Bicycle
Kostya Novoselov was learning to draw. He was particularly interested in a style of Chinese painting where each work only takes 10-15 minutes. In this style, one aims not to achieve photographic accuracy, but to capture the "essence" of the object colored by the artist's emotional state at the moment of painting. To hone the skills, Kostya's teacher instructed him in the four traditional objects of Chinese art: bamboo, cherry blossom, lotus, and orchid. Time after time were these forms repeated, with patient guidance and corrections. Once Kostya had a particularly hard day at work and was already on edge arriving at the painting studio. He approached the easel and in a few minutes drew a bicycle. The teacher looked over the painting and said that his student is finally getting the right idea. That was the first painting Kostya ever sold.
An old adage states that if a boy didn't have a bicycle growing up, but today he has a Bentley, he is still a boy who didn't have a bicycle growing up. The childhood scarcity becomes an unfinished psychological pattern and keeps draining one's energy, keeps asking for a point to be proven, keeps open the hole in one's soul that can never heal. Metaphorically, the bicycle can be anything that kids tend to lack: computers, food, world domination. My childhood might have missed out on a few other things, but I did have a bicycle. In this story the bicycle is just a bicycle, but it points at so much more.
While some boys didn't have bicycles growing up, we can't limit bicycle stories to boys. In a used bookstore I picked up a book priced $6.95 with the subtitle "Intersectional Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories". This volume 5 of the anthology is all about interdimensional races, dystopias, post-apocalypse, and training astronauts - themes that might have seemed current half a century ago. But this is not the white macho modernist genius scifi. It's a future in which Black women matter-of-factly exist, disabilities need to be managed, and collectives rather than superheroes get to save the day. And at the center of it, only rarely shoehorned, is the bicycle, the most robust movement and liberation machine known to humans.
A bicycle is an aesthetic artifact of significant emotional charge that Kostya, many other grown-up boys, and the diverse anthology authors tapped into. However, the power of bicycles is derived from both our relationships with individual bikes and the world we have built to ride bicycles in.
Bicycles are a modern miracle because they let us move without a constant input of energy, something that we can't do on foot. Yet bicycles are fundamentally understandable because we humans have already invented the wheel, we humans already understand how inertia works, and our human bodies have quite a bit of inertia. Adding just a little angle to the front wheel fork augments our miracle of motion with auto-steering. With those simple technological ideas, learning to ride a bike, at a movement skill level, is easy.
You can spend any amount of time and money on optimizing your bike gear and debate the merits of different chains, tubeless tires, derailleurs, drop handles, disc brakes, pannier mounts, and tight shorts. You can write PhDs (or better hire PhDs) to engineer the best tire composites that take into account the direction of wheel rotation and the type of pavement. You can optimize your body for pedaling speed or endurance by choosing a training regimen. However, both types of optimization require an understanding of the landscape that exists outside of us. Where do we ride bicycles?
Biking through a city is very revealing about the design pressures that shaped it, the objectives that planners were trying to optimize for. Where I have been living lately bikes are not an entirely alien species, but surely an invasive one. It might take you a little stroll on a stroad to convince yourself that a pedestrian is a criminal and a biker is a violent and suicidal criminal. It usually takes a winter for a biker to realize themselves as a second class citizen - and I am not that often a first class citizen. Second class of citizens is the first class whose interests are sacrificed under resource constraints. Bike lanes disappear into snow or construction or stopped cars. A ride over the snow melting salt piled on the painted bike lane has recently cost me a chain replacement. It was really my mistake, riding on salty slush in the winter. They only plow the car lanes.
Riding a bike really highlights the communal infrastructure because the effect of bike accessibility is systemic. As a boy in Minsk I could ride my bike on sidewalks within a few blocks from my house, but being a fully fledged road user with rights never reached my imagination. At some point Minsk city officials laid down one recreational trail along a river and assumed all riders to be happy, including those who commute across the river or go nowhere near the river. Bikers try to combine the benefits of pedestrians and car drivers, but more often hit limitations of both. To make them happy, you need to rethink the whole network of protected bike lanes, intersections, traffic lights, bike parking, and countless other issues that constitute the daily experience. You have to think of bikers as another real class of road users.
But isn't this demand of a total overhaul of city structure completely orthogonal to cities' real problems? Just a few years ago the popular urbanistic discourse that I ran into revolved around cool benches, readable road signs, and user-friendly mailboxes. But urbanism today is about systemic design for walkability, accessibility, bike-friendliness, climate impacts, accident prevention, and financial solvency of cities. The new wave of YouTube channels such as Not Just Bikes make the case that all these goals are not exactly orthogonal, but quite aligned. Bicyclists are then like coal mine canaries: it is very hard to make them truly happy, but if you manage, you are well underway to making the city better for many other humans who don't drive tanks (I meant SUVs). In the words of an impactful designer, "A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once."
Much like with other aspects of city development, study of bicycle mobility is newly awash with data, especially through the bike-share services. With the new data, and with old ideas like percolation theory, researchers can propose targeted interventions like new protected lanes that make biking systematically better. Better biking is both individually empowering and strongly correlated with other city quality of life measures.
I don't want to hyper-optimize my life for biking, though I have great respect for those who choose to. I don't want to be the special one who overcomes the odds and survives the unfriendly streets. I am not interested in naked rides for charity or the Tour de France. I just want to be a normal commuter who is fast, safe, and nimble in getting from A to B. We should not allow a scrap chance of survival among the multi-ton metal giants only to the most physically fit and alert among us. We win by designing systems that work for people.
Dedicated to the memory of a blue Retrospec with bright orange cable housing. Rest in pieces, friend!
[added May 9, 2023] Just need to follow up on my bike thoughts with this incredible analysis of bicycle forces that lead to the "classic" bike design we use.