Haulin
Cycling can be a sustainable form of transport. It has been so for centuries on and currently is going through a renaissance of sorts with emphasis for cycling for commuting in major cities in Europe and the US of A. Even in sunny Singapore, there are social experiments being conducted to see if Cycling can be included as an alternate mode of transportation**.
Over the past few decades however, as we witness, cycling has been relegated to two different groups in the society. Cycling for sport and recreation (typically involving light weight and expensive machines) and transport for low income people. the bicycle companies seem to have found a perfect middle ground – They can sell expensive high end bicycles to people who do not need them and constantly crave better (and they can afford it) and at the same time do not antagonize the rich oil companies and car manufacturers. At the same time, extremely cheap and crappy bikes flooded the market and were consumed by the masses which further made commuting by bicycle less glamorous.
The renaissance that we are experiencing now is putting emphasis on utility bikes that people use. There are a number of reasons why people do not want to ride and if you start to cycle, you will find that every reason is pretty much senseless. I have been trying my hand at riding to work and have been pretty happy with my progress and my choice of lifestyle. I want to actually move further and experiment with cycling as a sustainable mode of transportation for most needs. With that in mind, I took my bike out when I wanted to pick come stuff up from a nearby bike shop. Well it was about 10 km from home and rides through traffic free roads. I did make it in one piece and learnt a couple of things. The ride back with load was not too bad given that the load is heavy and unwieldy and it save me at least about 20 bucks on the round trip. Not bad for a start eh.
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June 3rd, 2008 18:05
Welcome to the club. I have been riding for > 10 years as my main transport to work and elsewhere, including JB some years back.
Although I am one of the low income people, but I think cycling shouldn’t be considered a transport for low income people. Last Sat night I saw a westerner family of 4 mounted on to two bicycles with all the proper gears to ride home from Novena Square.
Btw, is the Old Tampines road what you called a traffic free road? I won’t see it that way. I consider such road as very dangerous road, and rear mirror is a must.
June 10th, 2008 12:14
My point about cheaper bikes is that people have stopped using bikes for utility as it is looked at as a transportation mode for the poor. To the affluent, it is a spot. The Large mass in between have been deluded into a false idea of Cycle for utility = not glamourous and Cycle for sport = Expensive. And cycling has lost its place in commute / transport. This is primarily true in recently developed / developing countries (Asia and funnily enough Americas).
Places where people have grown out of their obsession for automobiles (read northern Europe, Japan etc) hav had a good lead time to develop friendly infrastructure and a sustainable culture for supporting cycling. Singapore is probably far behind at this point in time.