Reinventing the Wheel (or the Bicycle) Will Not Save Us From Climate Catastrophe

By Anonymous

A precursor to the bicycle known as a "laufmaschine".

I recently came across an article on CityLab titled "How an Ancestor of the Bicycle Relates to Climate Resilience." The article discusses a group of architecture students in Buffalo, NY who were tasked with creating new mobility tools to avert climate change.

The students were inspired by the story of the laufmaschine (“running machine”), a German precursor to the bicycle which was used to avoid the environmental costs (cropland dedicated to horsefeed) of horse-based transportation. The students built their own laufmaschines of improvised designs, and CityLab decided to highlight their great strides in the fight against climate change by writing an article about them.

Your wheeled toys are not fast enough to escape the coming tide of climate refugees.
I find myself frustrated by the narrative I see repeated in progressive, transportation-related discourse: that incremental "innovation" is fighting climate change. It's easy to pick on students reinventing a 19th century transportation technology, but the real offenders are new mobility companies like UBER, Bird, and the Boring Company.

As we learned from Professor Wach's lecture, there really hasn't been much "innovation" in the transportation industry in the past decade. Old solutions are simply reframed or rebranded, from jitney buses to electric scooters. In the early days of rideshare, TNC companies promised that they would replace personal automobile ownership and save our cities and environment. Now the consensus is that TNCs actually increase regional VMT. The Boring Company has been applauded internationally for its innovation of a smaller subway tunnel, and electric scooters promise similarly-shady salvation.

I'm not saying we should abandon these new tools in urban transportation. I just wish we would be realistic about what we are up against. Climate change is an existential threat to the planet as we know it. Californians seem eager to fight this threat with taxes yet unable to fathom real solutions which involve changing their car-loving lifestyles.

If we cannot commit to the real solutions needed  to avoid climate change, maybe we should focus on inventing a laufmaschine that works underwater...

Innovation?











Comments

  1. Adam RussellApril 29, 2019 at 10:03 PM

    I think this gets to the heart of a constant danger for elected officials and the public at large: we end up re-inventing the bus every 6 months because that's something that's exciting and (at least marketed as) different. Everyone wants to be able to simply buy their way into a climate change solution.

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