Group bike rides build community

I have been getting a lot of satisfaction lately from group bike rides. Community emerges naturally when people ride bikes in groups. The contrast underscores how automobile culture is a death cult: every driver gets their own sarcophagus for the living to move them through places while keeping the driver sealed apart. The driver is isolated from nature, from community, and from life at a human scale. They begin to live at a car scale where our instincts and experiences no longer bind us to our neighbours. The car is built to move at 60, 80, 100 km per hour, and to be indifferent to anything it might need to kill to do so.

Group bike rides provide a tangible vision for an idealized future without private cars. That’s a world where people who take the same routes and live in the same neighbourhoods know each other and talk: where they are neighbours. That’s a world with flower fairy girls on lavishly decorated cruiser bikes, and with guys in motorcycle helmets and body armour riding on zippy electric unicycles.

On a bike in the city, you live with the constant awareness of being killed. When riding alone, the great majority of my attention is always directed to nearby drivers and what abrupt, dangerous, or illegal thing they may do next. For drivers in the city, they may live with a mild awareness that their every careless action threatens to kill others, but they are distracted by bluetooth calls and streaming media, alienated from their fellow residents by socially atomized affluence, and shielded by public opinion and a legal system where killing someone with your car through simple carelessness is a minor and unimportant oversight which ought not to impede your happy motoring.

Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here. View all posts by Milan