I was idly scrolling through Twitter the other day when I saw the question “What is the most under-rated invention?” answered by the Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb with “the bicycle”. My heart leapt with joyous agreement.

Regular readers know I’m a cycling obsessive – in a typical week, I’ll spend 3-6 hours in the saddle rising to 6+ hours a day on one of my bikepacking trips (and 18 hours once because I am nuts). The freedom, the peace, the sheer joy at moving under your own steam – you can’t beat it. There’s a quip in cycling circles that the real reason why cyclists get so much hate on social media is that “the bicycle gives you the freedom that auto ads promise.”

But did you know that the bicycle is the most efficient machine ever invented? It is said that if you converted the food calories burnt into the fuel equivalent, your efficiency would be 3000 miles per gallon (Bill Strickland). Per calorie, you get five times more distance out of a bike than a human walking, and it’s (much) more efficient than a salmon swimming or a pigeon flying (according to a famous 1973 study by Vance A. Tucker of Duke University). Of all the various personal choice options to decarbonise, giving up the car for a bike is by far the easiest and most fun.

So given the humble bicycle is cheap, green, efficient and healthy, why do we make it so bloody difficult for cyclists here in the UK? The easiest way to persuade anyone that cycling infrastructure is terrible is to take them for a ride across an urban centre. When the blood returns to their faces, they’ll be convinced of the problems – pot holes, broken glass, traffic, junctions designed solely for motor vehicles, painted cycle lanes (both times I’ve been knocked off my bike by a motorist, I was on a painted cycle lane and I had right of way) – I could go on. People who think these are intractable problems have never been to Amsterdam or Copenhagen.

What can organisations do? Lots. Provide convenient and secure cycle storage, lockers, showers, pay mileage, subscribe to cycle to work schemes, host free maintenance sessions (many people have bikes sat in sheds crying out for a little TLC), run team building exercises, provide cargobikes on loan, redesign their estates to allow safe entry and exit, lobby local authorities for segregated cycle lanes in the vicinity, persuade leaders to be seen to cycle to work.

Make cycling normal and make the world a better place.