Bike-bashing article engenders quick response from professors
(by Stuart Clement at BikeSA)
A bike-bashing article written by journalist Michael Duffy and published in last Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald has prompted a reply from two eminent professors in Sydney. John Pucher is professor of urban planning at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and visiting professor, Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at the University of Sydney.
Adrian Bauman is professor of public health at Sydney University. Both were prompted to respond to the contention that it is time that bikes should be removed from our road network. The reasons given in the article for such a proposal are sophistic, at best misleading, and likely to have been fuelled by a desire to be mischievous.
The usual response to such an article is a considered and sustained revelation of the need for and place of cycling in Sydney, Australia and other parts of the world; this is indeed the Professors’ response.
The original article can be seen here.
The Professors’ response is here.
One of the more specious claims in the original article is that cycling increases pollution on our roads due to delays caused to motor vehicles by cyclists. Pucher and Bauman are experts in their fields of urban planning and public health but are not as versed in the environmental consequences of road traffic as Dr Rocco Zito and Dr Stu Clement at the University of South Australia.
They comment that Duffy, while being theoretically correct in asserting that motor vehicles of the internal combustion engine variety will emit more pollutants by being briefly delayed by cyclists than if they were delayed by other vehicles (assuming no increase in vehicle numbers should cyclists be banned!) fails to acknowledge two critical reasons for actively increasing bicycle use. Firstly that the increase in pollutants expounded by Duffy would not register on a measurement of the daily total motor vehicle pollutant output in any Australian town or city.
Second, the saving in emissions by that one cyclist preferring to ride rather than drive more than makes up for any increase due to that cyclist being on the road marginally delaying motor vehicles. Further, Duffy does not acknowledge that if all cyclists were to travel by motor vehicle (most would gravitate towards cars) the resulting pollution increase, not to mention congestion increase, would make urban road networks very unpleasant much sooner than currently anticipated.
John Pucher can be heard as he visits Adelaide to deliver the keynote address at the 2nd Thinking on Two Wheels Cycling Conference on 16 January 2006 at the Adelaide Hilton.
