What Cyclists Always Get Wrong About The Environment

Cycling is good for the planet, but it’s a far more complex and poor solution than it may seem…

Provided you haven’t been living under a rock for the last couple of decades, there is a mild to moderate drive across the world to improve transportation and commuting in an environmentally friendly way. Some claim we need electric cars, while others claim we need vacuum tubes or drones. Suggestions there are many, one infinitely more ludicrous than the other. If there was an award for stupid tech that makes no sense but looks cool in animated videos, we’d have thousands of startups bagging it. There is one idea though that stands out — cycling. And for good reason. We’ve done it before, right? Well, let’s look into this, shall we?

Is cycling really as cracked up to be? Are all the claims cyclists like to make valid, or are bicycles really just a half-arsed solution to climate change?

A note of warning. I appreciate that this article might end up pissing many cyclists off, but I, for one, don’t give a Flying Scotsman. I, myself, love cycling — cycling around Friesland was an absolute pleasure, and I always give the Netherlands as a positive example of a less automobile-reliant society. None of this however stops me from being honest and realistic about just how much bullshit cyclists are trying to sell to get an extra bike lane. So, without further ado, let’s look at the claims.

NB: everything presented here is in a city context, and speed measured in kilometres.

Bicycles need less road infrastructure

Because why? Last time I checked, we don’t actually have flying bicycles. This concocted nonsense that bikes use less road has only one small seed of truth. Indeed, the life of a road is determined by what runs on it. Why do you think we have roads built by the Romans thousands of years ago and lasted that long? Carts, horses, and humans were a lot lighter. The heavier the vehicle, the more often the road deteriorates and needs maintained or entirely rebuilt. This aspect is true. Bikes are infinitely lighter, their tires are barely a few cm wide, roads would last infinitely longer.

What isn’t true however is the amount of road infrastructure we’d end up requiring if the world moved from cars entirely to bicycles. Cycling advocates like to present an alleged reality where the need for roads is drastically reduced, but in a fully bike-oriented society that would hardly be the case. Granted, for every car, you can probably safely fit around four bikes on a road, but if you spend enough time to look into all the theoretical examples online, you’ll find that all have one thing in common — everyone is stationary. The reason? When things get moving, those numbers fly right out the window.

Now, imagine an entire city having moved to cycling. Some of them electric, some classic. Some mountain bikes, some city bikes, some race bikes, imagine all the bikes you can imagine, sharing the same road on the way to work in the morning. Suddenly, every bike needs more space than before, to safely manoeuvre. Suddenly, also that wide road that previously was used for cars still manages to fill up with bikes, because the same rules apply to bikes and human nature as they did before. The wider the road, the more bikes you’ll have. And the more bikes you’ll have, the faster they’ll get and will effectively just become electric motorcycles, which some frankly already are.

Only cars need traffic lights

Not so long ago, a fairly well-known cycle channel posted a short video, arguing that the city of Groningen solved the traffic light problem for bicycles and in junctions the lights go green for all directions, while also claiming that traffic lights only exist because cars exist, as cars are fast and don’t move at a human pace.

If that’s not an overly simplistic way to look at the bike traffic problem, I don’t know what is. Firstly, it’s quite easy to let riders organically deal with a green junction in all directions when there’s maybe a dozen or so coming from each direction, but raise that number to even 50, and you’ve got yourself a mayhem on two wheels. In a bike-first society where hundreds if not thousands of cyclists would be rushing to their destination every day, this system would fall apart within minutes. If you think Mumbai traffic looks crazy, junctions with no traffic lights would create endless hours of bike traffic jams.

Secondly, the argument that bikes move at human pace is also utter horse-poop. There is nothing human-paced about something weighing 100 kg fly past you at 25–40 km/h. If you think the 40 km/h is unlikely, I have one word for you: downhill. Geography and bridges are still a thing, just in case you forgot. 🙂 Anyone attempting to create a future city where bikes rule and does so without traffic lights, needs committed to a mental asylum, as they present an imminent danger to society.

It’s a great alternative

In what world is getting frozen, burnt, wet, sweaty, dirty and tired with wrinkled clothes anywhere you’re going, a great alternative? I won’t argue it being an alternative to almost any other means of transportation, but it’s anything but a great alternative. In fact, apart from reduced CO2 emissions (by 75%, not 100% as some claim), and potentially some exercise, it is the worst means of transportation out there. Make it de-facto, and it will be even worse.

Imagine India in the rainy season or even Ireland in the … any season. Walking with an umbrella, while still uncomfortable and annoying, it’s still a better option than a bike. No mode of transportation that can be flipped over by a gust of wind sounds like a great alternative to me. Or try cycling in the snow, or on black ice. Yeah, not a great alternative. If you’re going to tell me to just add a wee cabin, and an extra wheel, then I’m going to ask you to read some history, we already did that, it’s called a fucking car! Wasn’t that what you were trying to get rid of in the first place?!? 🤣

Carbon-neutral

Can someone sell me some bicycle seed that I can grow in a pot, please? OK, sarcasm aside, I think we can all agree that bicycles are far-far better for the environment than cars, especially ICE cars. Claiming, however, that bicycles are 100% green, is a flat-out lie. While a good bicycle’s frame will likely last decades — and often a lot longer than a car’s chassis — there is one core element that currently is anything but carbon-neutral, and that’s — you probably guessed it — the tires. In some ways, a bicycle tire is less cost-efficient than even a car tire, as their life-span is a lot shorter.

While that still may be debatable, the fact that over a million tonnes of bicycle tires and inner tubes end up in landfills is far less so. The good news? There is space for improvement. Tubeless tires are being trialled across the world, the bad news, however, is that unless we introduce very strict recycling rules on bike tires, we’ll still continue to create millions of tonnes of landfill waste made up of synthetic rubber.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s also the very shady aspect of where the rest of the bike parts are built. Turns out that frames tend to have very opaque manufacturing origins, but not opaque enough to know that the large majority come from severely underdeveloped areas of the world, all produced through anything but environmentally friendly methods.

Right now, riding a bicycle may make your air a tad cleaner, but it’s making someone else’s on the other side of the planet, a lot more toxic.

Fewer accidents

I love this myth. A classic example of selling bullshit to the masses. In 1880, we had exactly zero automobile accidents. Care to guess why? Nevermind, I’ll tell you. There were no cars back then. The first historically recognised car was driven in 1885 by Karl Friedrich Benz. Until the explosive adoption of cars later in the 20th century, accidents were rare. However, as more people adopted the automobile as their primary mode of transportation, the number of motor-vehicle crashes exploded too. It took the world and car manufacturers decades to improve safety to somewhat curb those numbers, but it’s still the number 1 killer.

Now, apply the same to bikes. We have relatively few on the roads today. Once those numbers go up, however, bike accident numbers will look very different. Unrecognisably so, in fact. With the advent of electric bikes and scooters and their inevitable advancements in both technology and speed, a bicycle accident will be exponentially more of a threat and so will serious injury and death. You see, while sitting in a car, even at relatively high speed, you are protected by the chassis and other modern safety features. On a bike, you’re not.

A bicycle crash at 30 km/h can land you unexpectedly sipping piña coladas with St. Peter at the pearly gates, no problem.

On a bike, you are completely exposed. Why do you think motorbike riders are called organ donors by doctors? Sure, it won’t be quite that bad, but add a shit-tonne more bicycles, remove the traffic lights, and you have yourself a sure-fire way to call cycling the century’s most dangerous mundane activity.

No pedestrians

This part is just fucking infuriating. Every single time there is a conversation about cycling, environment, road infrastructure, etc, somehow pedestrians are never taken into consideration. Like we don’t even exist. Whether drivers and cyclists like it or not, the vast majority of city traffic still happens on foot. Shocking, innit, that some of us defy “evolution” and just use the mode of transportation we were born with. So… basic, right? The amoebas of the traffic food-chain who walk, like a caveman. They can’t even get like an electric scooter or something. Savages.

And OK, OK, I know, some studies went as far as suggesting that cycling has a smaller carbon footprint than walking, but all that falls apart when you consider the cost of manufacture and maintenance. Even common-sense dictates that the most environmentally friendly mode of transportation is walking. It’s also healthy, especially in a highly environmentally conscious city where the streets don’t smell like rubber and smog. But of course, we can’t do that, because certain overzealous bike activists want to remove traffic lights from junctions, so pedestrians can play dodge the bullet with 2000 bikes every morning on their way to the grave… I mean the office.

So, what is the solution, then?

I’m starting to feel like that person who always ends up suggesting the same thing over and over again, but when it comes to travel, commuting and transportation, without a shadow of a doubt I can tell you that rail transportation is still both incredibly efficient and environmentally friendly. In the case of cities, light rail, aka the street-car or tram beats even cycling.

While not in the chart, the carbon footprint of cycling one kilometre is usually in the range of 16 to 50 grams CO2eq per km, depending on how efficiently you cycle and what you eat. — ourworldindata.org

And guess what, it has been invented already! Isn’t that great? In fact, they were quite popular until cities started prostituting themselves out to car and bus manufacturers while polluting our collective air as their bank accounts grew bigger and bigger.

I used to live in a city called Arad, in this little-known country Romania, in the Eastern bloc of Europe. As early as 1913 it already had an electrified light rail, the very first in Eastern Europe, and the 8th in the entire world. As a child and teenager, I remember never needing a bicycle to get anywhere, or even a taxi. The tram would take you anywhere, and the nearest stop was never further than 10 or so minutes’ walk away. To this day, the tram network has 138 trams that run on 100.17 km of tracks. I had a bicycle, but it was for leisure and I got much more use out of it, only once I moved to the countryside, but in the city it was pretty pointless for any kind of commute.

Imagine removing cars from the roads entirely. On a four-lane boulevard, you can now easily get rid of two lanes, turn them into green zones, parks, whatever. Essentially, all you’d ever need, would be a maximum 2-lane wide space for the trams to run. You could claim back all parking spaces, many roads and turn them into footpaths, community and commercial areas so people wouldn’t have to even have to think of getting on a tram to buy groceries or see their family doctor. When you put it like that, it makes a lot more sense than shoving everyone’s ass onto a bicycle saddle, doesn’t it?

It’s disingenuous to sell cycling as this magic, great über-green solution to our climate crisis, because it’s not. In fact, it’s a very poor and unimaginative solution. Light rail, public transportation, is still unbeatable.

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.