Building a Bridge with Bikes

One of my favorite bike routes has been closed for 100 days since a bridge is being replaced. The bridge crosses Big Creek along Robinson Road in Chardon Township. The road is very lightly traveled and is poorly maintained especially in that area. The bridge cost $1.5M. It's got a steel frame and concrete deck. I think most of the cost and time for the project went into building the footings on either side of the river. They used a piledriver to shove huge steel plates into the ground, welded them together, then poured a concrete pad on top. It's all pretty impressive.

The bridge shows how difficult it is to down-scale the civilization tool kit. When you build a bridge or a road, it has to be able to carry 60,000 pound excavators and concrete trucks because you need those pieces of equipment to build bridges and roads.

If everyone used bicycles to travel, that problem would persist even though the weight of each passenger vehicle is very small. The bikes only exist in the first place because of all the industrial infrastructure that enables the mass production of the materials involved in building a bike frame, seatpost, etc... The production of simple components like a bicycle crank or the gearing involves mega machinery and vast mining and material processing infrastructure.

Obviously, maintaining the roads for bicycles requires a bunch of heavy equipment and resources as well. The bikes-only infrastructure will last much longer and cost less per passenger, but is light duty and not productive, which is a major downside. The per-unit cargo cost of a road that carries 18 wheeler tractor-trailers is probably way lower than some implausible bike cargo scheme--that'd be an interesting thought experiment to carry out.