As the world continues to struggle with the ongoing pandemic there is ongoing discussion about the changes that it is and will cause to our lifestyles. The nature of shopping, social gathering, and working are all seeing changes.
Transportation is also being affected. Bike shops are running out of inventory as people look for a means to exercise in the out of doors and for an alternative to public transit. We see cities making changes to the ways that streets and byways are used, closing spaces to automobile traffic in favor of human-powered options.
I often find myself wondering what our society’s would look like in terms of transportation if things developed along different lines - if the development of the internal combustion engine hadn’t come along when it did, spawning our embrace of, and dependence upon, the automobile. And lately I am wondering if we might not be starting to see a bit of what might have been.
A few years ago, inspired by reading David McCullough’s Wright Brothers biography, I put together a timeline analysis of bicycle adoption. To sum it up briefly, the development of the safety bicycle - essentially our modern bicycle - happened so closely in time to the automobile that, in my humble opinion, cycling never had a chance to take hold before people had a motorized option.
What if that hadn’t happened? What if, say, the internal combustion had never been invented or perfected to the point that it could be made in a small enough package to power personal transportation?
It does seem that, prior to the introduction of the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, the world was not necessarily expecting such a thing to develop. A trip through cycling history sites shows that there was considerable effort in the 1800’s to develop human powered vehicles. Yes, we all know about the penny-farthing bikes of the 1870’s, but things started ahead of that...
Folks were clearly pretty inventive. They didn’t yet have the key developments - pneumatic tires, effective gearing, lightweight materials - that make our modern machines so capable, but they were clearly on the path. If those inventions had come along earlier or if, as we said, the internal combustion engine hadn’t, I suspect our transportation sector would look very different. What would that alternate universe look like?
I don’t think anyone would argue that human-powered vehicles would be routinely used for long-distance transport. I suspect we’d see rail heavily employed for that purpose. While it’s sadly insufficient here in the United States, rail is still a primary transportation mechanism in many countries around the world. Early locomotives were, of course, built on external combustion engines, so they fit with our thought experiment. Many trains now are electrically powered, and we’re going to assume development of electric systems would have progressed as they have in our current day. For the US this would be a significant change - we’d likely see railroads in the place of our interstate highway system, connecting our cities and towns, probably with express routes between major cities supplemented by regional and local lines.
I’ll pause here let my fellow US citizens picture that - it’s a mental image that takes a little while to absorb. No highways.
It would also mean no heavy motor vehicles - no long-haul or short trucks, etc. The US used to be covered with rail lines and spurs to facilitate local movement of heavy goods like grains and coal. Cyclists in the States are already familiar with that fact, at least obliquely - it’s the bulk of what Rails to Trails was built on, recovering the land from defunct rail lines.
Or - perhaps by the equivalent of current day in our alternate universe it would be more accurate to say: there would be no heavy motor vehicles with internal combustion engines. It might be the case that electric vehicle technology would have evolved sufficiently for short-haul heavy vehicles (range being a long-term problem for electric vehicles we are only now starting to solve). So - perhaps electric farm equipment, and electric trucks bringing loads to the local depot for rail transit. But I suspect that our alternate universe would have relied on animal power for moving heavy loads for much longer than our actual one did.
For virtually everything else - for short distance transportation, certainly, and possibly medium distance as well - I think we’d be looking at human-powered vehicles. After all, cycling is the most efficient known form of human transport.
One of the things about this aspect that fascinates me is trying to consider the form those HPV’s would take. I don’t take it as read that we’d all be tooling around on a typical upright, diamond-frame bicycle at this point. In our alternate universe the HPV is the primary means of transportation, and would have had nearly 200 years of development with that as a focus. In our actual universe cycling has been somewhat sidelined as a recreational activity and/or as a transportation option for children and for those who cannot afford, or are not allowed, motorized alternatives (when I say "not allowed" I am picturing the men you see riding an old bike wearing work clothes and smoking a cigarette - I suspect we all know what’s going on there...).
Without that sidelining our alternate universe might well have seen cycling technology advance at a much more rapid pace. Consider, for example, that the first derailleur system was developed between 1900 and 1910, but we didn’t really start to see bikes with multiple speed gear sets here in the US until the mid-1960’s. Now we have cycling machines with extensive gear ranges - I’ve got 30 speeds on my Catrike Expedition, for example - but those are relatively recent developments. I suspect they’d have happened sooner in our alternate history. Similarly, we’d likely have seen the adoption of more exotic materials - aluminum, titanium at least - earlier on to reduce weight.
I mentioned above that I suspect we - or at least, most of us - wouldn't be riding around on upright two-wheeled bikes. While I obviously have a bias here towards recumbent trikes, I come by it honestly. Some people come to trikes because, for one reason or another, they aren’t able to ride an upright. While there’s nothing wrong with that - I love that trikes let people continue to ride - I came to trikes because I think they are cool. Since I first saw an article on a Greenspeed, probably 15 years ago (possibly longer), I’ve wanted one. And one of the first things I thought about it was: "that is the natural evolution of the bicycle". In addition, with HPV’s being the primary form of transportation we wouldn't have been as likely to see the ban on recumbents by the UCI that is felt to have propped up the upright bike over recumbents in the 1930’s.
Not to say that I think our alternate universe denizens would necessarily be riding about on Catrikes and HP Velotechniks. Actually, I suspect people would be mostly moving about in something like a Velomobile. Particularly in less weather friendly areas, an enclosed human powered vehicle would make more sense, and riders would benefit from the aerodynamic advantages as well. I suspect they’d be somewhat different than what we see now - there would likely be a need for better cargo carrying options, though perhaps that could be managed with trailers or similar systems. Pulling a trailer is an acquired skill when it’s behind a motor vehicle. It’s considerably less intimidating a task when it’s attached to an HPV.
We are in the middle of an e-bike boom in our our actual world, and one suspects that would have happened much sooner in our alternate world. Having battery support would be needed to operate mechanical systems - wipers and ventilation systems, for example. And while it took a very long time to get electric cars with ranges that match gasoline vehicles, that range wouldn’t be necessary in our alternate reality. But having the battery support would make our HPV’s practical medium-distance vehicles. No train to the next town? It’s only 30 miles - let’s just take the Velomobile...
There are other implications as well. Streets would look different - there would be considerably less need for traffic controls - stop signs and such - and probably no need at all for stoplights. The Dutch have already demonstrated this to a considerable degree. Road surfaces would last longer without the constant pounding of one- to three-ton machines. Pedestrian injuries and traffic deaths in general would be far, far lower. People in would be far more fit, on average, given the routine cardio workout involved in traveling from place to place. Not to mention the lack of issues surrounding air pollution and all of the problems with finding, securing, drilling, refining, and transporting oil.
Will our world look more like the alternate universe we are considering here going forward? It’s hard to say for sure, but the opportunity appears to be there at the moment. The effects aren’t simply academic. Multiple European countries, particularly (but not exclusively) Denmark and the Netherlands have seen many of the benefits listed above with their focus on cycling, and we’ve already seen an improvement in air quality with the reduced automotive traffic during the shelter-at-home orders. And one expects the changes, to the degree they occur, will be seen more in the cities than in rural areas, particularly here in the States - there’s a lot of territory to cover, and that old train network is long gone. But I still enjoy the idea...