March 2, 2023 • 51 mins
James and Gare talk to John Stehlin about bike lanes, critical mass, and how we can make cities that are safer and more sustainable
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi, everyone, Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast
which bipopular demand today is about livestock, as we will
be going forward. It's me, It's Garrison, and we're talking
about species of sheep. Don't not really, we're not talking
about species of sheep, much to my disappointment, not yet,
but that will be coming. We're going to be getting
into clined texuls, mules that kind of think big sheep stuff.
(00:25):
But now today we're actually joined by John and John
has been subjected to my weight introduction, but we're not
We're not talking about sheep today. We're talking about active
transport infrastructure and we're talking about how cities tend to
build that in certain communities and not in others. So
welcome to the show. John, Yeah, thanks for having me.
(00:46):
I'll say that my partner would have been overjoyed if
the podcast was actually about species of sheep, So she's
tired of hearing me talk about bikes, I'm sure, So,
but here we are. Um, Yeah, thanks for having me,
John Alan. I'm an assistant professor at University of North
Carolina at Greensboro. Great. Yeah, So I think to start
(01:08):
off with if if you could kind of outline what
sort of like I guess, I guess people might not
be familiar at all with bike infrastructure, certainly if they
live in some parts of the US or like more
rural areas, and sort of what it looks like, and
what cities have been doing in the last few years
building bike infrastructure, and then how that relates to the
(01:29):
I guess, the income disparities within cities. Yeah, I mean,
that's a that's a big question, something that I tackled
in my book, which came out in twenty nineteen. But
then I haven't haven't kept up with it quite as much.
I've been trying to start work working on other projects,
but you know, I keep I keep tabs on things
(01:50):
a little bit. Um. I mean, basically, if we're talking
about the the standard rundown of infrastructure, the the I
would say, the most common thing that people think about
and probably the most common thing that's built in part
because it's quite cheap, especially over they say the last
(02:10):
twenty years, is the bike lane. You know, a bike
lane is usually about three to five feet wide, and
it's in to the far right of the roadway. If
you're in the United States or you know, if you're
driving on the right, tends to be where glass collects,
tends to be where car doors are it. And so
(02:35):
that nevertheless was you know, very common in places that
we're building bicycle infrastructure. That's what was being built in
I would say the last ten to fifteen years, there's
been a push to do more what people might call
Dutch style protected bike lanes. Either they're protected by buffer
(03:01):
of kind of plastic posts that don't prevent an emergency
vehicle from kind of getting where it needs to go,
but also don't prevent drivers from just driving into the
bike lane. Really, so you'll see those and then you
know parking protected bike lanes. So the protected bike lanes
(03:23):
started became the big demand from bicycle infrastructure planning practitioners,
especially in cities like Portland's, you know, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago,
New York City, et cetera, et cetera. Something that was
actually protected by a curb usually really usually it's still
(03:46):
like some kind of a plastic curb right or cars right,
and you're not seeing a lot of you know, concrete
or brick curb work like you'll see in the Netherlands
or something like that. And then interestingly enough another piece
of infrastructure that there was a funny kind of Mayaculpa,
or not Mayaculpa, but a reevaluation of it was the sharrow,
(04:12):
which is just a sort of a chevron symbol in
the middle of a car lane, intended to remind drivers
that cyclists are allowed to be there, but sort of
put cyclists in the location where they would sort of
garner the most hatred. And there was a recent recent
editorial from Dave Snyder, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. It was
(04:33):
a big, big pioneer just in general bicycle infrastructure. I
interviewed him for my dissertation and he talked about how
they don't work. That was a mistake. It was mistake
kind of splitting the difference, making it seem like you
didn't have to take any space away from cars in
order to fit bikes into the roadway. So I don't
(04:54):
know if that's kind of more than you wanted from that. No, No,
that's great because I think a lot of folks might
not have seen all these different things. Certainly, like if
you're like me and you wrote your bike every day,
you know to teach of these different things, and some
of them make you feel safer, some of them don't,
and some of them are just kind of tokenistic. I
think a lot of this kind of gets to a
bigger discussion, which which is one waybe we can touch on,
(05:15):
which is like who the city is for? When we're
building cities in this country, certainly it seems like we've
built them around cars, with a few exceptions like older
cities and stuff, and increasingly like if you ask for
space that and you are not a car, then you
know to include people wanting to live on the streets,
right that cars have free places to go at night,
(05:36):
but people don't. And so like this reallocation of space
I think gets to a bigger question, which is, yeah,
maybe something you can speak to. Yeah, so I mean
the question of I think you can think of who
both In terms of the mode of transport, it's very
car dominant society, right, and car car driving is even
(06:03):
on the rise in places like Copenhagen. Right, there's kind
of a lot of fretting among my supply advocates in
Copenhagen about the rise of car usage. So there's the
quite the sort of the mode of transport. But you know,
cars aren't people, right, as you sort of pointed out
just then and then so there's another layer to it
that intersects with it, which is cities being increasingly sort
(06:26):
of oriented towards attracting higher income residents, right, kind of
creating an attractive urban environment. There's a there's a kind
of an intersection with the interest in attracting kind of
high tech or creative or knowledge intensive types of jobs,
(06:48):
right your software programmers, you know. I think it was
Chicago mayor Roman Manuel. I use this in lectures all
the time. He said something like, um, you can't be
for a high tech, creative city economy and not be
pro bike. Right. So there's this there's this idea that
(07:09):
you know, may be a little bit spurious, or it
might be kind of loose causality, but there's this idea
that the kinds of workers that you want in your
city that are either going to take high paying jobs
and increase the property tax base or themselves create new startups,
(07:34):
entrepreneurial energy, arts, culture and and things like that, right
that they are they are attracted by bicycle infrastructure or
bicycling or bicycle culture in some respects. So there's that
that kind of the The irony, of course, is that
those workers, you know, guilty, I have a car, right,
(07:58):
typically bring cars with that, right, And so yes, maybe
they don't want to use them on a daily basis,
like I don't use my car on a daily basis.
I don't use my car to get to work, right,
But they, you know, are often kind of having it
both ways, right, in a lot of ways in terms of,
(08:19):
you know, buildings will be built with garages, right, and
that's only recently starting to be eroded, right as just
a you know, a one to one parking ratio and
a transit connected building. Yeah. And so when we're talking
about it, the combination of these two things, right, like
affluent areas or cities trying to attract affluent people and
cities trying to build bike infrastructure. And something I've observed
(08:44):
where I live, which is San Diego, is that we've
built a lot of bike lanes, but only connecting privileged
communities to places where people do high income work. And
it seems like increasingly like riding your bike safely is
a privilege, there's only a forty to a certain group
of people. Is that something that's broader than justested in
(09:04):
my town? I'd say so, I mean, I think you
see this in in where I did a lot of
my research in the San Francisco Bay area, also did
research in Philadelphia and Detroit and Austin as well. That's
not in the book, but yeah, that's it's common, and
there's a few different There's kind of a there's a
(09:25):
degree of cumulative causality, as we would say in economic geography. Right,
you have, going back to say the nineteen nineties, you
had bicycle advocates primarily recreational, primarily middle class, largely white,
recreational cyclists, or and you start to seem participants in
(09:51):
by squad vocacy organizations also being kind of bicycle commuters.
The kinds of jobs that were growing in urban centers
in the nineteen nineties and two thousands or you know,
the first decade of this millennium, right, are the kinds
of you know, if not high tech, sort of professional
(10:17):
technical type of employment, right, growing in urban centers. And
there's relatively affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods that makes it
feasible and desirable actually that you could you could, you know,
(10:40):
find a fairly affordable house and be able to bike
to work right two to three miles, right, rather than
the commute in from the suburbs or the commute out
from the urban center to jobs at the suburbs. Right. So,
I think that you get a lot of the initial
(11:00):
energy around the bicycle movement if you look at critical Mass,
if you look at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and
its early days. Again, these are things I'm familiar with.
A lot of this sort of the political mobilization is
around making those types of journeys easier, more doable. Right.
You also have the phenomenon where the neighborhoods that are
(11:22):
getting gentrified in this time are your sort of classic
innermost streetcar suburbs developed around a hundred years ago, fairly
walkable themselves. They have a mix of commercial and residential.
They aren't buying large industrial neighborhoods, right, The industrial neighborhoods
where you still have a lot of truck traffic, where
(11:45):
industry be got more industry or de industrialization really hollowed
out the economic base where you have you know, large roadways,
you have you know disinvestment and kind of a mix
of small retail, etc. Etc. Um. Lower income population. Uh,
(12:08):
those were not um. Those were not areas where were
that were attracting the kinds of people who would be
listened to when they're demanding bicycle infrastructure. Right, there's still
lots of cyclists in those neighborhoods UM in a place
like East Oakland or um uh North Philadelphia or something
(12:32):
like that, right where there are a lot of people
who ride bicycles, but they don't they're not organized politically
uh under the sort of the block of of of
cyclists UM. And so there's this sort of paradox or
in the way that I came around to this project
(12:53):
was I was working in a bike shop in Philadelphia,
and I was one of those white hipsters on fixies.
Right at the same time, I spent a lot of
my day speaking Spanish, talking with and helping people fix
their bikes, mostly Latin American immigrants who were working as
(13:16):
dishwashers or delivering food, buying bikes at Walmart because it's
what they could afford, even though they knew that they
were crapped, they just couldn't afford anything better trying to
get the most out of those bikes. And so there's
this funny dichotomy. On the one hand, it's like you
have the cool bike already, creative scene that is sort
(13:39):
of trying to be encouraged maybe, And on the other hand,
a lot of the people were actually making do on
bicycles are not sort of part of that vision, I
guess for the city, right when I think about things
in spatial terms as well, right, if you imagine going
(13:59):
back to the journeys to work from a sort of
close in residential neighborhood that is experiencing a lot of turnover,
a lot of middle class you know, mostly white but
not necessarily exclusively white, in migrants, the types of journeys
that a lot of you know, I'll take Durham for example,
(14:21):
where I live now, which is not there's not a
lot of good bicycle infrastructure. There's a little there's not
a lot of good bicycle infrastructure, but there's some job
growth in the downtown area. There's certainly a lot of
job growth in the sort of the suburbs. But in
terms of the kinds of jobs that, um, you know,
(14:44):
working class jobs that are being created at Amazon fulfillment centers,
those are at the urban periphery, right, They're not places
that even in a kind of a gentrifying neighborhood. Even
if bicycle infrastructure were created. This sort of the direct
tionality of the feasible commute kind of runs against the
(15:06):
feasible bicycle commute sort of runs against the very kind
of spread out and scattered commutes in the sort of retail, wholesale, warehousing, manufacturing,
et cetera, et cetera, the sectors that are experiencing job
sprawl rather than a sort of a concentrated, concentrated job
(15:30):
growth in in the sort of the urban center. Right.
So that's another aspect to it as well. Bike advocacy
is very interesting to me. Like I was a bike messenger,
I was a bike racer like these, I've made my
(15:51):
living riding a bike. I've also just ridding my bike
to get to work. And bike advocacy really hasn't reflected
a broadsworth of psychists for a very long time. Do
you think that's why we don't see like better infrastructure
in some of these like d industrializing areas for instance,
And does that lead directly to it being more dangerous?
(16:14):
Like you would be the best to ask of their
statistics to show that, like it's more dangerous to ride
your bike. So I'll say a couple of things. The
the the directionality or the causality is a little bit complicated.
I would say certainly there was some evidence that bicycle
advocates weren't in the early days, and there was a
(16:37):
big sort of cultural shift in by advocacy in the
nineteen nineties part of the nineteen nineties. You have a
lot of cyclists who are actually opposed to bicycle infrastructure.
We still have. They are still a loud, being rish
voice in San Diego. Yeah, exactly, the vehicular cyclists, right, yeah, yeah,
(16:57):
can you explain that, sure? Vehicular cyclists. Um. It was
a philosophy expounded by John Forrester. I have his book
right here in the book and it's not here in
the book Effective Cycling. Um. Where it was the idea
was that cyclists should be riding like cars, right, which
(17:22):
means riding fast, center of the lane, behaving exactly like
a car. And they were very opposed to any infrastructure
that would sort of create be created especially for bicyclists,
on the basis which there was maybe some slight truth
(17:43):
to this, that that cyclists would be banned from roads
that didn't have dedicated bicycle infrastructure. There was a little
bit of concern that was there was I think I
remember reading about a little bit of actual talk among
legislators and planners that bicyclists would be kept off of
(18:06):
main roads. And I think their to their credit, they
saw the creation of bicycle infrastructure at that time as
basically designed to get cyclists out of the way of motorists, right,
And so it was mainly to advance the interests of motorists, right.
(18:26):
But they were very hostile to um. They're very hostile
to a sort of a Dutch style model, which, like
you know, these were guys who like to ride fast
and like you don't. You can't ride fast in the Netherlands, yea,
not everyone's physically able nor really wants to go forty
(18:49):
miles an hour on a road next to cars exactly right.
So it was very much around a strong, fit, confident
cyclist who who knew all the laws of the road,
road really fast, was very assertive. It obviously lent itself
towards a sort of a boomer type, right, a sort
(19:16):
of adventurous type, and it was very much that we
that bicycle advocates should advance the interests of cyclists, not
try to grow the number of people cycling, right, And
so the shift towards that maybe the critical mass moment
is not the only thing, but this is that's sort
(19:36):
of a good moment to kind of tag it to
the nineteen ninety two first critical mass era, but you
know Earth Day vehicle for a small planet, all of
this sort of growing interest in bicycling. Yeah, the shift
towards more people should be doing. Yeah, can you explain
critical mass to people who haven't like participated, because I
(19:59):
think it's quite meek an interesting phenomena. Sure, yeah, absolutely so.
I'm critical mass began in San Francisco in I think
the first critical mass was nineteen ninety two, and it
was began sort of as like a group of people working,
(20:22):
you know, broadly working office jobs who were sort of
kind of culturally anarchistic or you know, had these sort
of anarchist or situation as kind of ideas and who
were kind of organizing months of selves to ride home
as a group. Right, And they started getting this idea
(20:43):
of sort of having these monthly ride together um happenings. Right.
They called it. They didn't call them protests, and they
weren't organized rides. They were um sort of rolling festival
was the idea. I think the first The first name
(21:04):
that they came up with, which mercifully didn't stick, was
like the commute clot right, So it was also about
kind of jamming up the regularity of the Friday evening commute,
so it would be like the first Friday of every
month at commute time. Right. Um. Some of these I
think still happened in Portland. Oh yeah, yeah, it's it's
(21:27):
the critical mass still happens. Um. There's a you know,
one of the chapters in my book, I sort of
trace this arc of critical mass through to the more
kind of bike party oriented exactly exactly the slow roll
type of model, which I think is interesting because it's
(21:48):
a little bit it's consciously less confrontational. It's not held
at a time that would clog up um, sure, clog
up evening traffic. Uh. It's designed to attract kind of families,
people who aren't trying to have confrontations with drivers or police. Right.
One of the things that sort of really put put
(22:10):
bicycle infrastructure on the agenda and San Francisco was this
mass arrest of critical Mass in nineteen ninety seven, supposedly
because the mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown at the time,
got stuck in one in his limo and was like
furious and so asked the police to crack down next time.
(22:31):
It was a huge it was. It backfired massively politically,
but it also created this opening for the San Francisco
Bicycle Coalition, which actually was an organization. Critical Mass was
not an organization, right. It gave them this opportunity to say, well,
what cyclists want is, you know, to actually build out
(22:53):
the bike plan that supposedly exists, but nobody's been doing
anything about it, right, So, I mean that's probably maybe
more than you wanted to know. But sort of that
that arc of Critical Mass as this sort of countercultural
moment that created this opening for a more formal bicycle
planning uh, an advocacy organization or a set of organizations
(23:18):
to emerge, right, Um, And maybe it's unfair I think
I'd probably do it in the book. It's a little
bit unfair probably to call it a kind of depoliticization,
But there was certainly a degree of kind of like
explicit politics of sort of reclaiming the city more broadly
from a kind of left perspective that does disappear somewhat
(23:40):
in the sort of the rhetoric of the bike movement. Yeah,
it's definitely it's definitely lost some of that like radical
edge where these types of these types of you know
when when when like a hundred or two hundred people
on bikes takeover streets in Portland every once in a while,
it is way more in the form of like a
big party. It's like it's it's it's like it's like
a it's like a rolling block party. It does not
(24:01):
have that same level of like, yeah, almost like situationist
creating a happening or creating a situation that that affects
the regular politics and affects the regular way that the
city functions. Yeah, I mean, yeah. That being said, the
sort of the successors, like bike Party in San Jose
was a huge one, and this that bike party model
(24:21):
kind of spread throughout California were often much bigger than
critical maps, right, um, a lot of times more diverse
as well. Right, So there's there's a really interesting kind
of politics around Is the is the politics in the
sort of explicit slogans, or is the politics and sort
of like showing people that there is a kind of
(24:44):
collectivity that they might be part of simply by virtue
of like moving through urban space in a different way.
And for a lot of people it was their first
time riding a bike in the city because they were
so afraid of cars other wise. Right, yeah, it's safety
and numbers. Yeah yeah, yeah, it definitely, Um, I know
(25:05):
for a lot of people that was the case. Like
I've done some critical masses, I mean the UK, we
had reclaimed the streets as well, like a similar vibe.
I remember in the early I guess the first decade
of this century, like there would be critical mass rides
before anti G eight protests, like I remember in Octor
rider in Scotland and things or not in Octorada before that,
(25:25):
and like before other G eight protests would be mass
rights and it's a very different scene to like bike
advocacy now, right yeah, yeah, And you saw this a
little bit with like the Occupy movement, the at least
my experience of them, the sort of early wave of
the Black Lives Matter movement in twenty fourteen with the
(25:47):
killing of Trayvon Martin Um, there were a lot the
bicycles seemed like an intuitive protest for many people, and
that's probably sort of some of the cultural political tools
of critical mass that sort of surface here and there.
(26:09):
But I think for the twentieth anniversary, Chris Carlson, who
was one of the early organizers, called it talks about
critical mass all over the world, and that San Francisco
felt kind of like the hole in the middle of
the donut, right, Like it sort of created this reverberation,
but then it actually withered to a degree in the center.
(26:32):
And often the narrative is, well, you're you're getting like
you're winning, right, so critical mass is no longer necessary
because you're getting bike lanes, you're getting you know, you're
getting investment, you're getting attention from planners, etc. Etc. Right. Obviously, yeah,
the gains, whatever they are, are pretty kind of geographically circumscribed.
(26:56):
And that kind of relates back to how we kind
of started by talking about how, you know, some cities
are putting more development into bike infrastructure, but how it's
being developed is not actually serving people who like like
have to use a bike to commute because they don't
own a car and they can't afford a car, Like
it's it's it's getting used to people who actually already
have a lot of resources. And like an interesting case
(27:17):
in point in this is the belt line in Atlanta,
which like started off in the you know as an
idea in nineteen ninety nine with wanting to create like
a giant loop using like public transit, having having rail
going around the city, having bike having bike paths going
all around the city, being able to like connect the
(27:37):
city with these with these like spaces for like green
space and affordable housing, and instead the project kind of
manifested as this like like is this project that was
had up by real estate companies to replace a whole
bunch of low income neighborhoods with the massive amounts of
like expensive restaurants and luxury condos and you know, putting
(28:01):
putting the belt line and as a path to create
these like expensive, like gentrifying areas around the city. And
it's how like these ideas can start off so good
and then when they get like, you know, actually done,
it's manifested in a way that is actually like not
helpful to people who need this type of thing at all. Yeah. Yeah,
(28:23):
I mean the belt Line. I don't know enough about it.
I've read I've read a little bit of the sort
of academic literature, and I've been there, and it is
really kind of interesting how it is this it is
this huge investment in the reconversion of infrastructure, right to
(28:44):
sort of restore the value of the land surrounding it, right,
sort of old rail, old industrial infrastructure. And that's something
that I don't think that you can you're ever you know, people,
there are studies here and there that try to demonstrate
the kind of the economic value of bicycle infrastructure, the
(29:07):
contribution to tax tax receipts, etcetera, etcetera, But it gets
pretty hard to parse the causality, especially when you're you know,
especially when compared to something that is really sort of
overhauling the space, right, I don't you know, the belt
(29:28):
belt line is it's I think probably it's success from
a sort of financial perspective has to do with it
being a multi use path, right rather than it being
bicycle infrastructure, um, and sort of being being framed as
(29:49):
this much broader type of thing, right rather than um,
a bike lane on a street. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
It's no great to ride down like later on the
weekend because you'll just be slam full of full of people.
It's full of like I when I when I when
I was visiting last year during the start of summer,
(30:09):
I went with a friend to the area by Ponce
City Market, which is kind of a great example of
the gentrifying force of of the belt line. But also like, yeah,
there's people who's trying, people who are trying to ride
bikes around, but there's like kids on rollers, kids everywhere.
There's it's it's it's pretty packed. It's getting it's it's
getting pretty pretty warm. Um. But there's other parts that
(30:30):
are like you know, that are that are more isolated,
where it is much more of like a of like
a commute path. But it's it's interesting. It's just like
it like weaves in and out of these like retail
and luxury apartment um, you know pop up exactly, and
all that stuff is is relatives like relatively new for
all the stuff that is like specifically surrounding surrounding like
(30:52):
the construction of the belt line. Yeah, and I mean
the um, I think that you maybe see this just
a little bit with like, you know, the direction that
I've taken this thinking about it is more the sort
of the types of urban strategies that have begun to
incorporate bicycle infrastructure right or active transportation more generally as
(31:18):
the kind of big driving forces rather than like, is
this bike lane here causing gentrification? It's usually it's often
the other way around. Right. Bicycle infrastructure sort of emerges
as a result of gentrification, right, or as a result
of the in migration of people who are going to
(31:41):
be listened to, right because of their status, because of
their income, because they have kind of existing capacities in
organizing for these types of things. Right. It's I think
what's interesting is one of the one of the positions
(32:02):
I've sort of come around to, right is thinking more
about um, not like should we do bicycle infrastructure because
it might kind of create the perception of gentrification or
cause gentrification or something like that, and instead, like, you
know what, one of the things that gentrification results from
(32:22):
when you're thinking about amenities that sort of lead to
the revalorization of urban space is that they are in
some way special. Right. And so if the question is
the specialness of this particular place, you know, garrison, as
you said, what makes say, you know, the kinds of
(32:45):
places where you can safely ride a bike are fairly unique, right,
They're not well distributed, right, And so from my perspective,
it's sort of the more routine they become as an
as as you know, including them into urban space, the
less special the places where they are built become right,
(33:09):
and it's and so routine that it wouldn't be worth mentioning, right,
It's like mentioning that there is a sewer line, right,
Like it's like mentioning that it has connection to city water,
which okay, yeah, and you know at the at the
urban edge where I live, Um, I don't live at
the urban edge, but at the urban edge in the southeast, Um,
(33:32):
you know, there isn't always connection to the city water. Um. Yeah,
Like trying to get it normalized to the point where
it's like obvious that it's something that is like a
part of the city. It's like yeah, like right, of course,
it's it's just as normal as like a sidewalk or
a road or like a power line, which but fair.
I don't have any sidewalks on my street, and most
of the streets around me have a sidewalk on one
(33:53):
side only Portland Portland also has very has very few sidewalks. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
you have this. Yeah. I lived in Belgium for a
while when I was racing. It, like I lived in
a town that was very much just to look in.
Lots of Belgium is shitty, gray coal mining towns. I
love Belgium, but this is the thing, and like, yeah,
they would never have beat you know, the bike infrastructure
is unremarkable. It was just a thing that everyone used
(34:15):
to go to the shops to go to school. It
wasn't right lest like selling point for a branch restaurant. Yeah,
and I think it's this kind of thing where it's
bigger than just the infrastructure. Right. A lot of the
places where bicycle infrastructure has been really successful, right are
these sort of dense, relatively dense areas, actually not the
(34:38):
densest areas right where everything was is in walking distance,
but the area is kind of just beyond there, right
where where there are you know, shops, places of employment, services, etc. Etc.
All sort of within reasonable biking distance or maybe long
(35:00):
walking distance, right, but too short to really merit a
trip on a bus or a train. Right, And you know,
short enough that maybe some of us would feel a
little bit silly getting in the car to go do it, right,
So that that kind of zone is also not terribly
common in the United States, Right, A lot of those
(35:22):
places got destroyed to build highways. Right, or got destroyed
to build kind of suburban style shopping malls, and so
that's part of their part of their specialness. But going
back to the idea of you know, people in the
places where people were really relying on bicycles, right, that
(35:45):
there isn't necessarily infrastructure. It's partially a data issue, going
back to your data question. Right. The way that we
collect data on bicycling is people people bicycling to work. Right.
If people aren't in the workforce, or they happen to
not have a job, that is not counted in the census. Right,
(36:10):
even if you bicycle to the train like I do.
Like if I get to fill out the census, I'm
going to fill out train, right, because that's the bulk
of my journey when I commute. And so it skews
your perception of where infrastructure might be needed if you're
using data toward places that where people are commuting by bicycle,
(36:35):
right rather than you know, commuting is only a quarter
to a third of all trips, right, rather than all
the other trips that we don't know about, right. And
sometimes we measure them with passive measurement, like pressure sensors
in the streets. Sometimes active measurement, like people doing bicycle
counts on particular days. Right, there's a whole history of that.
(36:56):
Now we're using Strava. But then we're getting a small
like we're getting a very rich data set about a
small subset of cyclists and hoping that that extends to most,
if not all cyclists. And then to your question started,
I'll I'll pause right to your question about the the
(37:18):
the data question. Right, how how deadly or how dangerous
are various streets that don't have bike lanes. There is
a big problem of the missing denominator. Right, We don't
know how many people cycles, so we don't know the
rates of injury on these particular roadways in the way
(37:42):
in the same way that we do know car volumes
and can have a better sense of the rates of
injury based on collisions. Right, But you do see clusters
of collisions in places where you know, where they're large
roads meeting where basically no very few if any traffic
(38:06):
engineers would sign off on taking away some of that
car capacity to create more safety for cyclists. And of
course those those kind of compound, those factors kind of compound. Right.
You maybe have an industrial area, it's a big interface
with a large urban arterial or an off ramp to
(38:28):
a highway. Right, these kind of all go together with
um with potentially sort of lower lower income area are
sort of a lower less pressure to improve that that area. Yeah,
(38:48):
So I'm thinking when I think about, like how the
bike movement missed an opportunity to be better. I always
think about like this moment in twenty twenty when this
man called Dijon Kizzie was killed by police in LA
And the incident which which led to the cops shooting him,
began because the cops tried to pull him over for
running a stop sign on a bike, right, which is
(39:09):
a thing that tenth of thousands of white dudes in
Spandex do every single day in this kind of and
not a word was spoken by the bike movement, at
least that I saw by bike folks, you know, in
sort of solidarity or opposition to what had happened. Right,
It just it was just another thing that went mourned
(39:31):
by thousands of people and ignored by others. So like it,
maybe think about how we build Maybe it's wrong to
think about how we build a better bike movement, and
maybe it's better to think about how we make it
unremarkable that you bike, right, we make it like not
an identity. Think, but how do we make cities where
people are safe riding bikes I guess, regardless of whether
(39:53):
they're wearing spandex or they're just trying to get to
the shops. Yeah, I mean that's a really kind of
an important question, and in my research a lot of
people were grappling with that. There was an incident that
mercifully didn't result in someone being killed or seriously injured.
But you know, a guy was pulled off of his
bike by a police beaten up in San Francisco, and
(40:16):
there was a big march afterwards, and some of the
some bi SURP advocates did show up, but it was
not framed as this is something that you know is
affecting us as cyclists, right, This is or that affecting
some of us as cyclists, right, and an injury to
one as an injury at all. Right, that's not that's
(40:36):
not It was not the kind of the frame that
people were using to mud from what I could tell, right, Um,
and you had bicycle you know black bisqua advocates in
East Oakland who didn't really frame themselves as bice squadvocates
necessarily in the traditional or the mold that is sort
of determined by the sort of the hegemonically kind of
(40:59):
white and the class advocacy organizations, right, but they were
very much plasicle advocates who you know, um, a lot
of were a lot of a lot of what they
did was sort of like teaching people to ride correctly
so that they would have fewer interactions with police, right
or um kind of managing interactions with police, and you know,
(41:25):
hopefully becoming well enough known as cyclists that they weren't
kind of subject to the kinds of interactions that you
know where people police end up killing somebody. Right. Um,
Now that I live in a place where very few
people bicycle to work or for much of anything, right,
I'm thinking a bit more holistically about uh, you know,
(41:51):
it's now kind of a buzzword, but you know, a
kind of a more car optional um city right where
you don't need to have a car to do various things.
You know. I'm I'm involved with bicycle advocates here, but
like when I when I look around, I see like
a bus stop that is a stick in a median, right,
(42:15):
there's no bench, there's no sidewalks to get to it,
there's no crosswalks or anything like that. And I mean,
I think that one of the bigger one of the
bigger questions is to make a place that's safe for cyclists,
safe for people walking, safe for people walking their bikes,
(42:35):
or safe for people walking to transit. Right. Um is
reducing the kind of the space and the way that
space and speed go together, right, that are devoted to cars,
and a lot of that is like um, reducing the
(42:56):
the the distances that people need to travel right for
various things. Right, this gets into this sort of the
fifteen minute city stuff, which is it's been really wild
to see it being turned into this like QAnon type,
you know, Agenda twenty one, un black Helicopters type of
conspiracy theory, right, because I think of it as a
(43:19):
very kind of milk toast type of policy framework that's
honored in the breach right sort of like complete streets,
there's a carve out for unless the traffic engineer says
it's not really feasible, and then we won't really question
that judgment. We just won't do it. Right. So, I mean,
I do think it's bigger than modes of transport are
(43:39):
really bigger than people's individual decisions or even like what
the sort of once you are in your mode of transport,
what the sort of behavioral matrix is. Right, It's sort
of like what is your life consist of? Right? What
what do you do to preserve your dignity with your coworkers? Right?
(44:03):
All of these kinds of things that feed people towards
towards driving, except in you know, very specific places that
you know have have become special in the United States.
(44:25):
I mean there's a lot, there's a lot to say, right.
It is really it's much bigger than than bicycling. Um.
It's the sort of the built environment. And I think
one of the things that what I land on in
the book maybe belated ly, right, because these these these
things take years, is um, is this the way that
(44:46):
bicycling is still kind of this interstitial um solution? Right.
It's sort of like kind of picking up scraps here
and there in the built environment. Right, It's like picking
up some of the loose ends right in how cities
are organized that makes them frustrating difficult to navigate, right. Um.
(45:08):
And you know, I think a lot of the energy
not exclusively, certainly, And bicycle advocacy has become much more
diverse in part through like listening to a lot of
the voices of advocates of color and women advocates, and
you know, um kind of thinking beyond that sort of
(45:31):
stereotypical you know, not just the middle aged man in
micro but like the the sort of middle aged guy
on us early, right, you know that that maybe successor
to the middle aged man and micro right, and certainly
calling myself out, um, but the it's still very kind
of an interstitial thing, right, Um, it's and the thing
(45:55):
about the urban transportation systems in the United States is
that they leave a lot of interstices, right, There's a
lot of areas that are poorly served by anything but cars,
and honestly poorly served by cars. You know, in Oakland
you had people a lot of the sort of the
maybe not anger but certainly annoyance at bicycle advocacy and
(46:20):
bicycle infrastructure would be And I think you see this
in Portland too, where it's like we've been asking for sidewalks,
we've been asking the city to to like fill these potholes,
and instead there's these bike lanes that people who just
got here are asking for right, and so maybe that's
a failure of solidarity on people coming, you know, people
(46:42):
moving to a neighborhood. They're like, why is it so
torturous to get somewhere by bike? Rather than kind of
maybe stopping and saying, all right, what what what have
people been demanding here before I got here? Right? Um?
And how can I sort of contribute to that as
well and sort of kind of merge our agendas potentially? Um?
(47:04):
But it is the sort of it's a it's an
interstitial um solution, right. And so from for me, you know,
the bigger the bigger questions are sort of what what
role will bicycles play when we start to really take
seriously the kind of broader urban structure, so you don't
(47:29):
have these sort of islands of bike ability inside a
sea of automobility. Right, Um, do you have a situation
where it actually becomes more practical to walk and take
transit than it is to bike? Right? I would call
that a that a win? Right? And I think you know,
there's a there's a there's a degree to which we
can get fixated on on the particular mode of transport.
(47:51):
I think because we all kind of like fell in
love with bicycles and that was the sort of the
the the gateway drug into thinking about like transport in
cities and how people move around and the sort of
the history of urban planning. Right. So, I mean these
are all I don't know if I really kind of
offered anything that sort of puts it all together nicely, right,
(48:14):
but the idea that it really does need to become normalized,
and if it actually sort of disappears in the process
of being normalized and it stops being a signifier of
environmental rectitude or something like that. And you know, if
I could walk to a grocery store instead of having
(48:35):
to bike to a grocery store, I would prefer that
honestly where I am right now, right, even though I
love cycling, right and it's something that I'll never stop doing. Right.
So I think kind of thinking more holistically about what
kinds of cities we need to have to move beyond,
move beyond automobility, both from a climate perspective and a
(48:57):
social justice perspective and just almost like a thermodynamic perspective. Um.
So I mean that maybe that's the moving up to
the level of physics is where one kind of place
to end. Yeah. No, I think that's very good. Yeah.
Is there anything you'd you'd like to plug maybe people
(49:21):
where people can find your book, where people can follow
you online, and I think like that, any sort of
projects you're interested in. Sure. Yeah, so, um my you
can find me on Twitter. I'm at j O st
e h l I N. My book is now, it's
few years old. It's twenty nineteen with University of Minnesota Press.
It's all. It's called cycle Scapes of the Unequal City
(49:44):
M and my latest work I'm actually looking at, um
the politics of highway removal. So maybe scaling up in
terms of infrastructure, thinking about sort of bigger, kind of
the great clanking gears of urbanism rather than you know,
(50:04):
this little tiny stretch of pavement on the side that's
that's full of glass and car doors and stuff like that.
So but of course they all kind of fit together,
sort of what are the how does the fabric of
the built environment have to change in order to grapple
his climate change, inequality and sort of making a sort
(50:24):
of a more human type of city. Yeah. I think
it's great. It's a wonderful place. Tran, thank you so
much for giving us some of your afternoon. JA. Yeah,
thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time and
it was a really fun conversation. Hi, podcast fans, it's me,
It's Durings and it's just a tiny little pick up
that I wanted to add to the end of the
episode because I neglected to mention that Siklista Zene did
(50:47):
call out the police killing of Dijon Kissy very explicitly
and had an excellent peace on it, as they do
on lots of other things. They are incredibly wonderful and
you can find them at Siklista Zene cyc l I
s t A z i ne dot com. They are
not representative of the rest of the bike media, so
(51:08):
well worth looking at if you like bikes and not
the police murdering people. They're a wonderful publication. Okay, thanks bye.
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
(51:31):
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia, dot com, slash sources, thanks for listening.
Hi, everyone, Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast
which bipopular demand today is about livestock, as we will
be going forward. It's me, It's Garrison, and we're talking
about species of sheep. Don't not really, we're not talking
about species of sheep, much to my disappointment, not yet,
but that will be coming. We're going to be getting
into clined texuls, mules that kind of think big sheep stuff.
(00:25):
But now today we're actually joined by John and John
has been subjected to my weight introduction, but we're not
We're not talking about sheep today. We're talking about active
transport infrastructure and we're talking about how cities tend to
build that in certain communities and not in others. So
welcome to the show. John, Yeah, thanks for having me.
(00:46):
I'll say that my partner would have been overjoyed if
the podcast was actually about species of sheep, So she's
tired of hearing me talk about bikes, I'm sure, So,
but here we are. Um, Yeah, thanks for having me,
John Alan. I'm an assistant professor at University of North
Carolina at Greensboro. Great. Yeah, So I think to start
(01:08):
off with if if you could kind of outline what
sort of like I guess, I guess people might not
be familiar at all with bike infrastructure, certainly if they
live in some parts of the US or like more
rural areas, and sort of what it looks like, and
what cities have been doing in the last few years
building bike infrastructure, and then how that relates to the
(01:29):
I guess, the income disparities within cities. Yeah, I mean,
that's a that's a big question, something that I tackled
in my book, which came out in twenty nineteen. But
then I haven't haven't kept up with it quite as much.
I've been trying to start work working on other projects,
but you know, I keep I keep tabs on things
(01:50):
a little bit. Um. I mean, basically, if we're talking
about the the standard rundown of infrastructure, the the I
would say, the most common thing that people think about
and probably the most common thing that's built in part
because it's quite cheap, especially over they say the last
(02:10):
twenty years, is the bike lane. You know, a bike
lane is usually about three to five feet wide, and
it's in to the far right of the roadway. If
you're in the United States or you know, if you're
driving on the right, tends to be where glass collects,
tends to be where car doors are it. And so
(02:35):
that nevertheless was you know, very common in places that
we're building bicycle infrastructure. That's what was being built in
I would say the last ten to fifteen years, there's
been a push to do more what people might call
Dutch style protected bike lanes. Either they're protected by buffer
(03:01):
of kind of plastic posts that don't prevent an emergency
vehicle from kind of getting where it needs to go,
but also don't prevent drivers from just driving into the
bike lane. Really, so you'll see those and then you
know parking protected bike lanes. So the protected bike lanes
(03:23):
started became the big demand from bicycle infrastructure planning practitioners,
especially in cities like Portland's, you know, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago,
New York City, et cetera, et cetera. Something that was
actually protected by a curb usually really usually it's still
(03:46):
like some kind of a plastic curb right or cars right,
and you're not seeing a lot of you know, concrete
or brick curb work like you'll see in the Netherlands
or something like that. And then interestingly enough another piece
of infrastructure that there was a funny kind of Mayaculpa,
or not Mayaculpa, but a reevaluation of it was the sharrow,
(04:12):
which is just a sort of a chevron symbol in
the middle of a car lane, intended to remind drivers
that cyclists are allowed to be there, but sort of
put cyclists in the location where they would sort of
garner the most hatred. And there was a recent recent
editorial from Dave Snyder, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. It was
(04:33):
a big, big pioneer just in general bicycle infrastructure. I
interviewed him for my dissertation and he talked about how
they don't work. That was a mistake. It was mistake
kind of splitting the difference, making it seem like you
didn't have to take any space away from cars in
order to fit bikes into the roadway. So I don't
(04:54):
know if that's kind of more than you wanted from that. No, No,
that's great because I think a lot of folks might
not have seen all these different things. Certainly, like if
you're like me and you wrote your bike every day,
you know to teach of these different things, and some
of them make you feel safer, some of them don't,
and some of them are just kind of tokenistic. I
think a lot of this kind of gets to a
bigger discussion, which which is one waybe we can touch on,
(05:15):
which is like who the city is for? When we're
building cities in this country, certainly it seems like we've
built them around cars, with a few exceptions like older
cities and stuff, and increasingly like if you ask for
space that and you are not a car, then you
know to include people wanting to live on the streets,
right that cars have free places to go at night,
(05:36):
but people don't. And so like this reallocation of space
I think gets to a bigger question, which is, yeah,
maybe something you can speak to. Yeah, so I mean
the question of I think you can think of who
both In terms of the mode of transport, it's very
car dominant society, right, and car car driving is even
(06:03):
on the rise in places like Copenhagen. Right, there's kind
of a lot of fretting among my supply advocates in
Copenhagen about the rise of car usage. So there's the
quite the sort of the mode of transport. But you know,
cars aren't people, right, as you sort of pointed out
just then and then so there's another layer to it
that intersects with it, which is cities being increasingly sort
(06:26):
of oriented towards attracting higher income residents, right, kind of
creating an attractive urban environment. There's a there's a kind
of an intersection with the interest in attracting kind of
high tech or creative or knowledge intensive types of jobs,
(06:48):
right your software programmers, you know. I think it was
Chicago mayor Roman Manuel. I use this in lectures all
the time. He said something like, um, you can't be
for a high tech, creative city economy and not be
pro bike. Right. So there's this there's this idea that
(07:09):
you know, may be a little bit spurious, or it
might be kind of loose causality, but there's this idea
that the kinds of workers that you want in your
city that are either going to take high paying jobs
and increase the property tax base or themselves create new startups,
(07:34):
entrepreneurial energy, arts, culture and and things like that, right
that they are they are attracted by bicycle infrastructure or
bicycling or bicycle culture in some respects. So there's that
that kind of the The irony, of course, is that
those workers, you know, guilty, I have a car, right,
(07:58):
typically bring cars with that, right, And so yes, maybe
they don't want to use them on a daily basis,
like I don't use my car on a daily basis.
I don't use my car to get to work, right,
But they, you know, are often kind of having it
both ways, right, in a lot of ways in terms of,
(08:19):
you know, buildings will be built with garages, right, and
that's only recently starting to be eroded, right as just
a you know, a one to one parking ratio and
a transit connected building. Yeah. And so when we're talking
about it, the combination of these two things, right, like
affluent areas or cities trying to attract affluent people and
cities trying to build bike infrastructure. And something I've observed
(08:44):
where I live, which is San Diego, is that we've
built a lot of bike lanes, but only connecting privileged
communities to places where people do high income work. And
it seems like increasingly like riding your bike safely is
a privilege, there's only a forty to a certain group
of people. Is that something that's broader than justested in
(09:04):
my town? I'd say so, I mean, I think you
see this in in where I did a lot of
my research in the San Francisco Bay area, also did
research in Philadelphia and Detroit and Austin as well. That's
not in the book, but yeah, that's it's common, and
there's a few different There's kind of a there's a
(09:25):
degree of cumulative causality, as we would say in economic geography. Right,
you have, going back to say the nineteen nineties, you
had bicycle advocates primarily recreational, primarily middle class, largely white,
recreational cyclists, or and you start to seem participants in
(09:51):
by squad vocacy organizations also being kind of bicycle commuters.
The kinds of jobs that were growing in urban centers
in the nineteen nineties and two thousands or you know,
the first decade of this millennium, right, are the kinds
of you know, if not high tech, sort of professional
(10:17):
technical type of employment, right, growing in urban centers. And
there's relatively affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods that makes it
feasible and desirable actually that you could you could, you know,
(10:40):
find a fairly affordable house and be able to bike
to work right two to three miles, right, rather than
the commute in from the suburbs or the commute out
from the urban center to jobs at the suburbs. Right. So,
I think that you get a lot of the initial
(11:00):
energy around the bicycle movement if you look at critical Mass,
if you look at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and
its early days. Again, these are things I'm familiar with.
A lot of this sort of the political mobilization is
around making those types of journeys easier, more doable. Right.
You also have the phenomenon where the neighborhoods that are
(11:22):
getting gentrified in this time are your sort of classic
innermost streetcar suburbs developed around a hundred years ago, fairly
walkable themselves. They have a mix of commercial and residential.
They aren't buying large industrial neighborhoods, right, The industrial neighborhoods
where you still have a lot of truck traffic, where
(11:45):
industry be got more industry or de industrialization really hollowed
out the economic base where you have you know, large roadways,
you have you know disinvestment and kind of a mix
of small retail, etc. Etc. Um. Lower income population. Uh,
(12:08):
those were not um. Those were not areas where were
that were attracting the kinds of people who would be
listened to when they're demanding bicycle infrastructure. Right, there's still
lots of cyclists in those neighborhoods UM in a place
like East Oakland or um uh North Philadelphia or something
(12:32):
like that, right where there are a lot of people
who ride bicycles, but they don't they're not organized politically
uh under the sort of the block of of of
cyclists UM. And so there's this sort of paradox or
in the way that I came around to this project
(12:53):
was I was working in a bike shop in Philadelphia,
and I was one of those white hipsters on fixies.
Right at the same time, I spent a lot of
my day speaking Spanish, talking with and helping people fix
their bikes, mostly Latin American immigrants who were working as
(13:16):
dishwashers or delivering food, buying bikes at Walmart because it's
what they could afford, even though they knew that they
were crapped, they just couldn't afford anything better trying to
get the most out of those bikes. And so there's
this funny dichotomy. On the one hand, it's like you
have the cool bike already, creative scene that is sort
(13:39):
of trying to be encouraged maybe, And on the other hand,
a lot of the people were actually making do on
bicycles are not sort of part of that vision, I
guess for the city, right when I think about things
in spatial terms as well, right, if you imagine going
(13:59):
back to the journeys to work from a sort of
close in residential neighborhood that is experiencing a lot of turnover,
a lot of middle class you know, mostly white but
not necessarily exclusively white, in migrants, the types of journeys
that a lot of you know, I'll take Durham for example,
(14:21):
where I live now, which is not there's not a
lot of good bicycle infrastructure. There's a little there's not
a lot of good bicycle infrastructure, but there's some job
growth in the downtown area. There's certainly a lot of
job growth in the sort of the suburbs. But in
terms of the kinds of jobs that, um, you know,
(14:44):
working class jobs that are being created at Amazon fulfillment centers,
those are at the urban periphery, right, They're not places
that even in a kind of a gentrifying neighborhood. Even
if bicycle infrastructure were created. This sort of the direct
tionality of the feasible commute kind of runs against the
(15:06):
feasible bicycle commute sort of runs against the very kind
of spread out and scattered commutes in the sort of retail, wholesale, warehousing, manufacturing,
et cetera, et cetera, the sectors that are experiencing job
sprawl rather than a sort of a concentrated, concentrated job
(15:30):
growth in in the sort of the urban center. Right.
So that's another aspect to it as well. Bike advocacy
is very interesting to me. Like I was a bike messenger,
I was a bike racer like these, I've made my
(15:51):
living riding a bike. I've also just ridding my bike
to get to work. And bike advocacy really hasn't reflected
a broadsworth of psychists for a very long time. Do
you think that's why we don't see like better infrastructure
in some of these like d industrializing areas for instance,
And does that lead directly to it being more dangerous?
(16:14):
Like you would be the best to ask of their
statistics to show that, like it's more dangerous to ride
your bike. So I'll say a couple of things. The
the the directionality or the causality is a little bit complicated.
I would say certainly there was some evidence that bicycle
advocates weren't in the early days, and there was a
(16:37):
big sort of cultural shift in by advocacy in the
nineteen nineties part of the nineteen nineties. You have a
lot of cyclists who are actually opposed to bicycle infrastructure.
We still have. They are still a loud, being rish
voice in San Diego. Yeah, exactly, the vehicular cyclists, right, yeah, yeah,
(16:57):
can you explain that, sure? Vehicular cyclists. Um. It was
a philosophy expounded by John Forrester. I have his book
right here in the book and it's not here in
the book Effective Cycling. Um. Where it was the idea
was that cyclists should be riding like cars, right, which
(17:22):
means riding fast, center of the lane, behaving exactly like
a car. And they were very opposed to any infrastructure
that would sort of create be created especially for bicyclists,
on the basis which there was maybe some slight truth
(17:43):
to this, that that cyclists would be banned from roads
that didn't have dedicated bicycle infrastructure. There was a little
bit of concern that was there was I think I
remember reading about a little bit of actual talk among
legislators and planners that bicyclists would be kept off of
(18:06):
main roads. And I think their to their credit, they
saw the creation of bicycle infrastructure at that time as
basically designed to get cyclists out of the way of motorists, right,
And so it was mainly to advance the interests of motorists, right.
(18:26):
But they were very hostile to um. They're very hostile
to a sort of a Dutch style model, which, like
you know, these were guys who like to ride fast
and like you don't. You can't ride fast in the Netherlands, yea,
not everyone's physically able nor really wants to go forty
(18:49):
miles an hour on a road next to cars exactly right.
So it was very much around a strong, fit, confident
cyclist who who knew all the laws of the road,
road really fast, was very assertive. It obviously lent itself
towards a sort of a boomer type, right, a sort
(19:16):
of adventurous type, and it was very much that we
that bicycle advocates should advance the interests of cyclists, not
try to grow the number of people cycling, right, And
so the shift towards that maybe the critical mass moment
is not the only thing, but this is that's sort
(19:36):
of a good moment to kind of tag it to
the nineteen ninety two first critical mass era, but you
know Earth Day vehicle for a small planet, all of
this sort of growing interest in bicycling. Yeah, the shift
towards more people should be doing. Yeah, can you explain
critical mass to people who haven't like participated, because I
(19:59):
think it's quite meek an interesting phenomena. Sure, yeah, absolutely so.
I'm critical mass began in San Francisco in I think
the first critical mass was nineteen ninety two, and it
was began sort of as like a group of people working,
(20:22):
you know, broadly working office jobs who were sort of
kind of culturally anarchistic or you know, had these sort
of anarchist or situation as kind of ideas and who
were kind of organizing months of selves to ride home
as a group. Right, And they started getting this idea
(20:43):
of sort of having these monthly ride together um happenings. Right.
They called it. They didn't call them protests, and they
weren't organized rides. They were um sort of rolling festival
was the idea. I think the first The first name
(21:04):
that they came up with, which mercifully didn't stick, was
like the commute clot right, So it was also about
kind of jamming up the regularity of the Friday evening commute,
so it would be like the first Friday of every
month at commute time. Right. Um. Some of these I
think still happened in Portland. Oh yeah, yeah, it's it's
(21:27):
the critical mass still happens. Um. There's a you know,
one of the chapters in my book, I sort of
trace this arc of critical mass through to the more
kind of bike party oriented exactly exactly the slow roll
type of model, which I think is interesting because it's
(21:48):
a little bit it's consciously less confrontational. It's not held
at a time that would clog up um, sure, clog
up evening traffic. Uh. It's designed to attract kind of families,
people who aren't trying to have confrontations with drivers or police. Right.
One of the things that sort of really put put
(22:10):
bicycle infrastructure on the agenda and San Francisco was this
mass arrest of critical Mass in nineteen ninety seven, supposedly
because the mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown at the time,
got stuck in one in his limo and was like
furious and so asked the police to crack down next time.
(22:31):
It was a huge it was. It backfired massively politically,
but it also created this opening for the San Francisco
Bicycle Coalition, which actually was an organization. Critical Mass was
not an organization, right. It gave them this opportunity to say, well,
what cyclists want is, you know, to actually build out
(22:53):
the bike plan that supposedly exists, but nobody's been doing
anything about it, right, So, I mean that's probably maybe
more than you wanted to know. But sort of that
that arc of Critical Mass as this sort of countercultural
moment that created this opening for a more formal bicycle
planning uh, an advocacy organization or a set of organizations
(23:18):
to emerge, right, Um, And maybe it's unfair I think
I'd probably do it in the book. It's a little
bit unfair probably to call it a kind of depoliticization,
But there was certainly a degree of kind of like
explicit politics of sort of reclaiming the city more broadly
from a kind of left perspective that does disappear somewhat
(23:40):
in the sort of the rhetoric of the bike movement. Yeah,
it's definitely it's definitely lost some of that like radical
edge where these types of these types of you know
when when when like a hundred or two hundred people
on bikes takeover streets in Portland every once in a while,
it is way more in the form of like a
big party. It's like it's it's it's like it's like
a it's like a rolling block party. It does not
(24:01):
have that same level of like, yeah, almost like situationist
creating a happening or creating a situation that that affects
the regular politics and affects the regular way that the
city functions. Yeah, I mean, yeah. That being said, the
sort of the successors, like bike Party in San Jose
was a huge one, and this that bike party model
(24:21):
kind of spread throughout California were often much bigger than
critical maps, right, um, a lot of times more diverse
as well. Right, So there's there's a really interesting kind
of politics around Is the is the politics in the
sort of explicit slogans, or is the politics and sort
of like showing people that there is a kind of
(24:44):
collectivity that they might be part of simply by virtue
of like moving through urban space in a different way.
And for a lot of people it was their first
time riding a bike in the city because they were
so afraid of cars other wise. Right, yeah, it's safety
and numbers. Yeah yeah, yeah, it definitely, Um, I know
(25:05):
for a lot of people that was the case. Like
I've done some critical masses, I mean the UK, we
had reclaimed the streets as well, like a similar vibe.
I remember in the early I guess the first decade
of this century, like there would be critical mass rides
before anti G eight protests, like I remember in Octor
rider in Scotland and things or not in Octorada before that,
(25:25):
and like before other G eight protests would be mass
rights and it's a very different scene to like bike
advocacy now, right yeah, yeah, And you saw this a
little bit with like the Occupy movement, the at least
my experience of them, the sort of early wave of
the Black Lives Matter movement in twenty fourteen with the
(25:47):
killing of Trayvon Martin Um, there were a lot the
bicycles seemed like an intuitive protest for many people, and
that's probably sort of some of the cultural political tools
of critical mass that sort of surface here and there.
(26:09):
But I think for the twentieth anniversary, Chris Carlson, who
was one of the early organizers, called it talks about
critical mass all over the world, and that San Francisco
felt kind of like the hole in the middle of
the donut, right, Like it sort of created this reverberation,
but then it actually withered to a degree in the center.
(26:32):
And often the narrative is, well, you're you're getting like
you're winning, right, so critical mass is no longer necessary
because you're getting bike lanes, you're getting you know, you're
getting investment, you're getting attention from planners, etc. Etc. Right. Obviously, yeah,
the gains, whatever they are, are pretty kind of geographically circumscribed.
(26:56):
And that kind of relates back to how we kind
of started by talking about how, you know, some cities
are putting more development into bike infrastructure, but how it's
being developed is not actually serving people who like like
have to use a bike to commute because they don't
own a car and they can't afford a car, Like
it's it's it's getting used to people who actually already
have a lot of resources. And like an interesting case
(27:17):
in point in this is the belt line in Atlanta,
which like started off in the you know as an
idea in nineteen ninety nine with wanting to create like
a giant loop using like public transit, having having rail
going around the city, having bike having bike paths going
all around the city, being able to like connect the
(27:37):
city with these with these like spaces for like green
space and affordable housing, and instead the project kind of
manifested as this like like is this project that was
had up by real estate companies to replace a whole
bunch of low income neighborhoods with the massive amounts of
like expensive restaurants and luxury condos and you know, putting
(28:01):
putting the belt line and as a path to create
these like expensive, like gentrifying areas around the city. And
it's how like these ideas can start off so good
and then when they get like, you know, actually done,
it's manifested in a way that is actually like not
helpful to people who need this type of thing at all. Yeah. Yeah,
(28:23):
I mean the belt Line. I don't know enough about it.
I've read I've read a little bit of the sort
of academic literature, and I've been there, and it is
really kind of interesting how it is this it is
this huge investment in the reconversion of infrastructure, right to
(28:44):
sort of restore the value of the land surrounding it, right,
sort of old rail, old industrial infrastructure. And that's something
that I don't think that you can you're ever you know, people,
there are studies here and there that try to demonstrate
the kind of the economic value of bicycle infrastructure, the
(29:07):
contribution to tax tax receipts, etcetera, etcetera, But it gets
pretty hard to parse the causality, especially when you're you know,
especially when compared to something that is really sort of
overhauling the space, right, I don't you know, the belt
(29:28):
belt line is it's I think probably it's success from
a sort of financial perspective has to do with it
being a multi use path, right rather than it being
bicycle infrastructure, um, and sort of being being framed as
(29:49):
this much broader type of thing, right rather than um,
a bike lane on a street. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
It's no great to ride down like later on the
weekend because you'll just be slam full of full of people.
It's full of like I when I when I when
I was visiting last year during the start of summer,
(30:09):
I went with a friend to the area by Ponce
City Market, which is kind of a great example of
the gentrifying force of of the belt line. But also like, yeah,
there's people who's trying, people who are trying to ride
bikes around, but there's like kids on rollers, kids everywhere.
There's it's it's it's pretty packed. It's getting it's it's
getting pretty pretty warm. Um. But there's other parts that
(30:30):
are like you know, that are that are more isolated,
where it is much more of like a of like
a commute path. But it's it's interesting. It's just like
it like weaves in and out of these like retail
and luxury apartment um, you know pop up exactly, and
all that stuff is is relatives like relatively new for
all the stuff that is like specifically surrounding surrounding like
(30:52):
the construction of the belt line. Yeah, and I mean
the um, I think that you maybe see this just
a little bit with like, you know, the direction that
I've taken this thinking about it is more the sort
of the types of urban strategies that have begun to
incorporate bicycle infrastructure right or active transportation more generally as
(31:18):
the kind of big driving forces rather than like, is
this bike lane here causing gentrification? It's usually it's often
the other way around. Right. Bicycle infrastructure sort of emerges
as a result of gentrification, right, or as a result
of the in migration of people who are going to
(31:41):
be listened to, right because of their status, because of
their income, because they have kind of existing capacities in
organizing for these types of things. Right. It's I think
what's interesting is one of the one of the positions
(32:02):
I've sort of come around to, right is thinking more
about um, not like should we do bicycle infrastructure because
it might kind of create the perception of gentrification or
cause gentrification or something like that, and instead, like, you
know what, one of the things that gentrification results from
(32:22):
when you're thinking about amenities that sort of lead to
the revalorization of urban space is that they are in
some way special. Right. And so if the question is
the specialness of this particular place, you know, garrison, as
you said, what makes say, you know, the kinds of
(32:45):
places where you can safely ride a bike are fairly unique, right,
They're not well distributed, right, And so from my perspective,
it's sort of the more routine they become as an
as as you know, including them into urban space, the
less special the places where they are built become right,
(33:09):
and it's and so routine that it wouldn't be worth mentioning, right,
It's like mentioning that there is a sewer line, right,
Like it's like mentioning that it has connection to city water,
which okay, yeah, and you know at the at the
urban edge where I live, Um, I don't live at
the urban edge, but at the urban edge in the southeast, Um,
(33:32):
you know, there isn't always connection to the city water. Um. Yeah,
Like trying to get it normalized to the point where
it's like obvious that it's something that is like a
part of the city. It's like yeah, like right, of course,
it's it's just as normal as like a sidewalk or
a road or like a power line, which but fair.
I don't have any sidewalks on my street, and most
of the streets around me have a sidewalk on one
(33:53):
side only Portland Portland also has very has very few sidewalks. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
you have this. Yeah. I lived in Belgium for a
while when I was racing. It, like I lived in
a town that was very much just to look in.
Lots of Belgium is shitty, gray coal mining towns. I
love Belgium, but this is the thing, and like, yeah,
they would never have beat you know, the bike infrastructure
is unremarkable. It was just a thing that everyone used
(34:15):
to go to the shops to go to school. It
wasn't right lest like selling point for a branch restaurant. Yeah,
and I think it's this kind of thing where it's
bigger than just the infrastructure. Right. A lot of the
places where bicycle infrastructure has been really successful, right are
these sort of dense, relatively dense areas, actually not the
(34:38):
densest areas right where everything was is in walking distance,
but the area is kind of just beyond there, right
where where there are you know, shops, places of employment, services, etc. Etc.
All sort of within reasonable biking distance or maybe long
(35:00):
walking distance, right, but too short to really merit a
trip on a bus or a train. Right, And you know,
short enough that maybe some of us would feel a
little bit silly getting in the car to go do it, right,
So that that kind of zone is also not terribly
common in the United States, Right, A lot of those
(35:22):
places got destroyed to build highways. Right, or got destroyed
to build kind of suburban style shopping malls, and so
that's part of their part of their specialness. But going
back to the idea of you know, people in the
places where people were really relying on bicycles, right, that
(35:45):
there isn't necessarily infrastructure. It's partially a data issue, going
back to your data question. Right. The way that we
collect data on bicycling is people people bicycling to work. Right.
If people aren't in the workforce, or they happen to
not have a job, that is not counted in the census. Right,
(36:10):
even if you bicycle to the train like I do.
Like if I get to fill out the census, I'm
going to fill out train, right, because that's the bulk
of my journey when I commute. And so it skews
your perception of where infrastructure might be needed if you're
using data toward places that where people are commuting by bicycle,
(36:35):
right rather than you know, commuting is only a quarter
to a third of all trips, right, rather than all
the other trips that we don't know about, right. And
sometimes we measure them with passive measurement, like pressure sensors
in the streets. Sometimes active measurement, like people doing bicycle
counts on particular days. Right, there's a whole history of that.
(36:56):
Now we're using Strava. But then we're getting a small
like we're getting a very rich data set about a
small subset of cyclists and hoping that that extends to most,
if not all cyclists. And then to your question started,
I'll I'll pause right to your question about the the
(37:18):
the data question. Right, how how deadly or how dangerous
are various streets that don't have bike lanes. There is
a big problem of the missing denominator. Right, We don't
know how many people cycles, so we don't know the
rates of injury on these particular roadways in the way
(37:42):
in the same way that we do know car volumes
and can have a better sense of the rates of
injury based on collisions. Right, But you do see clusters
of collisions in places where you know, where they're large
roads meeting where basically no very few if any traffic
(38:06):
engineers would sign off on taking away some of that
car capacity to create more safety for cyclists. And of
course those those kind of compound, those factors kind of compound. Right.
You maybe have an industrial area, it's a big interface
with a large urban arterial or an off ramp to
(38:28):
a highway. Right, these kind of all go together with
um with potentially sort of lower lower income area are
sort of a lower less pressure to improve that that area. Yeah,
(38:48):
So I'm thinking when I think about, like how the
bike movement missed an opportunity to be better. I always
think about like this moment in twenty twenty when this
man called Dijon Kizzie was killed by police in LA
And the incident which which led to the cops shooting him,
began because the cops tried to pull him over for
running a stop sign on a bike, right, which is
(39:09):
a thing that tenth of thousands of white dudes in
Spandex do every single day in this kind of and
not a word was spoken by the bike movement, at
least that I saw by bike folks, you know, in
sort of solidarity or opposition to what had happened. Right,
It just it was just another thing that went mourned
(39:31):
by thousands of people and ignored by others. So like it,
maybe think about how we build Maybe it's wrong to
think about how we build a better bike movement, and
maybe it's better to think about how we make it
unremarkable that you bike, right, we make it like not
an identity. Think, but how do we make cities where
people are safe riding bikes I guess, regardless of whether
(39:53):
they're wearing spandex or they're just trying to get to
the shops. Yeah, I mean that's a really kind of
an important question, and in my research a lot of
people were grappling with that. There was an incident that
mercifully didn't result in someone being killed or seriously injured.
But you know, a guy was pulled off of his
bike by a police beaten up in San Francisco, and
(40:16):
there was a big march afterwards, and some of the
some bi SURP advocates did show up, but it was
not framed as this is something that you know is
affecting us as cyclists, right, This is or that affecting
some of us as cyclists, right, and an injury to
one as an injury at all. Right, that's not that's
(40:36):
not It was not the kind of the frame that
people were using to mud from what I could tell, right, Um,
and you had bicycle you know black bisqua advocates in
East Oakland who didn't really frame themselves as bice squadvocates
necessarily in the traditional or the mold that is sort
of determined by the sort of the hegemonically kind of
(40:59):
white and the class advocacy organizations, right, but they were
very much plasicle advocates who you know, um, a lot
of were a lot of a lot of what they
did was sort of like teaching people to ride correctly
so that they would have fewer interactions with police, right
or um kind of managing interactions with police, and you know,
(41:25):
hopefully becoming well enough known as cyclists that they weren't
kind of subject to the kinds of interactions that you
know where people police end up killing somebody. Right. Um,
Now that I live in a place where very few
people bicycle to work or for much of anything, right,
I'm thinking a bit more holistically about uh, you know,
(41:51):
it's now kind of a buzzword, but you know, a
kind of a more car optional um city right where
you don't need to have a car to do various things.
You know. I'm I'm involved with bicycle advocates here, but
like when I when I look around, I see like
a bus stop that is a stick in a median, right,
(42:15):
there's no bench, there's no sidewalks to get to it,
there's no crosswalks or anything like that. And I mean,
I think that one of the bigger one of the
bigger questions is to make a place that's safe for cyclists,
safe for people walking, safe for people walking their bikes,
(42:35):
or safe for people walking to transit. Right. Um is
reducing the kind of the space and the way that
space and speed go together, right, that are devoted to cars,
and a lot of that is like um, reducing the
(42:56):
the the distances that people need to travel right for
various things. Right, this gets into this sort of the
fifteen minute city stuff, which is it's been really wild
to see it being turned into this like QAnon type,
you know, Agenda twenty one, un black Helicopters type of
conspiracy theory, right, because I think of it as a
(43:19):
very kind of milk toast type of policy framework that's
honored in the breach right sort of like complete streets,
there's a carve out for unless the traffic engineer says
it's not really feasible, and then we won't really question
that judgment. We just won't do it. Right. So, I mean,
I do think it's bigger than modes of transport are
(43:39):
really bigger than people's individual decisions or even like what
the sort of once you are in your mode of transport,
what the sort of behavioral matrix is. Right, It's sort
of like what is your life consist of? Right? What
what do you do to preserve your dignity with your coworkers? Right?
(44:03):
All of these kinds of things that feed people towards
towards driving, except in you know, very specific places that
you know have have become special in the United States.
(44:25):
I mean there's a lot, there's a lot to say, right.
It is really it's much bigger than than bicycling. Um.
It's the sort of the built environment. And I think
one of the things that what I land on in
the book maybe belated ly, right, because these these these
things take years, is um, is this the way that
(44:46):
bicycling is still kind of this interstitial um solution? Right.
It's sort of like kind of picking up scraps here
and there in the built environment. Right, It's like picking
up some of the loose ends right in how cities
are organized that makes them frustrating difficult to navigate, right. Um.
(45:08):
And you know, I think a lot of the energy
not exclusively, certainly, And bicycle advocacy has become much more
diverse in part through like listening to a lot of
the voices of advocates of color and women advocates, and
you know, um kind of thinking beyond that sort of
(45:31):
stereotypical you know, not just the middle aged man in
micro but like the the sort of middle aged guy
on us early, right, you know that that maybe successor
to the middle aged man and micro right, and certainly
calling myself out, um, but the it's still very kind
of an interstitial thing, right, Um, it's and the thing
(45:55):
about the urban transportation systems in the United States is
that they leave a lot of interstices, right, There's a
lot of areas that are poorly served by anything but cars,
and honestly poorly served by cars. You know, in Oakland
you had people a lot of the sort of the
maybe not anger but certainly annoyance at bicycle advocacy and
(46:20):
bicycle infrastructure would be And I think you see this
in Portland too, where it's like we've been asking for sidewalks,
we've been asking the city to to like fill these potholes,
and instead there's these bike lanes that people who just
got here are asking for right, and so maybe that's
a failure of solidarity on people coming, you know, people
(46:42):
moving to a neighborhood. They're like, why is it so
torturous to get somewhere by bike? Rather than kind of
maybe stopping and saying, all right, what what what have
people been demanding here before I got here? Right? Um?
And how can I sort of contribute to that as
well and sort of kind of merge our agendas potentially? Um?
(47:04):
But it is the sort of it's a it's an
interstitial um solution, right. And so from for me, you know,
the bigger the bigger questions are sort of what what
role will bicycles play when we start to really take
seriously the kind of broader urban structure, so you don't
(47:29):
have these sort of islands of bike ability inside a
sea of automobility. Right, Um, do you have a situation
where it actually becomes more practical to walk and take
transit than it is to bike? Right? I would call
that a that a win? Right? And I think you know,
there's a there's a there's a degree to which we
can get fixated on on the particular mode of transport.
(47:51):
I think because we all kind of like fell in
love with bicycles and that was the sort of the
the the gateway drug into thinking about like transport in
cities and how people move around and the sort of
the history of urban planning. Right. So, I mean these
are all I don't know if I really kind of
offered anything that sort of puts it all together nicely, right,
(48:14):
but the idea that it really does need to become normalized,
and if it actually sort of disappears in the process
of being normalized and it stops being a signifier of
environmental rectitude or something like that. And you know, if
I could walk to a grocery store instead of having
(48:35):
to bike to a grocery store, I would prefer that
honestly where I am right now, right, even though I
love cycling, right and it's something that I'll never stop doing. Right.
So I think kind of thinking more holistically about what
kinds of cities we need to have to move beyond,
move beyond automobility, both from a climate perspective and a
(48:57):
social justice perspective and just almost like a thermodynamic perspective. Um.
So I mean that maybe that's the moving up to
the level of physics is where one kind of place
to end. Yeah. No, I think that's very good. Yeah.
Is there anything you'd you'd like to plug maybe people
(49:21):
where people can find your book, where people can follow
you online, and I think like that, any sort of
projects you're interested in. Sure. Yeah, so, um my you
can find me on Twitter. I'm at j O st
e h l I N. My book is now, it's
few years old. It's twenty nineteen with University of Minnesota Press.
It's all. It's called cycle Scapes of the Unequal City
(49:44):
M and my latest work I'm actually looking at, um
the politics of highway removal. So maybe scaling up in
terms of infrastructure, thinking about sort of bigger, kind of
the great clanking gears of urbanism rather than you know,
(50:04):
this little tiny stretch of pavement on the side that's
that's full of glass and car doors and stuff like that.
So but of course they all kind of fit together,
sort of what are the how does the fabric of
the built environment have to change in order to grapple
his climate change, inequality and sort of making a sort
(50:24):
of a more human type of city. Yeah. I think
it's great. It's a wonderful place. Tran, thank you so
much for giving us some of your afternoon. JA. Yeah,
thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time and
it was a really fun conversation. Hi, podcast fans, it's me,
It's Durings and it's just a tiny little pick up
that I wanted to add to the end of the
episode because I neglected to mention that Siklista Zene did
(50:47):
call out the police killing of Dijon Kissy very explicitly
and had an excellent peace on it, as they do
on lots of other things. They are incredibly wonderful and
you can find them at Siklista Zene cyc l I
s t A z i ne dot com. They are
not representative of the rest of the bike media, so
(51:08):
well worth looking at if you like bikes and not
the police murdering people. They're a wonderful publication. Okay, thanks bye.
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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(51:31):
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