The Bicycle Wins The Numbers Game
There is a tendency for those of us living in places other than Copenhagen, Portland or Amsterdam to feel put-upon, threatened and marginalized by being cyclists. Let’s face it, jealousy also plays a big part.
I spotted a fantastic piece on the Bespoke blog titled; “The Bicycle and the New Economy: Towards a Curated Consumerism“. The article looks at the role that bicycle could have in a era where, as the writer says, “conspicuous consumerism is over”.
The graph shows that bicycle production is on the up and also the figures between the numbers of cars and bikes being produced since the 1950’s – the surprising aspect being how the chart shows the bicycles quantitative dominance.
A guess as to why this could be – when most of us are can plainly see we are in the minority every time we go out – brings into sharp relief the myopic view we have of the world looking through the first world, western telescope.
The start date for that graph is interesting as 1949 was the year that the People’s Republic of China was founded and the bicycle soon found a strong advocate in the communist government. The Chinese cycle industry came into being by deliberately merging smaller manufacturers into larger state-owned ones which were given preferential allowances of rationed materials. The industry was thus was able to accomplish growth rates of 58.7% annually – ambitiously charted out in the first Chinese Five-Year-Plan. By 1958 one million bicycles were in China, double what there had been only 8 years earlier. Bicycle lanes became part of urban street planning and commuting workers received financial subsidies when purchasing a bicycle.
Today there are over half a billion Chinese cyclists.
Since the death of Mao Zedong and through the Deng Xiaoping era China has changed dramatically. Internal liberalization and privatization of state enterprises established a series of joint ventures with foreign capital to establish companies in industries hitherto unknown in China. The result was a vibrant, growing economy and the rise of the car, like in the west, as a status symbol for it’s population. It is predicted that by around 2020, China will have 140 million cars on it’s roads.
I wrote last week about how officials in Beijing are looking to boost numbers in the city. If it’s true that the graph, above, can be explained, in part, by a post-revolutionary China, from 1949 on, transforming into a cycling nation, I wonder how the graph will look should 500 million people get behind the wheel of a car?
