Bicycles and Horses

As a child in rural Ireland in the mid 1960s I can still remember a society and economy that was not fully integrated into the global oil economy. Only the wealthy and professionals owned cars. Poorer households did not have a car and the bicycle was still a very important form of mass transit. Many smaller farmers did not own a tractor and draught animals were still common. I also remember a few people were still using handcarts and wheelbarrows to carry cargo on the roads.

The Horse - beautiful but expensive

No one used horses as personal transport. Those without cars used bicycles, small motor bikes or they walked. Apart from the fox hunting horses of the rich and the gentry, there were heavy draught horses and they were used exclusively to haul heavy loads and do heavy farm work like ploughing and mowing. Asses were used for lighter loads and work like getting turf out of the bog.

Horses particularly hard working heavy draught horses are very expensive. They need a lot of ground for grazing, when working hard, like when plowing they need grain, which required more acres to grow. An old farmer told me the first tractor he bought freed up one third of his land for human food production.

A tractor when not in use can be left unattended and costs nothing. A draught animal needs food and attention 365 days a years. They are prone to health problems and can be difficult to get into foal, this all takes time. They need a lot of land and a lot of labour, and in this way they consume a lot of renewable energy.

The Bicycle - practical and cheap

Compared to a horse a bicycle is cheap in both energy and time. A bicycle can travel a lot further and faster in a day than a horse and will consume less energy doing so. Like a tractor when not in use it has no cost and needs no attention. It is also a lot more energy efficient than walking and a human can carry a lot more cargo on a bicycle than on foot. Humans are unlikely to give up the bicycle, for walking or riding a horse over distances.

A neighbour who is an expert horse trainer and breeder told me his father, who was also a horseman, would go long journeys to horse fairs in the 1950s to buy good draught horses he could sell close to home at a profit. He did not go on a horse, nor did he walk, or take the train, he rode a bicycle. If he bought a horse, it walked  home beside the bicycle, even poorer Irish horse farmer in the 1950s travelled by bicycle not by horse.

Even when fossil fuels are all gone in some distant future, steel could be made in solar furnaces and water turbines could power machine tools and all those scrap cars will provide lots of metal to recycle for making bicycles. People may end up riding heavy steel bikes on gravel or dirt paths in the future as they do today in rural Africa.

The Rising Cost of Motoring

I came across an interesting article on walesonline.co.uk about the decline in car driving in Wales. Until 2007 the miles driven by Welsh motorists had been increasing, with a record 13.9 billion miles covered that year. By 2010 that had fallen to 13.3 billion miles. A similar trend is happening all over the UK with a 3% decline in “car use” since the peak and a 15% increase in cycling. The cause is the rising price of fuel. Motoring is becoming more expensive.

In the late 1990s during the dot com bubble, I worked for a Dublin based dot com business. I worked mostly from home, but had to go to Dublin at least once a week, a return journey of 130 miles. At the time I was driving a 1300 cc Toyota Starlet, from empty the fuel tank could be filled for ten Irish pounds. If I drove for economy this would take me to Dublin and back twice. So my daily commute of 130 miles cost me five pounds, the equivalent of perhaps six euros now.

Our 1996 Nissan Micra

My mother still drives that same car and she tell me it now takes about 40 euros to fill it with fuel. On this basis car fuel is almost three and half time more expensive now than it was in the late 1990s. If I were still doing the same commute today it would now cost me twenty euros on fuel alone. Throw in new road toll charges and higher parking charges and it would now cost at least five times more to do that 130 mile commute than it did in the late 1990s. Luckily I no longer have to commute to Dublin.

We now drive a 1996 Nissan Micra, a small and very light car (750 kg) with a 1000 cc engine. When driven carefully on a long journey it is possible to get close to seventy miles a gallon with it. With insurance and car tax also cheap, this is about as cheap as modern motoring comes.

But like the average UK driver we are cutting our mileage as much as possible. I now use a bicyle for all short journeys. The nearest village is two miles away, this is where our local shop, bank, post office, filling station and pub are. I no longer use the car to travel there unless I need to carry something heavy home. I have weaned myself off the ridiculous habit of doing short journeys in a car.

I use the bike for going to the pub, to visit friends and go to parties in the local area. These events often involve the consumption of alcohol and I sometimes end up over the legal limit for taking a vehicle on a public road. The beauty of the bike over the car, is that I can push it home.