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Book cover: Bicycle/Race. Transportation, Culture, & Resistance

Book review: Bicycle/Race

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.

Wide bike path separated from road by metal barrier

Non-cycling culture

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!

Let’s Bike Oakland officially adopted

The new Oakland bike plan was officially adopted by the Oakland City Council last night. I have my critiques, of course, but I also want to give credit where it’s due. The plan represents probably the best effort possible in our current planning environment, and it’s largely the result of dedicated work by some of the folks involved who pushed back against structures which are not designed to address topics outside of infrastructure. Because of that, there’s a lot more in the plan about community programs and equity than would ever have been the case otherwise.

Cycling and development

Andy Singer (who you may know from his “No Exit” cartoons) today posted on streets.mn about the possibility of re-purposing part of a railroad bridge across the Mississippi to extend the popular Midtown Greenway. For me, this resonated with my take-away from last week’s Mobility4All panel, of how bike infrastructure became associated with gentrification partly because the bike advocacy movement chose to pair infrastructure with economic development to gain political influence.

A day with Rich City: Self-Care Sunday and Mobility4All

I’d been looking forward to this day for six months, since Adonia Lugo had to cancel her talk at Rich City Rides in December. And in the meantime it had gotten even more interesting, because I’d gotten to know a bit more about Doria Robinson, and RB was joining to represent the Scraper Bike Team. I started by heading up for the weekly Self-Care Sundays ride out of Unity Park, where I got to have a number of interesting conversations with Naj, RB, and Phoenix, and then had the opportunity to meet and hear Dr. Lugo and the others at the great Mobility4All panel.

More on a bad idea

My post on Vision Zero’s threat amplification communications strategy got some interesting responses. One class of response as a sigh of relief, from advocates and city officials who don’t want to adopt such a confrontational style. Another was an interest in comparison data; what happened in non-Vision Zero cities over the same time frames? An entirely reasonable question, and easy for me to research.

Changing the conversation: A bad idea?

In streets advocacy, I think we have two core goals: Reducing auto trips, and increasing safety. When we consider our tactics, we should consider how they will advance that strategy. The advocacy response to the recent death of Tess Rothstein in San Francisco raised a concern that’s been troubling me for some time; our rhetoric around street safety has become increasingly hyperbolic and strident. What if “Interested but Concerned” cyclists might be scared away by repeated messages about life safety risks? What if changing the conversation is a bad idea?

Bike women

For a Twitter thread on International Women’s Day, I was reflecting on how many of the people who’ve inspired my work are women. I thought they deserved a more substantial post here, so, here are some shout outs.

BlackSpace Manifesto

Deep listening

Two somewhat related items came across my feed recently which got me thinking about our responsibilities as planners in listening to disadvantaged communities. One is a study about how urban cycling investments “focus on the needs of wealthy riders and neglect lower-income residents and people of color.” The other is the BlackSpace Manifesto, a statement of principles by a group of Black planners and activists.

National Household Travel Survey bike/walk data

The 2017 National Household Travel Survey is out! In preparation for my talk next week at Luckyduck Bicycle Cafe, I dug into the data to see if the findings from 2009 hold, and they mostly do. Hispanics have the highest cycling mode share overall, and the data suggest substantial differences in cultural relationships to active transportation modes.

Celebrations of community

I got to do two holiday rides this year, with Rich City Rides and the Scraper Bike Team, and it got me thinking about what it means to celebrate the holidays in that way. Holiday traditions are important to communities, and that both of these community groups have incorporated the bicycle into their own traditions speaks to the way the bicycle has become part of their identities. That will have long-term effects on cycling rates, and therefore health and wellness in those communities. And these kinds of rides can help brake down the barriers which separate East Oakland from Alameda.

Paint the Town

I led another bike ride for Walk Oakland Bike Oakland (WOBO), the lead sponsor of the Paint the Town program, which gives groups the opportunity to collaborate on painting an intersection or street. The city waives permit fees and provides a small bit of funding, and the neighbors work together to come up with a design and do the project. It’s a pretty cool program, inspired by City Repair in Portland. I’d done a ride to visit a number of Portland’s projects, and doing a similar ride in Oakland seemed like a fine idea.

Bicycle “Friendly” “Community”

My feed today lit up with friends sharing the news that Oakland has been granted Gold status in the League of American Bicyclists’ “Bicycle Friendly Community” program, which has been a goal of the advocacy movement here for some time. As you might expect, I have an opinion about it.

Further unsolicited advice

Everyone who’s involved in cycling advocacy, especially in places like the Bay Area where advocacy has become powerful, must take the time to read and understand Adonia Lugo’s Unsolicited Advice for Vision Zero, which challenges advocates to think about how their behaviors contribute to the identification of bike infrastructure with whiteness. Conflict amongst advocates over the Telegraph Avenue design in Temescal demonstrates the point.

T-shirt depicting apocryphal sketch of bicycle allegedly done by Leonardo

The image of the bicycle

I just returned from a bike tour in Italy (wonderful!), and was struck by the way the image of the bicycle is used. Perhaps the #1 t-shirt sold in tourist shops in Tuscany is a fake sketch of a bicycle supposedly drawn by Leonardo. I think the reason tourists buy that shirt is that the bicycle is relatable, and the drawing connects to their personal experience of travel. I think those shared experiences can help us develop shared understanding across cultural gaps.

Pedestrian bridge crossing multiple freeway and railway lines

High Line to Nowhere

After Amazon finally decided who would win its HQ2 sweepstakes (psych! It’s just two offices we were going to open anyway), there has been some talk about the pedestrian and bike improvements, particularly near the Crystal City site. But comparing this quarter-mile airport corridor to the High Line is absurd, and Amazon should have to pay for it.

Victory over incrementalism

This weekend I joined up with some folks from OakDOT at the Scraper Bike Team’s “Pothole City” ride. I always want to take opportunities to learn about cycling cultures, and to visit parts of the city I don’t know as well. And fortuitously, earlier in the week OakDOT had just approved a radical road diet project on 90th Avenue, based on the Scraper’s preferred design. It involves a protected two-way bike lane running down the center of the road, painted orange, and potentially incorporating street murals.

Southern European biking

One of Adonia Lugo’s criticisms of the U.S. bike advocacy movement is its focus on Northern European solutions, and implicitly, Northern European thinking and values. I happen to be traveling in southern Europe right now, where biking has a much different social meaning.

Our first stop was in Barcelona, a city which urbanists love to talk about. One thing urbanists don’t tend to mention is that cycling rates are fairly low; about 2% mode share, despite years of investment in infrastructure.

Ding ding ding

Nakari from Rich City Rides posted this story of a black cyclist in Seaside Heights, NJ, getting handcuffed and arrested for obstruction of justice. The video doesn’t show the beginning of the interaction, but the claim it makes (which I see no reason to dispute) is that he was stopped for not having a bell on his bike. No other explanation for the arrest is offered.

Electricity

The biggest change to transportation in the Bay Area in the past year has been the adoption of dockless e-bikes, and most recently, e-scooters. I rode both a Jump e-bike and a Lime scooter recently, which left me thinking about the implications for the city.

One thing that’s notable is the demographic split between bike share and scooter share. According to Motivate, over 75% of their riders are white, and while I haven’t seen hard data on the scooters, it’s pretty clear that in Oakland they are heavily used by people of color, especially kids.

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