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. In Ivan Illich: Toward a
History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978.]
--
Rich Points
Community Cycles Director
http://CommunityCycles.org
Rich@CommunityCycles.org
720-565-6019