Cycling advocacy is surfing a rising tide of passion. Every time a car driver runs over a cyclist, the war is re-stoked with vigor. Every time a cyclist escapes a stalled parade of cars, motorists scream a violence of frustration to the freedoms their enemy seems to so nonchalantly enjoy. They complain, they shout and they scream their frustrations through horn tooting bellows and the therapeutic vitriol of prime time talk-back radio.

But it’s a strange kind of war. I am convinced there’s more than a modicum of envy driving the reactions we cyclists seem fated to endure whenever we confront these self-abusing slaves of the motorcar. Read the vitriol. Read into the rage. Dig and you will find, time after time, expressions of frustration over perceived airs of insufferable righteousness we cyclists seem to so consistently convey. We are, apparently, ruthlessly arrogant about what must surely be pretensions to fitness, mobility and ecological sensibility. We are senseless, apparently, to the sober responsibilities of conformity to this contemporary socially constructed, economically rationalised age. We are the wild irresponsible children wielding spanners to their well ordered works. Why can’t we suffer like they do?

But there’s much more to the passions that fire my own particular advocacy of cycling and ‘cycling mind’ (which I’ve officially proclaimed to be the cultural phenomenon of ‘bicyclism’), than the thrills of rebellion. This is a life defining passion; but I’m not just in it to reduce my personal carbon load.

Cycling has indeed become a statement of practical action in relation to doing the ‘right environmental thing’. Riding a bike’s not some kind of a statement of insincere intent (like ‘I donate to good environmental causes’ … and switch my lights off, and proudly proclaim the energy star rating of my ‘fridge). No, cycling is direct action; just like chaining yourself to a tree to stop the forest-leveling bulldozers from moving in – or joining Paul Watson’s Sea Shepherd anti-whaling crusade. Cycling is real. Cycling is proactive. Cycling is putting the rhetoric to work.

But there’s more to it than that.

Cycling keeps the biological clock tracked to a slower, more measured pace. Serious cycling keeps us fitter for longer (until we get run over by a car…). Cycling is proactive, holistic medicine without pills, potions and the whackier rituals of the incense chanting plasti-zen, off-the-shelf health food alternative consumerist crowd. Cycling’s the real deal of hard-earned wellness of body and mind. Rewards are gained in direct proportion to physical effort; and enduring life-embedded persistence. One ride a month at granny pace spinning down a hill is the packaged weight loss programme the deluded seem to think will achieve their aims. No, money can’t buy fitness of the hard-won kind. Fitness that’s earned through effort is the only elitist indulgence with which I am prepared to engage. I love stuff that only dedication and persistence can buy. Persistent fitness is something even trillionairs can’t buy. Manageralist tyrants can’t take these achievements away. These are assets beyond the protective possibilities of the world’s biggest vaults.

But there’s more to it than that.

Cycling is obsessively compelling as an endeavour of itself. Just like I am sure flying would be if only we had wings. Effort and rewards are directly linked and at the command of your legs. Is there a freedom of movement quite like this from other endeavours? Like running, swimming, skiing or paddling a racing kayak? Not for me. Cycling can take me further, faster and for longer than anything else I could do. It’s more all-season, free access, infrastructure independent than anything else. There’s no chair lifts, car portage, time rationed barriers and irksome apres-posing rituals attached to the riding I do. Running is close. But cycling is complete.

But, yes, there’s more to it than that.

Cycling is my kind of club. Anyone and everyone can apply for membership. But only those willing to pay the entry fee of physical and mental dedication are permitted to stay. There’s no slave class of caddy carriers here. There’s no side-line cheer squad apres-associate memberships on offer in this sporting club. You are a cyclist; or you are not. Money is not in the equation of membership. You can pretend. You can spend. But we all know who is real or not. All is revealed on every hill we ride together. This is a club where mind, body and machine mesh together like nowhere else. There are no bald mid-life crisis fatties hiding-behind-the-wheel in the world of skin tight lycra and muscle powered speed.

I must confess that now we are getting to the core. There’s another thing about cycling that can explain the life-hold it has over me. Cycling is the most technical endeavour with which I can engage while still being in control. My confidence in machines of any kind extends to the limit of my maintenance and engineering expertise. I need to know how things work before I can trust the workings of the thing I am working with. Every tiny bit; every part and the way those parts connect. These are the things I need to know and understand. If something goes amiss 60 km out on a remote rural trail, I am in command of my fate to return home. There’s a sense of security there that is totally alien to my experiences with any car. Or motorbike. The bicycle is an holistically beautiful machine. There’s nothing to disguise under the ruse of styling or anything else that’s fake. There’s a beauty of precision and mechanical perfection in every single part. There’s an astounding beauty in the synergies of how those parts interact. There’s a beauty in the abject honesty of design and purpose. In my view, the bicycle is the highest level complexity to which any machine can extend before trust and blind faith enter the equation of use. Anything more complex than a bicycle and you are no longer on your own. Your enterprise then becomes a vehicle of dependency with behind-closed-doors specialist skills and their moderation through the marketplace. Your vehicle then becomes a vehicle of disenfranchisement from the pleasures and satisfactions of doing stuff yourself – and of being in total control. I am passionate about doing stuff myself. I don’t like being undone by the undoing of others. Those who have also lost careers to the egotistical excesses of machine management managerialism will understand…

Back in the days of sew up tyres and five speed cogs, I had a passion for tales from medieval times. Castle builders, rural fundamentalism! Life made from simple stuff. Wars, plagues and superstition on overdrive; yes. But life was so … organic then. They were all so local in those days of long, long ago. Or perhaps the attraction is that those were the days when all the things I so detest about modern times were beyond even the first hint of speculation. Air travel for one! The pathology of motorcars, for another. Those were the days before engineering lost control to the religion of accounting and economics. Those were the days when everything was hand made! Those were the days before the ascendency of the supercilious plastic marketing grin.

Yes, I know those times and these times are probably just times different by a degree of stage dressing and fashion… I’ll bet the cart drivers from 1066 also suffered from road rage. And I’ll bet the superstitious bureaucrats from way back then were just as unreasonable as those now blinkered by the new religion of economics. And I bet the foot walkers of the day were enraged by the moronic road manners of those who drove carts. Just like we cyclists are by their descendants who now drive cars. And I bet the pomp and circumstance of life at court was every bit as odious as these modern times of the moneyed plasti-sculptured brigade. Yes, the main difference is probably just down to the deodorants of current choice and the relative amount of horse manure on the road.

Yes, the frustrations of any age are probably just the same in different dress.

But I can admire the romance of those en-castled, herbally-infused, pre Ecological-Economic Crisis days.

Which (like everything else in life) brings me to cycling… of course.

If I wanted to capture the essence of the best of times, for these times or those times, what would that essence be? Erecting an imposing castle in my yard would be a start. Surround that with a huge piranha-fuelled moat to exclude the Mormons, tax collectors, meter readers and suitors for my daughters would be even better. But that’s not quite the essence I had in mind.

OK. You like the Tour de France. I like the Tour de France. What is it that we see almost as much as bikes when we watch the big race on TV? Castles, that’s what! Is it some coincidence that our journey with Le Peloton weaves through France like a guided history tour through that land’s timeless past? No coincidence! And that’s the point. Cycling and the residual icons of a legendary past is a mix like tea leaves and water. A splendid, mutually reinforcing mix of harmonious perfection.

Cycling is set to the same timeless scale as the historical monuments beside the road. As Le Tour cycles through and past the rural flatter lands of France, we can see and experience the connections between our time-defying sport and the time-resilience of the landscape of which it is a part. The historically-paced landscape and the unhurried deliberation of cycling are two tones from a tune played out in perfect harmony. Even the raucousness of the motorbike/official flashing-light, horn tooting car entourage is an essential part of the mix. They’re there as loud-mouthed, fume-bellowing reminders of the intrusions of modern transitory fixations and superficialities into the timeless roots of the sport we admire. These intrusions are so loud because they are so transitory. All this siren shouting is a brave, but ultimately pointless, attempt to stand out from the oceanic-sweep of the deeper things they seek to disturb. Just like disposable wrapping around the real goods inside. It’s the real goods that survive, not the tinselled wrapping foil. Cycling and a medievally marinated landscape are the real goods. These are the things that really endure – paced with time and tuned to the greater, more enduring values of life.

So, who needs time travel back to the romanticism of the deep past? Beneath the neon-lights of modern life lies a river of reality that persists beyond all the odds. Who’d have thought that in these modern times of virtual reality, simulated pleasures and a fundamentalist devotion to money, that something as primeval as cycling could persist? But persist it does and along with that goes the thread that connects all that we were with all that we will ever be. It’s not just about the bike! It’s all about the ride.

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There’s one last outpost of the uncivilised world, largely untouched by the machine manicured perfections of the bureaucrat’s ordered vision. We, the cyclists of the world, are still, largely, free to do our thing. Isn’t it wonderful!

You can almost understand why we’ve been left to last. Consider the different kinds of cyclists out there. Granny coaster-riding her way to the shops with bagel basket attached, is a cyclist. That 10 year old wobbling down the cycling track oblivious to the wider world, is a cyclist. Mountain bikers are cyclists. Lance is a cyclist. Even Cadel… Tandem riders are cyclists. So are recumbents(!) Pork bellied dentists riding the latest and greatest from the artisans of Italy and France, are, it is rumoured, cyclists. I am a cyclist too! Even my mate who only ever gets as far as remembering the bike rusting away in his shed, is a cyclist (because he did indeed ride once). Yes, consider the diversity of machine and riders out there who fit the Bicyclism bill. Was there ever such a diversity in the world of cars? It’s a glorious, fabulous untamed chaos of diversity and confusion out there in the land of the pedal powered machine. A confusion that enrages the Lego Land, Swiss clock tick tock of the bureaucrat’s lab-white Matrix model of how the world should and must be.

How long can all this last? We live in a world where the only sign of economic growth is via the perpetual inflation of government bureaucracy. Every day, in every way, we get more and more policies and rules to bandaid us from the anarchy of our unruly policy-confused lives. Like birds need to build nests, bureaucrats need to layer the world with ever more rules. It’s what they do. It’s in their genes (or perhaps it’s the drugs in their OH&S triple-approved water coolers…).

The bureaucrats have to rake the policy compost of their nests. How else can they maintain control over all the other turkeys rooting about in peripheries of their territorial domain?

So, when more and more cyclists take to the roads (as oil runs out and the rules that govern the mobility of cars finally governs all that mobility away), what precisely do you think the bureaucrats are going to do?

They’ll be wanting to save us cyclists from the compounding anarchy of our under-governed confusions, that’s what.

We’re the last Great Promised Land of unclaimed policy paradise for them to explore. There’s a gold mine of policy claims to be staked. A new world of confusion for our bureaucrats to tame! You can see the excitement build. Restructuring plans to make, Departmental re-organisations, policy summits to attend! World fact finding missions to plan. Green Papers and then White Papers to write. Senate reviews, Commissions, Investigations, Policy Councils to set up. Endless fun. It’s Party Time! A cycling-led recovery for a bureaucracy that might otherwise have fallen asleep…

Clearly, when our bureaucrats turn their gaze in our direction, they will feel the urge to do what they have always done before; to do what it is that is in their genes to do: to reproduce a litany of categories, classes and schemas through which to manifest order onto the unruly chaos within which we have wallowed for too long. In a flash, they’ll be convening committee structures all over the land. They’ll be appointing Committee’s with chairs charged to tame this last vestige of free flying chaos. They’ll be charged to deliver a vision of groomed hierarchically ordered landscapes – tick boxed, cog-driven, procedurally accountable, results/outcomes directed … ‘transparent’(!) … audit-compliant pathways to bureaucratic heaven!

In no time soon, there will be categories within categories with manuals of glorious specifications a thousand pages thick through which to define which particular hole within which we each would then be deemed to fit.

In no time soon. I’d become a cyclist Class IV, Category II, Grade V, open-restricted. Log books required. Annually reviewed. Insurance Category 1006b, Annex 1a. All for the one low and terribly reasonable cost of $500 per year. Not including medical and mechanical certification tests, also required – enlightening our prospects for eternal safety for ever more! Hallelujah! Blessed be the enlightenment bestowed by our benefactors to rescue us from our chaotic untamed-policy wilderness…

As a Class IV, Category II, Grade V, open-restricted cycling person, I’d get a series of rights. Right’s I never had before if only because I was too ignorant to know that these are the things to which I should have aspired, instead of the simple crude pleasures of just going for a ride… Please see pages 1004-6009 of the Official Cycling Code book through which to familiarise myself with what I now can and cannot do. Ownership of said Code Book being compulsory. $910.95 please. Payable at any friendly Roads and Cycling Authority Office (please take a number and wait in the queue). Credit cards – or gold bullion – acceptable. A small inconvenience to pay for the enlightenment now bestowed! Ah Men; long may the bureaucracy live forever… and ever… in accordance with the doctrines of policies decreed. Blessed be the rule makers.

Yes. This new orderly world of manicured policies through which to govern us once wild anarchical cycling louts will sing the song of glory to our bureaucratic lords. A sight to behold and admire! The vision splendid for thousands of repurposed bureaucrats once so terrifyingly dispossessed when the oil ran out.

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For years I have been advocating, wishing and otherwise dreamed of a world vastly improved through more and more bicycles and less and less cars. Could enough bikes ever be too many? What’s the carrying capacity of our planet for bicycles anyway?

Imagine a world where those who can, and many who you’d think can’t, choose the bicycle as their foremost mode of transport. Imagine our roads supporting an endless business of commerce hauling bikes, shopping cart converted bikes, bikes moving refrigerators, bikes with a family of five on-board, bikes climbing mountains, police on bikes, lycra-racer bicycling elites, counter-culture revolutionary protest movement bikers wearing cleated sandals and Armani suits… Imagine it all!

Imagine the humiliation of those poor residual few who still persist with driving car. Imagine their misery as they head out on to the road surrounded by scornful cyclists out and about like a perpetual Critical Mass parade. Imagine a world where the cycling advocacy zealots of today had won a victory beyond even their most fevered desires. Imagine a world where cycling rules the roost once more (as was once the case in the 1870’s or so).

I am wondering if this fevered vision might have a few flaws. I suspect that there’s one sleeping serpent that we zealots have overlooked as we wish for this promised land.

You see, if we cyclists were to rise to such a giddy height, what, exactly, would those legions of administrators then do when their attentions could no longer be directed at the world of cars? The human urge to plan and regulate the affairs of all others down to match one’s own personal world view is an urge that can’t be curbed. ‘If only everyone could see the world as I see it, the world would be a better place!’ Now if you empower folk who think that way, the thing they need to maintain control are tiers and tiers of rules, policies and processes customised to keeping their views as some kind of Copernican gravitational core. And that’s precisely the way the rules of the road are currently maintained. I am sure you have noticed the multi-tiered bureaucracy that controls the affairs of those who drive cars… Where do the attentions of that manic bureaucracy go when the world runs out of cars? Why, to the brave-new-world of bikes, of course!

There are some signs of this bureaucratic holocaust in place right now. The scaffolding of regulation is already in place. Only there’s still too few of us to meet the full attention of the bureaucrat’s interest; for now.

My local bike shop guy handed be a brochure from the local roads authority the other day. It was an information piece on the rules of road as they are perceived to apply to cyclists. There was a paragraph in there that got me seriously concerned. It was a sign of things to come. If, the brochure proclaimed, a cycling path existed beside any road, any cyclist must use that path rather than the road. This one’s a dormant seed; sown and ready for emergence when the rule makers decide the time’s right.

Let me explain. There’s this hill into my local town. It’s a 2 kilometre descent set entirely within the urban traffic speed controlled zone. It’s hard to check the speed of my bike down to the 50 km/hour restriction that applies. I can certainly keep up with any car along that road. But beside that road, weaving a circuitous path via every local household’s front yard verge, is a gravel goat track that pedestrians and little kids use to be safely removed from the furies of trucks and cars. That gravel track is the local cycleway. I’ve looked at that path once or twice. It would be certain death for my high pressure tyres; it would destroy my carbon wheels. I am not sure I could navigate a track like that on my Pinarello Prince, let alone on my S-Works Roubaix. And of one thing I can be sure; if I did, there’d be more than a few pedestrians who would complain!

But by the rules that currently apply, I should be using that track. Technically, I am breaking the law by riding on the road when I should be using the goat track instead. But practically, right now, no one’s going to complain (except a couple of the most rampantly deranged motorists I have enticed to overtake as I descend at the posted speed limit; only to be fined by police speedtraps at the bottom of the hill…). Right now, this is one of those ‘in principle’ rules that are practically ignored.

But, as cycling takes greater hold; as a more diversified array of two wheelers start to dominate the road, it is inevitable that sleeper rules such as this will be invoked to sleep no more. As the revenue to be raised from speeding cars declines with the number of cars on the road, the attention of our frustrated bureaucrats will turn to us. I can see a time when I will have to ride to town on a mountain bike; just so that I can navigate that terrible cycling track.

And then, of course, how do we fill the till of the bureaucrats who levy registration and compulsory insurance from the currently healthy flock of motoring sheep? Why from bicyclists of course! It’s as inevitable as the sun will rise, that bicycle registration will eventually enter the radar of a bureaucracy finding themselves increasingly with nothing to do. Then we’ll cop the attention of the Mob that runs the insurance game. Compulsory personal accident insurance for cyclists is a certainty as our numbers increase. Our motorcycling cousins are already subject to the tyrannies of this insurance racketeering game. If a motorcyclist can be levied above the level of a 2 tonne SUV, what makes us think we will retain our freedom for long?

No, we cyclists will need to replace the revenues as the motoring mainstream sidelines into Peak Oil decline. These funds are needed to keep the bureaucracy alive! And nothing on this earth matters more than job security for our bureaucratic tyrants.

My vision for a cycling-first future is one that needs to be considered with a more realistic eye. I am not entirely sure that the passions and pleasures of cycling could withstand the excesses of bureaucratic control that are now extended to control the world of cars. I’ve seen a glimpse of how my vision could go so very wrong. You only need to ride a motorcycle to see how dumb our bureaucracies can be when they turn their attention from four wheels to two.

Actually, I’ve begun to think that the promised land is the land of the here and now. Despite the continual assaults from those mental cripples whose minds are crippled through driving a car, we do have freedoms that are substantial and impressive. Like a freedom from the tyrannies of compulsory insurance; freedom from the extortion of registration; and freedom from the Safety Mafia who’d love nothing more than to determine just how we should be allowed to ride. Yes, some of these freedoms are exercised only through the non-enforcement of currently embedded rules. But they are freedoms no less for us to enjoy. But, they are freedoms that are a big attractor to those more enlightened motorists suffering the oppression of the bureaucracy of cars. These are the freedoms that will attract more and more to the world of two wheels. And they are the freedoms that will fray as these folk swell the now casually moderated ranks in what I now think must be the end-times of cycling’s golden age.

Please consider making a donation to keep Bicyclism Blog going! Any contribution you make will indicate your support for my efforts and help cover bandwidth and related costs. You can make a donation through clicking the donate button on the Bicyclism Blog or the Bicyclism.net home page. Thanks!