I bought a trek hybrid bicycle and have swapped a good chunk of my car-based daily commute with a train/bike based commute, as well as in "in-town" errands like going to the store with a bike ride.
I think first year physics students should have to ride a bike. It makes newtonian physics much more native. In our wonderful energy rich modern world, we USAians have faint ideas of, say Conservation of energy. However, it's easy, at least for people like me, who rely on auto/trains for their mobility become somewhat disassociated with the mechanics of life on planet earth: if you need more energy to increase your velocity, well, you simply push the accelerator button, and voila you are going much faster... And this entire concept of energy is somewhat displaced from you in this nice victorian way.
However, on a bike, you must come head to head with all the issues of mechanics in a non-relativistic frame on a very personal basis. For example, on most routes the path integral of energy is zero and conservative: if you go downhill at one point, you will have to go back uphill to get home. What that means is that the bike does not pedal itself: you have to provide the energy the whole damn time.
On a bike, you regularly must make concious decisions of vector cross products when weaving in and out of traffic. The concept of torque is no longer this hypothetical force that you associate the turning of lightbulbs with, but rather has very practical applications in your overall acceleration.
Also on a bike, you must came face to face with entropy: on my commute home, I go through an underpass which has a sharp downhill segment, and a corresponding uphill segment. As fun as it is to go downhill at really high speeds, you'll never fully overcome the uphill segment and will have to pedal really hard at what feels like the steepest part of the gradient. You will always be putting in more time in pedaling than coasting if you don't want to feel like a slow coasting slob in traffic.
I still haven't gotten the same sort of environmental self satisfaction from greening my life that I did when I became a vegetarian. Perhaps because I know that having fossil fuel transportation in one form or another, whether it is a car, plane, or train, will probably be a constant in my life for a very long time to come...
Posted by Da Mystik Homeboy at March 1, 2005 01:43 PM