In 1996 I moved to New York City from the Bay Area because I wanted to get rid of my car.  

Living in my car depresses me. I miss people too much. I find myself wondering about the people in the other cars.  I try to see what was going on behind the tinted windows at the stoplight. I wave, and sometimes people wave back.  But the illusion of separateness is exhausting.

A bicycle rider is not anti-social.  When I am riding I (usually) am not on a phone, I’m not listening to the radio. I’m paying attention, so I’m right here, right now.  I’m flying, I’m not thinking about anything.  I forget myself completely.

I have never seen two bicycle riders getting into an argument. On a bike there is a pay-off for being polite.  A bicycle rider has a certain amount of inherent dignity because of this.

Bicycles can be gorgeous.   Most people remember the deep love they felt for their first Schwinn or Huffy. Later on someone suckered them into buying a lousy aluminum hybrid or mountain bike, and the love was gone. But there are plenty of beautiful bikes out there.

There has been a lot of focus in the last ten years on the evils of automobile pollution, but this is really not really the major problem with cars.   The much bigger issue is that cars isolate us from one another.   Each driver lives in her own little rolling castle, with shaded windows and locked doors — on the phone and with the radio on. Drawbridge up, nobody home.

More recently we moved to a large town in Montana (small enough to walk end to end) — and then to a small city in Colorado because of its bike paths.  We’re moving to Amsterdam next month, a city with more bicycles per square meter than anywhere else in the world.

The absolute best way to live is in a city or town or neighborhood that is no bigger than distance that one can comfortably bicycle from end to end.  Then we may can choose to live most of our lives (work, play, friends, food) within that area. Subways count too, of course.

But to get from one place to another very quickly, without losing ourselves, a bicycle is the very best.