The bicycle, a machine to float and save the planet

A few years ago I worked as a correspondent in Paris and in the middle of the morning, if the weather was good (a rare thing in Paris) and there was not much to do (a rare thing in El País), I would go to my daughter's school to take her on a bicycle. lunch food.

It was less than a 40-minute journey, 20 one way and 20 return: it bordered the Champ-de-Mars and then continued along the side of the Motte-Picquet avenue to the school.

I really liked that bike ride.

In fact, I have forgotten many things about my stay in Paris, and some of them were surely important.

But not that long half hour pedaling quietly to my daughter's school in the morning.

The psychoanalyst and psychiatrist David Dorenbaum, in an article in this same newspaper,

He argued that riding a bicycle is an effective remedy against stress because the rhythmic rhythms of the two wheels favor the engagement of creative thinking.

I don't know.

Can.

Maybe yes, because, in a way, cycling on flat ground is like floating.

The latter is not a set phrase and hides a story in which a man, his son and a school also appear.

More information

Cities get on the bike: in 2021, 22 million bicycles were sold in Europe, almost twice as many as cars

At the end of the 19th century, an intelligent and skilled Irish veterinarian, John Boyd Dunlop, saw that his son suffered greatly from riding his tricycle to school every day.

The paths were irregular, with poorly assembled cobblestones, and the wheels of the tricycle, although surrounded by rubber, being made of solid wood, transferred the vibrations of the ground to the body of the vehicle.

Dunlop -creator of today's well-known tire brand- thought that a tube that separated the rubber from the wood in the wheel would help absorb shocks.

He further surmised that smoother driving would increase the speed of the trike.

At first he tried the rubber from a hose filled with water.

But that didn't work.

Then he used compressed air.

He experimented with the tires on the back of his son's trike and this time it did.

Driving,

indeed, it was now lighter, easier and safer.

Also faster.

From that day on, all bicycles in the world began to be manufactured with a compressed air chamber that isolated them from the ground.

So when you ride one, you kind of move through the air.

Hence the pleasant—and relaxing—feeling of floating.

As the writer and bicycle advocate Jody Rosen points out in a recently published book in Spanish,

(Editorial Indicios), from which I have extracted the story of Dunlop, “your bicycle does not take you on a trip to the Moon, but it is not entirely terrestrial either”.

Paris never changes.

Except for one thing: the number of bike lanes and cyclists there are now

In 2011 I left Paris.

I did not return until last year, when my wife and children traveled on vacation in the summer.

We visited the old house where we had lived, we walked like tourists through the streets and the places that years ago we used to visit several times every day to do the shopping or take the subway and that meant so much to us.

We explain to the children – who are now older – some of their memories of their French childhood.

It was strange to come back: we had changed, but not Paris.

Paris never changes much.

It was still the same unalterable beautiful city.

Except for one thing: the multitude of bike paths and people coming and going on bikes.

I liked that.

I remembered my morning walk to bring food to my daughter.

When I returned I looked for information and verified that what I had seen on the street, even in August,

It corresponded with figures and with a determined policy: in 2020, after the great confinements, more than 170 kilometers of cycle paths were opened in Paris and its metropolitan region.

In this time the number of people who move on two wheels has increased by more than 60%.

I, who am from Madrid, have always envied cities with sea;

and now I also envy the few cities that, today, allow themselves to be invaded by two wheels.

Cyclists on Rue de Rivoli in Paris on Sept. 16, 2021. DMITRY KOSTYUKOV (DMITRY KOSTYUKOV / New York Times)

There was a time when the whole world looked like it was going to belong to bikes.

It happened at the end of the 19th century, when the horse was being forgotten as expensive and problematic and the car had not yet begun to be mass-produced and sold.

In 1869, the historian JT Goddard assured that the velocipede, as it was called then, was going to replace the horse as a method of transportation.

And he explained it forcefully: "It doesn't cost so much, it doesn't eat, it doesn't kick, it doesn't bite, it doesn't get sick and it doesn't die."

In the mid-1990s, the horse market was in decline, at least in the United States.

Rosen collects newspaper articles from the time that suggest that saddlers who specialized in making saddles had switched to designing bicycle saddles and that many riding academies were by then transformed into makeshift driving schools for cyclists.

The specialists specify that the abandonment of the horse was also helped by the proliferation of electric trams.

But, as an individual vehicle, as an almost perfect machine with which one goes four times faster than on foot using one fifth of the effort, the bicycle was going to banish the horse forever.

He had everything to win.

As an individual vehicle, as an almost perfect machine with which one goes four times faster than on foot using one fifth of the effort, the bicycle was going to banish the horse forever.

He had everything to win.

As an individual vehicle, as an almost perfect machine with which one goes four times faster than on foot using one fifth of the effort, the bicycle was going to banish the horse forever.

He had everything to win.

More information

Bicycles, the new French revolution

We all know he didn't win: The first Ford Model T rolled off a Detroit assembly line in 1908. Numbering in the millions of years ago, bicycle sales plummeted by then.

The road (the cities, the whole world) would belong to the car.

The bicycle lost, it was (has been) almost reduced to a children's toy, to a vehicle for the brave on dangerous streets, to weekend entertainment, to a sports instrument on which the heroes of the Tour encourage us on some soporific summer afternoons.

What would have happened if the invention of the car had taken several more decades?

Or if the bicycle had been invented earlier — than 1817, in the absence of evidence and consensus on earlier dates — since the materials and technique had been available almost since the Middle Ages?

The answer to these questions came, surprisingly, more than two years ago.

It was then, in the midst of the pandemic, immediately after humanity locked itself up at home, after extreme confinements, when we finally timidly dared to go out on the street again, somewhat distressed, with the mask on and looking at the others in sideways

In those strange days, attracted by the silence and the absence of ships, groups of dolphins went up the Bosphorus and approached Istanbul;

the wild boars descended on Barcelona,

some cougars wandered around Santiago de Chile and a seal was seen near the coast in San Sebastian.

The cities, empty of cars, suddenly became a calm and quiet place.

By a rare historical carom, we were granted the privilege (perhaps as compensation for so much suffering) to see cities as they could become and not as they are.

In those days the cities, taking advantage of the absence of cars and trucks, buses and motorcycles, were populated with bicycles.

All cities: even Madrid, so hostile, aggressive and unfriendly to cyclists.

Many people were encouraged to go out.

Not just experienced cyclists.

Also the clumsy ones, the novices, those who, like me, are not very brave, those who do not trust too much either in our own ability or in the benevolence of the drivers.

The fact was reflected in sales: only in Spain, in 2020, its acquisition grew by 24%.

More than a million and a half.

Twice as many cars.

There were cities as distant as Mexico, Berlin, London, Bogotá or Barcelona that took advantage of and created new kilometers of bike lanes.

Also, of course, Paris: the cycling metamorphosis of the city that I perceived last year was, in part,

A new mass culture on two wheels is rising up against the aggressive and polluting model imposed by the car

The causes of that cycling explosion in the world must be sought, among other things, in teleworking, which emptied the streets of cars.

Also in the fear of contagion from traveling on the subway or by bus.

To

.

But also, I think, because the very fact of the pandemic made us rethink many things: from where to work to what we are doing with the planet;

from how to go to the office to what am I doing with my life.

Threatened by the virus, like any very serious patient who looks in the mirror, humanity has examined its conscience.

All that happened.

Cars, at least in my city, have filled everything again.

Pollution has also returned.

And it scares me again to take the bike and go down Calle de Alcalá on a weekday.

But there are specialists, such as the aforementioned Rosen, who assure that the tide of the bicycle driven by the pandemic and the desire to live at a calmer and more bearable pace is unstoppable and growing, that a new mass culture on two wheels is is rising against the aggressive and polluting model imposed by the car, the source of a good part of the greenhouse gases that turn the atmosphere into an increasingly overheated plastic bell.

I write this in a summer full of heat waves.

If we continue like this, soon we will not count them, we will count the intermediate periods.

The men of the time will announce the few intervals of bearable temperatures to be able to make plans.

Summers will become a continuous and unbearable heat wave, getting bigger and longer.

It is not science fiction.

It is simply pessimism.

The bicycle, that perfect and sustainable invention, the floating machine, is a very modest part of the solution.

That is why every time I see a cyclist in the noisy traffic of Madrid I think that this brave man is changing the world.

I shouldn't be so alone.

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