Homegrown Revolution will be making an appearance at the Alt-Car expo this Saturday October 20th at 10:30 a.m. to pimp for the bicycle as an alternative to the electric and ethanol cars crowding the improvised showroom at the Santa Monica Airport. We’ll be joined on a panel discussion by Jennifer Klausner of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition and Joseph Linton of Livable Places. The panel is entitled “Getting out of the Box”. He’s what we’re gonna say:

We don’t ride bikes because they are good for the environment–we ride them simply because they are fun and unlike a car, each mile we go makes us stronger physically and more alert mentally. Riding a bicycle puts us in touch with the spaces we live in and the people who inhabit those spaces. As the Situationist Guy Debord said,

“Traffic Circulation is the organization of universal isolation. In this regard it constitutes the major problem of modern cities. It is the opposite of encounter, it absorbs the energies that could otherwise be devoted to encounters or to any sort of participation.”

By riding a bike we break out of the isolation and anger that a box on four wheels stuck in traffic breeds.
The bicycle is the most elegant of all human inventions. Repair and maintenance are within the grasp of virtually everyone. Parts are understandable and, for the most part, interchangeable. With each pedal stroke, legs, heart, lungs and mind grow stronger.

Riding a bicycle is something you can do now. You need not wait for a future of expensive electric vehicles or technical innovations that may never come. The bicycle has a proven 150 year plus record of dependability.
You need not wear Lycra and, as the picture above proves, sometimes skin-tight clothes can be a very bad idea. You don’t need to be an athlete or have special clothing or equipment. Just jump on and roll.

In Southern California we don’t have the excuse of bad weather. Conditions are perfect for year-round cycling and the terrain is mostly flat. It’s a bit hilly in Homegrown Revolution’s neck of the woods, but these hills build character.

We’re what you might call “car-light”. Between Mr. and Mrs. Homegrown Revolution we still have a battered 1994 Nissan Sentra which spends the overwhelming majority of its time sitting in the garage collecting dust. Around the time we got rid of our second car we put together an Xtracycle. While it’s hard to improve on the basic design of the bicycle, the Xtracycle is a great way to haul cargo. We can easily pack just as many groceries on this bike as we used to in the Sentra.

The chief objection that we hear is that cycling is not safe. We used to use this excuse not so long ago before we hopped back on our bikes. We respond by saying no it isn’t safe, but neither is any other mode of travel. Cycling is definitely what Socrates would call, “the considered life”–it demands your full attention. But there are ways to minimize the danger and maximize the fun. Two good sources: the League of American Cyclists Road 1 class and Robert Hurst’s excellent book, The Art of Urban Cycling Lessons from the Street. Route choice, i.e. going out of the way if you have to to choose mellow streets, will also greatly reduce the hassle of dealing with impatient and distracted motorists.

We’ll close our brief presentation with this image of a Ghanaian welder who created this tall bike. To ride it he first pushes it to get it going, climbs up high enough to turn the pedals with his hands and, once he has enough momentum, jumps up in the seat. It symbolizes for us not only the shear joy of riding a bike, but a future that will be more about techniques than technologies. As Daniel Pinchbeck said,

“Instead of envisioning an ultimately boring ‘technological singularity,’ we might be better served by considering an evolution of technique, of skillful means, aimed at this world, as it is now. Technology might find its proper place in our lives if we experienced such a shift in perspective–in a society oriented around technique, we might find that we desired far less gadgetry. We might start to prefer slowness to speed, subtlety and complexity to products aimed at standardized mind.”

The bike is ready to go. That showroom full of electric cars, ethanol guzzling engines, and pie-in-the-sky fuel cells are all the dying gasp of a disastrous 20th century fixated on technology for technologies’ sake. It’s time to ride on.