Cycling is enjoying something of a resurgence. It seems to offer a health-giving alternative for short urban journeys that ring all the right ethical bells in terms of sustainability, environmental friendliness and obesity-busting , lung-filling exercise that motorized transport fails to deliver. Yet it has its problems; not least its openness to the elements, its speed in relation to other road users and its perceived vulnerability to motor vehicles. Go a bit further than these and we come to cycling culture itself. We all have a perception of ‘cyclists’; stereotypes of course, but even cyclists have a perception of ‘cyclists’ that is not entirely positive. The equivalent to ‘petrol head’, ‘white van man’ and ‘Sunday driver’ in motoring, depending on what type of cyclist is making the thought. All three are blended in the minds of other road users, who, with only about 4% of journeys made by cycle in the UK, represent the other 96%. Consider the three type-forms. The lycra clad enthusiast on a fashionably expensive, light, performance machine usually designed for competition; the courier style rat-runner paying little or no heed to traffic signs or law; the worthy member of the right-on middle classes. Listen to Radio 4 or read a Sunday newspaper and we might believe that all this is something new. But it is not.
When the bicycle was invented in 1817, its inventor, Baron Karl Von Drais, believed that he had made a machine of real value to the future of transport; he was disappointed. The problem for the new machine was that it was, and remains, merely an alternative to other transport forms. Foot and animal traffic at first, then railways, then motorised road vehicles. Sure, it encouraged the advance of a number of useful technologies in tube-making, chain making, gearing and metallurgy, but this type of technological determinism is questionable. Forget the cycle and start with an internal combustion engine, all those things that developed for cycles would have followed. Yet cycling history builds itself round just such technological determinism. No, what cycling really gave the future was a new type of culture, a culture built round the use of personal mechanized transport. This is its significant legacy, but also its greatest burden. Like most things that are first in the field, it followers learned from it and did it better, leaving the originator in nothing but a cloud of dust…literally, in this case. The theme of this book is that cycling is a victim of its own culture. It offers no solutions, there are none. Like the plot of The Third Policeman the history of cycling culture is one that will revolve endlessly in a nightmare of its own making so long as a viable alternative form of transport is available, which its own history tells us it always will be, given that humans and animals have legs.