The worst thing I have ever done on a bicycle was race after a car that had just run a red light and nearly run me down. Pedaling like Lance Armstrong after a fresh IV of oxygen-rich blood, I caught up to the beat-up Toyota at the next pause in traffic, banged on its roof, and then, in a ridiculous eruption of speech, took all the rage I had picked up on the side of the road and shoved it in the ears of this unsuspecting driver.
Didn’t he see the red light? I asked. Not waiting for an answer, I then asked which of my three children he thought least deserved to see their father again? Or was it their mother he didn’t like? Or was it my employer? Or was it the bank that owned my mortgage? Because I couldn’t imagine, I said, what he had against me personally, being complete strangers and all. But since we were on the subject, I continued, would he, please, for the love of God, tell me what drove him to want to kill me?
He was a schlumpy-looking guy, about my own age and quite frightened by my appearance at his car door. Nervously turning down the volume on his radio, he stated, very apologetically, that he had not seen a red light back there. To the driver of a car, a person on a bike is a nuisance; to a person on a bike, a car is a tank, a vehicle of war, a death threat.
But this is all perception—subjective and highly fallible. Standing there, freaking out at this complete stranger who had committed only a simple driving error of a kind that must occur thousands of times a day in the United States, I finally realized that I ought to calm down and be on my way. I was just a few blocks from home when I resolved not to go chasing cars again. What was I, a dog? A maniac?
Years later, however, as I pedal around town or ride to work, my brain still churns with indignant monologues whenever a driver does me wrong: “I’m sorry. Is my life in the way of your car?” is a line I have drafted for my next moment of great outrage. Let’s hope it never comes.
These days, arguments are breaking out left and right as the number of bicyclists continues to increase in urban areas such as New York, Washington, Portland, and many other cities. The recent addition of a short bike lane in my neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, gave rise to clamorous public meetings and even made the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal, in whose sport pages columnist Jason Gay recently made a deliriously friendly plea for peaceful coexistence between bicyclists and drivers, is also home to some serious anti-bicycle animus. The formidable Dorothy Rabinowitz, I learned from reading Margaret Guroff’s The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life said in 2013 that “the most important danger in the city is not the yellow cabs; it’s the bicyclists.” Which is not even possibly true.
Overreaction is, however, endemic to the debate over the bicycle, all the more reason to welcome the arrival of Guroff’s light but well-researched history of this ingenious, efficient, and salubrious invention. Guroff is a confident social historian who allows her eye for the colorful detail to lead the way while never neglecting to think through the chain of incidents and inventions that paved the road from the early 19th-century draisine, two wheels and a seat but not much else, to the battery-assisted fat-wheeled wonders of today. Where the author is especially strong is in drawing out the connections between bicycle and society.
Guroff illustrates the bicycle’s part in women’s liberation. In the last two decades of the 19th century, the safety bicycle came along. It’s the bicycle as you know it: two equal-sized wheels and two pedals and a chain that turns the back wheel. Designed to reduce head injuries, the safety bike became so popular that it knocked a loophole in the rules for courtship. A young lady who might require a chaperone on an outing with a bachelor—Guroff tells us, citing a New York Evening Post article—could forgo such supervision if she and her suitor were only going for a bicycle ride. It also led people to question the utility of long dresses, and changed the shape of bicycle frames for women. That descending crossbar we associate with women’s bicycles was originally an accommodation to women’s clothing, though it would have made more sense as an accommodation to male anatomy.
An even more subtle connection that Guroff draws out is the one between bicycles and the rise of general interest magazines near the turn of the 20th century. This was a key moment in the history of mass media as magazine publishers dropped their prices after realizing they could make more money selling readers to advertisers than by selling magazines to readers.
Bicycle manufacturers bought many pages of advertising and their products provided an image, a prop, a “new thing” for the quintessential magazine story about a life better than the one you already have. Albert A. Pope was a major figure in the American bicycle business and a keen student of the relationship between manufacturing and marketing: “We created the demand for bicycles with one hand, and the supply with the other,” he once told a journalist. Pope even published magazines of his own. Guroff notes that S. S. McClure cut his teeth editing two of Pope’s cycling rags. This was the man who gave us the estimable McClure’s magazine, home of various muckrakers where Willa Cather earned her journalistic stripes as a managing editor.
Good stories abound in Guroff’s account: the role of bicycles in the history of manufacturing, where they helped advance factory methods later perfected in the automobile industry; in the history of exercise, where the bicycle helped people understand the benefits of regular physical exertion; in the development of airplanes, the Wright brothers having been bicycle mechanics before they took to the air; in the history of warfare, where bicycles became an alternative form of cavalry, a quiet mode of transportation for scouts, and an effective, low-cost tool of resistance fighters. All this, and yet The Mechanical Horse is a sprint of a book, 166 pages, not counting the backmatter.
Partisans of the bicycle such as myself will find it sobering, however, that every time the bicycle has enjoyed a moment of extreme popularity, a major market correction was not far behind. After the 1890s frenzy of the safety bike, sales plummeted by 80 percent between 1899 and 1902. The ten-speed boom of the early 1970s (in which bicycles outsold cars for three years straight) became the bust of 1974-76 as sales declined by 50 percent and the shoddy products that had been raced to the sales floor ended up stolen or gathering dust in the garage, their cheap dérailleurs broken, their joys forgotten.
It doesn’t take an Albert A. Pope to suspect that one of the major causes behind the pro-bicycling policies of cities like Washington and New York is mere fashion. And what fashion gives it will eventually take away. Consider, too, how unevenly distributed the current bicycle boom is: Bike commuting is up in prosperous nerd burgs like Portland and Washington, but bike riding is mildly decreasing nationwide—and way down among kids.
Still, the bicycle is a noble beast: Cheap and fun, it can take you far. That it is also environmentally friendly should be counted in its favor. That its riders sometimes act like they’re rolling in virtue should not.
David Skinner is author of The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published.
