Grist on bicycle shame
Posted July 27th, 2007 in Culture, Advocacy
Alan Durning at Grist has posted a terrific piece on cycling simultaneously being framed as something shameful to do in our car dominated world or something for elite inner inner city types.
To be a successful adult, apparently, you have to drive. Cycling is for children; cycling is for losers. In this view, it’s fitting that the pinnacle of the sport of cycling is the Tour de France. (Implied snicker about France as a symbol — unfair, of course — of all that’s cowardly, effeminate, and weak.)
Call this Bicycle Shame.
Oh, one other thing. A variant of Bicycle Shame that’s increasingly heard in Cascadia’s transportation debates is that cycling is elitist. It’s for privileged, overeducated, white people. For urbanites. For intellectuals. (And they probably speak French.)
He also makes this interesting assumption.
Cycling for transportation — as opposed to recreation — may, some evidence suggests, concentrate at the two ends of the income ladder, among those with very low incomes and those with high incomes. Cycling also seems to increase with education (as does income): the more degrees you’ve got, the more likely you are to pedal (and have money). (The evidence, such as it is, is here, here, and here [PDF].)
And finishes with what we as cyclists all know.
Biking is the least exclusive form of vehicular transportation there is. It’s not restricted to people with money, or people with drivers’ licenses and insurance. About 30 percent of Cascadians — and 10 percent of Cascadian adults — don’t have a license to drive, by my calculations (drawn partly from here). But cycling isn’t limited in this way: aside from the disabled, almost everyone over the age of six could bike. As I noted previously, there’s no upper age limit on cycling, either.
There’s a lot more, and even though most of us are already converted it’s worth a read for the way in which he presents the arguments for cycling. Great stuff.
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True to an extent but a certain level of education is required for people to realise that riding a bicycle for transportation makes more sense than driving a car (circumstances dependent)