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.
Being on a bike and in a car are two very different experiences – with the first being so much more connected with surroundings.
After years of road riding, knee limitations kept me from cycling.
Use of an electric bicycle has opened the world of cycling again and it feels very very good.
I have not returned to group rides, but about 25% of the time go on a ride with a friend
Cars and oil are Canada’s biggest industries. Opposing them consigns you to political irrelevance in the Gulf Islands.
“The activities that once brought us together now drive us apart. Where once we travelled to work on buses, trams and trains, now, partly as a result of massive state investment in roads coupled with the declining availability of public transport, many have little choice but to travel by car. It is not just that this means we stop talking to each other, but that when we drive, society becomes an obstacle. Pedestrians, bicycles, traffic calming, speed limits, the law; they all become a nuisance to be wished away. The more we drive, the more bloody-minded and individualistic we become.”
Monbiot, George. Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Verso, 2017. p. 60
“I think it’s analogous to the same way that people are more aggressive behind the keyboard,” she said. “Being in a car gives us a sense of anonymity and deindividuation. It’s a kind of psychological barrier between us and other people.”
Being in a car also creates a barrier that make it difficult for drivers to read each other’s intentions, which means a harmless beep can be perceived as an aggressive honk.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-road-rage-1.7306230