[TheThinkTank] Social effects of motorized transport - Ivan Illich

http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/facts/social_effects.html http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/%7Eira/illich/facts/social_effects.html

Social effects of motorized transport

Ivan Illich gives a set of very interesting facts and figures when he discusses his concept of convivial transport:

* *The United States puts between 25 and 45 per cent of its total
  energy* (depending upon how one calculates this) *into vehicles*:
  to make them, run them, and clear a right of way for them when
  they roll, when they fly, and when they park. For the sole purpose
  of transporting people, 250 million Americans allocate more fuel
  than is used by 1.3 billion Chinese and Indians for all purposes.
* The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to
  his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling.
  He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on
  it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for
  gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of
  his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources
  for it. And this figure does not take into account the time
  consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in
  hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching
  automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to
  improve the quality of the next buy.
* The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: *less
  than five miles per hour*. In countries deprived of a
  transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking
  wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent
  of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent.
  What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic
  in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for
  the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high
  doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the
  transportation industry.
* Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He
  carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by
  expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more
  efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his
  weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen,
  less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man
  settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant
  societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per
  cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or
  the encampment.
* Man on a *bicycle *can go three or four times faster than the
  pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He
  carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an
  expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect
  transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of
  locomotion. *Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency
  of not only all machines but all other animals as well.*
* Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also
  cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his
  durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American
  devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public
  utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of
  an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even
  less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two
  systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary
  only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far
  from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as
  they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has
  extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot
  walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.
* The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked
  in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the
  space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a
  given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by
  using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move
  them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on
  bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows
  people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can
  reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new
  locations from which he is barred.
* Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up
  significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can
  spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a
  year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs
  without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of
  others. They become masters of their own movements without
  blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those
  demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized
  speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the
  bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new
  relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between
  their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying
  their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered
  traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster
  is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for
  it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the
  evidence for their claim.

[from: Energy and Equity http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/%7Eira/illich/texts/energy_and_equity/. In Ivan Illich: /Toward a History of Needs/. New York: Pantheon, 1978.]