Move yourself. Move others. Move across time and space. Überfahr investigates the people, technologies, innovations, laws, trends, solutions and systems that help move our urban centers to a post-automobile reality.

The bicycle and cycling culture are the current ingredients that flavor Überfahr. This will change as innovation catches up to the massive and massively subsidized automobile industry and all of its impact. From the violence that permeates our streets and daily lives, to the choking fumes and poisonous gases that envelop our planet; the automobile is a deadly and expensive form of transportation that corrodes our daily life with crushing cash layouts, noise, congestion, and general violence.

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving” – albert einstein

From our primordial selves and our competitive advantage as diurnal long-distance runners able to hunt and avoid being hunted by nocturnal predators, to our ability to harness local energy from our existing very local source – our bodies; we are whole. Brain and body.

As is our brain to our tools, so might be our body to our energy sources and resources. And so might the body and the brain continue to intertwine in perpetual motion. But not as factory workers in some interior caverns of degradation or as office slugs, no less interior or bodily degrading. Rather, as upright, moving, environmentally connected natural and proud human selves.

There is a fundamental shift before us. We seem mostly unaware that America’s earliest paved roads, shortly after the Civil War, were created for bicycle transportation and that this pre-dated the automobile. Even as late as 1997, the bicycle moved more people and things on this planet earth than any other transportation type. This timeline also parallels the rise of the bicycle in the 1850s-1890s and the rise of the automobile, not much later, in the 1900s.

These are all clues to where we will be going, without a doubt. We will soon see incredible technological innovations of human-powered and human-assisted transport technologies that are more convenient much more economical and practical. This will then demand a recalibration of our current, near 100% allocation of roads and highways to motorized vehicles, in contrast to non-motorized/human-powered/assisted transport units.

Early data on the scant research being done on the role of the bicycle indicates that when bicycles are a critical part of the transportation infrastructure, positive phenomena results: more jobs are created than building highways or roads; accident rates drop amongst all transportation and moving types – automobile accidents, bike accidents, pedestrian accidents, related; and there is reason to believe that people who enjoy daily bicycle exercise are healthier than people who do not exercise.

The video below is part of the story. We intend to follow this entire story – for the ride.

“The bicycle is such a success because it makes people’s lives easier.“

The Bicycle City. Trailer from Greg Sucharew on Vimeo.