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The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power --- Travis Culley, Villard Books, 2001. What these people don't know is that the bicycle is more than a sport and more than a job. The bicycle is a revolution, an assault on civilian territory, intent upon taking, from the ground up, responsibility for the shape of our cities. It is a mutiny, challenging the ever-one-way street. The bicycle is a philosophy, a way of life, and I am using it like a hammer to change the world and to redeem our war-torn cities ... We may have overlooked the cult of human power that is reclaiming public space and giving it back to average people. Don't be mistaken. Couriers want to make a living – that's all – but motorists will likely never understand this because they will never address the innate advantages a bike has over a car. The kind of perception that a driver has behind a windshield, a set of small mirrors, a thousand-pound engine, and dashboard seriously limits his view of a cyclist's experience. The speedometer, the doors, the little sticker that says that the steering wheel is equipped with an explosive air bag, the seat belt, all of these aspects to driving a car condition the driver's mobility and perception. A cyclist works with a much more open sense of immediate space than a driver does. ... The car for most people is an anesthetic, a wall between themselves and the world. The importance of this separation is hard to underestimate, but the most important consequence concerns a driver's safety. I find that most drivers' sense of confidence is artificial; they cannot see and they have little notion of what it means when the odometer reads sixty-five, seventy-five, or eighty-five miles per hour. They don't know what kind of danger they are in. Even though, the annual rate of auto fatalities is perfectly predictable, collisions are still called accidents because they seem to take everyone by surprise. John Dollard, a behaviorist, outlined long ago how aggressiveness can be clinically understood to be a buildup of frustration ... the regular interruption of a specific action or goal-directed activity leads to aggression. What remains to be understood, in the context of the car, is what kind of aggression it leads to. ... how can a government of car-numbed, suburban politicians intelligently manage a street or organize a city when they are unable to see beyond their dashboards and their own symbolic aggression? ... traffic and congestion are actually helpful to a city. Braess's paradox (discover in 1968 by the German mathematician Dr. Dietrich Braess) describes this fundamental conflict between cars and space. His theory suggests that adding extra travel lanes for regular traffic increases congestion problems because, given extra room, drivers will pass more often and try to move more quickly. This results in numbers of cars trying to get ahead of one another, fighting to take the same traffic opportunities. Streets in Chicago are not open for public use and they do not allow people to freely find the resources they need to survive ... By driving, the civilian is supporting the oil and automobile market that gives the United States the economic green light to weaken and even invade foreign countries. With the design of our cities, America has learned to create enough demand to feel justified in taking the resources of other nations. The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city. --- Lewis Mumford It is said that the only time a person feels more important than the whole of his community is when he is insane – or when he is driving. This is the basis of car culture, the idea that the world and all of the world's people are merely in its way. This is the arrogance that makes our big businesses stronger and our failing democracy weaker. This is the arrogance that has made the spirit of our country so proud and yet so blind to the acute poverty, the blanket levels of illiteracy, and the social disinvestment that we have, ourselves, set in motion. In Amsterdam, to have virtue, you bike to work, and to shop. You say, 'I will give my energy to the natural flow of the urban environment. For the sake of the city, I will create no noise, no waste, no injury, no accidents, and I will be public while being in motion,' something most Americans have lost. In the 1930s, National City Lines bought and closed down forty-eight independent electric-rail systems that were serving major cities across the country. Later, the company was taken to court and proven guilty of antitrust violations. Though it may not have been conspiring to shut down the rail system to the benefit of more car traffic, it was conspiring to replace the trolley with, exclusively, GM-brand city buses. The conglomerate was fined a mere $5,000, though the ultimate cost of the transaction is beyond measure. This purchase, however much its consequences may have been unforeseen and unintentional, marked the end of the integrated roadway by making the public street the absolute territory of the auto manufacturer. Work to eat, eat to live, live to ride, ride to work.
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