After living in regions that were (foolishly¹) designed exclusively for cars, I moved to a proper city: a city with public transport and a cycling infrastructure. Started using public transport and felt liberated. No more insurance burden, no maintenance burden, no vehicle registration, no traffic fines, parking fees & fines, no more financing unethical right-wing oil companies that are burning up the planet, etc. It was a weight off my shoulders to live cheaper and more ethical.
public transport also unethical
Then a colleague convinced me that using public transport needlessly is also unethical.. that the huge amount of energy required to power that infrastructure is still harmful & wasteful. Public transport needs to exist for various reasons like serving disabled people, but when able-bodied people flood onto it more vehicles must be dispatched more frequently. I was adding to that burden.
the answer: cycling
So after years on public transport I switched to a bicycle. It’s even cheaper than public transport. And it came with another upgrade to liberties:
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privacy— my realtime whereabouts is no longer surveilled & tracked (no license plate readers, no public transport card readers w/DBs, no insurance records which can then intermingle with other insurance & credit records & cause harm in other ways).
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independence— it’s easy to maintain one’s own bicycle. So I’m free of dependency on mechanics & free of dependency on public transport schedules (which can be unreliable). Dirt cheap and you only need to depend on yourself.
After evolving into a cyclist, I cannot stomach the thought of living again in a non-cyclable region. Those regions are encumbered by stupidity and addicts: people addicted to their perception of convenience (despite sitting in traffic that bicycles are immune to and despite looking for parking)… and people addicted to energy (from oil or power plants) because they think peddling their bike will be a notable effort.
Intelligence of car drivers
It’s been said jokingly (by Douglas Adams IIRC) that dolphins are smarter than humans because they’ve figured out how to get their needs met without investing crazy amounts of cost and labor to create things that work against them to some extent. Cyclists are like dolphins in this regard, as they see people work their asses off to be able to afford the car that takes them to work, where they earn the money to finance their car ownership so they can work more. At the same time they work to finance the oil politicians who work against them.
2023 research suggests cycling makes you smarter and apparently 2014 research suggests cyclists are more intelligent² (I suspect there’s the factor that people with naturally higher IQs favor cycling anecdotally. E.g. many profs cycle to universities).
self imprisonment
We all live in a prison of some kind. My new prison is being self-excluded from a big chunk of the car-dependent world and living in all those regions. But I prefer my new prison better than that of car dependency and being forced to finance companies that finance politicians who work against humanity.
footnotes
¹: it would be unfair to fault pre-climate aware municipal designs as foolish, but foolish that decades thereafter these shitty designs are still being maintained (unlike Utrecht who were wise enough to realize their mistake & fix it) while people continue rewarding the shit designs with their residency and tax.
²: I’ve not read the 2014 study myself. Some articles claim the research shows cyclists are perceived as more intelligent while other reports claim cyclists are more intelligent.
update: bonus paragraph. Due to popular demand, I’m giving you folks a bonus paragraph:
car → bicycle upgrade If we go back to the last year I drove a car, and someone were to say: ditch your car and get a bicycle, my answer would probably be hell no, I'm not going to peddle my ass around. I might rather drive over animals like in this pic (j/k). Having the public transport middle-step seems important. It’s easy to go from car to effectively being chauffered around. Then to transition to cycling has the upgrade of not waiting, no tracking, etc.. door-to-door about the same as public transport.
