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Still, many readers—riding readers, perhaps—will find most meaning in Rosen’s carefully restrained but unmistakable personal passion. “Cycling is the best way I know of to reach an altered consciousness,” he writes, “better than yoga, wine, or weed. Sex and coffee work the neck and neck.” All the whimsy is a little ridiculous, and Rosen reaches a kind of smug nirvana at moments when he contemplates his subject. Lovingly describes a stunt rider’s stunts, crossing Dhaka in a rickshaw, or his own encounters with snow, car doors, and of course drivers.
Four wheels are bad – this is the logical second half of the quote that the title of the book invites us to finish. Should we as a species ride a bicycle instead of a car? Probably. “The automotive age is an age of carnage,” writes Rosen. “About 1.25 million people die in traffic accidents each year.” Not only that: “Motor vehicles are the biggest net contributor to climate change.”
The inevitable problem is that cars have their own romance. “Two Wheels Good” fights this fact admirably without ever subduing it. Even China, which at its peak in 1996 distributed 523 million bicycles among its citizens, succumbed to a new “automobile craze” and sent bicycle use into a “sudden decline”. For all the bike’s appeal, usefulness, and elegance, we as a species are drawn to its disastrously problematic successor.
I live in Los Angeles, where cyclists come down the curves of Griffith Park so fast it sometimes seems like a miracle that one of them brought him home alive. It’s a driving city, and so I’m a driving person right now – although I completely believe in Rosen’s assertion that cities built on bikes will be “safer, healthier, more livable”. Unfortunately, we live in a different world than we would like. “Ice is melting above and below the planet,” the author writes, “forests are burning, political systems are crumbling, an epidemic has shaken daily life to the ground, and a new global cycling culture is emerging amid the turmoil.”
The question is whether it’s on time. Anyway, would it be surprising if after the apocalypse we all end up with humble, easy, indestructible bikes? I was convinced of this after reading Rosen’s passionate history. There is also a bike shop nearby. I make sense to go there.
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