Two Wheels Good

1) "The connection we make between cycling and flying is metaphorical. You might even call it spiritual: an expression of the powerful feelings of freedom and exhilaration we experience when we ride bikes. But it is also a response to a physical fact. If cyclists imagine themselves to be flying, it is because, in a sense, they are. When you ride a bicycle, you're airborne. The wheels that spin beneath you slip a continuous band of compressed air between the bike and the road, holding you aloft. That floating feeling, that sensation of airy buoyancy, is heightened by the way the bike bears your body: your legs do the work of propelling the vehicle, but the job of supporting your body weight is outsourced to the bicycle itself. Today you can attach an inflatable saddle to your seat post and sit back on a pillow of air even as your bike's wheels turn on air. Perhaps you are riding down an empty road on a quiet night; maybe, like Johnnie Dunlop, like Elliott and E.T., you are riding on a night lit by a full moon. Your bicycle will not take you on a voyage to the moon, but it is not quite earthbound, either. You're in another world, an intermediary zone, gliding somewhere between terra firma and the huge horizonless sky."

2) "A favorite slogan of bicycle activists goes: 'Two wheels good, four wheels bad.' It's a cheeky paraphrase of Orwell, but the motto smacks of sanctimony: the certainty that bikes are morally superior to cars, and that cyclists are nobler than motorists."

3) "The design was clever in several ways. Drais situated the saddle toward the rear of the frame, at a height low enough for the user's legs to reach the ground. On the other end of the Laufmaschine, Drais placed a padded rest for the forearms. This arrangement held the rider's body in an optimal position—back erect, torso slightly tilted forward—providing comfort and ensuring efficient movement. 'The instrument and the traveller are kept in equilibrio,' Drais noted in his first published description of the invention. He had hit upon the defining oddity of bicycle mechanics: the symbiosis between man and machine, between the bicycle and the rider who is also the power source. Drais's intuition about ergonomics was matched by an eye for aesthetics. The Laufmaschine was primitive by comparison with the bicycle as we have come to know it, lacking many key features, notably pedals. But its silhouette—the slender frame that loops on either end into wheels of equal size—is recognizably that of a bike. To behold the Laufmaschine in 1817 was to glimpse the future."

4) "There have been many innovations in bicycle design and construction since the arrival of the safety bike. Derailleurs, disc brakes, titanium and carbon-fiber frames—innumerable new components and building materials have appeared on the scene. Whole new genres of bikes have come into the world. There are collapsible bikes that fold on hinges so you can carry them around like a backpack or briefcase; there are bicycle designs that you can download on open-source websites and print out on a 3D printer. But the basic shape, the classic safety bicycle silhouette, remains and reigns. Lewis Mumford wrote: 'In every art there are forms so implicit in the process, so harmonious with the function, that they are, for practical purposes, 'eternal.'' Mumford had in mind such things as the safety pin and the drinking bowl, whose antiquity would seem to justify the heady designation 'eternal.' In historical terms, the bicycle is a new thing, but its form feels as fundamental and inviolable as any pin or bowl or Grecian urn."

5) "[Excerpt: The Wichita Daily Eagle (Wichita, Kansas), 1896] The bicycle has appeared in a new role—that of destroyer of a once happy home. The woman in the case is Mrs. Elma J. Dennison [...who was] married to Charles H. Dennison in 1892. At that time she devoted herself to household duties which were soon increased by the arrival of two pretty children. Then, in an evil hour, Mr. Dennison presented his wife with a bicycle. Mr. Dennison says that his wife developed the bicycle fever to such a degree that she neglected everything her home, her children, and her husband. She lived only for her wheel, and on it. Soon she changed her bicycle for a man's wheel; then she discarded her skirts and adopted bloomers."

6) "As for his own cycling: he finds the kind of fulfillment on a bike that you might expect of an erstwhile aspiring monk. 'The feeling that you get when you're riding on the trail, alone in nature, surrounded by all those nature sounds, it is one of the greatest feelings you can ever have,' shering said. 'My happiness—my own personal GNH—is the mountain bike and the forest.'"

7) "The CEVIS [Cycle Ergometer with Vibration Isolation and Stabilization System] does not quite fulfill the old fantasy of bicycles in outer space. No one will mistake the pedaling astronaut for the nymphs in those old advertising posters, zigzagging their bikes through an obstacle course of moons and stars. But a spin on NASA's bicycle holds other wonders. Astronauts are often required to ride for ninety minutes at a stretch, during which time the space station passes over two sunrises, completing an orbit of Earth. At NASA they like to joke that the riders of its exercise bike are the fastest cyclists in history, capable of circling the globe in a single workout. ('Lance Armstrong, eat your heart out!' wrote the astronaut Ed Lu in a blog post.) A cyclist clicks his shoes into the CEVIS and goes wheeling above clouds, deserts, jungles, oceans full of islands and icebergs, the Himalayas, the Amazon, Newfoundland, New York, Antarctica, Africa, Asia crossing the heavens at 17,150 miles per hour, and going nowhere at all."

8) "There are two more bikes hanging from the ceiling in the garage: a yellow Fuji S10-S and a black Sekai 2500. These are the bicycles that Bill Samsoe and Barb Brushe rode across America in the summer of 1976. BILL: Neither of us has been on those bikes in quite a number of years. I used mine for triathlons for a while, but it's not really a triathlon bike. It's a touring bike. BARB: We'll probably never ride them again, but I don't think we'd ever get rid of them. BILL: They're museum exhibits, you know? But I bet if I put in a little bit of work, they'd ride fine. They say if you treat it right, a bicycle will run for a hundred years."

9) "Boorish American car culture and incipient American fascism were natural allies."