A woman and child on a bicycle, Mzimba District, northwestern Malawi, 2012.
Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.
—H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905)
Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history.
—P. J. O’Rourke, “A Cool and Logical Analysis of the Bicycle Menace” (1984)
For two centuries, people have looked at the bicycle and dreamed out-of-this-world dreams. Those whose bicycle reveries do not extend to the realm of the moon and stars have nonetheless made huge claims for the humble two-wheeler. Bicycles have stirred utopian visions and aroused violent emotions, given rise to crackpot theories and inspired reams of purple prose. The bicycle took decades to evolve, passing through fitful stages of technical development, from the primeval “running machine” of 1817 to the boneshakers and high-wheelers of the 1860s and ’70s to the so-called safety bicycle of the 1880s, whose invention gave the bike the classic form we recognize today and launched the fin de siècle cycling boom. But in each of these eras, the bicycle was hailed as revolutionary, a paradigm shifter, a world shaker.
The bicycle was the realization of a wish as ancient as the dream of flight. It was the elusive personal transport machine, a device that liberated humans from their dependence on draft animals, allowing individuals to move swiftly across land under their own power. Like another nineteenth-century creation, the railway locomotive, the bicycle was “an annihilator of space,” collapsing distances and shrinking the world. But a train traveler was a passive rider, sitting back while coal and steam and steel did the work. A cyclist was her own locomotive. “You are traveling,” wrote a bicycling enthusiast in 1878. “Not being traveled.”
As decades passed and successive bicycle crazes gripped Europe and the United States, momentous transformations were ascribed to bikes. The bicycle was praised as a class leveler, a cleanser of bodies, a liberator of spirits, a freer of minds. “Bicycling…has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,” said Susan B. Anthony in 1896. “It would not be at all strange,” wrote a Detroit Tribune editorialist that same year, “if history came to the conclusion that the perfection of the bicycle was the greatest incident in the nineteenth century.”
We may be inclined to dismiss these claims as period pieces, hyperbole typical of a bygone age. But the case that has been made for bicycles in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is no less bombastic. In the 1970s, activists on both sides of the Atlantic championed the bike on ecological and spiritual grounds. The bicycle was a remedy for the car culture that was choking cities and polluting skies; bikes also embodied progressive values, the lofty ideals of peace, love, and unity. In the words of a ’70s “pedal power” manifesto: “Perhaps an interface between East and West is the bicycle, the machine which makes us all brothers and sisters.” Now, with climate change threatening life as we know it, the rhetoric has grown more messianic. The bike advocates of our time speak of “the noblest invention,” “the most benevolent machine,” “rideable art that can just about save the world.” The bicycle of the nineteenth century was a marvel; in today’s formulations, it is moral. It was enchanted; now it’s enlightened. Bicycles are great—but, more to the point, bicycles are good.
______
Are the bicycle’s venerators wrong? You could say that the bike’s preeminence is irrefutable. There are approximately one billion cars in the world today. There are twice as many bikes. The number of bicycles manufactured this year in China alone will exceed the total worldwide production of automobiles. The cities and towns we inhabit, our economies, our laws are designed for cars; we hop between continents on airplanes. Yet we live on a bicycle planet.
Around the world, more people travel by bicycle than by any other form of transportation. The bicycle is the primary means of transport in the rural hinterlands of the Southern Hemisphere and in city centers of northern European capitals. There are twenty-three million bicycles in the Netherlands—five million more bikes than there are Dutch citizens. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bicycle. Nearly everyone does.
The bicycle’s ubiquity is a testament to its versatility. A bicycle is a vehicle for transport and for sport, for leisure and for labor. We ride bicycles to deliver the mail, to tour the countryside, to burn calories and tone muscles. A bike can be a child’s toy and a commuter vehicle that brings that child’s mother to work.
Bikes are people movers and load bearers, carriers of bodies and carters of stuff. Thousands of pedal-driven taxis jam the streets of Singapore and Manila. Subsistence farmers in Vietnam, India, and other countries use modified bikes to plow and till and harrow. In Peru, bicycles function as mobile fruit and vegetable stalls; in Zambia, cycles bring goods to marketplaces and the sick to hospitals. In much of the world, it is pedal power that keeps cities running, that keeps commerce flowing, that stands between life and death.
The bicycle’s continuing relevance upends myths of progress, challenging our convictions about history’s steady forward march and the linear course of technological advancement. It also defies simple logic. In many ways, bikes are impractical. A bicycle can’t zip down turnpikes or cross oceans. It won’t keep you dry in a rainstorm; riding in the snow is treacherous. “Get a bicycle,” wrote Mark Twain in 1886. “You will not regret it, if you live.”
These cautionary words still apply. If you ride your bike every day in New York City, as I do, you are tempting fate, throwing yourself in the path of steamrolling motorists and the swinging doors of parked cars. One cyclist memorably likened the sound of an opening car door to that of a gun being cocked. “The cyclist is a suicide apprentice,” wrote the Mexican essayist Julio Torri. “Since cars have multiplied in our streets, I have lost the admiration with which I formerly regarded bullfighters and I have reserved it for bicyclists.”
Other nineteenth-century inventions—the steam engine, the typewriter, the telegraph, the Daguerreotype—have been rendered obsolete or modernized beyond recognition. The bicycle, though, is essentially unchanged, a machine of improbable simplicity, elegance, and ingenuity: two wheels of equal size, two tires, a diamond-shaped frame, a rear chain drive, a pair of pedals, handlebars, a seat—and on that seat, a human being who is both the vehicle’s passenger and its engine. This was the design of English inventor John Kemp Starley’s breakthrough Rover bicycle of 1885. The bicycle Maurice Garin pedaled to victory in the inaugural Tour de France in 1903, the bike Albert Einstein rode around the Princeton University campus, the Flying Pigeon roadster enshrined by Deng Xiaoping as a glory of China’s social compact; the bikes ridden by X Games competitors, by food deliverymen, by migrants navigating the no-man’s-land on the San Diego County side of the U.S.-Mexico border, by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol’s bicycle unit who police that no-man’s-land, by weekend warriors wrapped in spandex, by “anarcha-feminist” cycling collectives; my bicycle, your bicycle—they’re all more or less the same machine, barely modified versions of that pioneering Rover. Even e-bikes, which augment the old-fashioned pedal-and-crank with battery-powered electric motors, do not alter the underlying design. Decades and centuries pass; revolutions, technological and otherwise, remake the world. The bicycle keeps rolling along.
______
Where the bicycle goes, controversy flares and culture wars erupt. People often express surprise to find bikes at the center of fierce debates about some of the most central issues of our time—not just predictable squabbles about transit policy but broader questions of class, race, morality, sustainability, the very future of life on Earth. The furor that surrounds the bicycle seems antithetical to the thing itself, a quaint, even cute, vestige of the Victorian world. But the bicycle has always been a lightning rod. The purple ink has flowed in both directions: for every paean to the bicycle there has been an answering screed, proclaimed in words of high dudgeon.
The outcry began at the beginning, circa 1819, when the first primitive two-wheelers were met by criticism and legal suppression on three continents. The machines gained favor among the wealthy and fashion-conscious, and promptly became targets of populist ridicule. (“A curious two-wheeled vehicle called the Velocipede has been invented which is propelled by jackasses instead of horses.”) Carriage drivers and pedestrians objected to the presence of velocipedes on roads and footpaths; crackdowns followed. Velocipede riding was banned in London in March 1819; similar restrictions were soon imposed elsewhere. An American newspaper editorial urged citizens to “destroy” velocipedes, and mob violence was visited on both the vehicles and their riders.
This earliest bicycle backlash bears a striking resemblance to those that have followed. Class-based antagonisms; contestation over the right to roadways; a sense that the bicycle is by definition absurd and illegitimate, a thing to be mocked and dismissed and, if possible, obliterated altogether—these are features of anti-bike agitation to this day. At the height of the 1890s bike boom, the criticism took on a more hysterical tone. In the United States, Britain, and elsewhere, cycling fever provoked outrage and moral panic. Bicycles were denounced as a threat to traditional values, public order, economic stability, women’s sexual purity. Bike-riding villains blazed across the pages of the yellow press; in medical journals, cycling maladies were diagnosed: bicycle face, bicycle neck, bicycle foot, bicycle hump, cyclomania, “kyphosis bicyclistarum.” Anti-bicycle invective thundered from church pulpits and filled the manifestos of moralists. “[The] bicycle runs for Satan,” pronounced the Women’s Rescue League of the United States in 1896. “The bicycle is the devil’s advance agent, morally and physically.”
Again, our inclination to roll our eyes at yesteryear’s excesses must be checked against the rhetoric of our own time. The terms of the disparagement have shifted, but the fervor remains. Where turn-of-the-century critics decried the bicycle as a malignant force of modernity, P. J. O’Rourke sees an affront to progress, a machine for “backward-thinking atavists.” O’Rourke may be exaggerating his indignation for satirical effect—but perhaps he isn’t? Consider the social science. A 2019 Australian study explored the negative view of cyclists that prevails “in many countries,” prejudice that is expressed in “public and humorous references to violence against cyclists” and in actual physical assaults on cyclists. The researchers posited that in societies organized around motor vehicles, cyclists are subject to processes of dehumanization: “On-road cyclists…look and act differently to typical ‘humans.’ They move in a mechanical way, and their faces are often not seen by motorists, blocking empathetic responses that might humanize them.” To automobile drivers who regard the roads as their domain, bicycle riders appear to be alien others, pests that must be shooed away or stomped out. (“Many informal slurs against cyclists refer to them as ‘cockroaches’ and ‘mosquitos.’ ”) The study concluded that 49 percent of non-cyclists regard cyclists as “less than fully human.”
______
This book tells a story about bicycle love and bicycle loathing. It explores the powerful affection and antipathy that bicycles inspire, and the way those attitudes have reverberated through history and culture and the minds and lives of individuals. It’s a drama that is unfolding at this moment on a vast scale. Today, we are seeing a huge surge in cycling, propelled by an explosion of bicycle commuting in cities around the world. The global bicycle market has grown by billions of dollars over the past decade; analysts predict that the market will hit $80 billion by 2027. These numbers reflect the scope of a cycling craze that has reached a wider and more socially diverse swath of humanity than those of the past. Two hundred years after the bicycle’s invention, we are experiencing the biggest bike boom of them all.
Bike booms bring bike battles. New cycling infrastructure is rising on city streets, bicycle-sharing programs are proliferating, pedal-assist e-bikes are buzzing along in a thickened stream of two-wheeled traffic—and once again, disputation between bike lovers and loathers has risen to a shrill pitch. The vehemence of that conversation says something about the bicycle’s stature, the awareness, among advocates and critics alike, that bikes are once again transforming the places we live and the way we live in them. Past cycling booms can in many cases be traced to changes in technology and the development of new kinds of bikes. But the current wave seems to have been brought on by larger forces, by the crises and dilemmas gripping the globe in the third decade of the third millennium. In the ecologically imperiled, rapidly urbanizing, traffic-clogged, socially turbulent, pandemic-plagued twenty-first century, the nineteenth-century two-wheeler is a relic whose time, it seems, has come.
The quarrels that have shaped the bicycle’s past and are roiling its present are the focus of many of the chapters that follow. The politics of the bicycle may seem to be self-evident. In the United States, we associate bikes with progressive views and values: with blue states and green policies; with hipsters and bourgeois bohemians; with the renegade protesters of Critical Mass, whose guerrilla group-rides aim to promote cyclists’ rights; and with others who lean left. These are clichés, of course; there are countless bike riders to whom these stereotypes don’t apply. But the bicycle’s relationship to progressivism and radicalism is grounded in history.
Among the first major cycling organizations were socialist bicycle clubs in 1890s Britain, which hailed the bicycle as an egalitarian “people’s nag.” Through the decades, the bicycle has retained its countercultural potency. A manifesto issued by the Provo, the 1960s Dutch anarchist group behind the world’s first bike-sharing plan, envisioned a revolutionary affiliation of “mods, students, artists, rockers, delinquents, ban-the-bombers, misfits…those who don’t want a career, who lead irregular lives, who feel like cyclists on a motorway.”
Governments have long recognized the bicycle as a means of resistance. One of Adolf Hitler’s first acts upon assuming power, in 1933, was to smash Germany’s cycling union, the Bund Deutscher Radfahrer, which was associated with anti-Nazi political parties and was capable of assembling tens of thousands of cyclists in the streets. Later, German soldiers in Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and other countries confiscated bicycles from the local populations. To a repressive regime or an occupying army, the bicycle was a menace, a device that could be used by dissenters to sneak up and speed off, to organize and mobilize and elude.
The bicycle’s reputation as a catalyst of social change is based above all on its role in the women’s movement. At the turn of the century, feminist reformers in the United States, Britain, and continental Europe adopted bicycles as totems of changing values and tools of protest. (In Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s words: “Women are riding to suffrage on a bicycle.”) Cycling offered women a new kind of autonomy, while dispelling myths about their physical frailty. And bike riding provided the impetus for another kind of liberation, freeing women from the constrictions of Victorian clothing, the architectural bustles and whalebone crinolines that made it impossible to mount, let alone ride, a bicycle. Female cyclists embraced “rational dress”—most famously, bloomer pantaloons, which became, along with the bicycle itself, a symbol of emancipated New Womanhood.
Today, the bicycle remains a flashpoint in the struggle for women’s rights. Authoritarian governments in Asia and the Middle East have periodically imposed bans on cycling by women. In 2016, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, proclaimed a fatwa prohibiting women from biking in public on the grounds that it “attracts the attention of male strangers and exposes society to corruption.” Iranian women responded by posting photos on social media of themselves on their bikes, and by writing slogans on their clothing such as “Do not be sexually tempted; I am merely riding a bicycle.” The ban was widely defied and not strictly enforced, but hardline clerics in several Iranian provinces have continued issuing edicts against women cyclists. In recent years, women in Iran have had their bikes confiscated, have faced arrest and other forms of “Islamic punishment,” and have reported physical attacks and sexual assaults. For millions of women across the world, bike riding remains inherently political, an act of defiance and a claim of freedom undertaken at personal risk.
These stories loom large in bicycle lore. Many accounts of the bicycle’s history emphasize its role as a liberating force and portray cyclists as heroic underdogs. This framing resonates with a romantic conception of the bicycle as insurgent and “punk,” a scourge of conservatism, corporatism, and car culture.
But the politics of the bicycle are complex; the facts do not always align with the pieties. Recently, scholars have begun unearthing a less hagiographic history. In many places, the bicycle first appeared carrying soldiers, settlers, prospectors, proselytizers, and other seekers of territory, treasure, and souls. The raw materials used to build bikes—the steel for the diamond frames, the rubber in Dunlop’s magical tires and inner tubes—have been acquired at a cost to the environment and to human beings, in some cases, through systematic violence against indigenous populations in colonial states.
The high-minded story passed down in standard bike histories—humanity finding freedom and fulfillment pedaling a peaceable “green machine”—can therefore be counterposed with different scenes. Infantrymen, gendarmes, tax collectors, and other colonial officers riding bikes in British Malaya, in German Togoland, in French Algeria. Black servants in the West Indies chauffeuring plantation owners on cycle rickshaws. Bicycle-riding European missionaries in Malawi and India and the Philippines. White fortune hunters biking to oil fields in Nigeria and gold fields in the Australian outback. Bicycle battalions of both the British and Orange Free State armies, facing off on the fighting grounds of that paradigmatic Scramble for Africa conflict, the Second Boer War. Millions of Congolese people harvesting rubber in the jungles of the Belgian king Leopold II’s Congo Free State—a genocidal system of forced labor instituted when the rubber market boomed during the bicycle craze.
The point, of course, isn’t that bicycles are nefarious. The point is that bicycles have a complicated history, as real things in the real world often do—including, or perhaps especially, products of industrial capitalism. Consider the relationship of bikes and cars, whose genetic links are closer than most people know. Two decades before the Model T rolled out of Detroit, Henry Ford produced his first automobile, the Quadricycle. As the name suggests, it was a four-wheeled cousin of the bike, with a small frame, a seat for two passengers, and an ethanol-powered two-cylinder engine that drove the rear wheels, bicycle-style. Parts essential to the development of cars, from ball bearings to brake pads, were first developed for bicycles. Cornerstones of the automotive industry—the assembly line, dealer networks, planned obsolescence—were likewise pioneered by bicycle magnates, many of whom transitioned from bikes to the car trade.
Then there are the roadways themselves, which, in the United States, are a legacy of the Good Roads Movement, a turn-of-the-century political crusade led by cyclists. The Interstate Highway System, suburban sprawl, strip malls: the credit, and the blame, for these features of the American landscape is usually ascribed to car culture, but their origins can be traced to the vision of coast-to-coast “macadamization” first advocated in the 1890s by the then-powerful “bicycle bloc.” Bike activism, more or less literally, paved the path for the car. “It is the task of critical historians of the bicycle to help recover the real history of the complex material relations between the bicycle, the automobile and the roads they share,” the social historian Iain Boal has written. “Bicycle purists, who imagine that they are somehow unambiguously an antithesis to motorists, need to rethink this fantasy.”
These complexities are not just artifacts of ages past. The present-day cycling boom has surfaced racial and social class tensions. In many American and European cities, bike-sharing schemes and other pro-cycling measures are tied to efforts to attract global capital and to policies that exacerbate economic inequality. Researchers have correlated the building of new cycling infrastructure and the predations of real estate developers, showing that bicycle lanes often serve as “maps of gentrification.” Gentrification is also an issue in the world of cycling advocacy, whose ranks are dominated by white men. The term “invisible riders” has gained currency among critics who decry the marginalization of Black, Latino, female, and working-class cyclists by establishment activists. The political rage expressed by certain cycling activists is arguably a reflection of entitlement: riding a bike in traffic, a white guy may experience structural inequities he encounters nowhere else in life.
The truth is, the politics of the bike are always up for grabs. In the pandemic summer of 2020, Black Lives Matter demonstrators poured into the streets of American cities, many of them on bikes. They were met there by another group of cyclists: heavily armored bicycle cops, who deployed violent crowd-control tactics and weaponized the bicycle itself, using bikes to bludgeon protesters. Perhaps the bicycle is the noblest invention, the most benevolent machine; but the nobility and benevolence aren’t inherent. The ideal of the bicycle, like the ideals of justice and equity, is subject to an ongoing struggle—a fight that sometimes unfolds block by block.
______
I’ve tried to keep these complications in mind while writing this book. There is a lot of history in the chapters that follow, but this isn’t a history of the bicycle per se. Major themes have been left to other chroniclers. I pay little attention, for example, to the sport of cycling, a subject that occupies kilometers of shelf space in the bicycle library.
My aim is to highlight some different stories. Traditionally, bicycle historians have told a transatlantic tale, concentrating almost exclusively on Europe and the United States. A similar provincialism is displayed by activists. The influential urban designer and cycling advocate Mikael Colville-Andersen has popularized “Copenhagenize” as a watchword of today’s pro-cycling movement, anointing the bicycle-friendly Danish capital as the spiritual center of the bicycle universe.
But the vast majority of bikes and cyclists are nowhere near Denmark. Statistically speaking, a twenty-first-century cyclist is far likelier to be a migrant worker in an Asian, African, or Latin American megacity than a white European exemplar of “cycle chic” (another Colville-Andersen coinage). The issues that preoccupy bicycle advocates in the West—bike commuting as a planning priority and “lifestyle choice”—have little connection to the reality of the hundreds of millions for whom cycling is simply a necessity, the only viable and affordable means of travel.
In the developed and the developing world alike, the bicycle is an urban machine, and much of this book is devoted to tales of the city. Of course, there are millions of rural cyclists. Practically from the moment of its invention, the bicycle was extolled as a means of escape from the metropolis, a vehicle that could whisk frazzled urbanites to greener pastures and cleaner air. But bikes were created in and by and for cities. Whatever the future holds for bicycles, that destiny will surely play out on city streets.
In fact, the fate of cities may be predicated on bikes. Demographers estimate that by 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities. On a planet of sprawling megalopolises, in an age of climate crisis, the problem of urban transit is no longer a mere quality-of-life question, a matter of aggravating traffic jams and unpleasant commutes. The way we travel may determine not just how we live, but if we do.
Increasingly, public opinion is tilting toward a belief long held by cycling advocates: cars are killing us. Researchers say that motor vehicles are the largest net contributor to climate change. The problem will not be solved by electric or hybrid automobiles, since tire wear and other non-tailpipe pollutants account for a large percentage of vehicle emissions.
The climatic effects only scratch the surface of car culture’s toll. The automotive age is an age of carnage. Globally, some 1.25 million people die in car crashes each year, an average of more than 3,400 deaths per day. Automobile accidents are the leading cause of death among young adults ages fifteen to twenty-nine worldwide. An additional twenty to thirty million people are injured or disabled each year on the world’s roads.
Then there are the larger geopolitical consequences of car culture: the dubious alliances formed and principles forsaken, the wars fought and lives lost, in order to keep the petroleum flowing.
Against this ghastly backdrop, the bicycle takes on a virtuous glow. “The bicycle is the most civilized transport known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.” When Iris Murdoch wrote those words, in 1965, she could hardly have imagined our world, where plutocrats in global capitals rent helicopters to swoop over streets paralyzed by traffic.
There are signs that history may be reversing course. With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, millions turned to bike riding as a way to get around while maintaining social distance. Cyclists found themselves pedaling through a locked-down world, on eerily empty streets cleared of most pedestrians and motor vehicle traffic. Suddenly, the great cities of the world were cycling cities. It was a strange blend of dystopia and utopia. The vacant cityscapes were like disaster-movie scenes of apocalypse—but they offered a hopeful glimpse of the future, a time when bikes might navigate serene streets beneath skies undarkened by exhaust fumes. Whether or not bicycles can “save the world,” there is little doubt that a city with lots of bikes and few cars will be a safer, saner, healthier, more habitable, more humane place.
A favorite slogan of bicycle activists goes: “Two wheels good, four wheels bad.” It’s a cheeky paraphrase of Orwell, but the motto smacks of sanctimony: the certainty that bikes are morally superior to cars, and that cyclists are nobler than motorists.
Yet “Two wheels good” is also a plain statement of fact. In a world of bum deals, a bicycle offers an excellent return on investment. Bikes are cheap and durable and portable and take up little space. A bike can carry you down the road five or ten or two hundred miles; when you get home, you can carry the bike upstairs into your apartment. Try doing that with a sports car or a pickup truck.
Cyclists get back more from their bikes than they put in. A bicycle is a remarkably effective device for converting human exertion into locomotion: on a bike, a person moves four times faster than on foot while expending five times less energy. “The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion,” wrote the philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich two generations ago. “Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.” Even digital age utopians, with their blazing faith that everything on Earth can be optimized by “tech,” must bow before the unbetterable efficiency of the steampunk two-wheeler. None other than Steve Jobs called the personal computer “a bicycle for our minds.”
Or maybe the machine for our minds is the bicycle itself. Many of us know that our brains feel invigorated, our vision sharper, our senses keener, when pedaling a bike. Bike riding is the best way I know to reach an altered consciousness—not an ennobled or enlightened state, exactly, but definitely an enlivened one. A bike ride is better than yoga, or wine, or weed. It runs neck and neck with sex and coffee. It’s also, in my experience, an antidote for writer’s block. If you’re stuck, if you need to ungum the synapses and lift dust off the cerebral lobes, take a trip on two wheels and the words will begin tumbling out. Eventually, for better or worse, you may find you have a book’s worth.