Today is the first day of spring. We’ve had an unseasonably, unreasonably warm winter, the kind that almost makes you wonder if there’s any point in the seasons changing at all, but the air still feels different. Trees are budding, flowers are shrugging up from the mulch; the air is no longer the weak, itchy warm of this dud winter but the full, sensual warm of proper spring. A Goldilocks warmth that makes you walk outside and think, “Mmm, delicious.”

When the season turns, when the sun is once again in my homeboy Aries, when the guns come out, there are a few things I reliably get a hankering for:

1. A gin and tonic

2. Honey cakes to honor my half-assed paganism

3. Riding a bicycle

Of these three, it is riding a bike that surely sparks the most joy (or, at least, the longest-lasting joy). All of those springy things I described above—the trees, the flowers, the sexy warm air—are even more enjoyable from atop a bicycle. The trees and flowers rush pleasantly past while you move slowly enough to enjoy looking at them. The air glides over your skin and whispers through your hair (via the holes in your helmet, of course). On a nice day, when the weather is good, I swear “What a Wonderful World” plays in invisible speakers overhead when I’m riding a bike.

My neighborhood just barely meets the threshold of “walkable.” The nearest grocery store is a 20-minute walk from my home; you can get to a library branch, medical offices, and places to buy sweet treats in about the same amount of time. But to reach any of these destinations you have to walk through a lot of residential zoning—a bunch of the same, with little to no visual interest on your journey. This same-ness makes the trip feel longer, less rewarding. You could technically get most things you need on foot, but it’s not quite the 15-minute city of urbanists’ dreams. It doesn’t have that je ne sais quoi* of an old European city that makes you think “I could live here” during your vacation.

But when you add a bike to the picture, things change. The neighborhood performs a tesseract and wrinkles everything toward you. The 20-minute walk to the library becomes a 5-minute bike ride. The destination that was too far to walk is now an easy 10–20 minutes by bike. The dream of the 15-minute city is, for the frequent cyclist, a bit closer to reality.

The bicycle must be one of the best things people have invented. It is peak transportation technology, augmenting the human body just enough to generate a huge increase in speed. And it has been pretty good at this for over a century: It went through quite an evolution in its earliest days—the precursor to the bicycle, the velocipede, was essentially one of those toddler balance bikes but for adults; and let us not forget the absurd whimsy of the pennyfarthing—but by the 1890s had reached more or less the form it maintains today. (Fun fact: It was a Black inventor, Isaac R. Johnson, who patented a bicycle design that was the first to employ the diamond frame, which remains the most popular frame type everywhere in the world except for the Netherlands.**)

And while the bicycle has always done a good job of augmenting the pedestrian, that boost to speed and scale has not been enough to keep up with our built environment, particularly in the U.S. where the car is king. Three miles is about my limit for what I consider a manageable distance to travel by bike (for transportation purposes; recreation is a different thing), but a lot of stuff in this bloated, stroad-ridden city is more than three miles away. Denver, like many other American cities that grew up in the age of the automobile, is designed to make you dependent on the car. But a recent development in the bicycle can help you kick that habit: Enter the e-bike.

If a basic, acoustic bicycle enables “walking but faster,” an e-bike introduces “driving but better.” And it truly is better. Aside from the sensory pleasures to be had, riding a bike—even an e-bike—lacks pretty much all of the social and environmental harms that driving a car inflicts on communities. A bike doesn’t fart planet-warming fumes into the air. It causes much less damage and wear on roads, to the tune of several orders of magnitude. A cyclist hasn’t killed anyone in Denver (to my knowledge, ever), while motorists killed 93 people in 2025 alone.

In cities, and probably most suburbs, e-bikes could replace cars more than half the time. I mean this literally: More than half of all car trips in the U.S. are less than six miles. Six miles may be a bit long for a regular bike, but it’s a very easy distance when there’s a motor involved. Where carbon emissions from transportation are concerned, one of the best things you can do for the environment is not to switch to an electric car but to get an e-bike: Worldwide, e-bikes displace four times as much demand for oil as electric cars. Smaller purchase, much bigger environmental payoff.

I’m not saying an e-bike is an accessible option to everyone. They’re expensive! They’re just not nearly as expensive as a car. And the people making all those short daily trips by car are more likely to be able to afford the investment in an e-bike than the people already using transit, cycling, or walking for daily transportation. Some may even find that they don’t need the electric version—that the good old-fashioned bicycle that Elliott used to move E.T. around is sufficient for their needs.

I am saying that the bicycle (e- or otherwise) is a liberating machine. A bike doesn’t require a license to operate or government registration to own. A bike offers door-to-door service where a car consigns you to parking lots and garages. When the street is clotted with traffic and cars are obliged to come to a halt, the bike, small and nimble, can keep moving. And, of course, the amount you ride a bike is inversely correlated with how much gas you have to buy—which, thanks to the hateful actions of unloved men, may make you feel fabulously wealthy right about now.

Humming gently beneath all these considerations is the feeling. On a nice day, with few hills or hazards, riding a bike is bliss. But even in suboptimal conditions, it feels better than driving a car. To drive a car is to insulate yourself, isolate yourself, from the community you live in. You get in, close the door, and the world shrinks down to the size of your vehicle. The air you breathe is yours alone. Through the windows, most of what you see is not other people, but other cars, their drivers obscured behind the glare of windshields. These cars are obstacles in your path, if not your mortal enemies. And at some point the realization may hit you that you are one of these faceless others. It is an experience of profound alienation.

But when you ride a bike, there’s no metal or glass to cut you off from the rest of the world. You’re in it with everyone else. You can call out to people to let them know you’re passing, or even stop to say hello. Last fall, as a cyclist was coming up behind me, I tried to pull my dog over to the side of the path and grunted “you dumb dog” as she fought me. The cyclist passed us right then, laughed, and said, “What did you call me?” That was hilarious. The winter before, a teenage girl on a bicycle complimented my hat as she rode by. That was thrilling.

These are moments that car-centric infrastructure has taken away from us but bicycles can give back. And when you add them up, they can mean the difference between a broken world and a better one.

Footnotes

* Actually, je sais exactly quoi. It’s just a city designed for people instead of cars. We should’ve stopped building cities as soon as the car was invented, but alas. Here we are, standing in the middle of a parking lot that could’ve been paradise.

** Another fun fact: There was an all-Black 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps that, in 1897, did an experimental ride from Missoula to St. Louis to test the bicycle’s suitability for Army operations. Most people will claim that the bike wasn’t widely adopted by the military because trucks came along soon after, but I contend that the pure whimsy inherent in riding a bicycle is fundamentally incompatible with war.

Recommended reading:

• The sharp, formidable, and pissed-off Christine Grimaldi recently launched her newsletter, Vendetta, which will “explore the intersection of the personal and the political through essays, discussions, and the ‘Grudge of the Week.’” Amazing! Exciting! Subscribe!

• “Everyone, at some point in the chain, is extracting marginally decreasing value from one another.” I really liked this piece on the logic of extraction, which to me was a different way of thinking about enshittification, more focused on the people than the products.

• Bad housing design has turned us into bad neighbors: “Inside our private abodes, space to accommodate our vast selection of screens now takes precedence over in-person human connection as a chief design consideration. The rise of the internet and mobile devices has changed our daily habits and how we move through our neighbourhoods as well. Many of us, myself included, purposefully plug into a podcast or browse social media in order to avoid having to make small talk with the strangers in our midst.”