part of the lane. Let’s say a pack of 50 cyclists is traveling such a road. Which is safer: for the cyclists to all hug the white line, single file in a paceline that would stretch at least 400 feet, which would take a motorist about 10 seconds to pass (risking a sideswipe all the while because he’ll try to squeeze by even when there are oncoming vehicles); or for the pack to ride four-abreast, taking up only 100 feet of length and requiring only about 3 seconds to pass? And please don’t tell me we shouldn’t travel in large packs:
"Congress shall make no law … abridging… the right of the people peaceably to assemble."
Hundreds of employers can choose to open and close their businesses at the same time, encouraging thousands of motorists to individually take to the roads during the same period, causing widespread congestion, deaths, and billions of dollars in injuries and property damage, and the community responds by throwing millions and billions more at the "problem" to enable even more businesses and motorists to continue an insane system. But if thousands of cyclists think it would be fun and would make a neat political statement about the way our public streets are used, and to gather one Friday evening per month and ride in a large, non-violent mass for a couple hours, adding minor delay to the street system – it’s time to call out the cops in riot gear and bust some heads.
Then there’s the unwritten law. It’s based on ridicule, an attitude of superiority, ignorance or disparagement of the written law, and the ability to flee the consequences of antisocial behavior. If it were written it would say:
Stay out of our way or we will scare the crap out of you, hit you, or maybe even kill you.
This unwritten law is the one that has the greatest impact on bicyclist behavior. As I said before, this law does not have to be enforced by many officers or self-appointed deputies to be effective. My wife was a victim of this vigilante justice system. A motorist threatened her, hit her with a lit cigarette that burned her arm, tried to get her to run into the rear of his vehicle by slamming his brakes, and finally got out of his vehicle, stepped in front of her, grabbed her handlebars, stopped her and threatened her some more. Fortunately an off-duty sheriff’s deputy saw the incident and gave the motorist a stern talking-to. He didn’t call the city police department to come pick this guy up for assault, though (it happened in the city and was out of his jurisdiction). Why not? He told my wife that, while he understood that cyclists have the right to use the roadway, such treatment was to be expected.
Imagine if she had been a black woman walking down the sidewalk and assaulted by a white man walking the same sidewalk. Is such treatment to be expected?
Florida Bicycle Association board member Duke Breitenbach was struck from behind by a motorist a few years ago in Lake County. The driver had already passed three other cyclists not far behind him. The motorist claimed Duke had swerved in front of him (of course) even though there was no reason for Duke to have done so; no crossroad, no driveway, no debris. It was a four-lane road; the motorist had an entire second lane in which to pass. The Florida Highway Patrol officer who worked the crash visited Duke in the hospital and told him he believed the motorist’s story, not that of the four cyclists. Furthermore, he told Duke he felt that bicyclists were a nuisance.
Let’s make a fictional comparison to Duke’s story with a different cast of characters. A white man trips a black man as he’s walking out the door of a store because the black man had the nerve to buy the last six-pack of Budweiser at the only open store in town. The black man falls hard (his hands are full) and breaks his arm. The white guy tells the police it was an accident, while three friends of the black man saw it happen and describe it as intentional. The cop visits the black man in the hospital and says he won’t arrest the white man because he believes his story. "Why don’t you just leave town, boy."
A Florida Highway Patrol officer once told me, when I suggested that the pedestrian’s right-of-way should be respected and enforced at marked and unmarked crosswalks at unsignalized intersections (as spelled out in Florida law), that that must not be done because, "I’m not going to stop all the traffic on SR 436 because some guy wants to cross the street to get to the Wendy’s for a Frosty."
Most traffic engineers believe pedestrians should walk hundreds of yards (along sidewalks barren of trees, in the sweltering Florida summer) out of their way to cross at signalized intersections. Why? Because in order for motorists to realistically be able to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks at unsignalized intersections (as the law already requires), they must travel at 25 to 30 MPH. The Motorist’s Manifest Destiny belief says this is unnatural.
Let’s also remember that the engineer’s rationale that the majority should be given priority gets tossed out the window when bicyclists become the majority. This is true not only on rural roads, but on shared use paths and in cities where bicyclists far outnumber motorists, such as in China.
In the early 1990s, then Florida DOT pedestrian and bicycle coordinator Dan Burden was invited by the Chinese government to go there and help address some of the problems they were experiencing with the huge numbers of bicyclists in their larger cities. Thinking their purpose was to find better ways of accommodating cyclists, Dan went eagerly. When he arrived he learned that the "bicycle problem" was that there were too many of them and that they were impeding the handful of motorists. Dan said, "Sorry, I can’t help you." (Meaning "I won’t help you.") Of course this would not happen in the U.S.; that many cyclists would exhibit a clear block of voting power.
Or would it? Take a trip on the Pinellas or West Orange Trails and you’ll see that the paths, which can carry 1,000 to 5,000 vehicles (bicycles) per day, are made to stop for cross streets that carry only a few hundred vehicles per day, and even for driveways. This is in clear violation of the engineering community’s own manual on traffic control. The message is clear: people in cars are more important than people on bicycles, even when they are the minority.
Act Up
We are ignored and despised and threatened and injured and sometimes even killed because we are "different," because we are believed to "take resources" from motorists, because we are believed to be doing something childish, or worse, inherently dangerous and therefore foolish, because those who despised and threaten us are not held accountable, and because carelessness behind the wheel of a motor vehicle that results in the death of another is not considered to be a serious crime because it is "inevitable."
We need to destroy the belief that bicyclists are "different." We can do this by celebrating bicyclists as individuals, telling our stories, and showing how we contribute to our communities.
We need to destroy the belief that bicyclists take time and resources from motorists. We can do this by showing that we contribute more than we "take" -- through our stories.
We need to destroy the belief that bicycling among motorists is inherently dangerous. We can do this by cycling conspicuously among motorists.
We need to destroy the belief that despising, harassing, or threatening bicyclists is acceptable. We can do this by shaming and ridiculing those who express such thoughts. Tell them, loudly and in public, "You should be ashamed of yourself." Then tell them why.
We need to destroy the belief that deaths and injuries of cyclists due to motorist carelessness are inevitable. We can do this by characterizing such carelessness as the equivalent of being careless with a gun, careless with poison, careless with dynamite, or careless with a large, vicious dog.
We have made some progress with cycling in this country over the past ten years. Money is flowing toward bicycle programs and accommodation. Our public health agencies are beginning to recognize cycling more as a solution to our sedentary lifestyles than as a safety problem. But we also have fewer children cycling to school, we still hear stories of motorists who intentionally injure and kill cyclists, and we still are harassed by motorists on a regular basis. Even though our interest is in an activity that many Americans enjoy and that also imparts many benefits to those who choose not to bike, we still are treated by many policy makers as a "special interest group." Those of us who drive bicycles know it is special, in a very good way.
Fuente: http://www.bicyclinglife.com/EffectiveAdvocacy/Marginalization.htm
sábado, 16 de junio de 2012
Energy and equity, por Ivan Illich
Energy and Equity
Ivan Illich
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``El socialismo puede llegar sólo en bicicleta.''
José Antonio Viera-Gallo
Assistant Secretary of Justice in the government of Salvador Allende
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THE ENERGY CRISIS
THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF TRAFFIC
SPEED-STUNNED IMAGINATION
NET TRANSFER OF LIFE-TIME
THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF ACCELERATION
THE RADICAL MONOPOLY OF INDUSTRY
THE ELUSIVE THRESHOLD
DEGREES OF SELF-POWERED MOBILITY
DOMINANT VERSUS SUBSIDIARY MOTORS
UNDEREQUIPMENT, OVERDEVELOPMENT, AND MATURE TECHNOLOGY
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This text was first published in Le Monde in early 1973. Over lunch in Paris the venerable editor of that daily, as he accepted my manuscript, recommended just one change. He felt that a term as little known and as technical as ``energy crisis'' had no place in the opening sentence of an article that he would be running on page 1. As I now reread the text, I am struck by the speed with which language and issues have shifted in less than five years. But I am equally struck by the slow yet steady pace at which the radical alternative to industrial society---namely, low-energy, convivial modernity---has gained defenders. In this essay I argue that under some circumstances, a technology incorporates the values of the society for which it was invented to such a degree that these values become dominant in every society which applies that technology. The material structure of production devices can thus irremediably incorporate class prejudice. High-energy technology, at least as applied to traffic, provides a clear example. Obviously, this thesis undermines the legitimacy of those professionals who monopolize the operation of such technologies. It is particularly irksome to those individuals within the professions who seek to serve the public by using the rhetoric of class struggle with the aim of replacing the ``capitalists'' who now control institutional policy by professional peers and laymen who accept professional standards Mainly under the influence of such ``radical'' professionals, this thesis has, in only five years, changed from an oddity into a heresy that has provoked a barrage of abuse. The distinction proposed here, however, is not new. I oppose tools that can be applied in the generation of use-values to others that cannot be used except in the production of commodities This distinction has recently been re-emphasized by a great variety of social critics The insistence on the need for a balance between convivial and industrial tools is, in fact, the common distinctive element in an emerging consensus among groups engaged in radical politics A superb guide to the bibliography in this field has been published in Radical Technology (London and New York, 1976), by the editors of Undercurrents. I have transferred my own files on the theme to Valentina Borremans, who is now working on a librarians' guide to reference materials on use-value-oriented modern tools, scheduled for publication in 1978. (Preliminary drafts of individual chapters of this guide can be obtained by writing to Valentina Borremans, APDO 479, Cuernavaca, Mexico.) The specific argument on socially critical energy thresholds in transportation that I pursue in this essay has been elaborated and documented by two colleagues, Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Jean Robert, in their two jointly written books, La Trahison de l'opulence (Paris, 1976) and Les Chronophages (Paris, 1978).
[from: Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978.]
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index
THE ENERGY CRISIS
It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy crisis. This euphemistic term conceals a contradiction and consecrates an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit in the joint pursuit of equity and industrial growth. It safeguards the illusion that machine power can indefinitely take the place of manpower. To resolve this contradiction and dispel this illusion, it is urgent to clarify the reality that the language of crisis obscures: high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu.
The advocates of an energy crisis believe in and continue to propagate a peculiar vision of man. According to this notion, man is born into perpetual dependence on slaves which he must painfully learn to master. If he does not employ prisoners, then he needs machines to do most of his work. According to this doctrine, the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command. This belief is common to the conflicting economic ideologies now in vogue. It is threatened by the obvious inequity, harriedness, and impotence that appear everywhere once the voracious hordes of energy slaves outnumber people by a certain proportion. The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these slaves. I prefer to ask whether free men need them.
The energy policies adopted during the current decade will determine the range and character of social relationships a society will be able to enjoy by the year 2000. A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.
At this moment, most societies---especially the poor ones---are still free to set their energy policies by any of three guidelines. Well-being can be identified with high amounts of per capita energy use, with high efficiency of energy transformation, or with the least possible use of mechanical energy by the most powerful members of society. The first approach would stress tight management of scarce and destructive fuels on behalf of industry, whereas the second would emphasize the retooling of industry in the interest of thermodynamic thrift. These first two attitudes necessarily imply huge public expenditures and increased social control; both rationalize the emergence of a computerized Leviathan, and both are at present widely discussed.
The possibility of a third option is barely noticed. While people have begun to accept ecological limits on maximum per capita energy use as a condition for physical survival, they do not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power as the foundation of any of various social orders that would be both modern and desirable. Yet only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. The one option that is at present neglected is the only choice within the reach of all nations. It is also the only strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology.
What is generally overlooked is that equity and energy can grow concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per capita wattage, motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy.
The widespread belief that clean and abundant energy is the panacea for social ills is due to a political fallacy, according to which equity and energy consumption can be indefinitely correlated, at least under some ideal political conditions. Laboring under this illusion, we tend to discount any social limit on the growth of energy consumption. But if ecologists are right to assert that nonmetabolic power pollutes, it is in fact just as inevitable that, beyond a certain threshold, mechanical power corrupts. The threshold of social disintegration by high energy quanta is independent from the threshold at which energy conversion produces physical destruction. Expressed in horsepower, it is undoubtedly lower. This is the fact which must be theoretically recognized before a political issue can be made of the per capita wattage to which a society will limit its members.
Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and ``cold turkey''---between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps---but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.
In previous discussions, I have shown that, beyond a certain level of per capita GNP, the cost of social control must rise faster than total output and become the major institutional activity within an economy. Therapy administered by educators, psychiatrists, and social workers must converge with the designs of planners, managers, and salesmen, and complement the services of security agencies, the military, and the police. I now want to indicate one reason why increased affluence requires increased control over people. I argue that beyond a certain median per capita energy level, the political system and cultural context of any society must decay. Once the critical quantum of per capita energy is surpassed, education for the abstract goals of a bureaucracy must supplant the legal guarantees of personal and concrete initiative. This quantum is the limit of social order.
I will argue here that technocracy must prevail as soon as the ratio of mechanical power to metabolic energy oversteps a definite, identifiable threshold. The order of magnitude within which this threshold lies is largely independent of the level of technology applied, yet its very existence has slipped into the blind-spot of social imagination in both rich and medium-rich countries. Both the United States and Mexico have passed the critical divide. In both countries, further energy inputs increase inequality, inefficiency, and personal impotence. Although one country has a per capita income of $500 and the other, one of nearly $5,000, huge vested interest in an industrial infrastructure prods both of them to further escalate the use of energy. As a result, both North American and Mexican ideologues put the label of ``energy crisis'' on their frustration, and both countries are blinded to the fact that the threat of social breakdown is due neither to a shortage of fuel nor to the wasteful, polluting, and irrational use of available wattage, but to the attempt of industries to gorge society with energy quanta that inevitably degrade, deprive, and frustrate most people.
A people can be just as dangerously overpowered by the wattage of its tools as by the caloric content of its foods, but it is much harder to confess to a national overindulgence in wattage than to a sickening diet. The per capita wattage that is critical for social well-being lies within an order of magnitude which is far above the horsepower known to four-fifths of humanity and far below the power commanded by any Volkswagen driver. It eludes the underconsumer and the overconsumer alike. Neither is willing to face the facts. For the primitive, the elimination of slavery and drudgery depends on the introduction of appropriate modern technology, and for the rich, the avoidance of an even more horrible degradation depends on the effective recognition of a threshold in energy consumption beyond which technical processes begin to dictate social relations. Calories are both biologically and socially healthy only as long as they stay within the narrow range that separates enough from too much.
The so-called energy crisis is, then, a politically ambiguous issue. Public interest in the quantity of power and in the distribution of controls over the use of energy can lead in two opposite directions. On the one hand, questions can be posed that would open the way to political reconstruction by unblocking the search for a postindustrial, labor-intensive, low-energy and high-equity economy. On the other hand, hysterical concern with machine fodder can reinforce the present escalation of capital-intensive institutional growth, and carry us past the last turnoff from a hyperindustrial Armageddon. Political reconstruction presupposes the recognition of the fact that there exist critical per capita quanta beyond which energy can no longer be controlled by political process. A universal social straitjacket will be the inevitable outcome of ecological restraints on total energy use imposed by industrial-minded planners bent on keeping industrial production at some hypothetical maximum.
Rich countries like the United States, Japan, or France might never reach the point of choking on their own waste, but only because their societies will have already collapsed into a sociocultural energy coma. Countries like India, Burma, and, for another short while at least, China are in the inverse position of being still muscle-powered enough to stop short of an energy stroke. They could choose, right now, to stay within those limits to which the rich will be forced back through a total loss of their freedoms.
The choice of a minimum-energy economy compels the poor to abandon fantastical expectations and the rich to recognize their vested interest as a ghastly liability. Both must reject the fatal image of man the slaveholder currently promoted by an ideologically stimulated hunger for more energy. In countries that were made affluent by industrial development, the energy crisis serves as a pretext for raising the taxes that will be needed to substitute new, more ``rational,'' and socially more deadly industrial processes for those that have been rendered obsolete by inefficient overexpansion. For the leaders of people who are not yet dominated by the same process of industrialization, the energy crisis serves as a historical imperative to centralize production, pollution, and their control in a last-ditch effort to catch up with the more highly powered. By exporting their crisis and by preaching the new gospel of puritan energy worship, the rich do even more damage to the poor than they did by selling them the products of now outdated factories. As soon as a poor country accepts the doctrine that more energy more carefully managed will always yield more goods for more people, that country locks itself into the cage of enslavement to maximum industrial outputs. Inevitably the poor lose the option for rational technology when they choose to modernize their poverty by increasing their dependence on energy. Inevitably the poor deny themselves the possibility of liberating technology and participatory politics when, together with maximum feasible energy use, they accept maximum feasible social control.
The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs. It can only be dissolved, along with the illusion that well-being depends on the number of energy slaves a man has at his command. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the thresholds beyond which energy corrupts, and to do so by a political process that associates the community in the search for limits. Because this kind of research runs counter to that now done by experts and for institutions, I shall continue to call it counterfoil research. It has three steps. First, the need for limits on the per capita use of energy must be theoretically recognized as a social imperative. Then, the range must be located wherein the critical magnitude might be found. Finally, each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying, and operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in exchange for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their operation.
The need for political research on socially optimal energy quanta can be clearly and concisely illustrated by an examination of modern traffic. The United States puts between 25 and 45 per cent of its total energy (depending upon how one calculates this) into vehicles: to make them, run them, and clear a right of way for them when they roll, when they fly, and when they park. Most of this energy is to move people who have been strapped into place. For the sole purpose of transporting people, 250 million Americans allocate more fuel than is used by 1.3 billion Chinese and Indians for all purposes. Almost all of this fuel is burned in a rain-dance of time-consuming acceleration. Poor countries spend less energy per person, but the percentage of total energy devoted to traffic in Mexico or in Peru is probably greater than in the United States, and it benefits a smaller percentage of the population. The size of this enterprise makes it both easy and significant to demonstrate the existence of socially critical energy quanta by the example of personal mobility.
In traffic, energy used over a specific period of time (power) translates into speed. In this case, the critical quantum will appear as a speed limit. Wherever this limit has been passed, the basic pattern of social degradation by high energy quanta has emerged. Once some public utility went faster than 15 mph, equity declined and the scarcity of both time and space increased. Motorized transportation monopolized traffic and blocked self-powered transit. In every Western country, passenger mileage on all types of conveyance increased by a factor of a hundred within fifty years of building the first railroad. When the ratio of their respective power outputs passed beyond a certain value, mechanical transformers of mineral fuels excluded people from the use of their metabolic energy and forced them to become captive consumers of conveyance. This effect of speed on the autonomy of people is only marginally affected by the technological characteristics of the motorized vehicles employed or by the persons or entities who hold the legal titles to airlines, buses, railroads, or cars. High speed is the critical factor which makes transportation socially destructive. A true choice among practical policies and of desirable social relations is possible only where speed is restrained. Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle.
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THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF TRAFFIC
The discussion of how energy is used to move people requires a formal distinction between transport and transit as the two components of traffic. By traffic I mean any movement of people from one place to another when they are outside their homes. By transit I mean those movements that put human metabolic energy to use, and by transport, that mode of movement which relies on other sources of energy. These energy sources will henceforth be mostly motors, since animals compete fiercely with men for their food in an overpopulated world, unless they are thistle eaters like donkeys and camels.
As soon as people become tributaries of transport, not just when they travel for several days, but also on their daily trips, the contradictions between social justice and motorized power, between effective movement and higher speed, between personal freedom and engineered routing, become poignantly clear. Enforced dependence on auto-mobile machines then denies a community of self-propelled people just those values supposedly procured by improved transportation.
People move well on their feet. This primitive means of getting around will, on closer analysis, appear quite effective when compared with the lot of people in modern cities or on industrialized farms. It will appear particularly attractive once it has been understood that modern Americans walk, on the average, as many miles as their ancestors-most of them through tunnels, corridors, parking lots, and stores.
People on their feet are more or less equal. People solely dependent on their feet move on the spur of the moment, at three to four miles per hour, in any direction and to any place from which they are not legally or physically barred. An improvement on this native degree of mobility by new transport technology should be expected to safeguard these values and to add some new ones, such as greater range, time economies, comfort, or more opportunities for the disabled. So far this is not what has happened. Instead, the growth of the transportation industry has everywhere had the reverse effect. From the moment its machines could put more than a certain horsepower behind any one passenger, this industry has reduced equality among men, restricted their mobility to a system of industrially defined routes, and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity. As the speed of their vehicles crosses a threshold, citizens become transportation consumers on the daily loop that brings them back to their home, a circuit which the United States Department of Commerce calls a ``trip'' as opposed to the ``travel'' for which Americans leave home equipped with a toothbrush.
More energy fed into the transportation system means that more people move faster over a greater range in the course of every day. Everybody's daily radius expands at the expense of being able to drop in on an acquaintance or walk through the park on the way to work. Extremes of privilege are created at the cost of universal enslavement. An elite packs unlimited distance into a lifetime of pampered travel, while the majority spend a bigger slice of their existence on unwanted trips. The few mount their magic carpets to travel between distant points that their ephemeral presence renders both scarce and seductive, while the many are compelled to trip farther and faster and to spend more time preparing for and recovering from their trips.
In the United States, four-fifths of all man-hours on the road are those of commuters and shoppers who hardly ever get into a plane, while four-fifths of the mileage flown to conventions and resorts is covered year after year by the same 1.5 per cent of the population, usually those who are either well-to-do or professionally trained to do good. The speedier the vehicle, the larger the subsidy it gets from regressive taxation. Barely 0.2 per cent of the entire United States population can engage in self-chosen air travel more than once a year, and few other countries can support a jet set which is that large.
The captive tripper and the reckless traveler become equally dependent on transport. Neither can do without it. Occasional spurts to Acapulco or to a party congress dupe the ordinary passenger into believing that he has made it into the shrunk world of the powerfully rushed. The occasional chance to spend a few hours strapped into a high-powered seat makes him an accomplice in the distortion of human space, and prompts him to consent to the design of his country's geography around vehicles rather than around people. Man has evolved physically and culturally together with his cosmic niche. What for animals is their environment he has learned to make into his home. His self-consciousness requires as its complement a life-space and a life-time integrated by the pace at which he moves. If that relationship is determined by the velocity of vehicles rather than by the movement of people, man the architect is reduced to the status of a mere commuter.
The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.
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SPEED-STUNNED IMAGINATION
Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbors and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy trucks reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast.
Equal speeds have equally distorting effects on the perception of space, time, and personal potency in rich and in poor countries, however different the surface appearances might be. Everywhere, the transportation industry shapes a new kind of man to fit the new geography and the new schedules of its making. The major difference between Guatemala and Kansas is that in Central America some provinces are still exempt from all contact with vehicles and are, therefore, still not degraded by their dependence on them.
The product of the transportation industry is the habitual passenger. He has been boosted out of the world in which people still move on their own, and he has lost the sense that he stands at the center of his world. The habitual passenger is conscious of the exasperating time scarcity that results from daily recourse to the cars, trains, buses, subways,and elevators that force him to cover an average of twenty miles each day, frequently criss-crossing his path within a radius of less than five miles. He has been lifted off his feet. No matter if he goes by subway or jet plane, he feels slower and poorer than someone else and resents the shortcuts taken by the privileged few who can escape the frustrations of traffic. If he is cramped by the timetable of his commuter train, he dreams of a car. If he drives, exhausted by the rush hour, he envies the speed capitalist who drives against the traffic. If he must pay for his car out of his own pocket, he knows full well that the commanders of corporate fleets send the fuel bill to the company and write off the rented car as a business expense. The habitual passenger is caught at the wrong end of growing inequality, time scarcity, and personal impotence, but he can see no way out of this bind except to demand more of the same: more traffic by transport. He stands in wait for technical changes in the design of vehicles, roads, and schedules; or else he expects a revolution to produce mass rapid transport under public control. In neither case does he calculate the price of being hauled into a better future. He forgets that he is the one who will pay the bill, either in fares or in taxes. He overlooks the hidden costs of replacing private cars with equally rapid public transport.
The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that reside in man's feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost confidence in his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them. He can no longer face the remote by himself. Left on his own, he feels immobile.
The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To ``gather'' for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He comes to believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one's claim on propulsion. He believes that the level of democratic process correlates to the power of transportation and communications systems. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.
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NET TRANSFER OF LIFE-TIME
Unchecked speed is expensive, and progressively fewer can afford it. Each increment in the velocity of a vehicle results in an increase in the cost of propulsion and track construction and---most dramatically---in the space the vehicle devours while it is on the move. Past a certain threshold of energy consumption for the fastest passenger, a world-wide class structure of speed capitalists is created. The exchange-value of time becomes dominant, and this is reflected in language: time is spent, saved, invested, wasted, and employed. As societies put price tags on time, equity and vehicular speed correlate inversely.
High speed capitalizes a few people's time at an enormous rate but, paradoxically, it does this at a high cost in time for all. In Bombay, only a very few people own cars. They can reach a provincial capital in one morning and make the trip once a week. Two generations ago, this would have been a week-long trek once a year. They now spend more time on more trips. But these same few also disrupt, with their cars, the traffic flow of thousands of bicycles and pedicabs that move through downtown Bombay at a rate of effective locomotion that is still superior to that of downtown Paris, London, or New York. The compounded, transport-related time expenditure within a society grows much faster than the time economies made by a few people on their speedy excursions. Traffic grows indefinitely with the availability of high-speed transports. Beyond a critical threshold, the output of the industrial complex established to move people costs a society more time than it saves. The marginal utility of an increment in the speed of a small number of people has for its price the growing marginal disutility of this acceleration for the great majority.
Beyond a critical speed, no one can save time without forcing another to lose it. The man who claims a seat in a faster vehicle insists that his time is worth more than that of the passenger in a slower one. Beyond a certain velocity, passengers become consumers of other people's time, and accelerating vehicles become the means for effecting a net transfer of life-time. The degree of transfer is measured in quanta of speed. This time grab despoils those who are left behind, and since they are the majority, it raises ethical issues of a more general nature than the lottery that assigns kidney dialysis or organ transplants.
Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto.
Contrary to what is often claimed, man's speed remained unchanged from the Age of Cyrus to the Age of Steam. News did not travel more than a hundred miles per day, no matter how the message was carried. Neither the Inca's runners nor the Venetian galley, the Persian horseman, or the mail coach on regular runs under Louis XIV broke the barrier. Soldiers, explorers, merchants, and pilgrims moved at twenty miles per day. In Valéry's words, Napoleon still had to move at Caesar's slowness: Napoléon va à la même lenteur que César. The emperor knew that ``public prosperity is measured by the income of the coaches'': On mesure la prospérité publique aux comptes des diligences, but he could barely speed them up. Paris---Toulouse had required about 200 hours in Roman times, and the scheduled stagecoach still took 158 hours in 1740, before the opening of the new Royal Roads. Only the nineteenth century accelerated man. By 1830, the trip had been reduced to 110 hours, but at a new cost. In the same year, 4,150 stagecoaches overturned in France, causing more than a thousand deaths. Then the railroad brought a sudden change. By 1855, Napoleon III claimed to have hit 96 kilometers per hour on the train somewhere between Paris and Marseilles. Within one generation, the average distance traveled each year per Frenchman increased one hundred and thirty times, and Britain's railroad network reached its greatest expansion. Passenger trains attained their optimum cost calculated in terms of time spent for their maintenance and use.
With further acceleration, transportation began to dominate traffic, and speed began to erect a hierarchy of destinations. By now, each set of destinations corresponds to a specific level of speed and defines a certain passenger class. Each circuit of terminal points degrades those pegged at a lower number of miles per hour. Those who must get around on their own power have been redefined as underdeveloped outsiders. Tell me how fast you go and I'll tell you who you are. If you can corner the taxes that fuel the Concorde, you are certainly at the top.
Over the last two generations, the vehicle has become the sign of career achievement, just as the school has become the sign of starting advantage. At each new level, the concentration of power must produce its own kind of rationale. So, for example, the reason that is usually given for spending public money to make a man travel more miles in less time each year is the still greater investment that was made to keep him more years in school. His putative value as a capital-intensive production tool sets the rate at which he is being shipped. Other ideological labels besides ``a good education'' are just as useful for opening the cabin door to luxuries paid for by others. If the Thought of Chairman Mao must now be rushed around China by jet, this can only mean that two classes are needed to fuel what his revolution has become, one of them living in the geography of the masses and the other in the geography of the cadres. The suppression of intermediary levels of speed in the People's Republic has certainly made the concentration of power more efficient and rational, but it also underscores the new difference in value between the time of the bullock driver and the time of the jet-driven. Acceleration inevitably concentrates horsepower under the seats of a few and compounds the increasing time lack of most commuters with the further sense that they are lagging behind.
The need for unequal privilege in an industrial society is generally advocated by means of an argument with two sides. The hypocrisy of this argument is clearly betrayed by acceleration. Privilege is accepted as the necessary precondition for improving the lot of a growing total population, or it is advertised as the instrument for raising the standards of a deprived minority. In the long run, accelerating transportation does neither. It only creates a universal demand for motorized conveyance and puts previously unimaginable distances between the various layers of privilege. Beyond a certain point, more energy means less equity.
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THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF ACCELERATION
It should not be overlooked that top speeds for a few exact a different price than high speeds for all. Social classification by levels of speed enforces a net transfer of power: the poor work and pay to get left behind. But if the middle classes of a speed society may be tempted to ignore discrimination, they should not neglect the rising marginal disutilities of transportation and their own loss of leisure. High speeds for all mean that everybody has less time for himself as the whole society spends a growing slice of its time budget on moving people. Vehicles running over the critical speed not only tend to impose inequality, they also inevitably establish a self-serving industry that hides an inefficient system of locomotion under apparent technological sophistication. I will argue that a speed limit is not only necessary to safeguard equity; it is equally a condition for increasing the total distance traveled within a society, while simultaneously decreasing the sum total of life-time that transportation claims.
There is little research available on the impact of vehicles on the twenty-four-hour time budget of individuals and societies. From transportation studies, we get statistics on the cost of time per mile, on the value of time measured in dollars or in length of trips. But these statistics tell us nothing about the hidden costs of transportation: about how trafficnibbles away at lifetime, about how vehicles devour space, about the multiplication of trips made necessary by the existence of vehicles, or about the time spent directly and indirectly preparing for locomotion. Further, there is no available measure of the even more deeply buried costs of transport, such as higher rent to live in areas convenient to the flow of traffic, or the cost of protecting these areas from the noise, pollution, and danger to life and limb that vehicles create. The lack of an account of expenditures from the social time budget should not lead us to believe, however, that such an accounting is impossible, nor should it prevent our drawing conclusions from the little that we do know.
From our limited information it appears that everywhere in the world, after some vehicle broke the speed barrier of 15 mph, time scarcity related to traffic began to grow. After industry had reached this threshold of per capita output, transport made of man a new kind of waif: a being constantly absent from a destination he cannot reach on his own but must attain within the day. By now, people work a substantial part of every day to earn the money without which they could not even get to work. The time a society spends on transportation grows in proportion to the speed of its fastest public conveyance. Japan now leads the United States in both areas. Life-time gets cluttered up with activities generated by traffic as soon as vehicles crash through the barrier that guards people from dislocation and space from distortion.
Whether the vehicle that speeds along the public freeway is owned by the state or by an individual has little to do with the time scarcity and overprogramming that rise with every increment in speed. Buses use one-third of the fuel that cars burn to carry one man over a given distance. Commuter trains are up to ten times more efficient than cars. Both could become even more efficient and less polluting. If publicly owned and rationally managed, they could be so scheduled and routed that the privileges they now provide under private ownership and incompetent organization would be considerably cut. But as long as any system of vehicles imposes itself on the public by top speeds that are not under political control, the public is left to choose between spending more time to pay for more people to be carried from station to station, and paying less taxes so that even fewer people can travel in much less time much farther than others. The order of magnitude of the top speed that is permitted within a transportation system determines the slice of its time budget that an entire society spends on traffic.
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THE RADICAL MONOPOLY OF INDUSTRY
A desirable ceiling on the velocity of movement cannot be usefully discussed without returning to the distinction between self-powered transit and motorized transport, and comparing the contribution each component makes relative to the total locomotion of people, which I have called traffic.
Transport stands for the capital-intensive mode of traffic, and transit indicates the labor-intensive mode. Transport is the product of an industry whose clients are passengers. It is an industrial commodity and therefore scarce by definition. Improvement of transport always takes place under conditions of scarcity that become more severe as the speed---and with it the cost---of the service increases. Conflict about insufficient transport tends to take the form of a zero-sum game where one wins only if another loses. At best, such a conflict allows for the optimum in the Prisoner's Dilemma: by cooperating with their jailer, both prisoners get off with less time in the cell.
Transit is not the product of an industry but the independent enterprise of transients. It has use-value by definition but need not have any exchange-value. The ability to engage in transit is native to man and more or less equally distributed among healthy people of the same age. The exercise of this ability can be restricted by depriving some class of people of the right to take a straight route, or because a population lacks shoes or pavements. Conflict about unsatisfactory transit conditions tends to take, therefore, the form of a non-zero-sum game in which everyone comes out ahead-not only the people who get the right to walk through a formerly walled property, but also those who live along the road.
Total traffic is the result of two profoundly distinct modes of production. These can reinforce each other harmoniously only as long as the autonomous outputs are protected against the encroachment of the industrial product.
The harm done by contemporary traffic is due to the monopoly of transport. The allure of speed has deceived the passenger into accepting the promises made by an industry that produces capital-intensive traffic. He is convinced that high-speed vehicles have allowed him to progress beyond the limited autonomy he enjoyed when moving under his own power. He has allowed planned transport to predominate over the alternative of labor intensive transit. Destruction of the physical environment is the least noxious effect of this concession. The far more bitter results are the multiplication of psychic frustration, the growing disutilities of continued production, and subjection to an inequitable transfer of power-all of which are manifestations of a distorted relationship between life-time and life-space. The passenger who agrees to live in a world monopolized by transport becomes a harassed, overburdened consumer of distances whose shape and length he can no longer control.
Every society that imposes compulsory speed submerges transit to the profit of transport. Wherever not only privilege but also elementary necessities are denied to those who do not use high-speed conveyances, an involuntary acceleration of personal rhythms is imposed. Industry dominates traffic as soon as daily life comes to depend on motorized trips.
This profound control of the transportation industry over natural mobility constitutes a monopoly much more pervasive than either the commercial monopoly Ford might win over the automobile market, or the political monopoly car manufacturers might wield against the development of trains and buses. Because of its hidden, entrenched, and structuring nature, I call this a radical monopoly. Any industry exercises this kind of deep-seated monopoly when it becomes the dominant means of satisfying needs that formerly occasioned a personal response. The compulsory consumption of a high-powered commodity (motorized transport) restricts the conditions for enjoying an abundant use-value (the innate capacity for transit). Traffic serves here as the paradigm of a general economic law: Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need. Beyond some point, compulsory schooling destroys the environment for learning, medical delivery systems dry up the nontherapeutic sources of health, and transportation smothers traffic.
Radical monopoly is first established by a rearrangement of society for the benefit of those who have access to the larger quanta; then it is enforced by compelling all to consume the minimum quantum in which the output is currently produced. Compulsory consumption will take on a different appearance in industrial branches where information dominates, such as education or medicine, than it will in those branches where quanta can be measured in British thermal units, such as housing, clothing, or transport. The industrial packaging of values will reach critical intensity at different points with different products, but for each major class of outputs, the threshold occurs within an order of magnitude that is theoretically identifiable. The fact that it is possible theoretically to determine the range of speed within which transportation develops a radical monopoly over traffic does not mean that it is possible theoretically to determine just how much of such a monopoly any given society will tolerate. The fact that it is possible to identify a level of compulsory instruction at which learning by seeing and doing declines does not enable the theorist to identify the specific pedagogical limits to the division of labor that a culture will tolerate. Only recourse to juridical and, above all, to political process can lead to the specific, though provisional, measures by which speed or compulsory education will actually be limited in a given society. The magnitude of voluntary limits is a matter of politics; the encroachment of radical monopoly can be pinpointed by social analysis.
A branch of industry does not impose a radical monopoly on a whole society by the simple fact that it produces scarce products, or by driving competing industries off the market, but rather by virtue of its acquired ability to create and shape the need which it alone can satisfy.
Shoes are scarce all over Latin America, and many people never wear them. They walk on the bare soles of their feet, or wear the world's widest variety of excellent sandals, supplied by a range of artisans. Their transit is in no way restricted by their lack of shoes. But in some countries of South America people are compelled to be shod ever since access to schools, jobs, and public services was denied to the barefoot. Teachers or party officials define the lack of shoes as a sign of indifference toward ``progress.'' Without any intentional conspiracy between the promoters of national development and the shoe industry, the barefoot in these countries are now barred from any office.
Schools, like shoes, have been scarce at all times. But it was never the small number of privileged pupils that turned the school into an obstacle for learning. Only when laws were enacted to make schools both compulsory and free did the educator assume the power to deny learning opportunities on the job to the underconsumer of educational therapies. Only when school attendance had become obligatory did it become feasible to impose on all a progressively more complex artificial environment into which the unschooled and unprogrammed do not fit.
The potential of a radical monopoly is unmistakable in the case of traffic. Imagine what would happen if the transportation industry could somehow distribute its output more adequately: a traffic utopia of free rapid transportation for all would inevitably lead to a further expansion of traffic's domain over human life. What would such a utopia look like? Traffic would be organized exclusively around public transportation systems. It would be financed by a progressive tax calculated on income and on the proximity of one's residence to the next terminal and to the job. It would be designed so that everybody could occupy any seat on a first-come, first-served basis: the doctor, the vacationer, and the president would not be assigned any priority of person. In this fool's paradise, all passengers would be equal, but they would be just as equally captive consumers of transport. Each citizen of a motorized utopia would be equally deprived of the use of his feet and equally drafted into the servitude of proliferating networks of transportation.
Certain would-be miracle makers disguised as architects offer a specious escape from the paradox of speed. By their standards, acceleration imposes inequities, time loss, and controlled schedules only because people do not yet live in those patterns and orbits into which vehicles can best place them. These futuristic architects would house and occupy people in self-sufficient units of towers interconnected by tracks for high-speed capsules. Soleri, Doxiadis, or Fuller would solve the problem created by high-speed transport by identifying the entire human habitat with the problem. Rather than asking how the earth's surface can be preserved for people, they ask how reservations necessary for the survival of people can be established on an earth that has been reshaped for the sake of industrial outputs.
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THE ELUSIVE THRESHOLD
Paradoxically, the concept of a traffic-optimal top speed for transport seems capricious or fanatical to the confirmed passenger, whereas it looks like the flight of the bird to the donkey driver. Four or six times the speed of a man on foot constitutes a threshold too low to be deemed worthy of consideration by the habitual passenger and too high to convey the sense of a limit to the three-quarters of humanity who still get around on their own power.
All those who plan, finance, or engineer other people's housing, transportation, or education belong to the passenger class. Their claim to power is derived from the value their employers place on acceleration. Social scientists can build a computer model of traffic in Calcutta or Santiago, and engineers can design monorail webs according to abstract notions of traffic flow. Since these planners are true believers in problem-solving by industrial design, the real solution for traffic congestion is beyond their grasp. Their belief in the effectiveness of power blinds them to the disproportionately greater effectiveness of abstaining from its use. Traffic engineers have yet to combine in one simulation model the mobility of people with that of vehicles. The transportation engineer cannot conceive of the possibility of renouncing speed and slowing down for the sake of permitting time-and-destination-optimal traffic flow. He would never entertain the thought of programming his computer on the stipulation that no motorized vehicle within any city should ever overtake the speed of a velocipede. The development expert who looks down compassionately from his Land-Rover on the Indian peasant herding his pigs to market refuses to acknowledge the relative advantage of feet. The expert tends to forget that this man has dispensed ten others in his village from spending time on the road, whereas the engineer and every member of his family separately devote a major part of every day to transportation. For a man who believes that human mobility must be conceived in terms of indefinite progress, there can be no optimal level of traffic but only passing consensus on a given technical level of transportation.
Most Mexicans, not to speak of Indians and Chinese, are in a position inverse to that of the confirmed passenger. The critical threshold is entirely beyond what all but a few of them know or expect. They still belong to the class of the self-powered. Some of them have a lingering memory of a motorized adventure, but most of them have no personal experience of traveling at or above the critical speed. In the two typical Mexican states of Guerrero and Chiapas, less than one per cent of the population moved even once over ten miles in less than one hour during 1970. The vehicles into which people in these areas are sometimes crowded render traffic indeed more convenient, but barely faster than the speed of a bicycle. The third-class bus does not separate the farmer from his pig, and it takes them both to market without inflicting any loss of weight, but this acquaintance with motorized ``comfort'' does not amount to dependence on destructive speed.
The order of magnitude in which the critical threshold of speed can be found is too low to be taken seriously by the passenger, and too high to concern the peasant. It is so obvious it cannot be easily seen. The proposal of a limit to speed within this order of magnitude engenders stubborn opposition. It exposes the addiction of industrialized men to ever higher doses of energy, while it asks those who are still sober to abstain from something they have yet to taste.
To propose counterfoil research is not only a scandal, it is also a threat. Simplicity threatens the expert, who supposedly understands just why the commuter train runs at 8:15 and 8:41 and why it must be better to use fuel with certain additives. That a political process could identify a natural dimension, both inescapable and limited, is an idea that lies outside the passenger's world of verities. He has let respect for specialists he does not even know turn into unthinking submission. If a political resolution could be found for problems created by experts in the field of traffic, then perhaps the same remedy could be applied to problems of education, medicine, or urbanization. If the order of magnitude of traffic-optimal vehicular velocities could be determined by laymen actively participating in an ongoing political process, then the foundation on which the framework of every industrial society is built would be shattered. To propose such research is politically subversive. It calls in question the overarching consensus on the need for more transportation which now allows the proponents of public ownership to define themselves as political adversaries of the proponents of private enterprise.
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DEGREES OF SELF-POWERED MOBILITY
A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel---probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions---finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.
Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment.
Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.
The invention of the ball-bearing, the tangent-spoked wheel, and the pneumatic tire taken together can be compared to only three other events in the history of transportation. The invention of the wheel at the dawn of civilization took the load off man's back and put it onto the barrow. The invention and simultaneous application, during the European Middle Ages, of stirrup, shoulder harness, and horseshoe increased the thermodynamic efficiency of the horse by a factor of up to five, and changed the economy of medieval Europe: it made frequent plowing possible and thus introduced rotation agriculture; it brought more distant fields into the reach of the peasant, and thus permitted landowners to move from six-family hamlets into one-hundred family villages, where they could live around the church, the square, the jail, and-later-the school; it allowed the cultivation of northern soils and shifted the center of power into cold climates. The building of the first oceangoing vessels by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, under the aegis of developing European capitalism, laid the solid foundations for a globe-spanning culture and market.
The invention of the ball-bearing signaled a fourth revolution. This revolution was unlike that, supported by the stirrup, which raised the knight onto his horse, and unlike that, supported by the galleon, which enlarged the horizon of the king's captains. The ball-bearing signaled a true crisis, a true political choice. It created an option between more freedom in equity and more speed. The bearing is an equally fundamental ingredient of two new types of locomotion, respectively symbolized by the bicycle and the car. The bicycle lifted man's auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible. In contrast, the accelerating individual capsule enabled societies to engage in a ritual of progressively paralyzing speed.
The monopoly of a ritual application over a potentially useful device is nothing new. Thousands of years ago, the wheel took the load off the carrier slave, but it did so only on the Eurasian land mass. In Mexico, the wheel was well known, but never applied to transport. It served exclusively for the construction of carriages for toy gods. The taboo on wheelbarrows in America before Cortes is no more puzzling than the taboo on bicycles in modern traffic.
It is by no means necessary that the invention of the ball bearing continue to serve the increase of energy use and thereby produce time scarcity, space consumption, and class privilege. If the new order of self-powered mobility offered by the bicycle were protected against devaluation, paralysis, and risk to the limbs of the rider, it would be possible to guarantee optimal shared mobility to all people and put an end to the imposition of maximum privilege and exploitation. It would be possible to control the patterns of urbanization if the organization of space were constrained by the power man has to move through it.
Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.
The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred.
Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim.
A grisly contest between bicycles and motors is just coming to an end. In Vietnam, a hyperindustrialized army tried to conquer, but could not overcome, a people organized around bicycle speed. The lesson should be clear. High-energy armies can annihilate people-both those they defend and those against whom they are launched-but they are of very limited use to a people which defends itself. It remains to be seen if the Vietnamese will apply what they learned in war to an economy of peace, if they will be willing to protect the values that made their victory possible. The dismal likelihood is that the victors, for the sake of industrial progress and increased energy consumption, will tend to defeat themselves by destroying that structure of equity, rationality, and autonomy into which American bombers forced them by depriving them of fuels, motors, and roads.
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DOMINANT VERSUS SUBSIDIARY MOTORS
People are born almost equally mobile. Their natural ability speaks for the personal liberty of each one to go wherever he or she wants to go. Citizens of a society founded on the notion of equity will demand the protection of this right against any abridgment. It should be irrelevant to them by what means the exercise of personal mobility is denied, whether by imprisonment, bondage to an estate, revocation of a passport, or enclosure within an environment that encroaches on a person's native ability to move in order to make him a consumer of transport. This inalienable right of free movement does not lapse just because most of our contemporaries have strapped themselves into ideological seat belts. Man's natural capacity for transit emerges as the only yardstick by which to measure the contribution transport can make to traffic: there is only so much transport that traffic can bear. It remains to be outlined how we can distinguish those forms of transport that cripple the power to move from those that enhance it.
Transportation can abridge traffic in three ways: by breaking its flow, by creating isolated sets of destinations, and by increasing the loss of time due to traffic. I have already argued that the key to the relation between transport and traffic is the speed of vehicles. I have described how, past a certain threshold of speed, transport has gone on to obstruct traffic in these three ways. It blocks mobility by cluttering up the environment with vehicles and roads. It transforms geography into a pyramid of circuits sealed off from one another according to levels of acceleration. It expropriates life-time at the behest of speed.
If beyond a certain threshold transport obstructs traffic, the inverse is also true: below some level of speed, motorized vehicles can complement or improve traffic by permitting people to do things they could not do on foot or on bicycle. A well-developed transportation system running at top speeds of 25 mph would have allowed Fix to chase Phileas Fogg around the world in less than half of eighty days. Motors can be used to transport the sick, the lame, the old, and the just plain lazy. Motor pulleys can lift people over hills, but they can do so peacefully only if they do not push the climber off the path. Trains can extend the range of travel, but can do so with justice only if people have not only equal transportation but equal free time to come closer to each other. The time engaged in travel must be, as much as possible, the traveler's own: only insofar as motorized transport remains limited to speeds which leave it subsidiary to autonomous transit can a traffic-optimal transportation system be developed.
A limit on the power and therefore on the speed of motors does not by itself insure those who are weaker against exploitation by the rich and powerful, who can still devise means to live and work at better located addresses, travel with retinue in plush carriages, and reserve a special lane for doctors and members of the central committee. But at a sufficiently limited maximum speed, this is an unfairness which can be reduced or even corrected by political means: by grassroots control over taxes, routes, vehicles, and their schedules in the community. At unlimited top speed neither public ownership of the means of transportation nor technical improvements in their control can ever eliminate growing and unequal exploitation. A transportation industry is the key to optimal production of traffic, but only if it does not exercise its radical monopoly over that personal mobility which is intrinsically and primarily a value in use.
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UNDEREQUIPMENT, OVERDEVELOPMENT, AND MATURE TECHNOLOGY
The combination of transportation and transit that constitutes traffic has provided us with an example of socially optimal per capita wattage and of the need for politically chosen limits on it. But traffic can also be viewed as but one model for the convergence of world-wide development goals, and as a criterion by which to distinguish those countries that are lamely underequipped from those that are destructively overindustrialized.
A country can be classified as underequipped if it cannot outfit each citizen with a bicycle or provide a five-speed transmission as a bonus for anyone who wants to pedal others around. It is underequipped if it cannot provide good roads for the cycle, or free motorized public transportation (though at bicycle speed!) for those who want to travel for more than a few hours in succession. No technical, economic, or ecological reason exists why such backwardness should be tolerated anywhere in 1975. It would be a scandal if the natural mobility of a people were forced to stagnate on a pre-bicycle level against its will.
A country can be classified as overindustrialized when its social life is dominated by the transportation industry, which has come to determine its class privileges, to accentuate its time scarcity, and to tie its people more tightly to the tracks it has laid out for them.
Beyond underequipment and overindustrialization, there is a place for the world of postindustrial effectiveness, where the industrial mode of production complements other autonomous forms of production. There is a place, in other words, for a world of technological maturity. In terms of traffic, it is the world of those who have tripled the extent of their daily horizon by lifting themselves onto their bicycles. It is just as much the world marked by a variety of subsidiary motors available for the occasions when a bicycle is not enough and when an extra push will limit neither equity nor freedom. And it is, too, the world of the long voyage: a world where every place is open to every person, at his own pleasure and speed, without haste or fear, by means of vehicles that cross distances without breaking with the earth which man walked for hundreds of thousands of years on his own two feet.
Underequipment keeps people frustrated by inefficient labor and invites the enslavement of man by man. Overindustrialization enslaves people to the tools they worship, fattens professional hierarchs on bits and on watts, and invites the translation of unequal power into huge income differentials. It imposes the same net transfers of power on the productive relations of every society, no matter what creed the managers profess, no matter what rain-dance, what penitential ritual they conduct. Technological maturity permits a society to steer a course equally free of either enslavement. But beware---that course is not charted. Technological maturity permits a variety of political choices and cultures. The variety diminishes, of course, as a community allows industry to grow at the cost of autonomous production. Reasoning alone can offer no precise measure for the level of postindustrial effectiveness and technological maturity appropriate to a concrete society. It can only indicate in dimensional terms the range into which these technological characteristics must fit. It must be left to a historical community engaged in its own political process to decide when programming, space distortion, time scarcity, and inequality cease to be worth its while. Reasoning can identify speed as the critical factor in traffic. Reasoning combined with experimentation can identify the order of magnitude at which vehicular speed turns into a sociopolitical determinant. No genius, no expert, no club of elites can set limits to industrial outputs that will be politically feasible. The need for such limits as an alternative to disaster is the strongest argument in favor of radical technology.
Only when the speed limits of vehicles reflect the enlightened self-interest of a political community can these limits become operative. Obviously this interest cannot even be expressed in a society where one class monopolizes not only transportation but communication, medicine, education, and weapons as well. It does not matter if this power is held by legal owners or by entrenched managers of an industry that is legally owned by the workers. This power must be reappropriated and submitted to the sound judgment of the common man. The reconquest of power starts with the recognition that expert knowledge blinds the secretive bureaucrat to the obvious way of dissolving the energy crisis, just as it blinded him to the obvious solution to the war in Vietnam.
There are two roads from where we are to technological maturity: one is the road of liberation from affluence; the other is the road of liberation from dependence. Both roads have the same destination: the social restructuring of space that offers to each person the constantly renewed experience that the center of the world is where he stands, walks, and lives.
Liberation from affluence begins on the traffic islands where the rich run into one another. The well-sped are tossed from one island to the next and are offered but the company of fellow passengers en route to somewhere else. This solitude of plenty would begin to break down as the traffic islands gradually expanded and people began to recover their native power to move around the place where they lived. Thus, the impoverished environment of the traffic island could embody the beginnings of social reconstruction, and the people who now call themselves rich would break with bondage to overefficient transport on the day they came to treasure the horizon of their traffic islands, now fully grown, and to dread frequent shipments from their homes.
Liberation from dependence starts at the other end. It breaks the constraints of village and valley and leads beyond the boredom of narrow horizons and the stifling oppression of a world closed in on itself. To expand life beyond the radius of tradition without scattering it to the winds of acceleration is a goal that any poor country could achieve within a few years, but it is a goal that will be reached only by those who reject the offer of unchecked industrial development made in the name of an ideology of indefinite energy consumption.
Liberation from the radical monopoly of the transportation industry is possible only through the institution of a political process that demystifies and disestablishes speed and limits traffic-related public expenditures of money, time, and space to the pursuit of equal mutual access. Such a process amounts to public guardianship over a means of production to keep this means from turning into a fetish for the majority and an end for the few. The political process, in turn, will never engage the support of a vast majority unless its goals are set with reference to a standard that can be publicly and operationally verified. The recognition of a socially critical threshold of the energy quantum incorporated in a commodity, such as a passenger mile, provides such a standard. A society that tolerates the transgression of this threshold inevitably diverts its resources from the production of means that can be shared equitably and transforms them into fuel for a sacrificial flame that victimizes the majority. On the other hand, a society that limits the top speed of its vehicles in accordance with this threshold fulfills a necessary-though by no means a sufficient-condition for the political pursuit of equity.
Liberation which comes cheap to the poor will cost the rich dear, but they will pay its price once the acceleration of their transportation systems grinds traffic to a halt. A concrete analysis of traffic betrays the truth underlying the energy crisis: the impact of industrially packaged quanta of energy on the social environment tends to be degrading, exhausting, and enslaving, and these effects come into play even before those which threaten the pollution of the physical environment and the extinction of the race. The crucial point at which these effects can be reversed is not, however, a matter of deduction, but of decision.
Fuente: http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1973_energy_equity.html#9
Ivan Illich
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``El socialismo puede llegar sólo en bicicleta.''
José Antonio Viera-Gallo
Assistant Secretary of Justice in the government of Salvador Allende
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THE ENERGY CRISIS
THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF TRAFFIC
SPEED-STUNNED IMAGINATION
NET TRANSFER OF LIFE-TIME
THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF ACCELERATION
THE RADICAL MONOPOLY OF INDUSTRY
THE ELUSIVE THRESHOLD
DEGREES OF SELF-POWERED MOBILITY
DOMINANT VERSUS SUBSIDIARY MOTORS
UNDEREQUIPMENT, OVERDEVELOPMENT, AND MATURE TECHNOLOGY
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This text was first published in Le Monde in early 1973. Over lunch in Paris the venerable editor of that daily, as he accepted my manuscript, recommended just one change. He felt that a term as little known and as technical as ``energy crisis'' had no place in the opening sentence of an article that he would be running on page 1. As I now reread the text, I am struck by the speed with which language and issues have shifted in less than five years. But I am equally struck by the slow yet steady pace at which the radical alternative to industrial society---namely, low-energy, convivial modernity---has gained defenders. In this essay I argue that under some circumstances, a technology incorporates the values of the society for which it was invented to such a degree that these values become dominant in every society which applies that technology. The material structure of production devices can thus irremediably incorporate class prejudice. High-energy technology, at least as applied to traffic, provides a clear example. Obviously, this thesis undermines the legitimacy of those professionals who monopolize the operation of such technologies. It is particularly irksome to those individuals within the professions who seek to serve the public by using the rhetoric of class struggle with the aim of replacing the ``capitalists'' who now control institutional policy by professional peers and laymen who accept professional standards Mainly under the influence of such ``radical'' professionals, this thesis has, in only five years, changed from an oddity into a heresy that has provoked a barrage of abuse. The distinction proposed here, however, is not new. I oppose tools that can be applied in the generation of use-values to others that cannot be used except in the production of commodities This distinction has recently been re-emphasized by a great variety of social critics The insistence on the need for a balance between convivial and industrial tools is, in fact, the common distinctive element in an emerging consensus among groups engaged in radical politics A superb guide to the bibliography in this field has been published in Radical Technology (London and New York, 1976), by the editors of Undercurrents. I have transferred my own files on the theme to Valentina Borremans, who is now working on a librarians' guide to reference materials on use-value-oriented modern tools, scheduled for publication in 1978. (Preliminary drafts of individual chapters of this guide can be obtained by writing to Valentina Borremans, APDO 479, Cuernavaca, Mexico.) The specific argument on socially critical energy thresholds in transportation that I pursue in this essay has been elaborated and documented by two colleagues, Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Jean Robert, in their two jointly written books, La Trahison de l'opulence (Paris, 1976) and Les Chronophages (Paris, 1978).
[from: Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978.]
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THE ENERGY CRISIS
It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy crisis. This euphemistic term conceals a contradiction and consecrates an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit in the joint pursuit of equity and industrial growth. It safeguards the illusion that machine power can indefinitely take the place of manpower. To resolve this contradiction and dispel this illusion, it is urgent to clarify the reality that the language of crisis obscures: high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu.
The advocates of an energy crisis believe in and continue to propagate a peculiar vision of man. According to this notion, man is born into perpetual dependence on slaves which he must painfully learn to master. If he does not employ prisoners, then he needs machines to do most of his work. According to this doctrine, the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command. This belief is common to the conflicting economic ideologies now in vogue. It is threatened by the obvious inequity, harriedness, and impotence that appear everywhere once the voracious hordes of energy slaves outnumber people by a certain proportion. The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these slaves. I prefer to ask whether free men need them.
The energy policies adopted during the current decade will determine the range and character of social relationships a society will be able to enjoy by the year 2000. A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.
At this moment, most societies---especially the poor ones---are still free to set their energy policies by any of three guidelines. Well-being can be identified with high amounts of per capita energy use, with high efficiency of energy transformation, or with the least possible use of mechanical energy by the most powerful members of society. The first approach would stress tight management of scarce and destructive fuels on behalf of industry, whereas the second would emphasize the retooling of industry in the interest of thermodynamic thrift. These first two attitudes necessarily imply huge public expenditures and increased social control; both rationalize the emergence of a computerized Leviathan, and both are at present widely discussed.
The possibility of a third option is barely noticed. While people have begun to accept ecological limits on maximum per capita energy use as a condition for physical survival, they do not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power as the foundation of any of various social orders that would be both modern and desirable. Yet only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. The one option that is at present neglected is the only choice within the reach of all nations. It is also the only strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology.
What is generally overlooked is that equity and energy can grow concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per capita wattage, motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy.
The widespread belief that clean and abundant energy is the panacea for social ills is due to a political fallacy, according to which equity and energy consumption can be indefinitely correlated, at least under some ideal political conditions. Laboring under this illusion, we tend to discount any social limit on the growth of energy consumption. But if ecologists are right to assert that nonmetabolic power pollutes, it is in fact just as inevitable that, beyond a certain threshold, mechanical power corrupts. The threshold of social disintegration by high energy quanta is independent from the threshold at which energy conversion produces physical destruction. Expressed in horsepower, it is undoubtedly lower. This is the fact which must be theoretically recognized before a political issue can be made of the per capita wattage to which a society will limit its members.
Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and ``cold turkey''---between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps---but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.
In previous discussions, I have shown that, beyond a certain level of per capita GNP, the cost of social control must rise faster than total output and become the major institutional activity within an economy. Therapy administered by educators, psychiatrists, and social workers must converge with the designs of planners, managers, and salesmen, and complement the services of security agencies, the military, and the police. I now want to indicate one reason why increased affluence requires increased control over people. I argue that beyond a certain median per capita energy level, the political system and cultural context of any society must decay. Once the critical quantum of per capita energy is surpassed, education for the abstract goals of a bureaucracy must supplant the legal guarantees of personal and concrete initiative. This quantum is the limit of social order.
I will argue here that technocracy must prevail as soon as the ratio of mechanical power to metabolic energy oversteps a definite, identifiable threshold. The order of magnitude within which this threshold lies is largely independent of the level of technology applied, yet its very existence has slipped into the blind-spot of social imagination in both rich and medium-rich countries. Both the United States and Mexico have passed the critical divide. In both countries, further energy inputs increase inequality, inefficiency, and personal impotence. Although one country has a per capita income of $500 and the other, one of nearly $5,000, huge vested interest in an industrial infrastructure prods both of them to further escalate the use of energy. As a result, both North American and Mexican ideologues put the label of ``energy crisis'' on their frustration, and both countries are blinded to the fact that the threat of social breakdown is due neither to a shortage of fuel nor to the wasteful, polluting, and irrational use of available wattage, but to the attempt of industries to gorge society with energy quanta that inevitably degrade, deprive, and frustrate most people.
A people can be just as dangerously overpowered by the wattage of its tools as by the caloric content of its foods, but it is much harder to confess to a national overindulgence in wattage than to a sickening diet. The per capita wattage that is critical for social well-being lies within an order of magnitude which is far above the horsepower known to four-fifths of humanity and far below the power commanded by any Volkswagen driver. It eludes the underconsumer and the overconsumer alike. Neither is willing to face the facts. For the primitive, the elimination of slavery and drudgery depends on the introduction of appropriate modern technology, and for the rich, the avoidance of an even more horrible degradation depends on the effective recognition of a threshold in energy consumption beyond which technical processes begin to dictate social relations. Calories are both biologically and socially healthy only as long as they stay within the narrow range that separates enough from too much.
The so-called energy crisis is, then, a politically ambiguous issue. Public interest in the quantity of power and in the distribution of controls over the use of energy can lead in two opposite directions. On the one hand, questions can be posed that would open the way to political reconstruction by unblocking the search for a postindustrial, labor-intensive, low-energy and high-equity economy. On the other hand, hysterical concern with machine fodder can reinforce the present escalation of capital-intensive institutional growth, and carry us past the last turnoff from a hyperindustrial Armageddon. Political reconstruction presupposes the recognition of the fact that there exist critical per capita quanta beyond which energy can no longer be controlled by political process. A universal social straitjacket will be the inevitable outcome of ecological restraints on total energy use imposed by industrial-minded planners bent on keeping industrial production at some hypothetical maximum.
Rich countries like the United States, Japan, or France might never reach the point of choking on their own waste, but only because their societies will have already collapsed into a sociocultural energy coma. Countries like India, Burma, and, for another short while at least, China are in the inverse position of being still muscle-powered enough to stop short of an energy stroke. They could choose, right now, to stay within those limits to which the rich will be forced back through a total loss of their freedoms.
The choice of a minimum-energy economy compels the poor to abandon fantastical expectations and the rich to recognize their vested interest as a ghastly liability. Both must reject the fatal image of man the slaveholder currently promoted by an ideologically stimulated hunger for more energy. In countries that were made affluent by industrial development, the energy crisis serves as a pretext for raising the taxes that will be needed to substitute new, more ``rational,'' and socially more deadly industrial processes for those that have been rendered obsolete by inefficient overexpansion. For the leaders of people who are not yet dominated by the same process of industrialization, the energy crisis serves as a historical imperative to centralize production, pollution, and their control in a last-ditch effort to catch up with the more highly powered. By exporting their crisis and by preaching the new gospel of puritan energy worship, the rich do even more damage to the poor than they did by selling them the products of now outdated factories. As soon as a poor country accepts the doctrine that more energy more carefully managed will always yield more goods for more people, that country locks itself into the cage of enslavement to maximum industrial outputs. Inevitably the poor lose the option for rational technology when they choose to modernize their poverty by increasing their dependence on energy. Inevitably the poor deny themselves the possibility of liberating technology and participatory politics when, together with maximum feasible energy use, they accept maximum feasible social control.
The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs. It can only be dissolved, along with the illusion that well-being depends on the number of energy slaves a man has at his command. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the thresholds beyond which energy corrupts, and to do so by a political process that associates the community in the search for limits. Because this kind of research runs counter to that now done by experts and for institutions, I shall continue to call it counterfoil research. It has three steps. First, the need for limits on the per capita use of energy must be theoretically recognized as a social imperative. Then, the range must be located wherein the critical magnitude might be found. Finally, each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying, and operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in exchange for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their operation.
The need for political research on socially optimal energy quanta can be clearly and concisely illustrated by an examination of modern traffic. The United States puts between 25 and 45 per cent of its total energy (depending upon how one calculates this) into vehicles: to make them, run them, and clear a right of way for them when they roll, when they fly, and when they park. Most of this energy is to move people who have been strapped into place. For the sole purpose of transporting people, 250 million Americans allocate more fuel than is used by 1.3 billion Chinese and Indians for all purposes. Almost all of this fuel is burned in a rain-dance of time-consuming acceleration. Poor countries spend less energy per person, but the percentage of total energy devoted to traffic in Mexico or in Peru is probably greater than in the United States, and it benefits a smaller percentage of the population. The size of this enterprise makes it both easy and significant to demonstrate the existence of socially critical energy quanta by the example of personal mobility.
In traffic, energy used over a specific period of time (power) translates into speed. In this case, the critical quantum will appear as a speed limit. Wherever this limit has been passed, the basic pattern of social degradation by high energy quanta has emerged. Once some public utility went faster than 15 mph, equity declined and the scarcity of both time and space increased. Motorized transportation monopolized traffic and blocked self-powered transit. In every Western country, passenger mileage on all types of conveyance increased by a factor of a hundred within fifty years of building the first railroad. When the ratio of their respective power outputs passed beyond a certain value, mechanical transformers of mineral fuels excluded people from the use of their metabolic energy and forced them to become captive consumers of conveyance. This effect of speed on the autonomy of people is only marginally affected by the technological characteristics of the motorized vehicles employed or by the persons or entities who hold the legal titles to airlines, buses, railroads, or cars. High speed is the critical factor which makes transportation socially destructive. A true choice among practical policies and of desirable social relations is possible only where speed is restrained. Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle.
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THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF TRAFFIC
The discussion of how energy is used to move people requires a formal distinction between transport and transit as the two components of traffic. By traffic I mean any movement of people from one place to another when they are outside their homes. By transit I mean those movements that put human metabolic energy to use, and by transport, that mode of movement which relies on other sources of energy. These energy sources will henceforth be mostly motors, since animals compete fiercely with men for their food in an overpopulated world, unless they are thistle eaters like donkeys and camels.
As soon as people become tributaries of transport, not just when they travel for several days, but also on their daily trips, the contradictions between social justice and motorized power, between effective movement and higher speed, between personal freedom and engineered routing, become poignantly clear. Enforced dependence on auto-mobile machines then denies a community of self-propelled people just those values supposedly procured by improved transportation.
People move well on their feet. This primitive means of getting around will, on closer analysis, appear quite effective when compared with the lot of people in modern cities or on industrialized farms. It will appear particularly attractive once it has been understood that modern Americans walk, on the average, as many miles as their ancestors-most of them through tunnels, corridors, parking lots, and stores.
People on their feet are more or less equal. People solely dependent on their feet move on the spur of the moment, at three to four miles per hour, in any direction and to any place from which they are not legally or physically barred. An improvement on this native degree of mobility by new transport technology should be expected to safeguard these values and to add some new ones, such as greater range, time economies, comfort, or more opportunities for the disabled. So far this is not what has happened. Instead, the growth of the transportation industry has everywhere had the reverse effect. From the moment its machines could put more than a certain horsepower behind any one passenger, this industry has reduced equality among men, restricted their mobility to a system of industrially defined routes, and created time scarcity of unprecedented severity. As the speed of their vehicles crosses a threshold, citizens become transportation consumers on the daily loop that brings them back to their home, a circuit which the United States Department of Commerce calls a ``trip'' as opposed to the ``travel'' for which Americans leave home equipped with a toothbrush.
More energy fed into the transportation system means that more people move faster over a greater range in the course of every day. Everybody's daily radius expands at the expense of being able to drop in on an acquaintance or walk through the park on the way to work. Extremes of privilege are created at the cost of universal enslavement. An elite packs unlimited distance into a lifetime of pampered travel, while the majority spend a bigger slice of their existence on unwanted trips. The few mount their magic carpets to travel between distant points that their ephemeral presence renders both scarce and seductive, while the many are compelled to trip farther and faster and to spend more time preparing for and recovering from their trips.
In the United States, four-fifths of all man-hours on the road are those of commuters and shoppers who hardly ever get into a plane, while four-fifths of the mileage flown to conventions and resorts is covered year after year by the same 1.5 per cent of the population, usually those who are either well-to-do or professionally trained to do good. The speedier the vehicle, the larger the subsidy it gets from regressive taxation. Barely 0.2 per cent of the entire United States population can engage in self-chosen air travel more than once a year, and few other countries can support a jet set which is that large.
The captive tripper and the reckless traveler become equally dependent on transport. Neither can do without it. Occasional spurts to Acapulco or to a party congress dupe the ordinary passenger into believing that he has made it into the shrunk world of the powerfully rushed. The occasional chance to spend a few hours strapped into a high-powered seat makes him an accomplice in the distortion of human space, and prompts him to consent to the design of his country's geography around vehicles rather than around people. Man has evolved physically and culturally together with his cosmic niche. What for animals is their environment he has learned to make into his home. His self-consciousness requires as its complement a life-space and a life-time integrated by the pace at which he moves. If that relationship is determined by the velocity of vehicles rather than by the movement of people, man the architect is reduced to the status of a mere commuter.
The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.
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SPEED-STUNNED IMAGINATION
Past a certain threshold of energy consumption, the transportation industry dictates the configuration of social space. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbors and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a sick child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy trucks reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast.
Equal speeds have equally distorting effects on the perception of space, time, and personal potency in rich and in poor countries, however different the surface appearances might be. Everywhere, the transportation industry shapes a new kind of man to fit the new geography and the new schedules of its making. The major difference between Guatemala and Kansas is that in Central America some provinces are still exempt from all contact with vehicles and are, therefore, still not degraded by their dependence on them.
The product of the transportation industry is the habitual passenger. He has been boosted out of the world in which people still move on their own, and he has lost the sense that he stands at the center of his world. The habitual passenger is conscious of the exasperating time scarcity that results from daily recourse to the cars, trains, buses, subways,and elevators that force him to cover an average of twenty miles each day, frequently criss-crossing his path within a radius of less than five miles. He has been lifted off his feet. No matter if he goes by subway or jet plane, he feels slower and poorer than someone else and resents the shortcuts taken by the privileged few who can escape the frustrations of traffic. If he is cramped by the timetable of his commuter train, he dreams of a car. If he drives, exhausted by the rush hour, he envies the speed capitalist who drives against the traffic. If he must pay for his car out of his own pocket, he knows full well that the commanders of corporate fleets send the fuel bill to the company and write off the rented car as a business expense. The habitual passenger is caught at the wrong end of growing inequality, time scarcity, and personal impotence, but he can see no way out of this bind except to demand more of the same: more traffic by transport. He stands in wait for technical changes in the design of vehicles, roads, and schedules; or else he expects a revolution to produce mass rapid transport under public control. In neither case does he calculate the price of being hauled into a better future. He forgets that he is the one who will pay the bill, either in fares or in taxes. He overlooks the hidden costs of replacing private cars with equally rapid public transport.
The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that reside in man's feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost confidence in his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them. He can no longer face the remote by himself. Left on his own, he feels immobile.
The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To ``gather'' for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He comes to believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one's claim on propulsion. He believes that the level of democratic process correlates to the power of transportation and communications systems. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.
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NET TRANSFER OF LIFE-TIME
Unchecked speed is expensive, and progressively fewer can afford it. Each increment in the velocity of a vehicle results in an increase in the cost of propulsion and track construction and---most dramatically---in the space the vehicle devours while it is on the move. Past a certain threshold of energy consumption for the fastest passenger, a world-wide class structure of speed capitalists is created. The exchange-value of time becomes dominant, and this is reflected in language: time is spent, saved, invested, wasted, and employed. As societies put price tags on time, equity and vehicular speed correlate inversely.
High speed capitalizes a few people's time at an enormous rate but, paradoxically, it does this at a high cost in time for all. In Bombay, only a very few people own cars. They can reach a provincial capital in one morning and make the trip once a week. Two generations ago, this would have been a week-long trek once a year. They now spend more time on more trips. But these same few also disrupt, with their cars, the traffic flow of thousands of bicycles and pedicabs that move through downtown Bombay at a rate of effective locomotion that is still superior to that of downtown Paris, London, or New York. The compounded, transport-related time expenditure within a society grows much faster than the time economies made by a few people on their speedy excursions. Traffic grows indefinitely with the availability of high-speed transports. Beyond a critical threshold, the output of the industrial complex established to move people costs a society more time than it saves. The marginal utility of an increment in the speed of a small number of people has for its price the growing marginal disutility of this acceleration for the great majority.
Beyond a critical speed, no one can save time without forcing another to lose it. The man who claims a seat in a faster vehicle insists that his time is worth more than that of the passenger in a slower one. Beyond a certain velocity, passengers become consumers of other people's time, and accelerating vehicles become the means for effecting a net transfer of life-time. The degree of transfer is measured in quanta of speed. This time grab despoils those who are left behind, and since they are the majority, it raises ethical issues of a more general nature than the lottery that assigns kidney dialysis or organ transplants.
Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto.
Contrary to what is often claimed, man's speed remained unchanged from the Age of Cyrus to the Age of Steam. News did not travel more than a hundred miles per day, no matter how the message was carried. Neither the Inca's runners nor the Venetian galley, the Persian horseman, or the mail coach on regular runs under Louis XIV broke the barrier. Soldiers, explorers, merchants, and pilgrims moved at twenty miles per day. In Valéry's words, Napoleon still had to move at Caesar's slowness: Napoléon va à la même lenteur que César. The emperor knew that ``public prosperity is measured by the income of the coaches'': On mesure la prospérité publique aux comptes des diligences, but he could barely speed them up. Paris---Toulouse had required about 200 hours in Roman times, and the scheduled stagecoach still took 158 hours in 1740, before the opening of the new Royal Roads. Only the nineteenth century accelerated man. By 1830, the trip had been reduced to 110 hours, but at a new cost. In the same year, 4,150 stagecoaches overturned in France, causing more than a thousand deaths. Then the railroad brought a sudden change. By 1855, Napoleon III claimed to have hit 96 kilometers per hour on the train somewhere between Paris and Marseilles. Within one generation, the average distance traveled each year per Frenchman increased one hundred and thirty times, and Britain's railroad network reached its greatest expansion. Passenger trains attained their optimum cost calculated in terms of time spent for their maintenance and use.
With further acceleration, transportation began to dominate traffic, and speed began to erect a hierarchy of destinations. By now, each set of destinations corresponds to a specific level of speed and defines a certain passenger class. Each circuit of terminal points degrades those pegged at a lower number of miles per hour. Those who must get around on their own power have been redefined as underdeveloped outsiders. Tell me how fast you go and I'll tell you who you are. If you can corner the taxes that fuel the Concorde, you are certainly at the top.
Over the last two generations, the vehicle has become the sign of career achievement, just as the school has become the sign of starting advantage. At each new level, the concentration of power must produce its own kind of rationale. So, for example, the reason that is usually given for spending public money to make a man travel more miles in less time each year is the still greater investment that was made to keep him more years in school. His putative value as a capital-intensive production tool sets the rate at which he is being shipped. Other ideological labels besides ``a good education'' are just as useful for opening the cabin door to luxuries paid for by others. If the Thought of Chairman Mao must now be rushed around China by jet, this can only mean that two classes are needed to fuel what his revolution has become, one of them living in the geography of the masses and the other in the geography of the cadres. The suppression of intermediary levels of speed in the People's Republic has certainly made the concentration of power more efficient and rational, but it also underscores the new difference in value between the time of the bullock driver and the time of the jet-driven. Acceleration inevitably concentrates horsepower under the seats of a few and compounds the increasing time lack of most commuters with the further sense that they are lagging behind.
The need for unequal privilege in an industrial society is generally advocated by means of an argument with two sides. The hypocrisy of this argument is clearly betrayed by acceleration. Privilege is accepted as the necessary precondition for improving the lot of a growing total population, or it is advertised as the instrument for raising the standards of a deprived minority. In the long run, accelerating transportation does neither. It only creates a universal demand for motorized conveyance and puts previously unimaginable distances between the various layers of privilege. Beyond a certain point, more energy means less equity.
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THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF ACCELERATION
It should not be overlooked that top speeds for a few exact a different price than high speeds for all. Social classification by levels of speed enforces a net transfer of power: the poor work and pay to get left behind. But if the middle classes of a speed society may be tempted to ignore discrimination, they should not neglect the rising marginal disutilities of transportation and their own loss of leisure. High speeds for all mean that everybody has less time for himself as the whole society spends a growing slice of its time budget on moving people. Vehicles running over the critical speed not only tend to impose inequality, they also inevitably establish a self-serving industry that hides an inefficient system of locomotion under apparent technological sophistication. I will argue that a speed limit is not only necessary to safeguard equity; it is equally a condition for increasing the total distance traveled within a society, while simultaneously decreasing the sum total of life-time that transportation claims.
There is little research available on the impact of vehicles on the twenty-four-hour time budget of individuals and societies. From transportation studies, we get statistics on the cost of time per mile, on the value of time measured in dollars or in length of trips. But these statistics tell us nothing about the hidden costs of transportation: about how trafficnibbles away at lifetime, about how vehicles devour space, about the multiplication of trips made necessary by the existence of vehicles, or about the time spent directly and indirectly preparing for locomotion. Further, there is no available measure of the even more deeply buried costs of transport, such as higher rent to live in areas convenient to the flow of traffic, or the cost of protecting these areas from the noise, pollution, and danger to life and limb that vehicles create. The lack of an account of expenditures from the social time budget should not lead us to believe, however, that such an accounting is impossible, nor should it prevent our drawing conclusions from the little that we do know.
From our limited information it appears that everywhere in the world, after some vehicle broke the speed barrier of 15 mph, time scarcity related to traffic began to grow. After industry had reached this threshold of per capita output, transport made of man a new kind of waif: a being constantly absent from a destination he cannot reach on his own but must attain within the day. By now, people work a substantial part of every day to earn the money without which they could not even get to work. The time a society spends on transportation grows in proportion to the speed of its fastest public conveyance. Japan now leads the United States in both areas. Life-time gets cluttered up with activities generated by traffic as soon as vehicles crash through the barrier that guards people from dislocation and space from distortion.
Whether the vehicle that speeds along the public freeway is owned by the state or by an individual has little to do with the time scarcity and overprogramming that rise with every increment in speed. Buses use one-third of the fuel that cars burn to carry one man over a given distance. Commuter trains are up to ten times more efficient than cars. Both could become even more efficient and less polluting. If publicly owned and rationally managed, they could be so scheduled and routed that the privileges they now provide under private ownership and incompetent organization would be considerably cut. But as long as any system of vehicles imposes itself on the public by top speeds that are not under political control, the public is left to choose between spending more time to pay for more people to be carried from station to station, and paying less taxes so that even fewer people can travel in much less time much farther than others. The order of magnitude of the top speed that is permitted within a transportation system determines the slice of its time budget that an entire society spends on traffic.
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THE RADICAL MONOPOLY OF INDUSTRY
A desirable ceiling on the velocity of movement cannot be usefully discussed without returning to the distinction between self-powered transit and motorized transport, and comparing the contribution each component makes relative to the total locomotion of people, which I have called traffic.
Transport stands for the capital-intensive mode of traffic, and transit indicates the labor-intensive mode. Transport is the product of an industry whose clients are passengers. It is an industrial commodity and therefore scarce by definition. Improvement of transport always takes place under conditions of scarcity that become more severe as the speed---and with it the cost---of the service increases. Conflict about insufficient transport tends to take the form of a zero-sum game where one wins only if another loses. At best, such a conflict allows for the optimum in the Prisoner's Dilemma: by cooperating with their jailer, both prisoners get off with less time in the cell.
Transit is not the product of an industry but the independent enterprise of transients. It has use-value by definition but need not have any exchange-value. The ability to engage in transit is native to man and more or less equally distributed among healthy people of the same age. The exercise of this ability can be restricted by depriving some class of people of the right to take a straight route, or because a population lacks shoes or pavements. Conflict about unsatisfactory transit conditions tends to take, therefore, the form of a non-zero-sum game in which everyone comes out ahead-not only the people who get the right to walk through a formerly walled property, but also those who live along the road.
Total traffic is the result of two profoundly distinct modes of production. These can reinforce each other harmoniously only as long as the autonomous outputs are protected against the encroachment of the industrial product.
The harm done by contemporary traffic is due to the monopoly of transport. The allure of speed has deceived the passenger into accepting the promises made by an industry that produces capital-intensive traffic. He is convinced that high-speed vehicles have allowed him to progress beyond the limited autonomy he enjoyed when moving under his own power. He has allowed planned transport to predominate over the alternative of labor intensive transit. Destruction of the physical environment is the least noxious effect of this concession. The far more bitter results are the multiplication of psychic frustration, the growing disutilities of continued production, and subjection to an inequitable transfer of power-all of which are manifestations of a distorted relationship between life-time and life-space. The passenger who agrees to live in a world monopolized by transport becomes a harassed, overburdened consumer of distances whose shape and length he can no longer control.
Every society that imposes compulsory speed submerges transit to the profit of transport. Wherever not only privilege but also elementary necessities are denied to those who do not use high-speed conveyances, an involuntary acceleration of personal rhythms is imposed. Industry dominates traffic as soon as daily life comes to depend on motorized trips.
This profound control of the transportation industry over natural mobility constitutes a monopoly much more pervasive than either the commercial monopoly Ford might win over the automobile market, or the political monopoly car manufacturers might wield against the development of trains and buses. Because of its hidden, entrenched, and structuring nature, I call this a radical monopoly. Any industry exercises this kind of deep-seated monopoly when it becomes the dominant means of satisfying needs that formerly occasioned a personal response. The compulsory consumption of a high-powered commodity (motorized transport) restricts the conditions for enjoying an abundant use-value (the innate capacity for transit). Traffic serves here as the paradigm of a general economic law: Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need. Beyond some point, compulsory schooling destroys the environment for learning, medical delivery systems dry up the nontherapeutic sources of health, and transportation smothers traffic.
Radical monopoly is first established by a rearrangement of society for the benefit of those who have access to the larger quanta; then it is enforced by compelling all to consume the minimum quantum in which the output is currently produced. Compulsory consumption will take on a different appearance in industrial branches where information dominates, such as education or medicine, than it will in those branches where quanta can be measured in British thermal units, such as housing, clothing, or transport. The industrial packaging of values will reach critical intensity at different points with different products, but for each major class of outputs, the threshold occurs within an order of magnitude that is theoretically identifiable. The fact that it is possible theoretically to determine the range of speed within which transportation develops a radical monopoly over traffic does not mean that it is possible theoretically to determine just how much of such a monopoly any given society will tolerate. The fact that it is possible to identify a level of compulsory instruction at which learning by seeing and doing declines does not enable the theorist to identify the specific pedagogical limits to the division of labor that a culture will tolerate. Only recourse to juridical and, above all, to political process can lead to the specific, though provisional, measures by which speed or compulsory education will actually be limited in a given society. The magnitude of voluntary limits is a matter of politics; the encroachment of radical monopoly can be pinpointed by social analysis.
A branch of industry does not impose a radical monopoly on a whole society by the simple fact that it produces scarce products, or by driving competing industries off the market, but rather by virtue of its acquired ability to create and shape the need which it alone can satisfy.
Shoes are scarce all over Latin America, and many people never wear them. They walk on the bare soles of their feet, or wear the world's widest variety of excellent sandals, supplied by a range of artisans. Their transit is in no way restricted by their lack of shoes. But in some countries of South America people are compelled to be shod ever since access to schools, jobs, and public services was denied to the barefoot. Teachers or party officials define the lack of shoes as a sign of indifference toward ``progress.'' Without any intentional conspiracy between the promoters of national development and the shoe industry, the barefoot in these countries are now barred from any office.
Schools, like shoes, have been scarce at all times. But it was never the small number of privileged pupils that turned the school into an obstacle for learning. Only when laws were enacted to make schools both compulsory and free did the educator assume the power to deny learning opportunities on the job to the underconsumer of educational therapies. Only when school attendance had become obligatory did it become feasible to impose on all a progressively more complex artificial environment into which the unschooled and unprogrammed do not fit.
The potential of a radical monopoly is unmistakable in the case of traffic. Imagine what would happen if the transportation industry could somehow distribute its output more adequately: a traffic utopia of free rapid transportation for all would inevitably lead to a further expansion of traffic's domain over human life. What would such a utopia look like? Traffic would be organized exclusively around public transportation systems. It would be financed by a progressive tax calculated on income and on the proximity of one's residence to the next terminal and to the job. It would be designed so that everybody could occupy any seat on a first-come, first-served basis: the doctor, the vacationer, and the president would not be assigned any priority of person. In this fool's paradise, all passengers would be equal, but they would be just as equally captive consumers of transport. Each citizen of a motorized utopia would be equally deprived of the use of his feet and equally drafted into the servitude of proliferating networks of transportation.
Certain would-be miracle makers disguised as architects offer a specious escape from the paradox of speed. By their standards, acceleration imposes inequities, time loss, and controlled schedules only because people do not yet live in those patterns and orbits into which vehicles can best place them. These futuristic architects would house and occupy people in self-sufficient units of towers interconnected by tracks for high-speed capsules. Soleri, Doxiadis, or Fuller would solve the problem created by high-speed transport by identifying the entire human habitat with the problem. Rather than asking how the earth's surface can be preserved for people, they ask how reservations necessary for the survival of people can be established on an earth that has been reshaped for the sake of industrial outputs.
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THE ELUSIVE THRESHOLD
Paradoxically, the concept of a traffic-optimal top speed for transport seems capricious or fanatical to the confirmed passenger, whereas it looks like the flight of the bird to the donkey driver. Four or six times the speed of a man on foot constitutes a threshold too low to be deemed worthy of consideration by the habitual passenger and too high to convey the sense of a limit to the three-quarters of humanity who still get around on their own power.
All those who plan, finance, or engineer other people's housing, transportation, or education belong to the passenger class. Their claim to power is derived from the value their employers place on acceleration. Social scientists can build a computer model of traffic in Calcutta or Santiago, and engineers can design monorail webs according to abstract notions of traffic flow. Since these planners are true believers in problem-solving by industrial design, the real solution for traffic congestion is beyond their grasp. Their belief in the effectiveness of power blinds them to the disproportionately greater effectiveness of abstaining from its use. Traffic engineers have yet to combine in one simulation model the mobility of people with that of vehicles. The transportation engineer cannot conceive of the possibility of renouncing speed and slowing down for the sake of permitting time-and-destination-optimal traffic flow. He would never entertain the thought of programming his computer on the stipulation that no motorized vehicle within any city should ever overtake the speed of a velocipede. The development expert who looks down compassionately from his Land-Rover on the Indian peasant herding his pigs to market refuses to acknowledge the relative advantage of feet. The expert tends to forget that this man has dispensed ten others in his village from spending time on the road, whereas the engineer and every member of his family separately devote a major part of every day to transportation. For a man who believes that human mobility must be conceived in terms of indefinite progress, there can be no optimal level of traffic but only passing consensus on a given technical level of transportation.
Most Mexicans, not to speak of Indians and Chinese, are in a position inverse to that of the confirmed passenger. The critical threshold is entirely beyond what all but a few of them know or expect. They still belong to the class of the self-powered. Some of them have a lingering memory of a motorized adventure, but most of them have no personal experience of traveling at or above the critical speed. In the two typical Mexican states of Guerrero and Chiapas, less than one per cent of the population moved even once over ten miles in less than one hour during 1970. The vehicles into which people in these areas are sometimes crowded render traffic indeed more convenient, but barely faster than the speed of a bicycle. The third-class bus does not separate the farmer from his pig, and it takes them both to market without inflicting any loss of weight, but this acquaintance with motorized ``comfort'' does not amount to dependence on destructive speed.
The order of magnitude in which the critical threshold of speed can be found is too low to be taken seriously by the passenger, and too high to concern the peasant. It is so obvious it cannot be easily seen. The proposal of a limit to speed within this order of magnitude engenders stubborn opposition. It exposes the addiction of industrialized men to ever higher doses of energy, while it asks those who are still sober to abstain from something they have yet to taste.
To propose counterfoil research is not only a scandal, it is also a threat. Simplicity threatens the expert, who supposedly understands just why the commuter train runs at 8:15 and 8:41 and why it must be better to use fuel with certain additives. That a political process could identify a natural dimension, both inescapable and limited, is an idea that lies outside the passenger's world of verities. He has let respect for specialists he does not even know turn into unthinking submission. If a political resolution could be found for problems created by experts in the field of traffic, then perhaps the same remedy could be applied to problems of education, medicine, or urbanization. If the order of magnitude of traffic-optimal vehicular velocities could be determined by laymen actively participating in an ongoing political process, then the foundation on which the framework of every industrial society is built would be shattered. To propose such research is politically subversive. It calls in question the overarching consensus on the need for more transportation which now allows the proponents of public ownership to define themselves as political adversaries of the proponents of private enterprise.
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DEGREES OF SELF-POWERED MOBILITY
A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel---probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions---finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.
Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment.
Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.
The invention of the ball-bearing, the tangent-spoked wheel, and the pneumatic tire taken together can be compared to only three other events in the history of transportation. The invention of the wheel at the dawn of civilization took the load off man's back and put it onto the barrow. The invention and simultaneous application, during the European Middle Ages, of stirrup, shoulder harness, and horseshoe increased the thermodynamic efficiency of the horse by a factor of up to five, and changed the economy of medieval Europe: it made frequent plowing possible and thus introduced rotation agriculture; it brought more distant fields into the reach of the peasant, and thus permitted landowners to move from six-family hamlets into one-hundred family villages, where they could live around the church, the square, the jail, and-later-the school; it allowed the cultivation of northern soils and shifted the center of power into cold climates. The building of the first oceangoing vessels by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, under the aegis of developing European capitalism, laid the solid foundations for a globe-spanning culture and market.
The invention of the ball-bearing signaled a fourth revolution. This revolution was unlike that, supported by the stirrup, which raised the knight onto his horse, and unlike that, supported by the galleon, which enlarged the horizon of the king's captains. The ball-bearing signaled a true crisis, a true political choice. It created an option between more freedom in equity and more speed. The bearing is an equally fundamental ingredient of two new types of locomotion, respectively symbolized by the bicycle and the car. The bicycle lifted man's auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible. In contrast, the accelerating individual capsule enabled societies to engage in a ritual of progressively paralyzing speed.
The monopoly of a ritual application over a potentially useful device is nothing new. Thousands of years ago, the wheel took the load off the carrier slave, but it did so only on the Eurasian land mass. In Mexico, the wheel was well known, but never applied to transport. It served exclusively for the construction of carriages for toy gods. The taboo on wheelbarrows in America before Cortes is no more puzzling than the taboo on bicycles in modern traffic.
It is by no means necessary that the invention of the ball bearing continue to serve the increase of energy use and thereby produce time scarcity, space consumption, and class privilege. If the new order of self-powered mobility offered by the bicycle were protected against devaluation, paralysis, and risk to the limbs of the rider, it would be possible to guarantee optimal shared mobility to all people and put an end to the imposition of maximum privilege and exploitation. It would be possible to control the patterns of urbanization if the organization of space were constrained by the power man has to move through it.
Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.
The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred.
Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim.
A grisly contest between bicycles and motors is just coming to an end. In Vietnam, a hyperindustrialized army tried to conquer, but could not overcome, a people organized around bicycle speed. The lesson should be clear. High-energy armies can annihilate people-both those they defend and those against whom they are launched-but they are of very limited use to a people which defends itself. It remains to be seen if the Vietnamese will apply what they learned in war to an economy of peace, if they will be willing to protect the values that made their victory possible. The dismal likelihood is that the victors, for the sake of industrial progress and increased energy consumption, will tend to defeat themselves by destroying that structure of equity, rationality, and autonomy into which American bombers forced them by depriving them of fuels, motors, and roads.
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DOMINANT VERSUS SUBSIDIARY MOTORS
People are born almost equally mobile. Their natural ability speaks for the personal liberty of each one to go wherever he or she wants to go. Citizens of a society founded on the notion of equity will demand the protection of this right against any abridgment. It should be irrelevant to them by what means the exercise of personal mobility is denied, whether by imprisonment, bondage to an estate, revocation of a passport, or enclosure within an environment that encroaches on a person's native ability to move in order to make him a consumer of transport. This inalienable right of free movement does not lapse just because most of our contemporaries have strapped themselves into ideological seat belts. Man's natural capacity for transit emerges as the only yardstick by which to measure the contribution transport can make to traffic: there is only so much transport that traffic can bear. It remains to be outlined how we can distinguish those forms of transport that cripple the power to move from those that enhance it.
Transportation can abridge traffic in three ways: by breaking its flow, by creating isolated sets of destinations, and by increasing the loss of time due to traffic. I have already argued that the key to the relation between transport and traffic is the speed of vehicles. I have described how, past a certain threshold of speed, transport has gone on to obstruct traffic in these three ways. It blocks mobility by cluttering up the environment with vehicles and roads. It transforms geography into a pyramid of circuits sealed off from one another according to levels of acceleration. It expropriates life-time at the behest of speed.
If beyond a certain threshold transport obstructs traffic, the inverse is also true: below some level of speed, motorized vehicles can complement or improve traffic by permitting people to do things they could not do on foot or on bicycle. A well-developed transportation system running at top speeds of 25 mph would have allowed Fix to chase Phileas Fogg around the world in less than half of eighty days. Motors can be used to transport the sick, the lame, the old, and the just plain lazy. Motor pulleys can lift people over hills, but they can do so peacefully only if they do not push the climber off the path. Trains can extend the range of travel, but can do so with justice only if people have not only equal transportation but equal free time to come closer to each other. The time engaged in travel must be, as much as possible, the traveler's own: only insofar as motorized transport remains limited to speeds which leave it subsidiary to autonomous transit can a traffic-optimal transportation system be developed.
A limit on the power and therefore on the speed of motors does not by itself insure those who are weaker against exploitation by the rich and powerful, who can still devise means to live and work at better located addresses, travel with retinue in plush carriages, and reserve a special lane for doctors and members of the central committee. But at a sufficiently limited maximum speed, this is an unfairness which can be reduced or even corrected by political means: by grassroots control over taxes, routes, vehicles, and their schedules in the community. At unlimited top speed neither public ownership of the means of transportation nor technical improvements in their control can ever eliminate growing and unequal exploitation. A transportation industry is the key to optimal production of traffic, but only if it does not exercise its radical monopoly over that personal mobility which is intrinsically and primarily a value in use.
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UNDEREQUIPMENT, OVERDEVELOPMENT, AND MATURE TECHNOLOGY
The combination of transportation and transit that constitutes traffic has provided us with an example of socially optimal per capita wattage and of the need for politically chosen limits on it. But traffic can also be viewed as but one model for the convergence of world-wide development goals, and as a criterion by which to distinguish those countries that are lamely underequipped from those that are destructively overindustrialized.
A country can be classified as underequipped if it cannot outfit each citizen with a bicycle or provide a five-speed transmission as a bonus for anyone who wants to pedal others around. It is underequipped if it cannot provide good roads for the cycle, or free motorized public transportation (though at bicycle speed!) for those who want to travel for more than a few hours in succession. No technical, economic, or ecological reason exists why such backwardness should be tolerated anywhere in 1975. It would be a scandal if the natural mobility of a people were forced to stagnate on a pre-bicycle level against its will.
A country can be classified as overindustrialized when its social life is dominated by the transportation industry, which has come to determine its class privileges, to accentuate its time scarcity, and to tie its people more tightly to the tracks it has laid out for them.
Beyond underequipment and overindustrialization, there is a place for the world of postindustrial effectiveness, where the industrial mode of production complements other autonomous forms of production. There is a place, in other words, for a world of technological maturity. In terms of traffic, it is the world of those who have tripled the extent of their daily horizon by lifting themselves onto their bicycles. It is just as much the world marked by a variety of subsidiary motors available for the occasions when a bicycle is not enough and when an extra push will limit neither equity nor freedom. And it is, too, the world of the long voyage: a world where every place is open to every person, at his own pleasure and speed, without haste or fear, by means of vehicles that cross distances without breaking with the earth which man walked for hundreds of thousands of years on his own two feet.
Underequipment keeps people frustrated by inefficient labor and invites the enslavement of man by man. Overindustrialization enslaves people to the tools they worship, fattens professional hierarchs on bits and on watts, and invites the translation of unequal power into huge income differentials. It imposes the same net transfers of power on the productive relations of every society, no matter what creed the managers profess, no matter what rain-dance, what penitential ritual they conduct. Technological maturity permits a society to steer a course equally free of either enslavement. But beware---that course is not charted. Technological maturity permits a variety of political choices and cultures. The variety diminishes, of course, as a community allows industry to grow at the cost of autonomous production. Reasoning alone can offer no precise measure for the level of postindustrial effectiveness and technological maturity appropriate to a concrete society. It can only indicate in dimensional terms the range into which these technological characteristics must fit. It must be left to a historical community engaged in its own political process to decide when programming, space distortion, time scarcity, and inequality cease to be worth its while. Reasoning can identify speed as the critical factor in traffic. Reasoning combined with experimentation can identify the order of magnitude at which vehicular speed turns into a sociopolitical determinant. No genius, no expert, no club of elites can set limits to industrial outputs that will be politically feasible. The need for such limits as an alternative to disaster is the strongest argument in favor of radical technology.
Only when the speed limits of vehicles reflect the enlightened self-interest of a political community can these limits become operative. Obviously this interest cannot even be expressed in a society where one class monopolizes not only transportation but communication, medicine, education, and weapons as well. It does not matter if this power is held by legal owners or by entrenched managers of an industry that is legally owned by the workers. This power must be reappropriated and submitted to the sound judgment of the common man. The reconquest of power starts with the recognition that expert knowledge blinds the secretive bureaucrat to the obvious way of dissolving the energy crisis, just as it blinded him to the obvious solution to the war in Vietnam.
There are two roads from where we are to technological maturity: one is the road of liberation from affluence; the other is the road of liberation from dependence. Both roads have the same destination: the social restructuring of space that offers to each person the constantly renewed experience that the center of the world is where he stands, walks, and lives.
Liberation from affluence begins on the traffic islands where the rich run into one another. The well-sped are tossed from one island to the next and are offered but the company of fellow passengers en route to somewhere else. This solitude of plenty would begin to break down as the traffic islands gradually expanded and people began to recover their native power to move around the place where they lived. Thus, the impoverished environment of the traffic island could embody the beginnings of social reconstruction, and the people who now call themselves rich would break with bondage to overefficient transport on the day they came to treasure the horizon of their traffic islands, now fully grown, and to dread frequent shipments from their homes.
Liberation from dependence starts at the other end. It breaks the constraints of village and valley and leads beyond the boredom of narrow horizons and the stifling oppression of a world closed in on itself. To expand life beyond the radius of tradition without scattering it to the winds of acceleration is a goal that any poor country could achieve within a few years, but it is a goal that will be reached only by those who reject the offer of unchecked industrial development made in the name of an ideology of indefinite energy consumption.
Liberation from the radical monopoly of the transportation industry is possible only through the institution of a political process that demystifies and disestablishes speed and limits traffic-related public expenditures of money, time, and space to the pursuit of equal mutual access. Such a process amounts to public guardianship over a means of production to keep this means from turning into a fetish for the majority and an end for the few. The political process, in turn, will never engage the support of a vast majority unless its goals are set with reference to a standard that can be publicly and operationally verified. The recognition of a socially critical threshold of the energy quantum incorporated in a commodity, such as a passenger mile, provides such a standard. A society that tolerates the transgression of this threshold inevitably diverts its resources from the production of means that can be shared equitably and transforms them into fuel for a sacrificial flame that victimizes the majority. On the other hand, a society that limits the top speed of its vehicles in accordance with this threshold fulfills a necessary-though by no means a sufficient-condition for the political pursuit of equity.
Liberation which comes cheap to the poor will cost the rich dear, but they will pay its price once the acceleration of their transportation systems grinds traffic to a halt. A concrete analysis of traffic betrays the truth underlying the energy crisis: the impact of industrially packaged quanta of energy on the social environment tends to be degrading, exhausting, and enslaving, and these effects come into play even before those which threaten the pollution of the physical environment and the extinction of the race. The crucial point at which these effects can be reversed is not, however, a matter of deduction, but of decision.
Fuente: http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1973_energy_equity.html#9
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