The many benefits of a bicycle

We travel the road to human development at the speed of a bicycle, argued Ivan Illich, who saw the humble machine as one of humanity’s finest ideas. You can keep your ChatGPT and your genome sequencing. For opportunity and empowerment, there’s no technology as powerful as a bike and everybody should have one.

That’s what Illich thought, and he’d have been encouraged by the results of a pioneering study in Zambia. Bike ownership has been assessed in a randomised controlled trial for the first...