Nothing’s Ever Free
Last year I discovered I had unlimited access to the entirety of Scotland—and for only a small down payment of £35 a day! No, this wasn’t Scottish public transport (which I also love); it was the E-Car Club. E-Car Club is a company based only in St. Andrews that provides affordable electric cars. Unlike other rental companies, it requires that you only be 19, and that you have any valid international licence for over a year. This, at first appeared to be a God-send. It took out so many barriers for me to travel Scotland: age, experience, time spent on a bus. It had utter simplicity. Yet, at the same time, it was not exactly what it was touted to be. Sometimes cars didn’t have their charge card or have full charge. Sometimes Scottish electric charging stations in the remote Cairngorms were out of commission. One horror story had my friend getting towed out of the Highlands at 3am on 0% charge. It’s a give and take.
I think Grootveld’s White Bicycle plan is similar. Initially, I thought to myself, “What a wonderful idea! It’s a transportation utopia!” Congestion and smoke are clearly not the best way to go about travelling the city. His creation is akin to Uber, CitiBike or E-Car Club: it capitalises on minimalism and ease.
When I watched the video again, however, scrutiny kicked in. I am cautious to believe that the white bikes, like E-Car, were completely ‘simple’. Surely there would be fights over whose white bike it is; whose time it is to take a turn; who, perhaps, broke the bike? Would there be total lawlessness? Even over such a small issue like bicycles, anarchic disorder cannot reign free. Society is so much more complex—it needs laws. Eventually utopia can lead to dystopia without the correct checks and balances of a governing body.
Besides these concerns, one word in particular made me further unconvinced of Grootveld’s creation: ‘purity’. ‘Purity’ engenders the concept of ‘virtuous’. As a realist, no-one’s actions or concerns can ever be ‘pure’—there is always a caveat. You need only read about Grootveld’s movement Provo’s other concerning missions to see him as anything but virtuous. While his bicycle plan seems benign, he also proposed parenting in couples of five and actively encouraged squatting in empty buildings—plans that innately erode the social fabric that has taken millennia to decide.
The bikes present a microcosm anarchy’s larger failings: there needs to be responsibility attached to any phenomena of society. We can’t rely on humans to be morally pure and return the bikes without having been tampered, repainted, or broken. Unlike the bicycles, E-Car at least has some form of logistical legal accountability, based in the fact that they will charge you money for any wrongdoing—although at times such responsibility is shirked by users without consequence. It still frustrates me to find an uncharged car, but at least I can call and complain. Ultimately, nothing is ever that simple.
