The Migratory Patterns Of North American Cyclists?

When I was working at Highland Park Cyclery, a customer said he was going to start pedaling from New Jersey in October and arrive in Florida--where he had family--around Thanksgiving.   After that, he said, he would spend the winter there and start pedaling north in April.

I don't know whether he actually followed through with his plan.  And I hadn't thought of him in a long time, until I saw this:

Is the bear pedaling to the place where he or she will hibernate this winter?

I'd Join Their Club If...

Most bicycle clubs I've seen have just one requirement for membership:  Pay your dues.  That sounds worse than it actually is.  Let's say you're in such a club and something comes up in your life that keeps you from riding with the club for, say, a few months.  Well, if you can keep up your membership, at least you can stay in touch with fellow riders--and partake of whatever benefits the club might offer, such as discounts at local bike shops.

Then there are clubs that have other requirements for membership, such as age or gender.  Others--usually racing clubs--want riders who can keep up with everybody else in the group.  

Sometimes these bars to entry are placed to keep the club focused, whether by interest or simply people's level of comfort with one or another.  I've heard of a few clubs that simply want to stay small (or, at least, no bigger than X number of riders) for whatever purpose(s).

But there is one cycling club in London that limits its size for a possibly unique reason, which has to do with its name.

The Pickwick Bicycle Club, founded in 1870, is said to be the oldest continuously-operating bicycle club in the world.  In following a custom that was fairly common in England at the time, the Pickwick wasn't just a group of cyclists; it was also a sort of literary club.  Specifically, its members were dedicated to a particular work by a writer who died in the same month the club held its first luncheon.

The club's name is "Pickwick", as in "Papers".  Because he died just as the club started--a year after the velocipede appeared in London--Charles Dickens probably didn't ride a bicycle.  Characters in the "Pickwick Papers", or any other Dickens story, didn't, either.  At the time the club held its first rides, however, he was at the peak of his popularity:  Clubs and other organizations existed solely for the purpose of public or group readings of his works.  And, it just happened that the sorts of people drawn to those groups--mainly middle-to-upper-class city dwellers--were also the same sorts of people who took up the then-new sport of cycling.

Pickwick Bicycle Club riders at Hampton Court, 1877

The Pickwick Club's membership has always been limited to about 200.  If you want to join, they won't quiz you on the PP or any other Dickens work.  It does, however, take a certain amount of knowledge of the Dickens oeuvre to pull off something the club requires:  that you become one of the novel's characters.  At least, in club circles, you have to be known by that character's name.

As you can tell by the number of club members, there were a lot of characters--mostly peripheral, but in the book nonetheless.  That is because Pickwick Papers was originally a serial that was later assembled into a book.  Every novel, however--even one as sprawling as War and Peace or Les Miserables--has a finite number of characters.  So, even at 200 members, Pickwick is a fraction of the size of other clubs I've seen, and of which I've been a part.

Can you imagine if bicycle clubs today limited their memberships to the number of characters in a novel--or a TV show or movie?  I must admit that, even though I didn't like Batman Forever, I would join any cycling club--hey, any club at all--that would allow me to be Dr. Chase Meridian, even if I wouldn't look as good doing it as Nicole Kidman did!

P.S. Even if I were a famous racer or writer, or someone influential in the cycling industry, I couldn't join The Pickwick Club:  It's still a men-only affair!

What Fits In The Box?

Why should we encourage people to give up their steering wheels for handlebars?  Here is one possible answer:

You have a box, and it holds only so much, and once it gets beyond that--then you start to have problems.

The "box" to which economic development specialist Einar Tangen was referring is a city--in this case, Beijing.  But he could have been describing just about any old European or Asian capital--or a few US cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco.

Tangen was describing a reality of the Chinese capital:  It simply wasn't designed for 22 million people--or, even more to the point (for the purposes of this blog, anyway), 5 million cars.  To put that in perspective, Beijing has almost two and a half times as many people, and cars, as New York City.  

From what I've read, I don't think anyone even began to realize Beijing's limits until, maybe, two decades ago.  That is when industrialization--and, with it, migrations from the countryside to the cities--accelerated.  

Beijing traffic jam,  1975

In 1995, Beijing and New York had roughly the same population--around 8 million.  Commuters and visitors to New York--especially the central areas of Manhattan--complained about traffic jams.  Driving from the Hudson to the East River along 14th Street--a distance of about 4 kilometers, or 2.5 miles--could, and can, take as much as 45 minutes, while a bus ride along the same route might cost an hour.  Meanwhile, even if a Beijing cyclist encountered a traffic jam, it would mean that the road was clogged with other bikes, not cars.  That cyclist could pedal the same distance in half as much time as it took transverse Manhattan.

Today, both cities contend with traffic jams.  Starting in the early 2000s, the ones in the Big Apple started to ease up a bit, at least for a decade or so.  But since 2015 or thereabouts, motor traffic is on the rise once again, in spite of Uber's boast that its services would take a million cars off this city's streets.  Uber and similar services, unbound from many of the regulations that govern New York's taxis and limousines, put thousands of new for-hire drivers on the city's streets.  Also, Amazon and other online shopping services began to offer free shipping for very small orders (Previously, most had a minimum number of items or dollar amount for no-charge shipping), which meant more deliveries, nearly all of which come in trucks.

Beijing's traffic jams, on the other hand, now have the same composition of the ones in most other major cities:  cars and trucks--but especially cars, in Beijing's case. 

Beijing traffic jam, 2015

New York, Beijing and other cities are facing or denying this reality:  They simply can't shoehorn any more motor vehicles onto their streets.  If anything, those places, and others, should encourge bicycling--but make it truly safe and convenient for people going to and from work, not merely a way for the affluent to stretch when they get bored with the gym.

As Einar Tangen said, each of these cities is a box that's already holding more than it was designed to hold.  To keep that box from bursting, planners need to start thinking out of the (auto-centric) box.