For some strange reason, few people ever want me to drive a car these days. My family suggests that they’d rather walk… Indeed, my kids say that walking is faster.

You see, I have this theory. My theory is that whatever speed is good enough for a bicycle is good enough for a car. I mean to say, I can get most places on a bike in reasonable time.

Which got me thinking, as I do when I’m out on a lovely long ride. What if the whole world could slow down to the speed of a bike? Such a nice thought. Especially considering that this thought of mine happened at just that point when a double trailered cattle truck was overtaking at ten times my speed on that lonely, dusty, gravel shrouded, oh so very very narrow road.

Let me run with this thought play of mine. Assume, somehow, that all vehicles were tied to the maximum speed of a bicycle. Not a kiddie’s BMX. Or some first timer’s wobbly ride. No, let’s assume the speed of, say, Louis Leon Sanchez. Or of Lance, if you insist. What’s that? About 45km/hour average on flattish roads? And about 100km/hour down really nice, steep, properly tarred hills. [That's about 28m/hr and 62m/hr respectively, for those of you who still clinging to the Imperial system - like a drowning sailor clinging to a raft on the edge of an earth thought to be as flat as a dinner plate...]. But there’s more. Assume as well that your daily dose of travel is also linked to the possibilities of the pedal: about 200km in a really, really, good day. Of about 7 to 8 hours. Before the average punter would pass out.

Imagine a world slowed down to the pace of our pedal powered legs. Instead of 1000km in a day, you’d be looking at 200 instead. Or more likely, about 100 [62 miles]. Imagine what that would imply.

For starters, people would start thinking more locally than they once might have been inclined. People would stay closer to home. They’d shop, work and play within a radius of a good two hour ride. Local businesses would start to pick up. They, in turn, would start sourcing their own supplies from closer to home. We’d all start becoming vastly more locally self-sufficient. If you insist on getting stuff that’s further away, be prepared to camp out as journeys that once took a day by car would now take up to a week. As our local communities are recharged, so too would be our employment. And that long-promised era of internet commuting would really take hold! More and more of us would start working from home. Think of the CO2 that would then stay in the ground instead.

Globalisation would wither like the dried snake-oiled skin it always was. Globalisation of trade in goods and the globalisation of all the world’s stupidities. The globalisation of culture into some odious amorphous mash. The globalisation of identity. The globalisation of financial crises. The globalisation of impacts further out than our own back yards! Import the goods, exports the bads.

But electrons would still be free to swing at the speed they need. The internet would keep us connected to the globalised crowd sourcing of ideas, creativity and learning. That’d keep us from falling back to medieval times. The best of the past fortified by the knowledge and technology of this internet age.

Our thoughts of distance would start to compress. Distance would recede ever further away. We’d start becoming re-regionalised all over again. Big urban centres would become even more centred around nodes of our now slower paced transport modes. Planes would fall out of the sky! They’d never be able to take off at bicycle speed… Ships would start sailing again. Trains would matter as they once did and always should. Cars would become an even bigger pain. And how many folk will persist with SUV’s when it takes all day to reach the next pit stop for beer?

How could we all go off to war if it took us a year to get to the front line?

If you are going to shoot off a missile at pedal powered speed, you’d better make sure your nuke has got a thousand kilometre fuse…

And just think how much more careful we’d all start being about the garbage we throw out. If our trucks can only cart your junk 100km in a day, in no time at all landfills would leech their return to your back yard fence. It’s harder to ship the stuff off to some distant place when distance is compressed by how far you can ride a bike in a day.

And what if you could no longer depend on instant responses from the ambulence, fire fighters and the police. We’d probably become somewhat more circumspect about the risks we take and the things we do that might cause offence. It’d become easier to catch a bicycle thief when the best he can do is escape at the same pace as you. Just maybe the village doctors might start making house calls again! Imagine.

And what’s the future of the business lunch when it would take those business men all day to reach their wine and truffles bloated troughs?

And what, oh what, would be the future for golf! So long in the commute and so little time on the green. There’d be no time left for swilling at the 19th hole.

Life would slow down and we’d start noticing the details our speed once blurred from view. Journey’s would become a time for living rather than an interruption between destinations. Life lived along the way. The smaller stuff of our lives would grow to become life’s more exciting adventures. A trip to town would become yesteryear’s trip overseas.

Just imagine. And best of all, next time I come across that double trailered cattle truck, I could pass him instead!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.