Mr Geller spoke to more than 100 people at the University of Melbourne and then repeated his story about the transformative value of cycling again two days later as the keynote speaker at Melbourne’s Bike Futures conference.
Portland is in every way different from Shepparton, but the essence of Mr Geller’s message migrates without any lessening of its worth.
Shepparton, along with all other communities, has evolved around the mobility allowed by the motor car and easy access to cheap fossil fuels and in a time when there was no knowledge of, and therefore interest in, such things as climate change.
All that has changed – oil is becoming scarcer so will, in the foreseeable future, become impossibly expensive and it is now clearly understood that human actives are impacting on our climate.
Cycling can play a significant role in easing those difficulties.
Portland did not have any sort of real cycling culture 20 years ago, but now 10 per cent of “Portlanders” consider cycling as the prime means of transport.
In a city of nearly 600 000 that is a significant number and retailers, about 130 of them, reacting to the social change have asked for on-street car parking in front of their shops to be replaced by bicycle parking, “corrals” as they are described .
Portland has 500 km of developed bikeways, both on-road lanes and specific bake paths, and every day they are busy with commuters on bicycles traveling about the city.
Those developed bikeways cost about $60 million, which is equivalent in cost of two kilometers of traditional inner-city freeway.
The savings in road costs are obvious and with research illustrating most car trips are just six kilometres and as bicycles travel nearly as fast as a car, they save money and help the environment, and beyond that cycling boosts our broader wellbeing.
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