Australia’s Is Voting With Its Pedals: Our Cycling Surge

Cycling is a remarkable gift to very unremarkable people like me.

I’ve spent the best part of fifty years admiring and sometimes madly envying people with real talent and skill. Those of amongst us who can:

· Do somersaults and handstands in gymnastics;

· Put names against every plant or rock they see;

· Play Mozart on the clarinet;

· Build a kid’s playhouse from a scratch, or;

· Understand and contribute to quantum mechanics.

Alas, I’m a very mere mortal with no ability in most things and limited ability in a narrow set of things — like writing a decent e-mail or occasionally taking a half-way okay snapshot. I’m grateful for having been born in the late 20th century, as my very poor eyesight and underlying mental and physical health issues would have seen me cast into the wilderness in virtually all other historical periods. And, I’m a big guy who gravity loves. The bottom line is I would have slowed the tribe and, in the not so distant past, the tribe would have made some executive decisions about me!

But, thanks to evolution, I have one attribute that I share with billions of other humans. I can balance reasonably adeptly.

Therefore, since age 5, I can pull off the near-miraculous thing that is riding a bike. The perfect and universally ubiquitous union of man and machine — even if I’m just chugging along rather than winning the King of the Mountain.

It really is something quite remarkable when you think about it:

· A piece of ingenuity and engineering that hasn’t changed in its basic design for hundreds of years (even as its component materials have radically improved).

· A hugely efficient way to transform one form of energy (chemical as in the food we eat) into another (mechanical as in the bike’s propulsion).

· All the physical and mental health benefits that go with regularised breathing, exercise, exploring and some extra time for contemplation.

· The sense of freedom one gets from the mobility of riding a bike.

· The lightest — perhaps — environmental footprint of any piece of mechanics we’ve ever invented.

As I peddle away at my normal 30 kilometre ride in a loop around the Parramatta River in western Sydney, I reflect on this set of magical things. I say to myself: ‘Wow, I can actually make this mechanism move forward relatively quickly, nimbly and efficiently. How cool is that.’

And lately I have been observing how the magical genie that is personal mobility is very much out of the bottle. At some 1.5 million per year now, bike sales are at record highs with e-bikes making up the most rapidly growing proportion of those sales.

This Sunday on my ride, I literally lost count after getting up to a thousand (!) riders of all varieties that came from the opposite direction:

· Serious and somewhat self-righteous MAMILs (Middle Aged Men in Lycra) on high-end and flashy road bikes;

· Elderly people on e-bikes, eg, the new e-grans, who perhaps have not ridden for decades prior to the recent introduction battery power packs;

· Family twosomes, threesomes, foursomes and more-somes in an activity that everybody can equally participate in, and;

· A 40-strong Boy and Girl Scout troupe out on a pedalling excursion.

And then there were the folks riding all sorts of new-fangled PTVs (personal transport vehicles) like powered scooters, skateboards and one-wheeled things I can’t even name yet.

While making these observations, it occurred to me that not only is this activity laudable, it’s unprecedented and historic for Australia. People are voting with their pedals and it represents any number of opportunities to claim (and some obstacles to overcome). These include:

· Making sure that our road rules, policies and legislation match this activity, especially to ensure appropriate sharing, mutual respect and safety between different types of road users and appropriate categorisation / registration of some PTVs;

· Investing in the necessary road and workplace infrastructure and capacity for PTVs, especially to claim more of their commuting potential;

· Getting the arrangements for PTV fleets and share schemes in our cities right, and;

· Ensuring there are environmental solutions in place for PTVs — and their components like batteries — at EoL (end of life) such as access to recycling and repurposing initiatives.

In the last respect, it’s cool to recently learn that none other than Elon Musk is working with other folks toward some solutions. If he can take us to space, he and other smart folks can surely help make sure we best manage one of the downside risks of more e-bikes.

I for one am really optimistic — in fact I’m investing in that optimism with a new PTV recycling initiative — that we will not only keep pedalling forward, but making sure our footprint remains light while we do so. That will be one more bit of ‘remarkableness’ about cycling and related riding to add to the list.