Biking in the Anthropocene: Cars, Cycling, and Wall-E
Halfway through my bike trip from Boston to Delaware, I was interrupted by wildfire smoke from out-of-control fires in Quebec, Canada. While I was in New York City, an apocalyptic orange haze descended on the city, and it was obvious to everyone living there that the air outside was unbreathable. The fires in Quebec are some of the worst that region has ever experienced, but every year it seems that we get another story about "once in a generation" wildfires in some region of North America. These large wildfires are the result of human caused climate change, sourced back to our insistence on pumping carbon into the air though the way we produce electricity, but also, crucially, through the way we travel.
Let's talk about cars. In every summary I give of my bike trips, I usually talk about the bike trails, the scenery, the stops, and the beauty. I don't talk about the cars, because I'd prefer they weren't there, but they are literally everywhere. A good 60 to 70 percent of my brain capacity on any given bike trip is spent avoiding or anticipating cars. The constant hum of freeways, the squealing brakes, the idiots parked in the bike lane - there is nowhere, at nearly any point, that I am not seeing, hearing, and experiencing the danger of cars. When you are on a bike, you really start to notice them, because you must. I started to realize that I probably couldn't remember if I had ever experienced a single day, in my entire life, where I hadn't seen a car. That's truly wild when you think about it, given that throughout most of human history, most humans of course experienced their entire lives without ever encountering these things. Yet, we have become so saturated with them, we can't even go a single day without seeing them, and on most days, we are surrounded by them.
Cars produce carbon emissions. In fact, cars are responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions within the global transportation sector, far more than both planes and shipping vessels. Cars are also responsible for 1.3 million deaths annually merely from traffic accidents, and that's not even counting the thousands of people who die prematurely due to air pollution. Cars are dangerous, loud, and unsustainable. So why are they everywhere? What is it about the car that has caused them to dominate the landscape of North America to such an extent that we cannot escape them? Perhaps they are an effecient means of transportation? Perhaps they get us to our destination faster than any alternative means of movement? Any investigation into this hypothesis will result in the same resounding answer: no. Cars are not effecient at all, neither in their distance traveled per unit of energy consumed nor in their ability to move people. High-speed rail, in the countries where it exists, gets people to their destination at nearly 2x the speed of even the fastest passenger cars, and they also move thousands more people per hour. Cars also require large roadways, which require cutting down and paving over the natural landscape to a far greater extent than any other form of transport. There is not a single metric by which you would measure vehicle efficiency in which cars come out on top. Effeciency is not the answer.
Freedom! What about American freedom? Sure, a high-speed train might get you someplace faster, but think of the scheduling! You can't leave when you want. You are entirely reliant on the train schedule, which is of course set by engineers and bureaucrats. The reason cars are so much more popular in the United States comes down to freedom. That has to be the correct answer, right? Well, no. Cars give people the illusion of freedom, but in reality, cars are again one of the most constrained vehicles in existence. They require extensive and expensive maintenance, they are never free at the point of use due to their fuel consumption, and they can only go on marked roads. They must be registered with the state, they are taxed heavily, and they always cost more than they will ever be worth at resale. None of that sounds like freedom. In comparison, a bicycle is virtually unregulated, it can go wherever you are bold enough to take it, and the only cost at the point of use is whatever you ate for breakfast that morning. If freedom was what people craved, we'd be seeing everyone on a bicycle, not in a car. The bicycle is the most anarchist vehicle in existence - the only mode of transporation more free is walking. No, it isn't freedom that puts people behind the wheel. At least, it isn't freedom in the way it is traditionally understood. The thing driving car popularity in the United States is instead our sadomasochistic craving for isolation and convenience
Do you remember the 2008 Pixar film Wall-E? That film has a buffet of environmental messages it wants to convey, but one that I think it does particularly well is depicting the misplaced human desire for both isolation and convenience. Planet earth has been completely trashed, with all the remaining humans escaping onto a spaceship designed as a never-ending pleasure cruise. The people drive around in hover cars, never speaking with each other in-person, taken care of by robots who make their lives convenient but meaningless. At one point in the film, after Wall-E mistakenly deactivates the hyperactive entertainment system on two human hover cars, the two freed humans remark that they "didn't know the ship had a pool," despite it being in the center of the ship. They are so isolated from each other and their environment that they weren't aware of the most prominent feature of their surrounding area. Despite it being an exaggerated fiction, I think Wall-E is depicting something like car culture taken to its furthest extent, and I think the same drive that led the people in Wall-E to lose sight of their humanity is the one leading us to do the same, even in the face of climate disaster.
Cars both isolate you from your local environment and isolate you from other people. When you are in a car, you are not required to withstand either the elements or another's company. The scenery you are treated to is usually roadways, billboards, and direction signs, but you need not worry about rain or conversation. In this way, cars are appealing precisely because they allow us to get places without any sort of either human interaction or natural earthly experience. If we take the train, we might have to speak to someone, and if we bike, we might get a sunburn. It's undoubtedly nice, but I think if we're ever going to solve the climate crisis, one thing we need to do is rid ourselves of putting our desires for isolation and convenience above our need to care for the earth. Indeed, I think isolation is one of the foundational problems, and if we're ever going to really solve this, we're going to need to rembrace community.
In Wall-E, the two heroes, Wall-E and EVE, are largely unaware of the broader environmental and political concerns plaguing humanity. EVE knows that she is programmed to deliver a growing plant to the captain of the ship, and Wall-E is in love with EVE, so he follows her. That is really the extent of their knowledge, yet they are able to save the earth precisely because they break the rules of designed convenience and instead embrace community. There is a particularly poignant scene where Wall-E appears to be damaged beyond repair, and he tells EVE to take the plant up to the captain rather than stay with him, because that is her "directive." EVE looks at Wall-E and denies her programming, instead reaching her hand out to Wall-E saying "no, directive" - letting him know that their love is more important than her programming. Wall-E and EVE also recieve aid from a host of "defective" robots, all of whom denied their programming and instead decided to forge their own path. When the captain of the ship decides to return to earth against the wishes of the auto-pilot, he also is denying the ship's programming, determined to make the earth livable again rather than continue on the meaningless cruise of convenience.
To solve the climate crisis, we will probably also have to deny some part of our programming. It's so easy to pick the convenient path when it's right in front of us, and the desire is always there. The roadways have already been built, the car will get us where we need to go, and we won't have to talk to a stranger on the way. But the rewards for taking the slower road are individually great, beyond just the fact that we'd prevent climate catastrophe. At one point on my recent bike trip, I saw multiple baby deer playing in the grass near the bike trail. All of them came quite close to me, and because I wasn't making any loud noises or sudden movements, they seemed content to stay close by. The magic of seeing these animals so close is something that had never happened to me before, and I realized that it probably was only possible because I was biking. Had I been driving on the nearby road, they would have never gotten so close. I also was lucky enough to meet so many amazing people, all of whom I would have never met had I simply driven to my destination. I met people on trails, at train stations, at roadside bike stations, at bike party rides, and of course the people I connected with on Warm Showers who agreed to host me. All of these things made taking the slow road worth it, and I imagine that, if we're ever going to get out of the current crisis, we'll all need to embrace this sort of happenstance community that comes with denying the more instant gratification of driving.
I'm sure that I didn't convince anybody to give away their car and immediately start biking everywhere. That would take a far greater writer than myself. But perhaps I convinced you to at least try taking a trip, perhaps even just a local one, using either a bicycle or public transporation. Leave your car behind and see who you might meet and what experience you might have. Who knows? If we all did it, we might save the world