It’s clear to most people who visit this city that you sense a quality of life immediately. On the busiest streets, you find organization, you find people moving seamlessly and most importantly, you find that people look quite healthy and relaxed. So isn’t this the goal? To create a society where people look visibly and noticeably healthy and relaxed?
(Contrast with scenes of road rage, scrunched faces, contorted frowns, and people walking almost as if they are in combat just to get through a crowd or a cross a street).
During these days here in the city, I began to reflect. What is it exactly that leads to this sense of a quality of life and, while the components are many, my eyes were drawn to the large numbers of people on bicycles. I started to think about the destructive force of personal automobiles and in fact I think that I’m sure that personal automobiles are one of the most destructive forces in the history of mankind.
Cars have been luring everyone in since the times of Henry Ford with illusions of freedom, speed, convenience, and style. Go anyplace you want anytime you want! Speed down the highway with the wind in your hair! Watch everyone watching you as you drive by in shiny wheels. But was it the price we had to pay?
- Car payment, car insurance, maintenance, gas, parking can easily take up 25% of an average workers’ income
- Our village-like cities have had to be transformed into impersonal capitals where easy walk-ways have been paved over into multi-lane highways that are not fit for humans to walk on. Between roads, highways, and garages, most of our city’s spaces are not really designed for humans unless safely ensconced in a car.
- Our health has suffered by sitting immobile in a car seat instead of walking or pedaling a bicycle to where we need to be. How much of these waistlines could shrink if one pedaled to work and back each day?
- Our cities pushed out further way, in reach of cars but not in reach of human touch. We now live far from our jobs, far from our friends, increasing our sense of alienation
- Our cozy commutes in trolleys and buses in which we spoke to our fellow citizens and interacted with one another are now lonely commutes, with only the radio to keep you company
- Our psyches daily suffer from traffic jams, car horns, screaming matches, replacing the pleasant walk and hellos to neighbors on the way
- Our Earth has become polluted with exhaust, smoke, and smog from all the cars carrying one person one at a time to work and home, polluted with the chemicals from the production processes, and stripped of resources mined to manufacture the cars in the first place
I realize these are all generalizations. But one can see the point. I come back to the relaxed Dutch faces wizzing past me on bicycles.
Birds in a cage can lose their muscle’s ability to fly. Fish in a tank eventually become depressed. Bears in a zoo eventually lose their ability to hunt and find their own food. I guess humans were only meant to go as fast as their own foot power will take them. So maybe there is a trade-off: our super-human powers derived from technology are our own kryptonite. 
postsocialism