I had some clue about the plan but not the details. “Kids!”, my wife exclaimed, when my son broke a tip on the eve of my birthday. Come May 19 and she handed over the small packet. “This will make you more mobile, more easily”, she told as I opened the little packet, which contained a not so little gift - a ‘bluetooth ear piece’. I, as usual, was certainly worried about the cost, but what worried me even more was something different.
We claim to be so mobile, yet we are not. More and more gadgets are prompting us to move less and less. More food is reaching us, the pace even faster. Remember the promise of a (?in)famous food chain to give it free if they are late by more than thirty minutes. The results have been devastating. We lead the world in terms of numbers and dangers posed by ‘life style disorders’ – be it diabetes or heart disease. The nation is being obviously crippled. Lack of movement has certainly cost us dear.
Gifts, though always welcome, are never easy to be chosen. Could I have had a better gift, I pondered. Of-course, something could have really made me more mobile, healthier as well. Not very cheap, I should confess, yet certainly the cheapest mode of transport. Most of us did posses it some time in our life, but mercilessly abandoned later on, as newer, costlier versions became available. Something, which I still consider was one of the (if not the) greatest discoveries of mankind. Yes, you guessed it right – the bicycle! Can it be the ideal gift, not just for me but the whole society as well? Can it solve the life style crisis?
The bicycle is definitely very old with the Frenchman De Sivrac building the first vehicle in 1690, though Da Vinci drew some rough sketches even before. It took another 150 years for a Scottish blacksmith, Kirkpatrick Macmillan to add pedals too and get the credit for inventing the real bicycle. Today there are about a billion bicycles in the world, twice as many as motorcars. There are over half a billion bicycles in China , our ‘super power - competitor’. But where do we stand? Though about 100 million bicycles are manufactured worldwide each year how many do we use? The data is not welcome at all. Every year fewer Indians are using it especially in our State, with more and more falling in for cars and motorbikes. Americans use their bicycles for less than one percent of all urban trips, no wonder they have the worst statistics for obesity, unlike Europeans who bike in cities a lot more often - in Italy 5 percent of all trips are on bicycle, 30 percent in the Netherlands, and seven out of eight Dutch people over age 15 have a bike. Is anybody listening?
Bicycles currently displace over 238 million gallons of gasoline per year, by replacing car trips with bicycle trips. When World watch Institute compared energy used per passenger-mile (calories), they found that a bicycle needed only 35 calories, whereas a car expended a whopping 1,860. Bicycles use 2% as much energy as cars per passenger-kilometer, and cost less than 3% as much to purchase. Yet somehow we find cycles less fascinating. Pollution, one would agree is on the rise and is certainly contributing to today’s lifestyle burden. There is only one ‘zero pollution vehicle’, even a kid would know that. Bicycles are the safest vehicles too. They requires far less parking space as well. 6 to 20 cycles can be parked in a single car parking space.
Yet none of this, I would say, is the most important reason to cycle. The calories burnt, the fitness achieved at no extra cost or time would definitely be a big answer to today’s lifestyle crisis.
It is certainly high time that we start taking cues from around the world. Tour de France, one of the most famous bicycle races established in 1903, is still going strong. Bicycle Moto Cross (BMX), became a sport in the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing . Isn’t it time that we too start encouraging bicycle sports and cycle clubs. There are at least 400 such clubs in America , and many more in other developed countries. I remember our guide proudly announcing during our Montreal trip during the last World Diabetes congress, that her city probably had the highest number of bicycling population. The message is very clear. Cycling is definitely not old fashioned as some of our youngsters might think. It is ‘the trend’ in some of the most advanced nations. We, rather than copying their food culture, would do a lot better in imitating this healthy habit.
Personally, I am not keen at all to wait until my next birthday. I have decided to gift myself a bicycle. My kids already have one and they both are not bad at using it either. I am no great man to seek followers, but this trend, I strongly feel would be worth emulating. ‘More cycling’ would definitely be ‘more living’.
