My talk to the Northfield Rotary Club
February 4th, 2008,On Thursday, January 31, I spoke to the Northfield Rotary Club about the Northfield Area Task Force on Nonmotorized Transportation, on which I serve as chair. I began by explaining how I got involved in bike and pedestrian advocacy. I didn’t put it quite this way in the talk, but I’ve come to view my advocacy as really a coincidence resulting from the special character of the last two cities I’ve lived in: Davis, California, and my current city of residence, Northfield, Minnesota. Davis showed me what was possible for nonmotorized transportation in cities, while Northfield encouraged me with its potential and its people - people who agreed that Northfield could make important strides in healthier modes of transportation.
The bulk of my talk to Rotary addressed the reasons that communities should promote cycling and walking and the mission and goals of the task force. As far as the reasons for promoting nonmotorized transportation, I focused on energy issues and health issues, with more emphasis on the latter. Regarding energy, I displayed a slide showing the vastly different energy requirements for propelling a pedestrian or cyclist as compared to a person in a motor vehicle. Of course this is a function of the difference in the weight of the vehicles (or lack of vehicle) involved. Here are the examples of vehicle weights that I gave:
Bicycle: 25 pounds
Toyota Prius: 2765 pounds
Ford F-150 pickup: 4709 pounds
Cadillac Escalade SUV: 6800 pounds
I didn’t say this in the talk, but I think we generally live in denial or ignorance of concrete realities such as these. In a society such as the United States, mechanization, fossil fuels, government policy, and an expansive road infrastructure have made it possible to move about without realizing or thinking much about the energy used and emissions generated. We don’t really think about the energy required to move thousands and thousands of pounds of metal, glass, and plastic around. Nor are most of us conscious of the fact that we use so much less energy and emit so many fewer pollutants when we walk or bike.
I went on to talk about the health problems linked to physical inactivity and obesity. I’ve dealt with those issues before in this blog, so I will not take the time to do so now. However, I will mention that I made reference to the fact that business groups are concerned about these health issues. I noted the existence of the National Business Group on Health and read a quote by that group’s president, Helen Darling, taken from an essay she wrote for America’s Health Rankings 2007: “We have to…change our environments that work against healthy lifestyles and physical activity - including the way our towns and cities are built without sidewalks, safe paths and roads, and places to play, walk or run.” (America’s Health Rankings 2007, p. 121).
I concluded my comments about physical inactivity and transportation with these words: “We’ve engineered physical activity out of our lives. Now we need to engineer it back into our lives.”
February 4th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
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February 8th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Great stuff, Bill. That last line’s a doozy. I would have attended your talk (my boss, a Rotary member, invited me), but alas - two proposals due the next day scotched that plan. But I’m glad to hear that you got the word out. Did you talk about the Safe Routes proposal, and if so, how was it received?
The phenomenon of technologies hiding their demands - cars for gas, roads, space, for instance - is probably the main reason I went to grad school. I’m daily astounded that there are so many places to apply the idea - or the ability to criticize it - in everyday, non-academic life.
February 9th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Thanks, Christopher. I did talk about the Safe Routes proposal, but did not receive questions or comments about it.
I’d like to hear more from you about “technologies hiding their demands.” How else do you see this manifested?
February 13th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Oh, you name it. I think that a core characteristic of a modern technology - as versus another form of human expression, like visual art or even democratic politics - is that it ultimately hides its origins and dependencies. A computer’s a computer, just a gray box on your desk, until you start to literally and figuratively unpack all of its systemic demands: massive inputs of electricity for manufacturing and everyday use, incorporation of often-dangerous plastics and metals, reliance on massive physical networks of cables and wires, inextricability from a commercial economy predicated on change and profit, and so forth. It’s not coincidental that most of the most important modern technologies - from electricity in the latter third of the 19th century through the car during the 20th and the computer now - all exist in a kind of semi-vacuum of cause and effect. Consider merely how hard it is to quantify the polluting effects of cars, which are - as they say - “socialized” rather than borne by drivers, much less by manufacturers.
February 13th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Very interesting, Christopher. The idea of “hiding origins and dependencies” makes sense, and I’m conscious of how it applies to a technology like automobiles but not as much with other things such as computers.