The least expensive and most convenient form of personal mobility is walking, followed by public transportation where available. One step up are bicycles and e-bicycles followed in ascending rank by motor scooters, small motorcycles, larger motorcycles, smaller cars, larger cars, ‘crossovers’, SUVs, and at the top end, light trucks and vans. If one has enough resources, they might enjoy full and convenient availability of each form, but for one reason or another most of us must compromise. The need to do this is probably fortunate since it forces one to make decisions about personal mobility which probably help to slightly reduce our individual environmental impacts, and also may cause us to be slightly healthier.
For example, if I have enough time, and the distance to where I need to be isn’t too great, and the weather isn’t too severe, and I don’t need to carry much, I’ll walk. If it’s a bit farther and the load, weather and time allows, I’ll pedal. My small daily-transportation motorcycle comes next and after this there’s a larger motorcycle and a medium-size car available. Beyond that and my car can pull a small open utility trailer whenever necessary. Anything greater than these options I must rent or hire. Having access to all this makes me luckier than most.
I’ll generally choose the minimum suitable option for two reasons of roughly equal importance: A.) Lower cost with a reduced environmental impact, and B.) greater enjoyment and fun. For me walking is enjoyably calming and pedaling is similar but slightly more exciting. Next, absolutely any old crappy motorcycle is still tremendously more fun to operate compared to any car, even the coolest. Unless the weather also happens to be atrocious. But I have some nice gear for that.
Keeping all these options in my mobility quiver means occasionally resoling or replacing worn shoes and doing some of the maintenance and repair work necessary to keep the various vehicles safe and functional. Again, I’m luckier than most to usually (but not always) be capable of doing this work myself. Depending on the vehicle and job.
Not everyone thinks about their mobility this way. Linked below is an interesting recent essay by a guy named Harrison Markfield who writes for an academic press called ‘The Iowa State Daily’ which is a publication of the Iowa State University in Ames. He writes well about how ICE vehicles are bad for the planet and in his view electric vehicles are hardly better. He is also of the opinion our innate desire for comfort, convenience, status, range, and control (why automobiles became popular), may be a societal dead-end.
This last assertion seems like academia ‘Ivory tower’ hubris and BS, so with some very small moto-centric reservation I must disagree. Mr. (professor?) Harrison Markfield misses or ignores motorcycles and scooters ENTIRELY as socially, economically, environmentally beneficial, fun and responsible mobility options, and he also ignores how almost everyone from poor to plutocrat intuitively self-manages a quiver of their mobility options, which can (and does) change as a result of ever-shifting surrounding influences.
In aggregate, we humans are nothing if not flexible and resourceful. Which is where everything begins.
Read it here (two pages), or download it here (PDF).
What do you think? – Mr. Subjective, 2-2022
I can understand the reluctance for the writer to jump on the electric auto bandwagon since 37% of Iowa’s generated electricity comes from coal (24%) or natural gas (12%).
But ignored by the writer – and by a lot of other environmental pundits – is the fact that motorcycles in the USA and Canada are an insignificant contributor to the Green House Gas problem. They use about 0.2% of the fuel consumed by road vehicles in a year. And with the old British motorcycles that I still favour, they can be easily tuned to run well on higher levels of ethanol than the current 10% required. In fact, tuning these old British bikes for increasing percentages of ethanol simply requires a larger main jet and possibly a needle or slide adjustment, and results in more horsepower.
Markfield is not “anti personal mobility”. He is questioning the sustainability of the lifestyle that ensnares us in a web of socially and environmentally destructive trends. It is somewhat foolish to go on about disappeared trolley cars – they were all worn-out and losing money by the 1930s and mostly replaced by buses which work as well if not better in a suitable residential and commercial built environment. Our problem is that assuming cheap energy and endless land will always be available we have devoured good farmland to build a human landscape where no one can meet their basic needs without a car. So few have the option as Mr Subjective has of walking or cycling for everyday utility.
Save our farms and build compact dense cities and towns and then we at least will be able to walk and bicycle if we want – and our motorcycle rides in teh country will be a lot more pleasant.
I think that since Mr. Markfield writes for the Iowa State Daily, and it’s in Ames, that it’s Iowa State University, not the University of Iowa.
As always, I like what Mr. Subjective has to say, and this post very much resonated with me.
As for Markfield’s article, I have the same issue I often have with polemics of this nature. They ignore a very important contributor to the problems they suggest solutions for and that is population. We need to start talking about population and hopefully start encouraging people to have fewer children.
While some of Markfield’s comments about EVs are correct, and I am a big fan (and user) of public transportation when it works for me, I don’t see why we should give up the mobility and freedom personal vehicles can provide so we can keep coping with an unsustainable level of population.
This kind of anti personal mobility argument, complete with fawning over the “good old days” when there were electric streetcars in every sizeable city in America, is an old refrain, usually spouted by people with a lot of spare time on their hands and salaried positions that don’t require their daily physical presence in their workspace. The twist is how he’s tossing in the outdated “the EV is just as dirty as ICE” arguments we’ve been hearing ad nauseum ever since the first Prius poked its ugly little head out of the Toyota factory.
The EV, with its admitted flaws, is necessary because we’re not going to transition from ICE to mass transit and walking without massive and probably catastrophic societal and political change. We need it to reduce emissions, and since 70% of emissions in the US are transportation, it’s an obvious place to start. The more we delay it until the technology is “perfected,” the closer we are to a very grim future.
Markfield is right to point out that the autonomous driving emperor has no clothes. This is not a technology that will be ready to use (at least in the way we’re promised) until some very looming and complex technical, political and ethical issues are sorted out. Read “Autonorama” by Peter Norton for an in-depth discussion about that.
Anyway, I’m not sure what Markfield’s specific solutions are, aside from everyone moving to a tiny university town in the middle of a sea of cornfields.
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