For a richer and longer life – get on your bike

YOU KNOW WHAT, if I took two thin wheels, each about 60cm in diameter, and if then I connected these two wheels together,
with a cunning arrangement of steel tubes, and then stood the resulting contraption with the wheels upright, I don’t think any reasonable person would believe that you could mount it, that anyone could, even a child, and with a little practice remain upright
and moving without touching the ground with your feet.
If I were then to add a nifty set of pedals and a chain, you would in effect have a bicycle, which if you think about it is one of the most unlikely inventions ever. An unlikely invention, to be sure, but an incredibly efficient machine.
So, why don’t we use bicycles every day? Why don’t we see scores of bicycles every morning, firstly with kids going to school, and then with workers going to work? Our weather in Vryheid can’t be an impediment, and unless you live up the hill, then Vryheid’s fairly flat, so why don’t we see bicycles in our streets?
We might see, of an evening, a handful of wannabe Lance Armstrongs (hopefully without the dope) pedaling round town doing their own little Tour de Kans (jy vat ‘n kans met die taxis), but they’re doing it for sport, not to save hundreds of rands worth of petrol getting to work.
I dunno, what is it? One of the first things we teach our kids when they’re little is to ride a bike, and off they go, with or without the little training wheels, and then later, we take them to school in the car! I asked someone who was recently a pupil at one of our high schools if any of the kids cycled to school every day, and she looked at me as if I was daft. “It isn’t cool,” she said, to be seen on a bicycle. “Cool”? What’s “cool” got to do with it?
Listen, despite their reputation for being “soft” on drugs, the Dutch I think are one of the least “cool” nations. It’s difficult to be “cool” when your national colour is orange, you’re wearing wooden shoes, you’re eating raw herrings and your national hero
stuck a rigid digit in a dyke. Nevertheless, there are almost as many bicycles in Holland as there are people – 16,500,000 to 16,652,000. Yep, in Holland 25% of trips to work are made by bicycle, and 27% of all trips to any destination take place on a bicycle (I presume that excludes dagga-induced trips, but who knows, maybe 27% also take place on bicycles).

And one thing I have discovered is that in the top 10 countries with the most bicycles per capita, eight of them are Western European – Belgium, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Denmark and Holland. I thought Nigeria and India might be
among the top 10, but they’re not.
And what do we know about those countries? Well, my guess is that the citizens of those countries live longer than people elsewhere in the world, and enjoy a better standard of living while they do so. That’s my guess, and my guess also is that some of
that is due to the fact that they don’t care that they’re not “cool” when they cycle to school or to work. And this is despite European winters, and despite that in the case of Switzerland there are a lot of mountains; the hills might even be alive with the sound of cyclists puffing their way up a slope.
The other two countries in the top 10 are China and Japan – number 10 and number 7 respectively. China has over 500-million bicycles. In Shanghai, China’s most populous city, 60% of local cyclists go to work on their bikes. They don’t care if it’s not “cool” either, and it might be a contributing reason why everything nowadays, and I mean everything, is now made in China.
In Japan, about 57% of the population own bicycles, and there are 10-million more bicycles sold there every year. TEN MILLION. Japan, I think, we can categorise as a prosperous nation, and yet they say that “more and more Japanese are taking up bicycling to work for health reasons and to avoid traffic jams and crowded trains”. And Japan, I believe, has the world’s highest life expectancy
– 82.73 years, according to the UN.
Is that a coincidence?
My folks bought me my first bike, I guess when I was in Standard IV, so I could ride to school, but like my school uniforms they bought a bigger size for me to grow into. My Dad had to bolt wooden blocks onto the pedals so I could reach them. Tell me that’s
not “cool”? But I virtually lived on my bike – a Phillips bicycle (with a three-speed), a name which disappeared when the company was brought out by the better-known Raleigh.
The only other bicycle name I can remember from then, the 1950s, is Humber which I understand was also brought out and then made by Raleigh. That’s Humber as in “Thomas Humber”, the car maker, as opposed to “Hamba lapah lo voetsak” which is self-explanatory. And then I sold my Phillips when we were living in Eshowe, and I’ve not been on a bike since. Why?

I’m probably not going to practise what I preach, but a return to cycling would do us no harm. We’d have more money to spend, saved from petrol and bus fares, and we’d

live longer. What’s wrong with that?