From the Economist:
"FAT-BUSTING but not wallet-busting, the humble bicycle is an increasingly popular choice of transport. Around 130m bikes rolled off production lines in 2007 and even more are set to be made this year. Bicycle and car production grew pretty much in tandem in the two decades beginning in 1950. But since 1970 bike production has nearly quadrupled while car production has roughly doubled. Much of the recent growth has been driven by electric bikes; production has doubled since 2004, to 21m"
3 comments:
good stuff. Add one less car and one more bike to that graph, because I am selling mine :) While my car gets recycled into the market, one less car will have to be built for the next 5 to 10 ears for one family. That is saving 9 barrels of oil.
I'd be curious to see this graph from 1900 though. At one point of time, bicyclists advocated paved roads along with cars for ease of use.
We have to remember that this is for the world. The world includes China and India! Lets hope they are the ones buying the bikes and not cars, because if they all start to buy cars, then the Kyoto protocol can pretty much take a vacation to Mars! India and China have no obligation other than reporting and monitoring emissions.
That is pretty interesting, especially considering it is a graph of worldwide trends. A few months back, I was watching a news interview with a politician from Malaysia where the topic was Malaysia's economy in the face of rising food and fuel costs and how the people were upset that they, as a producer of oil, were still getting the shaft like everyone else on the price at the pump. It was more involved than I can go into here, but the guy basically said that the govt of Malaysia was "encouraging" its citizens to "explore other lifestyle means" of getting around and conducting their daily affairs. He specifically mentioned bicycling as being one of those options.
And I thought to myself how backwards we can be sometimes. Here was a govt basically telling its people to get on a bike, and here WE are fighting with ours for accessibility to use them. hmmm...
-thartley
Post a Comment