Apr 30, 2007

Are cyclists really green?

For months I’ve had it in mind to write something about winter riding, both its pains and its pleasures. Trouble is, here in the UK winter pretty much passed us by. We had a few days of hard frost, enough to put a skin of ice on the canal behind our house (it just about bore the weight of a duck). We had a dusting of snow on the high hills a couple of times. And that’s about it. What we have had, seemingly almost without respite, is wind. I can celebrate ice and snow, but it’s hard, as a cyclist, to find anything good to say about wind.

As far as winter goes, I feel cheated. I love riding in the warm, but I love it all the more when I can contrast it with the bite of a winter’s day. Maybe next time.

All this inevitably prompts thoughts about global warming. Virtually no-one now disputes that it’s happening, and with unprecedented speed; a minority of serious scientists still contest the claim that the prime cause is human activity. I don’t want to get too hung up on this debate; even if we aren’t 100% sure that we are causing global warming, aren’t there a lot of other good reasons to rein in our emissions of CO2 (and all the other nasties)?

Taking this as read, the question I want to raise is; can we, as cyclists, really feel smug about our environmental credentials? I’d like to say yes, but there are a few caveats to be entered. Just because you identify yourself as a cyclist doesn’t, of itself, reduce your carbon footprint. So are we, as cyclists, as green as we’d like to think?

I know a lot of people who like cycling, but because they aren’t happy cycling on Britain’s crowded roads, what they end up doing is strapping bikes on the back of the car to get to somewhere where there are safe lanes or off-road tracks. In fact they will often drive fifty miles to cycle fifteen.

Or take my own case. On the credit side, my partner and I moved house recently, and we deliberately chose somewhere within easy walking distance of all the shops we use regularly. We’re also in a great location for road cycling, with pleasant loops, mainly on country lanes, starting from the door. It’s also a lot nearer where my partner works and she does cycle (11 miles each way) pretty regularly. We’ve even down-sized from two cars to one.

But on the other hand, we just bought a new bike rack for the back of the car, mostly to carry the mountain bikes. While I’d certainly like to make a case for the environmental benefits of mountain biking, I also have to take note of the packed car-parks at places like Glentress and Coed-y-Brenin. Well, mountain bike centres are often, for understandable reasons, in out-of-the-way places, and they often aren’t well served by public transport. We just aren’t as good at this as most of our European neighbours. And surely there’s no better use for a car than to transport bikes. But still, it’s a negative that has to be acknowledged.

Here in the UK, there’s something even more confusing to report. A number of politicians, most notably Conservative Opposition leader David Cameron, now cycle to work regularly. Excellent. At least they have some idea about the value of cycling and what it’s actually like on our car-dominated streets. But Cameron and some of the others do their cycle-commute with a car following behind carrying official papers and so on. Now there’s a mixed message if I ever saw one.