You don’t have to go farther than Hollywood to see one reason Bicycle Neglect is so rampant in North America. Consider the 2005 film The 40-Year-Old Virgin. The middle-aged protagonist, obsessed with video games and action figures, seems stuck in early adolescence. The film spends two hours lampooning him for being emasculated, immature, not a real man. His vehicle? A bike. (You can almost hear the schoolyard snickers.)
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.)
In the imagery that’s typically invoked, real people—regular people, who work real jobs and raise real families—travel by regular means. They drive. They have no other choice. (See this and a recent example.)
These cultural associations are damnably hard to counteract, because their roots are emotional, even sociological. They have to do with in-groups and out-groups; with status, prestige, and identity. Overcoming them, therefore, is as much about creating new associations—or strengthening alternative ones—as it is about counterargument.
Still, analysis isn’t irrelevant, to which end, a few notes:
Emasculated? Driving a car or truck is about as strenuous as sitting on a couch, while cycling builds cardiovascular fitness and muscle tone with every pedal stroke. The rejoinder to “Tour de France” is “Lance Armstrong.”
Childish? Well, yes, the highest cycling rates in North America are among those under 18 years of age. But the young bike because they’re not allowed to drive, not because there’s anything innately childish about pedaling. Minors are also the most active in team sports, yet we don’t think of professional athletes as childish or immature. This stigma on cycling is just Car-head.
Losers? Elitist? Um. Where to begin?!
How about some data? The good people at the Puget Sound Regional Council shared with me their data on commuting choices by household income. Here’s a table of the breakdown, from the 2000 census, for residents of Washington’s King, Kitsap, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties.
| Means of Transportation to Work | Median Household Income, 1999 |
|---|---|
| Ferry | $71,050 |
| Work at home | $69,000 |
| Car, truck, or van | $66,920 |
| Motorcycle | $65,500 |
| All commuters | $65,000 |
| Bicycle | $61,000 |
| Bus | $52,200 |
| Walk | $34,000 |
(PSRC also analyzed the 1990 census, which showed a very similar rank-order of median incomes by commuting mode.)
Clearly, on average, cyclists are neither economic overlords nor hard-luck cases. Cycle commuters are poorer than car commuters, but richer than bus commuters and walkers. (The real elite in the greater Seattle area, apparently, work at home or ride ferries, and the only huge divergence from the norm is that people who walk to work have much less money than everyone else.)
Still, these data are only partial. They ignore the massive statistical influence of age: walking and biking commuters tend to be young, so their incomes are nowhere near peak levels. Drivers tend to be older, so their incomes are higher. Furthermore, these data reveal the median income of commuters but not the distribution of incomes that shape those medians. Are cycle commuters clustered around that median or polarized to the extremes?
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].)
The very poor presumably cycle because it’s affordable: less than one-sixth the cost of driving, according to one reckoning. As incomes rise above the poverty line, cycling plummets, then begins a slow increase as incomes continue to rise. The more educated and richer bike despite Bicycle Shame. Perhaps they’re better informed of the benefits. Perhaps their social circles don’t stigmatize cycling as much.
But elitist? What an inverted proposition! Private jets and limousines are elitist. Luxury automobiles and yachts are elitist. You need a lot of money to travel these ways. But bicycles?! A few hundred dollars will outfit you with a basic two-wheeler. Even a good bike, plus accessories and maintenance, cost less than a dime a mile, when you average the cost over the vehicle’s useful life. Think about that. Biking is cheaper than busfare on all but long trips, and most trips are short: half of all US trips are shorter than three miles (30 cents!); more than a quarter are under one mile (see here, slide 28 [large file]).
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.
Biking isn’t just cheap for bikers, it’s cheap for the communities in which people bike. Bikeways and bike racks are inexpensive to build and maintain. Because bikes are light and (relatively) slow, bike facilities don’t need anything like the structural strength of motorways.
Biking is also cheap for nations: they don’t have to import as much oil or defend their access to that oil with billions of dollars and divisions of soldiers. It’s cheap for health-care institutions: they don’t have to treat as many car-crash injuries, as much lung disease, or as many cases of diabetes and others
maladies of obesity. It’s cheap for our grandchildren who won’t have to endure as much climate disruption; cheap for polar bears who won’t have to go extinct; cheap for our consciences, our karma, our souls.
  |
Cycling—like walking—is democratic: it’s equally available to all (or all but a very small share of the population). Consequently, a Bicycle-Respecting community is more equitable than a Bicycle Neglecting one: Bicycle Respect gives independence to young teens and affordable mobility to low-income households and retirees. Like such democratizing social guarantees as public schools and unemployment insurance, Social Security and national parks, safe, separate, continuous facilities for cycling and walking put a common foundation under us. Such guarantees bind us together as one people, among whom—while many things are distributed by the competitive logic of the marketplace—certain necessities are available to all. We provide these things because we are not simply a collection of consumers who share a currency and a string of freeway exits. We are a community.
Is cycling for children, for losers, for intellectuals? Yes. It’s for them, because it’s for everyone.
(Both photos courtesy Brian Hansen, City of Copenhagen.)
kjmclark
Have you noticed that one of those paragons of all-American virility in our society, Chevrolet, has a thoroughly French name? It’s even pronounced pretty much as the French would pronounce it. Excellent essay. Don’t worry, Americans are pretty clueless about biking now, but people will figure it out. They won’t have much choice.
Arie v.
Great essay. Too bad cycling doesn’t have an ad agency behind it so they can do focus studies and counter back at many of conceptions. It works for sugar coated breakfast cereals 🙂 To counter there is an economic argument for not cycling at the personal level. If it takes me 1 hr to cycle in to work (15 miles), but only 25 minutes to drive, I’m losing over an hour a day. Depending on how you value your time, exercise, dangers of dump trucks whizzing by, etc the math can be as simple as $3 gas vs. 1hr that could be spent with your familiy. Now if we truly paid at the pump and could work a typical European work week, (and flatten out some of these hills) we might cycle more like the Dutch.
Matt
Regarding Chevrolet, not only is it pronounced as the French would pronounce it, the Chevrolet “bowtie” logo was taken from wallpaper in a Paris hotel room.It’s funny how bicycles exemplify and cars undermine so many of the traditional American male virtues; independent, self-reliant, strong, outdoorsy, pragmatic, even mechanically-inclined. Automobiles are none of these.
Matt the Engineer
(I just realized there are two people named Matt here – that’s what we get for choosing such an uncreative user name. I’ll see if I can change mine)
Kade
Matt, I should hope that by now, at least independence, self-reliance, strength, and pragmaticism, of those you mentioned, have also become traditional American female virtues.Great article, and good points in all the comments. I’ll be using some of this info while talking to my friends about cycling more often.I was surprised to read the estimate of ten cents per mile during bicycle travel. I’d assumed it was more like one cent.
MichelleV.P.
Yeah, I too was surprised and somewhat taken aback by the rather sexist slant of the main post itself which purports to be speaking “for everyone.”But, as a woman who highly regards bicycling as a sustainable means of transportation, it was interesting to glimpse the bicycling world as seen through men’s eyes, in this case.Alan, et al, are absolutely correct in dismissing Hollywood’s “emasculating” view of male bike riders, as sheer nonsense. One might even consider Hollywood’s take as being a case of envie de la bicyclette.
payton
Thanks for the statistics on commuters’ earnings. While biking to work today, a driver who “didn’t see” me yelled some “cheap-[obscenity]” insult—and it honestly puzzled me, since his used car and ragged T-shirt fairly screamed “proletarian.”That said, I know that I spend well over 10c a mile on bicycling—tooling around town on a shiny steed doesn’t rack up that many miles, but costs a good many shiny pennies. All told, my “extravagant” non-car lifestyle amounts to getting around town on <$150/mo., including transit, sturdy walking shoes, and flashy bike gear.@Arie: Sadly, the really big money’s still on driving. Just GM’s advertising budget is bigger than the entire American bicycling industry! That said, I read a business-mag article about how Shimano (one of bicycling’s biggest companies) did thorough market research into promoting bicycling in general in creating the Coasting marketing campaign. And smart but slick (and maybe cheap) ad campaigns actually attract city-dwellers’ attention better than carmakers’ airwave saturation strategy.
payton
We, as a community, also provide public space within our cities for enjoyment and for circulation. “Sweet modes” (as the French say) like walking, cycling, and transit are incredibly space efficient: we could shrink our roads 80%+ overnight if everyone used them. It’s cars and trucks, those space hogs, who demand not only giant public expenditures but also the lion’s share of the public-space commons.Since urban space is by definition an expensive and scarce resource, it makes perfect sense to charge those who waste (and lay waste to) it, while granting free access to those who use it wisely and graciously.We already ration, price, and regulate urban transportation’s use of public space via like parking meters, residential parking permits, drivers’ licenses, and now congestion pricing—but we usually don’t think of it that way. Instead, we’ve been trained by decades of car-think to see “roads” as conveyances [or storage facilities] for private vehicles, rather than as shared community assets.
Sierra
Well, now it is official and chic to ride a bike to work in Paris.Maybe the French know something about childhood that Americans can’t figure out. I know, why don’t we convince Paris Hilton and Britney Spears to ride bikes to work! Celebrity sells everything in America, why not bike riding?
Plymouth
Arie V. – the way I figure it I can either spend 20min driving plus an hour at the gym… or I can spend an hour biking. Figure it that way and biking SAVES me 20min a day. Plus the fact that I have a hell of a time motivating myself to get to the gym and find it mindnumbingly boring. You’d think I might find making the same bike commute boring too but so far that hasn’t happened in a year and a half of doing it roughly 3-4 days a week (there’s usually a day I need to drive most weeks plus I work a 9-80 schedule and get every other friday off work).
thpayne
This is a terrific series. I note that in many of the photos and movies, bicyclists are not wearing helmets. In 1989 Tommy and Diane Thompson and Fred Rivara, all from Seattle, published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (Google PMID: 2716781 to see it) showing that wearing helmets is associated with an 88 percent reduction in their risk of brain injury. Please bicyclists, wear helmets!
Claire Petersky
A friend who heads up transit planning for the City of Balitmore considers bike racks for buses to be “an upper middle class amenity” – i.e., for those who are rich enough to play with toys. He said he’d rather spend the money on routes that poor people need, that are dependent on transit.Based on my unscientific survey of other bike/bus commuters here in Seattle is that, yes, many of the multimodal commuters are suburban desk jockeys. When you sit in front of a computer all day, you appreciate the opportunity to ride to/from work and get outside and get some exercise. Bike/bus options mean that even those in the far-flung suburbs can ride their bikes part of the way into work.However, bike/bus commuters are a wider group than just that. There’s a certain slice that are not well served by transit alone. One fellow I talked to has an office up the waterfront. If his bus was any more than 2 minutes late, it was a 30 minute wait until the next one. Being able to pry a bike off of the bus and ride up there in 10 minutes was more reliable and just as fast. Another person was working a swing shift in the suburbs. She could take the bus there during rush hour at 4:00 PM, but had no way home at midnight, when service is greatly diminished. The bike rack meant she could take the job and know she could get home.When we look at bicycle amenities (such as bike racks on buses), they shouldn’t be seen as frills for the elite or only for “losers” as you put it. They can be important for all working people.