Developing world can't be forced back on the bike
- Source: Global Times
- [21:19 February 01 2010]
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Illustration: Liu Rui
By Shastri Ramachandaran
Beijing's plan to reverse the declining use of bicycles comes at an advanced stage of China's economic development.
Vittorio De Sica's unforgettable 1948 film The Bicycle Thief is the perennial reminder of the role of these two wheels for access to development rights.
Set in postwar Europe, the film is the story of a poor man's desperate search in the streets of Rome for his stolen bicycle, without which he cannot keep his new job.
The bicycle was once king of Beijing, too. From the time when 9 million bikes on Beijing's car-less avenues testified to a proletariat pedaling its way forward, to the peaking affluence of 4 million cars crawling in the Chinese capital, life has come full cycle.
Now, as then, there is a clamor for the bicycle. But, in the past, the bike was wanted by the one who rode it. Now, it is the authorities exhorting the motorists to get back on their bikes. The same authorities back in the old days were pushing the cyclists to move up the ladder to the motorized goodies of development.
You were asked to aspire, work hard, be ambitious, get a good job, buy a motorbike, become successful, make a pile, get rich, buy a car, be modern, and the rest. In short, "Don't be left behind" was the message dinned into you until you went deaf.
Given the glut of development goodies and the way they are choking the arteries of urban space to the point of collapse, now the self-same people are crying themselves hoarse about us having too much of the benefits of development.
Asking people in China, or India for that matter, to let go of cars and turbo-charged motorbikes, and return to the primitive bicycle amounts to pushing us to forego the rights and benefits of development.
The "forces of progress, development and modernity" persuaded and pushed nations in the global South to ape their paradigm, which we gleefully did in every sphere of human endeavor.
Mobility has come to mean owning cars not as a functional necessity to meet gaps in mass transportation services, but as a statement of having arrived in life.
Owning a car is a public display of wealth and status. It says "I have managed to get where generations before me didn't reach." There is no way that Beijing municipal authorities, any more than authorities in India or other developing countries, can bring back bicycles by "creating an environment" for them.
More parking spaces and more bike rental spots are not going to make anyone abandon their cars and opt for the bicycle. When the masses were using bicycles, it was the most superior form of transport affordable to them at that stage of their economic progress.
They didn't use bicycles because of what it did for their health or for the environment. That was all they could afford then. Using a bicycle in today's motorized urban jungle is life-threatening. If you are not hit and run over by a car, bus or truck, then the fumes and the distance you have to pedal will kill you over time.
There is no way that a person who has toiled, seen earlier generations toil, and with his hard-earned money managed, at last, to buy his first car, is going to "regress" to a bicycle because some eco-minded freaks are opposed to auto emissions.
It is bad enough that development was forced. Even so it was a struggle to secure the rights that come with development, water, food, education, job, shelter, transportation, public health, and so on.
In developing countries, people are being pushed back to the bike, just as they were told that the refrigerators and air conditioners had to be replaced because of CFCs.
There will never be an end to this cycle of deprivation of development's benefits to those at the bottom of the ladder. By the time anything gets there, there's so much of it in the world, in the strata above them, that they have to do without it.
Perhaps this is the only way the poor can take revenge.
The author, a journalist and writer, conceived and co-edited State of Nepal (Himal Books, 2002). He is an editor/writer with the Global Times. shastri@globaltimes. com.cn
