How the bicycle changed the world

Back at Easter, we went to the Netherlands for three days to visit Rotterdam and see the spring tulips. Outside the Keukenhof gardens, we discovered you could hire bikes to tour the flower fields on your own. They gave us a map and sent us off, telling us that if we got lost, we’d be the first people in seventy-five years.

For the next hour, until we got lost, we had one of the happiest experiences imaginable. The sun came out. Tractors and spires poked up from the colourful landscape. I waved to a train. We talked to a horse. There actually seemed to be a bit of destiny to it all. Little had I known that all those life-threatening cycles around East Belfast with the kids had been building to this!

Cycling has a lot to do with happiness: that’s one theme of Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by journalist and cycling New Yorker, Jody Rosen (Vintage, 2023). Walking the tulip fields would not have been the same. The epigraph to Chapter One has HG Wells saying, ‘Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia’.

And the link to happiness might have something to do with the link to flying. This is a motif in how bicycles have been depicted and written about since their invention. In fact, cycling in some ways is flying. The Wright brothers who developed the aeroplane, we learn, were bike mechanics, and their original models involved bicycles with wings. Thanks to Belfast’s John Boyd Dunlop and the Scotsman, Robert William Thompson, who separately invented the pneumatic tyre, we literally cycle on air. The chapter on trick cycling points out that normal cycling is itself a kind of gravity-defying stunt.

The pleasure also comes from the sense of power that the bicycle gives the rider. It’s a personal transport machine, and an efficient one. In the chapter on bicycle design and engineering, we learn how the bike’s components ingeniously amplify the fairly minimal effort of the pedaller. It’s almost an extension of human body.   

Two Wheels Good isn’t a chronological history. It looks at fifteen themes related to the bike, a disjointed structure which shows the many meanings and functions that pedal power has taken on around the world. The book tells us it purposely goes well beyond the Euro-American world where cycling originated. Rosen explains, ‘The issues that preoccupy bicycle advocates in the West – bike commuting as a planning priority and “lifestyle choice” – have little connection to the reality of the hundreds of millions for whom cycling is simply a necessity, the only viable and affordable means of travel.’ In short, ‘The vast majority of bikes and cyclists are nowhere near Denmark.’

Instead of obvious trips to Copenhagen or Amsterdam, we go to Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom famous for its Gross National Happiness concept, and where cycling is popular (the best riposte to anyone who says your landscape needs to be ‘low’ to have a cycling culture) as well as Dhaka, Bangladesh, a megacity which runs on over one million rickshaws. We are also taken to China, which once had the most advanced and certainly the biggest cycling culture in the world, but since the 1990s has been systematically destroying it in favour of the car. Fascinating cases, if a little randomly chosen.

Ultimately, the book is about humans’ relationship with a technology. There’s a remarkable chapter which is made up solely of extracts from newspapers and scientific journals from the US and Britain in the 1890s, showing the moral panic surrounding the bike boom of the day. Men were hysterical at the freedom the bicycle gave to women. Moralisers predicted the end of civilisation. Back then, the bicycle’s rival wasn’t the car but the horse – a mode of transport (and an industry) that symbolised a traditional and upstanding way of life.

Today, cycling in the West is closely associated with environmentalism, and it turns out that bicycles have a long history of showing up in support of progressive causes, from the campaign for women’s suffrage to Black Lives Matter. We hear how bikes were at the heart of the Tiananmen square democracy protests in 1989. One of the grim afterimages of the suppression of that movement was the square littered with hundreds of crushed bicycles.

But we also discover that colonialists and militarists have been bike enthusiasts (they were used by both sides in the Boer War). Countless lives were lost in forced labour plantations in places like Congo and Brazil harvesting the rubber that fed the West’s late nineteenth century bicycle craze. Bicycle manufacturing may still be as environmentally damaging as many other industries.

In the middle of all this is an incongruously explicit chapter on sex and cycling, or ‘cycle-sexuality’. Due to the wholesome nature of this blog, I can say no more. But it seems there are people out there who aren’t being figurative when they say they get turned on by bikes. 

Writing this book was clearly a personal journey for the author, an investigation into this thing that he loves and that has shaped his own life. Amid the analysis of the political and social meaning of the bicycle, we get many extended stories of individual cyclists in various times and places, including the author’s own. Some of these test the attention span, but they show the intimate impact of the bike in the midst of the larger historical currents.

Two Wheels Good is not a manifesto. It’s enthusiastic but doesn’t campaign. But for those of us who have suspected that there is something bigger going on with cycling, that a bicycle is more than the sum of its cleverly simple and effective parts and has much to do with politics and emotion and the good life, this book is enjoyable confirmation that we are right.  

The joy of the tourist map

At the beginning of July, wife and me took a notion and booked three nights for the family in Amsterdam at the end of the month.

The following Saturday morning I was in the house killing time with the kids. I said, ‘Let’s get the Glider into town and see if we can get something about Amsterdam!’ I wanted to look at guidebooks and maps in Waterstones. Foolishly thinking this meant Dutch-themed colouring/books/toys for them, the kiddies happily agreed. I didn’t correct them.

Off we went, and in the bookshop’s travel section we found no less than ten different thick guidebooks on Amsterdam. There was also a postcard-sized, fold-out map. But then I saw just what I wanted, a guide book with a fold-out map – maps in fact, including various sections of the city and the transport network. It was pocket-sized and affordable. We took it to lunch, played at folding it and looked at the photos.

Three weeks later we arrived in Amsterdam. The first morning, after breakfast, I asked, with a little faux helplessness, what was the best way to get into the city centre. This did the trick. Out came the hotel’s own branded city map. The receptionist laid it out between us and circled the hotel and the closest metro station. This map also marked some local points of interest like the nearest supermarket. Most importantly as it turned out, it contained the numbers of the city’s tram lines.

This was a win, but I wasn’t done yet.

‘But there’s got to be a stand full of tourist leaflets somewhere round here? There always is,’ I said.

‘There is,’ said my wife patiently, nodding past the reception.

Ah yes, tiered display shelves of literature – and I scored two more maps, one in a booklet of coupons, and another, a fold-out part of a city guide. Both free, but both with differing coverage of the city, different little pictures of landmark buildings, and different kinds of transport info.

Over the next three days, the maps were half-ripped from snatching, lost then found, smudged by rain and coffee, and crumpled from incompetent folding. At night I studied them, picking destinations, estimating distances, and charting routes. On subways and street corners I had two or more out at once, cross-referencing for our next move. The maps were joined by others that we picked up in local areas, tour routes and attractions – maps within maps, maps in every hand and pocket. Just once, when it was raining, I resorted to asking my wife to get out her phone and use the ‘stupid blue dot’ on Google Maps to find where we were (I refuse to turn on my location). But I had my maps and, for the most part, they were all we needed.

My six-year-old likes to write books after breakfast. The day after we returned home, she got some pages and wrote about going to Amsterdam. She listed all the places we went in order of her preference. Then she got the hotel city map out of the recycling and attached it, folded, to the back of her book. She was so pleased she’d made a book just like our guidebook.

On this trip I was more aware than ever what a colossal privilege it is to simply be a tourist. The amount of money, time, health, and social confidence it takes for a small group of people to successfully move from one country to another and back is staggering. So when I have that privilege, I want to do it right. The tourist map’s days may be numbered. But the map isn’t just about a place. It is a place.

So keep your blue dots! I’ll find myself – in the folds of a dog-eared tourist map.