A bicycle built for a better world (John Burke speech)

[phantom power]

Link to John Burke's speech at youtube (23 minutes):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfRiFylmiS0

I thought the article's author made some interesting points about the complexity of the modern globalized bike industry. But it's still worth noting that (globalized or not) the supply chain for a bicycle is at least two orders of magnitude more simple than the supply chain for an automobile. Likewise the manufacturing cost in natural resources.

At the Taipei International Cycle Show in March 2007, John Burke, president of the Trek Bicycle Corp., gave an address arguing that if bicycle manufacturers wanted to expand sales, they would have to do more than just focus on the old standbys of marketing and new product innovation. They would have to become evangelists for "a bicycle friendly world."

(...)

Burke recalled how in the early 1990s, bicycle advocates used to come to him asking for money, "and I would shoo them away -- no thank you, I've got other things that I need to worry about -- then I figured it out in 1997: We're going to support these people and we're going to support advocacy." Now, says Burke, Trek spends $2 million a year aiming to encourage bike-friendly infrastructure.

"What we really need to understand is this fact: This is the fastest way you can grow this business and the biggest way that we can have an impact on society. Creating a bicycle-friendly world is a very good thing."

"The bicycle is a simple solution to a complicated problem."

(...)

Which makes the bicycle a complicated solution to a complicated problem. A bicycle made in Taiwan by Giant or Trek or Specialized is an integral cog of the global economy, even when it is being ridden by a hippie in Berkeley pulling a Burley trailer full of locally grown organic produce behind him. You may help reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil by riding a bike, but you're a long way from opting out of the world-annihilating industrial megacomplex. Bikes are high-tech products manufactured according to the latest advances in metallurgical and plastics sciences in robot-run factories connected to globe-spanning supply chains and taking advantage of the differentials in labor costs between the developed and developing world. There's nothing at all simple about the role Taiwan plays in the world economy, or how modern manufacturing processes enable precision machined parts from scores of countries to be assembled together and delivered to a bike store near you. I'm all for a more bike-friendly world, where every road has a bike lane (or at least a wide shoulder) and every city goes the extra mile to welcome bikers with open arms. But let's not pretend that there's something simple, or bucolic, about what we're doing. It's darn complicated and only getting more so.

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/05/22/trek/print.html

[lfairban]

1. Infrastructure improvement is key.

As a result of a local bike path, I was able to use my bike as the fastest point to point transportation to work. It was faster and cheaper than driving a car or using the bus.

If I used a car, I would have needed to park in a lot over a block away. Cost for the lot was about $80 per month plus the cost of operating the car. The bus cost about $28 per month, and was a good alternative in the winter, but when conditions got real bad, the bus schedules were unreliable, and their was still a one block walk on each end, which is about as good as you can expect.

I could park the bike right outside the front door of the office building and in the garage at home which meant that when I used the bike path for about 70% of the commute, made it the fastest alternative by a few minutes, and I didn't need to master the bus schedules.

It worked for me.

[Kolesar]

2. Four bearing sets, sprockets, brakes and a freewheel

Does not seem that complex to me. The savings in resources to produce such a vehicle is obvious to me.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Yeah, the basic design is over a century old

A basic bicycle could be made in any country (producing the steel from iron ore is probably the most complicated part). Sure, you can put all sorts of bells and whistles on them, and use different materials to save a few kg here and there, but bikes are only complicated when there's a marketing opportunity for that.

[Dead_Parrot]

4. Compare and contrast...

From the OP:
Bikes are high-tech products manufactured according to the latest advances in metallurgical and plastics sciences in robot-run factories connected to globe-spanning supply chains and taking advantage of the differentials in labor costs between the developed and developing world.

From Wikipedia:
The first mechanically-propelled 2-wheel vehicle was believed to have been built by Kirkpatrick MacMillan, a Scottish blacksmith, in 1839.link

Ho hum.