EPILOGUE

The Future Is Here

“The Car Will Become an Accessory to the Smartphone”

In his book Roads Were Not Built for Cars, the British writer Carlton Reid explores the fascinating story of how, in the late nineteenth century, it was mainly cycling organizations that led the lobbying for properly paved highways. With the popularity of the bicycle predating any real use of cars by decades, groups like the League of American Bicyclists and, in the UK, the Cyclists’ Touring Club (CTC) were influential in pushing for many of the roads that still exist today, largely so their members could ride in more comfort and at greater speed.

Reid has described the book as “revisionism with an agenda,” describing his agenda thus: “I want motorists to think before they say or think, ‘Get off the road, roads are for cars.’”¹ It is a laudable ambition. That said, what fascinates me most in the story is less the way this all happened than how little time it took.

In the mid-1890s, bikes ruled the roads. As late as July 1896, the CTC was still debating whether it should admit the “horseless carriage movement,” seen more as a curiosity rather than a threat. Cars in Britain remained limited to a maximum speed of 5 mph and had to be preceded by someone carrying a red flag. But in November 1896, that rule was abolished, and everything began to change.

The new law, which followed vehement lobbying by the fledgling auto industry, saw speed limits raised to 14 mph, a velocity still gauged against the limitations of a horse. This soon became 20 mph, then no limit at all. Within three decades there were 2.5 million motor vehicles on the roads and more than seven thousand people being killed a year. The interloper had triumphed.

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It seems likely that another road transport revolution is about to hit us, undoing the decades of undisputed dominance for the motor vehicle. This time it won’t be a straightforward swap. Instead, a predicted steady decline in car use will see it supplanted by a range of transport options, everything from the automated driverless vehicles we heard about in the previous chapter to trams and metro rail systems. And in many urban areas the vacuum for shorter trips could be filled by a combination of walking and cycling.

This might sound like so much wishful thinking, and I admit I’m no neutral pundit. But it’s already happening. In 2015, Oslo, the Norwegian capital, announced plans to completely ban private cars from its compact city center within four years, in part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.² Stockholm in Sweden has mooted a similar idea.³ The Finnish capital, Helsinki, has outlined an ambitious plan to not so much bar cars from the city center as make them pointless, thanks to a proposed “mobility on demand” system, taking in shared bikes, driverless cars, buses, and other means, all organized via one app.⁴

It will not just be a Nordic utopia. Lyon, birthplace of the modern bike-share system, is plotting to extend its Vélo’v cycle network to electric cars and other communal means of transport. Gilles Vesco, the Lyon politician responsible for sustainable transport, talks in grand, ambitious terms. “Digital information is the fuel of mobility,” he told a colleague of mine in an interview. “Some transport sociologists say that information about mobility is 50 percent of mobility. The car will become an accessory to the smartphone.”⁵

All this can feel almost inconceivable for the great majority of people who have only ever lived in a world where motor vehicles were just about the only choice for personal travel. But much as the cycling groups were taken unawares by the car, it could all be coming much more quickly than we expect.

A Copernican Revolution in Transport

How quickly? The first person I asked was Klaus Bondam, head of the Danish cycling union and formerly Copenhagen’s mayor for roads and infrastructure. Nearing the end of my long chat in his office, I asked him how he saw the city changing in the coming years. The answer was illuminating. “Look at something like car parking,” he said. “It’s so old-fashioned in my eyes. The private ownership of a car—that will end in the next ten to fifteen years. I think it’s going to be a combination of shared cars, of city cars, of public transport, bicycles, electric bicycles, of freight distribution by electric cargo bikes.”

This sounded like a rapid timetable, I said—would the end of the private car really come within such a time? He was adamant: “I’m totally convinced about that,” he said. “Why on earth would you make a big investment that you just leave outside ninety-five percent of the time and don’t use it?”⁶

We were in Copenhagen, of course, a city with comprehensive bike and transit infrastructure, where cars are already restricted in some central areas. But as I talked to other people, everyone from city planners, to advocates, to mayors to Olympic champions, I asked them the same question about their cities and transport and the answers were uncannily similar.

Boris Johnson, speaking a week before the end of his term as London mayor and about to return to national politics, told me he was proud of having doubled bike use during eight years in office. But his hope, Johnson explained, was that London could see the current 3 percent or so of trips made by bicycle shoot up to 20 percent. This was, he agreed, “a big ask” but very possible. Typically for him, Johnson phrased the serious intent within a joke. “It was twenty percent in 1904,” he said. “What’s the point of being a conservative if you can’t turn the clock back to 1904? That’s what I want to know.”⁷

Soon afterward, I interviewed Bradley Wiggins, Britain’s most-successful-ever racing cyclist. Noting the newly built separated bike lanes just opening in London, Wiggins predicted that the UK could soon see Dutch levels of bike use. “Cyclists aren’t going to go away,” he said. “As the issues grow with cars, and emissions, and all these things, and roads getting busier, cycling is only going to get more popular, become more of a means of transport. People are aware at the moment that there is a boom in cycling. But as that boom becomes the norm and twenty years pass, we may get to a stage where we’re like an Amsterdam. I can’t see it not happening, to be honest.”

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New York City has already vastly increased the provision for cyclists in recent years. Janette Sadik-Khan, who oversaw much of that change as the city’s transport commissioner for more than six years, is also among those who believe much more is to come. “Transportation is almost going through a Copernican revolution,” she said. “There’s a tremendous change in understanding that our streets are incredible assets, and that they’ve been underutilized for generations. The potential is really hidden in plain sight.”⁸

Paul Steely White of the Transportation Alternatives advocacy group predicts an “exponential increase in cycling ridership and volumes,” fueled by new lanes, a growing Citi Bike network, and the rise of new technologies.

“E-bikes are going to make it a lot more accessible,” he said. “There are a lot of people in New York who just don’t want to bike over the bridges—they’re a fairly steep hill for some folk. And some people might be wearing a three-piece suit and don’t want to get sweaty. There’s going to be a confluence of making it much safer, the bikes becoming easier and more comfortable for people to use.”

He thinks Klaus Bondam’s prediction for Copenhagen could hold true for New York, he said: “I have a friend who says driving in city centers will become like smoking in public restaurants in fifteen or twenty years. There’s only so much street space to go around, and we can’t build ourselves out of that political conundrum. We tried that, and it didn’t work. That means higher capacity modes have to rule the roost.”⁹

The Future Is Here

Those quoted above are experts in their area, but they’re also people with an interest, and often a vested interest, in cycling. They might be expected to say what they do. Such unanimity about a predicted bike-centric future must come with qualifiers and caveats. That said, the more I’ve looked into the case for mass cycling while writing this book, the more compelling the evidence seems.

If, indeed, the cars do gradually begin to empty out of our towns and cities and we see a much-increased role for bikes, along with walking and public transport, there are immeasurable benefits, for all the many, compelling reasons outlined in the preceding pages. It’s worth noting that many of these positives don’t emerge if we only embrace the more passive new technologies and ignore everything else. The driverless cars of the near future might not crash or get caught in jams, but they will do nothing to stem the pandemic of illness caused by sedentary lives. And if they alone predominate, our cities risk becoming even more impersonal. Without even a driver to connect with, there are just passengers—barely glimpsed through glass, sealed, uncommunicative, and anonymous within a speeding capsule.

In contrast, more bikes means more people enjoying good health for longer. The economy gets a notable boost, not least from not having to pay out quite so much to treat the many, expensive ailments linked to sedentary living. Air quality improves, road casualties fall, and a small but notable step is taken toward mitigating the worst consequences of runaway climate change.

But, arguably as important, streets suddenly become based around people who, while moving, are recognizably, obviously, reassuringly human.

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I’ve spent much of this book focusing on the societal reasons for getting people on two wheels. But in many ways the most powerful arguments come when you bring it down to the individual. At risk of sounding borderline messianic, cycling makes your life better. My history with the bicycle is, admittedly, a particular one. Not everyone will credit the bike with transforming them from a wheezing, fragile teenager into someone newly imbued with a joyous sense of their physicality. But the trajectory could be equally transformative for many people. If it’s not asthma it could be diabetes, heart disease, or obesity that could be tackled or prevented.

There’s yet more to it. Riding a bike keeps me in touch with the weather, makes me feel firsthand the grip of the changing seasons. The importance and impact of this is not to be underestimated. An innovative Danish charity called Cycling Without Age uses volunteers to take older people too frail to use a bike themselves for rides on cycle rickshaws. Its motto sums up one of the joys of cycling: “Everyone has the right to wind in their hair.” This sounds more evocative still in the original Danish: “Alle har ret til vind i håret.” This is a pure joy that never tires. It can’t be stressed enough that without decent cycling infrastructure, this is precisely what the majority of people are denied, especially the more vulnerable or delicate, who don’t want to or can’t brave the traffic.

Cycling is also by far the best way to get to know a town or city, fast enough to cover a lot of ground, but sufficiently sedate and open that you can take in what’s there, stare through shop fronts, observe the gradual ascent of new buildings, lament the disappearance of old ones, smile at toddlers, wave to someone you know. In somewhere as large and traffic-choked as London, a bike has a near-magical ability to get me precisely where I want to be to within a minute or two of when I expected, and with a smile on my face. Yes, public transport has a huge role, as do the other noncar alternatives on the horizon. But in an era of unprecedented urbanization, the bike has an unparalleled capacity to work with the streets, not fight against them, to complement humans, not seal them away or make them suddenly a mortal danger to others.

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I’ll leave the last word to the person who, of all the activists and politicians we have encountered in this book, faces arguably the biggest and most thankless task. Jack Yabut, whom we met in chapter 6, is the longstanding head of the main cycling lobby group in Manila, the car-dominated capital of the Philippines. I asked Yabut why his organization has the beautifully evocative name of the Firefly Brigade. His answer, for me, sums up perfectly why bikes are needed and why, in many places, they are returning in numbers not seen for decades.

“It came from some friends who shared the idea that the first thing that disappears from a city’s landscape because of the pollution are the fireflies,” Yabut told me. “We believe that if we can help to clean up the air, the land and water quality, then the fireflies can come back. And the vehicle, the instrument to do it, is the bicycle. It’s something that can answer so many problems.

“We’re just a volunteer organization, doing what we can. But we’re like the fireflies: we’re the smallest particles in the equation, but we believe that we put everything together. And then we end up as a swarm. That’s when everything starts to change.”¹⁰

Around the globe this most benign of swarms is here. On their own, each cyclist is just flesh, blood, and a machine of such beguiling simplicity and perfection that its fundamentals have stayed roughly the same for 140 years. But together, like the fireflies, they are a powerful indicator of the vitality and livability of a city’s streets. Together they can save the world.