Ivan Illich once wrote…

A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the
coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-
calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could
now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing
also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel — probably the
last of the great Neolithic inventions — finally to become useful for
self-powered mobility.

Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries
one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending
0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient
than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he
performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses
or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made
its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent
and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time
budgets outside the home or the encampment.

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the
pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries
one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of
only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match
man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with
this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but
all other animals as well.

The ball-bearing signaled a true crisis, a true political choice. It
created an option between more freedom in equity and more speed. The
bearing is an equally fundamental ingredient of two new types of
locomotion, respectively symbolized by the bicycle and the car. The
bicycle lifted man’s auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which
progress is theoretically not possible. In contrast, the accelerating
individual capsule enabled societies to engage in a ritual of
progressively paralyzing speed.

Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also
cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable
bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the
purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed
to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure
tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price
differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle
system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense
traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not
thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on
cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man’s radius without shunting
him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can
usually push it.

The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in
the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space
devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size
to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated
trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars,
and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these
vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to
door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his
choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred.

Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up
significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend
fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They
can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting
undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become
masters of their own movements without blocking those of their
fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also
satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on
space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows
people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their
life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being,
without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern
self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic
runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to
pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the
evidence for their claim.

This passage is found in Toward a History of Needs