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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Part of my European trip involved a ferry to the island of Ischia, in southern Italy near Naples. Like most southern European places, Ischia was built with an entirely different set of design principles than American cities, and it shows from the moment you step off the ferry, where the main street is one-fifth the size of the Embarcadero in San Francisco.
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.
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.
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.
As an aspiring Marxist on Labor Day, I was reflecting on the relationship of cycling to worker organizations. One of the findings of my field work is that almost every city has a worker-owned bike collective, and there are a ton of them here in the East Bay.
The programs offered by these co-ops tend to be community-oriented: social rides, earn-a-bike programs, bike education, and cheap or free repairs and used bikes. I’m wondering, what is it about the bicycle that activates people’s interest in collectivism?
I was glad to hear this week that the charges against Naj K. Smith for playing loud music from his bike were dismissed, thanks to the outcry from the community and the pro-bono work of Walter Riley. So the rally planned for today to protest his court date instead turned into a rally to discuss racial policing. Speakers included Naj himself, as well as Oakland Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan (who also wrote a letter in support of Naj), and several folks from Red, Bike and Green, the organization Naj was leading the ride for when he got arrested. The general theme was that even though this particular case has been resolved, the structural problem of racially-biased policing remains.
I think that the Oakland DOT is doing a good job of trying to address social justice issues in its community engagement process for the bike plan update, but some of the other bike planning efforts going on in Oakland highlight how difficult it is to keep focused on those issues. One example was a workshop in Fruitvale about a proposal to redesign and pedestrianize East 12th Street near the Fruitvale BART station, and another was a community open house about updates to Telegraph Avenue in Temescal. Both were focused on infrastructure and lacked opportunities for meaningful input from the community.
Two of my recent bike-related experiences came together this weekend, when Naj K. Smith of Rich City Rides (who I met leading a ride last week) got arrested in Oakland for leading a ride on First Fridays with his sound system trailer. The bike and sound system were confiscated, and he was handcuffed and spent the night in jail. He made bail but the bike is still impounded.
I was going to go check out the new Dirt World bike park up in Richmond, but on my way there, I was fortunate enough to run into a group of cyclists with a sound system blasting a Jackson 5 remix. This turned out to be the weekly “Self-Care Sunday” social ride from Rich City Rides, and they were on their way to the Berkeley Kite Festival. I altered my plans to join them on the ride through town and along the Ohlone Greenway.
Oakland is working on updating its Bicycle Master Plan. Since the last update in 2007, a lot has changed in Oakland, but I think the two most important changes affecting this plan aren’t related to cyclists or even cycling infrastructure. What’s really different is that Oakland has consolidated various different agencies into a new Department of Transportation, and also created a new Department of Race and Equity. The structural changes have led to a very different (and better) community engagement process for the new bike plan.
In 2016, Oakland created a new Department of Race and Equity, charged with creating “a city where our diversity is maintained, racial disparities have been eliminated and racial equity has been achieved.” In Oakland, that’s a big ask. But the creation of the office is, I think, an honest attempt to look for ways to improve the situation. The department has just released its first Equity Indicators Report, and as you might expect, Oakland fails on a number of important indicators related to equity.
Heading out for a fun ride yesterday, I ran into the Oakland Rideout at Oakland Technical High. Sponsored by Marshawn Lynch, this was a super-social ride from his Beast Mode store downtown, up to my neighborhood. The event included a beautiful demonstration of the transformation of public space, as a sideshow of BMX and motocross bikes, and Lime scooters took over Broadway.
One of the topics at the Oakland BPAC was an update on bike share progress. As part of the 2017 East Bay roll-out, Motivate created a “Bike Share 4 All” program which allows low-income individuals to obtain an annual bike share membership for $5 (instead of the regular cost of $150). But Motivate has refused to place bike share stations in Deep East, despite using the Scraper Bike Team’s style as marketing for their service. The exclusive rights we granted Motivate are a give-away of public space to private interest.
Bike to Work Day began in Oakland 25 years ago. I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about it, partly because I feel like bike advocacy in the U.S. tends to frame cycling as a distinct activity, and I think it would be more productive to frame it as a common activity that everyone should be able to do all the time. This year, my wife was volunteering at the pancake breakfast at Oakland City Hall, so I decided to join the pedal pool led by Mayor Libby Schaaf and Council member Abel Guillen.
Roger Rudick of Streetsblog SF was among about 25 people who joined me on the Oakland Flatlands bike tour this weekend, and he wrote up a good summary.
The short version is, we had a good group, lots of good discussion, got finished before the rain started, and I think everyone got to learn some new stuff.
