PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five
times less energy in the process. … Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the
efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. Bicycles are not only
thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the
Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American
devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. … Eighteen bikes can be parked in the
place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single
automobile. 58
More importantly, however, Illich’s argument was also an anti-motorization plea
which asked people to renounce the temptation of increasingly accelerated lifestyles both
for environmental and social reasons (“Traffic nibbles away at lifetime”):
Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of
the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their
life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being,
without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered
traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never
proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try
to display the evidence for their claim. 59
Illich was one of the first thinkers to focus on “the contradiction implicit in the
joint pursuit of equity and industrial growth.” Since then, many of Illich’s colleagues and
friends have produced ecological treatises important in their own right. Wolfgang Sachs,
for example, has published numerous books and papers on the ecological and social
failures of our current transport systems. More generally, he has also propagated the
“virtue of enoughness” against the dominant approach of efficient resource management
(Sachs 1999b). Sachs’ perspective is particularly interesting because it updates Illich’s
fundamental argument about the need to decelerate traffic in a way that it results in a
powerful mix of ecological modernization, reflexive modernization and renunciation
“rationalities.” With Sachs, the renunciation of high-speed transport options appears as a
58 Excerpted from the Chapters “The Industrialization of Traffic” and “Degrees of Self-Powered Mobility”
in “Energy and Equity,” see http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/.
59 Ibid.