Here are a few words of cycling inspiration on a grey November morning:

"When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes
monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just
mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything
but the ride you are taking."

Arthur Conan Doyle, Scientific American, 1896

"The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the
impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this
tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other
animals as well. Bicycles let people move with
greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or
time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile
and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological
breakthroughs without putting undue claims
on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own
movements without blocking those of their
fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy.
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."

Energy and Equity. by Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs

These are taken from one of the most informative cycling statistics pages I have
ever come across on the internet:

http://www.bikebiz.co.uk/infozone/stats.php

This one massive web page contains hundreds of interesting statistics about
cycling world wide, and is definitely worth a
read. Some of the information is annotated with the source, but I wish more of
it had a reference. Still it gives an
interesting overview of the state of cycling in the world in 2004.

Perhaps the most depressing statistic is this one:

The Chinese domestic market for bicycles is about 22-25 million per year, down
from a peak of 40 million just a few years
ago. Thanks to government policies of promoting cars and discouraging cycling,
cycle use in China is plummeting, down to 20
percent of all trips, compared to 33 percent in 1995. The Chinese Bicycle
Association (CBA) is a branch of China Light
Industrial, a government ministry, and its leaders toe the party line, viewing
the removal of bikes lanes as a necessary
measure for accommodating increasing car use. In Beijing, only 20 percent of
commuters rode bikes in 2002, compared to 60
percent in 1998.

What a mad world! We rides bikes mostly made in China and campaign to have
cycling infrastructure improved, and in China
they remove cycle lanes to make space for the vast increase in
motorists..............

Time to re-read the Arthur Conan Doyle quote above.

Craig