"Two Wheels Good" Semi-Review
What I wish this book had gotten into more deeply, and a question it made me wrestle with
I just finished listening to Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle, by Jody Rosen. This is not exactly a review, because I listened to it as an audiobook and couldn’t take proper notes. But I wanted to write about it a bit and discuss some conceptual issues that it raised.
I thought the title, to start, was funny. Rosen notes that it’s a bit self-righteous, but while it’s an affirmation, it also calls to mind the fact that the slogan on which it’s based was repeated mindlessly by the sheep. So, to a cynical anti-bicycle reader, the title sounds like it is suggesting “Bicyclists are mindless sheep.” (Which of course I don’t think.)
There’s a lot in the book that is basically straight history: a bunch of engineering and design stuff, extended bits on various uses of the bicycle—in a Canadian gold rush, in the mountainous Bhutan, in a whimsical cross-country mass bike ride in 1976 dubbed the “Bikecentennial.”
The thing that stood out to me, from my broad “conservative urbanist” perspective, was the culture war stuff, and the ways in which, apparently going back more or less to the beginning, the bicycle was seen as somehow upsetting the social order, making women immodest or uppity, and being a fancy toy for lazy elites.
It’s kind of striking, Rosen observes, that these impressions can be traced from the bicycle’s initial wave of popularity in Europe to today’s cranky right-wing bike skeptics (he quotes P.J. O’Rourke taking a swipe at the bike, though perhaps takes him too seriously).
It is kind of striking. Initially Rosen seems to dismiss all of those ideas, especially that the bike is an instrument of sexual liberation. He roasts right-wing puritanical critiques of the bicycle and at times makes lefty bicycle activism sound a bit absurd.
One chapter is entirely composed of newspaper snippets from the 1800s and early 1900s, from Europe, Canada, and the United States, about the various alleged social problems caused by bikes. I think those snippets are meant to sound ridiculous, and to make the allegations sound ridiculous.
But then, chapters on bike activism and the bicycle and sexuality (very not-safe-for-work) return to some of these ideas and sort of confirm them from the left.