Anna Brones - Hello, Bicycle: An Inspired Guide to the Two-Wheeled Life

Why Bicycles?

If someone told you that there was one thing that you could do every single day that would make you healthier, help the environment, boost the economy, and maybe even make the world a better place, would you do it?

Well, good news! There is one thing you can do that accomplishes all of that: riding a bicycle.

THE MANY BENEFITS OF BICYCLES

Riding a bicycle may seem like just a small, unimportant act. How could pedaling once or twice a day make the world a better place? But while cycling is certainly a simple actyou are, after all, just pushing down one foot after the otherthe benefits are limitless.

Bicycles make us smile, they keep us in good shape, and they help us make positive changes. Riding a bicycle is empowering, freeing, because you are dependent only on yourself. A bicycle gives you autonomy. The one thing needed to get you from point A to point B on a bicycle is you. You dont need to buy a ticket; you dont have to follow a timetable. You dont need to go to the gas station to refuel; you dont need to check the oil. You dont need special gear or vocabulary or advanced technical knowledge. You need a bicycle and yourself. Thats all.

People who cycle regularly have been shown to be healthier and live longer, with better blood pressure and a lower likelihood of being overweight than their car-driving counterparts. Women who bike thirty minutes a day or more have a lower risk of breast cancer, and adolescents who bike are almost 50 percent less likely to be overweight as adults.

But the benefits of cycling arent just personal. When we ride, we inherently make our communities a better place to live.

More cyclists on the roadwho might otherwise be driving a car or taking the busmeans reduced carbon emissions. For example, in the bike-friendly Danish capital of Copenhagen, bike traffic prevents 90,000 tons of CO from being emitted annually. If in the United States each of us made just one four-mile round-trip by bicycle instead of by car each week, we would burn almost two billion fewer gallons of gas per year. And you know what else that accomplishes? It helps reduce economic dependence on foreign oil. Cycling is patriotic!

How often does something that makes us feel personally great also offer an extensive list of external benefits? Even those riding a bicycle for only selfish reasons are doing their part (even if they dont realize it), benefiting the entire community around them.

Given all the benefits, whats stopping us from riding?

Many of us learned to ride as children, yet somewhere in the journey into adulthood we lose the art of cycling. Pull up a memory of your first bicycle. Maybe it was red, maybe it was blue. Maybe it had streamers on the handlebars. Maybe it had those crazy colored spoke beads that made noise as the wheels turned. Whatever your first bicycle looked like, chances are you probably remember it clearly. That first bicycle is an inerasable vision forever etched into our memory. Remember learning how to ride that bicycle? Think back. You feel your fathers, your mothers, your uncles, your older sisters hand holding the back of the seat as they run beside you, making sure you dont fall. At first, youre timid. You pedal, reassured that someone is there to hold you. You get into a rhythm. You look to your side; whoever was holding you is gone. You are pedaling on your own. The exhilaration mounts. You are riding by yourself!

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What Biking Wont Do to You

Give you bike face

In the late nineteenth century, female cyclists were warned that riding could lead to bicycle face, a look of being exhausted and weary. In truth, if cycling gives you any kind of a face, its a face with a smile!

Turn you into a cycling geek

Well, unless of course you want to be one. You can make cycling a part of your everyday life and stay perfectly normalalthough eventually your two-wheeled life will become your new normal, which in turn might turn you into a little bit of a cycling geek. But thats not a bad thing.

Force you to wear spandex

You can ride in your everyday, normal clothes and feel good about it. No need to be intimidated because you dont have the right clothes. Eventually, if you start doing long road rides or racing, you might want sportier attire thats more comfortable for long stretches of cycling, but dont let a lack of special clothing get between you and your bicycle.

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That first bicycle, and the process of learning how to ride, sticks with us for as long as we live, because our first bicycle represents our first taste of true freedom. The bicycle is a door to many opportunities, particularly for a child. Its a new, efficient mode of transportation, and one that youand only youare responsible for. Those first few pedal strokes without an adult holding on to the back of the bicycle to steady you are freeing. You are alive. You are in control. You can do anything.

Remember what it felt like to ride a bike as a child? It was fun. It was simple. If you wanted to hop on your bike, you didnt spend too long thinking about it; you just did it. It was freeing. You could go where you wanted. You could explore. You went fast. Really fast. You probably scraped your knees in a few tumbles, but you didnt care. You got back on the bicycle and did it all over again.

If we were once so in love with riding our bicycles, what is it that stops so many of us from doing it as we get older? Because we forget the bicycles simplicity. Unfortunately, the bicycles simplicity and pace are rarely accommodated in the design of urban and suburban sprawl. If there are bike lanes, there are few of them, and the built environment around us encourages four wheels and not two. But we also complicate the act of riding a bicycle, and in the face of those complications, many of us become intimidated.

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25 Reasons Why You Should Ride a Bicycle

You will be healthier.

People will find you more attractive.

You can eat more and feel perfectly fine about it.

Youll make new friends.

Its budget friendly.

Your friends will admire your toned calves.

You dont need a parking space.

You can fit exercise into your everyday routine without even thinking about it.

A beer tastes better after a bike ride.

So does coffee.

Paying for a bike tune-up is much less expensive than buying gas on a regular basis.

You spend more time outsidesomething your mother was always telling you to do.

People have more respect for you when you show up to a dinner party having transported a cake on a two-wheeled vehicle.

Cycling is a stress reliever and emotional booster that doesnt require medication.

Youll never have to sit in rush-hour traffic.

Bike storage can also look like a really fancy interior design element in your house or apartment.

Riding in the rain is actually awesome.

Getting muddy is too.

You dont have to listen to boring talk radio during your commute.