PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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4.6.2 Renunciation as a Framework for EU Transport Policy
”El socialismo puede llegar sólo en bicicleta.”
José Antonio Viera-Gallo
Assistant Secretary of Justice in the government of Salvador Allende
With regard to transport aspects of the renunciation frameworks, the bicycle is
both the symbolic and real-life champion of this approach. Non-motorized transport
means zero-emission transport. More importantly, the production of bicycles is much
less resource intensive than the production of cars and other high-tech self-propelled
vehicles. One group within the ecology movement that has particularly focused on the
role of transportation and on the automobile in the industrial society is Ivan Illich and his
circle of friends. Widely regarded as one of the founding thinkers of the ecology
movement, Illich’s approach differs from purely eco-centric approaches in its explicit
focus on social and equity aspects of industrialization. Illich was convinced that “high
quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical
milieu”. 57 He was also a fierce advocate of cycling, arguing that the bicycle is in fact a
much more efficient means of transportation than any other mode. His basic argument,
made in the mid-seventies and reiterated by countless sustainable transport advocates
since, is simple:
The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car …. to get
7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation
industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they
allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per
cent.
57 This quote is from a series of text extracts from “Energy and Equity” available in the Ivan Illich Archives
of the University of Edinburgh’s Cognitive Science department under
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/.