The Bike Lab’s premise is that the bicycle can be a tool to understand and fight structural injustice. Bike riders everywhere share the same experience of freedom and mobility, and that shared experience can break down barriers and create new connections across communities. The Gaza Sunbirds sponsored a global solidarity ride in support of aid to Palestine, which created controversy in the East Bay bike community.
I had the privilege to accompany Backwards Brian to the Climate Ride Green Fondo. I talked with some of the organizers about their decision to allow him to join after hearing about what happened with AIDS LIfeCycle. To Climate Ride’s credit, they were willing to sit with the discomfort for a while, and eventually let Brian do his thing. Can we foster that kind of inclusion throughout the bike world? I’m pretty sure we’d all benefit.
I got into a good rant at Oakland BPAC this month, on the topic of the Transforming Oakland’s Waterfront Neighborhoods (TOWN) project, the city’s attempt to give away millions of dollars in support of the cynical and extractive effort to let a billionaire (A’s owner John Fisher) enrich himself by building 3,000 luxury condos at Howard Terminal. I got annoyed, because the project ignores the East Oakland waterfront neighborhoods which really need infrastructure, but also because it looks like a bad idea on its own merits.
Public-private partnerships require compromises. Compromises on terms are natural in such negotiations, but I am concerned with compromises on principles. There are two ways cities compromise their principles in public-private partnerships: bullshit requirements, and bullshit enforcement.
I see advocates assume that the projects that they advocate for will address issues of historical inequities. A thread on distributing bikes in LA led me to investigate whether LA Metro bike share is equitably distributed. Bike share does not reach the Black areas of the city at all; in fact, there’s not a single bike share station located in a census tract that is even 25% Black.
I’d been working on my post about disproportionate impact since before COVID-19 hit the Bay Area, but it happened to land in the middle of a broad conversation about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on poor and working-class BIPOC, and the opening of Oakland’s opportunistic Slow Streets program, which streets advocates across the country are now demanding their cities emulate.
Last night Oakland held its weekly COVID-19 town hall; the segment led by Warren Logan, Libby Schaaf’s Director of Mobility and Interagency Relations, really made the point about how we’re equity-washing streets programs.
I keep encountering a trope about how poor people of color are disproportionately impacted by the societal harms related to the topic the author is writing on. Whether it be pollution, housing insecurity, food insecurity, or health issues like asthma, diabetes, and now COVID-19, low-income BIPOC have it worse than anyone else. The trope goes further, to employ the fact of disproportionate disadvantage as a justification for the author’s favored project: a bike lane, or a housing development, or a park or an urban farm or whatever it is the writer thinks is important.
I will note that it’s generally true. BIPOC have been disadvantaged in America since Columbus first showed up, and the effects are still seen throughout out society.
But the problem with disproportionate impact—besides its existence and its effects on BIPOC—is that its very ubiquity limits its usefulness as a tool for policy analysis.
I have been really, really trying to avoid getting into the housing debate. But transportation and housing are inextricably linked, and my investigation of bike infrastructure’s relationship to gentrification is part of the Bike Lab’s work. A Twitter thread sparked by Phil Matier’s terrible SF Chronicle article led me to do some data analysis of Valencia Street’s transformation. Some of the results are pretty staggering.
Phil Matier is a terrible journalist. One of the ways in which he’s terrible is that he doesn’t understand statistics at all, or at least, the way he uses statistics in his writing is uninformed (at best) or intentionally misleading (at worst). I’ll be charitable and assume that the fallacies in his work come from a place of ignorance rather than deception.
As an urban critical theorist studying cycling cultures and neighborhood change, I’ve long been curious about the correlation between the terms “fixie” and “douchebag.” My working definition is that douchiness is where entitlement meets cluelessness. The douchebag is a privileged person who feels entitled to that spot at the bar, that condo in the city, that job in tech, and that private bus to work which makes it all possible. And he is clueless about how his entitlement to those things pushes others out of the way.
I’ve been thinking about how cycling and skateboarding cultures are different, and I have the impression skating has never embraced top-down hierarchy in the same way bike advocacy has. Reading Peter Flax’s interview with Effective Cycling founder John Forester, I realized that Forester is just as concerned with being at the top of the hierarchy as traditional bike advocates; he just disagrees about how to get there.
My posts earlier this year suggesting that Vision Zero’s communications strategy of amplifying safety risks might be counter-productive received a little bit of attention. I wanted to revisit the analysis to include the 2018 data from both the ACS and FARS, and to address some methodological criticisms.
I had a fascinating time at Untokening Durham. I am reflecting on of some of the great sessions and conversations I had, especially with Aidil Ortiz, Aya Shabu, Oboi Reed, Josh Malloy and Bonnie Fan. But my most prominent memory right now is of riding to dinner.
After my post about the Oakland Rideout, Twitterer Dianne Y. called out my characterization of the event as over-analysissand #plannerdy. Regular readers know that over-analysis is kind of what we do here at the Bike Lab. And being a city planning nerd is not merely a fact, it’s an aspiration. But she also challenged me as writing about disadvantaged groups from a privileged perspective, and I wanted to think about that question.
Last year I ran into the Oakland Rideout by accident. This year I’m a little more connected, so I heard about it ahead of time and went down to the Beastmode store to check it out. Man, what a spectacular event.
This weekend the painting work for the Scraper Bikeway on 90th Avenue finally got started. It was a nice event, and it’s great to see the community and city support for an innovative space in Deep East Oakland.
It was interesting to contrast the ride I did with folks from the Oakland Library last week, with the Fourth Fridays in the Park event with Rich City Rides. The librarians are using the bicycle to extend the physical community space of the library out into the streets. Rich City used the bicycle to create a community out in the streets, and on Fourth Fridays they bring it back into a physical space.
Last week I went on an urban geography bike tour, sponsored by the Oakland Museum and led by Mana and Sadie from the Oakland Library. We learned about railroad history in Oakland, and got lucky with lovely weather to visit Middle Harbor Shoreline Park. As a cycling urban geographer, I love that kind of stuff, and I love that people in the Library also see the bicycle as a tool for contemplating the city. I’m curious about how this alignment of the library and cycling programs in Oakland has arisen.
I was enthused to pick up a copy of Adonia Lugo’s latest book at the Bike4Justice event at Rich City Rides a couple months ago. I found it fascinating, but it wasn’t exactly what I had expected. Titled Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance, with cover art evoking Black power movements, I suppose that I anticipated something overtly political, a critical analysis of power dynamics related to cycling in the U.S. Instead, I found the book to be deeply personal, a memoir of Lugo’s own struggles to find a place for herself in cycling advocacy as a mixed-race woman from auto-centric Orange County. Lugo’s academic work is in ethnography, so it is not surprising that she is skilled at illuminating cultural and social frameworks via her lived experiences. As an ardent follower of Lugo’s work, the book helped me understand her perspectives, and how she arrived at her particular brand of advocacy.
I recently visited a friend in Puerto Rico, my first time on the island. I was surprised at just how pervasive car culture is there; public transit is virtually non-existent (there aren’t even inter-city buses), as is biking for transport. Our friends own a decent car, and were proud to drive us around the town and to tourist destinations on the coasts. When we’d suggest that we might walk the quarter-mile into town, or wander the streets of Ponce or Isabela, they were genuinely mystified. Why would you do that? We have a car, we can drive you!
