Bicycle

Wheels of Change

Despite its reputation as a green alternative to the automobile, the bicycle is an artifact of the same modernity that spawned the car. The cycling boom in Europe and the United States in the 1890s contributed to and was affected by a belief in scientific and social progress liberating the individual from the constraints of Victorian life. The changes to women's dress and mobility brought on by cycling articulated with feminism, and the bicycle's democratization of access to peri-urban parklands allowed more leisure time in the countryside.

At the same time, the boom presaged contradictions of automobile culture like dependence on neocolonial resource economies and the engineering of cities around personal vehicles over pedestrians or public transit. The demand for bicycles contributed to the scramble for rubber, which motivated the savage variety of European colonialism seen in the Belgian Congo. The political action of bicyclists in the United States in the 1890s centered on improving urban roads and reducing the street presence of trolley car lines. This put bicycles at odds with mass transit, and defined fast roads designed for private vehicles as the epitome of progress, an ideology of personal mobility amplified in the automobile age.

The bicycle was embraced by the European working classes for utilitarian purposes in the inter-war decades, but lost out to automobiles in the 1960s. At the same time, cycling rebounded in China, booming especially in the economic liberalization of the 1980s. Mass use of bicycles was a transport solution for rapid urbanization and industrialization without heavy investments in infrastructure, vehicles, or petroleum that the government encouraged through street engineering and support for domestic bike manufacturing. The rickshaw, a Japanese innovation influenced by European carriages, became the cycle rickshaw when fused with Western bicycle gearing and pedals. Human-powered urban transport fueled Asian urban economies with limited animal power or motorized vehicles, and created working class political power through paralyzing rickshawmens' strikes.

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