Maybe they're on to something...

A Bangladeshi "van"

     During one of my field visits, I met a family that was proud to say that one of their sources of income was having a "van" for transporting goods or people for money. They lived in a bamboo hut with woven walls, and I wondered where they got the money for a van. When I looked around the corner, I saw what they meant - it was a three wheeled bicycle outfitted with a wooden platform and raised seats on the sides for people to sit.
     I was struck by how, all over Bangladesh, most of the rikshas were man-powered bicycles, not the Bajaj style motor-driven three wheelers I was used to seeing in India and Nepal, in the 1990's. The pollution caused by these motor-driven rikshas was terrible. The worst I saw was in Kathmandu, where they had inherited the older, more polluting rikshas no longer usable in India.
     The riksha drivers I saw in Bangladesh were all skin and bones and were pulling heavy loads on crowded streets alongside motorcycles, cars, buses, and trucks.  As a passenger, I was terrified. But I had that feeling pretty much no matter what form of transportation I took over there. 

A Bangladeshi "school bus"

      It's no doubt, hard work driving these converted bicycles, more than what I'm used to seeing (or doing) in western countries. But then I thought, maybe the Bangladeshi's are on to something. It's hard work, but it's work. There is less mechanics to break down compared to a motorized vehicle. There is no expense for fuel. The man-powered vehicles are so much cheaper than the motorized kind, which are so pricey, the drivers have to pay to rent them, further cutting in to their already small profits.
     This blog post was originally inspired by a bio-fueled motorcycle developed in Japan by a toilet manufacturer Toto (Toilet Bike Neo), but I guess I got a little off track. This idea that we, as a society, don't need to be confined to using fossil fuels, and the countries that  are able to produce them. I can't imagine that bike powered riksha taxis or school busses are something that work in America - at least not anywhere in America that I've lived. And even the switch to bio-fuels will take a lot of lobbying and discussion. But the ideas are out there, you just need to know where to look.