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Bike Lanes are White Lanes
Bicycle Advocacy and Urban Planning
By Melody L. Hoffmann UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8820-1
CHAPTER 1
One Less Car, One More Critique
U.S. Urban Bicycle Culture and Advocacy
"But there's no black people here," Greg said to me when I suggested he cut in line for some breakfast. He was right. I looked around at the four hundred bicyclists being served, and no one looked like Greg. What makes Greg's comment even more poignant is that the breakfast was being served at All People's Church, a few blocks west of one of Milwaukee's unofficial segregation lines. And we were on the black people's side. I was volunteering for the Riverwest 24, a twenty-four-hour bicycle event based in the working-class neighborhood of Riverwest. People are required to ride a bicycle for twenty-four hours, following the same five-mile loop around the neighborhood. Every few hours a "bonus" event is scheduled, breakfast being one of them. So there I was with Greg, feeling embarrassed that the only other black people I could point out to him were residents in the neighborhood who had wandered over to witness the chaos of feeding four hundred people outside. I felt embarrassed because this was the exact conversation I dreaded. Why did a bicycle event committed to community building in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Milwaukee have to be so white-washed? Why wasn't a more representative group of people in the neighborhood participating in this event?
I am especially sensitive to these questions because I have spent the last five years discovering inequities like this in urban bicycling. Why do biking and high-profile bicycle events such as the Riverwest 24 seem to be designed for middle-class, or more specifically, upwardly mobile white people? Biking is not necessarily a "white" activity. Obviously, people of color ride bicycles too. But in practice, the needs of upwardly mobile white bicyclists are prioritized across the country in all sorts of bicycle planning. Urban bicycling, whether in the form of a community event or new bicycle infrastructure, is framed around how upwardly mobile white people use a bicycle. This does not necessarily mean that people of different backgrounds use bikes in divergent ways or that all upwardly mobile people bike in the same way. But the ways in which particular white people have planned bicycle events, infrastructure, and other amenities may not speak to other cultures in the same manner.
A Pro-Bicycling Critique of Bicycle Advocacy
I have come to this admittedly provocative standpoint as an upwardly mobile white bicyclist myself. For over ten years I have used a bicycle to traverse my urban surroundings. I rarely drive a car. I am also a bicycle advocate, volunteering for local bicycle organizations, helping adults learn how to ride a bicycle, and organizing bicycle events. I am deeply immersed in urban bicycling and benefit greatly from how cities have paid attention to the needs of bicyclists like me. Even though I am critical of how mainstream bicycle advocacy and planning have rolled out as bicycling increases in popularity, I am still a bicyclist. I approach the inequity issues in urban bicycling from a pro-bicycling standpoint.
With most objects of cultural study, there are some elements that are easier to critique than others; within transportation research, this is certainly the case. The automobile, driver, and freeway are the easiest targets for the critic to analyze. Public transit is also a common object for critique, but transportation scholars criticize those who control the transit, not the actual vehicles or the people who ride. The bicycle, its rider, and its related amenities are assumedly off-limits for critique because of the way that bicycling is framed in the media, by advocates, and by some city governments as a positive, progressive, and good thing for all people. Or as cultural geographer Justin Spinney put it, "Biking is understood as apple pie; no one can hate apple pie."
People avoid critiquing the bicycle and connected cultures for a few reasons. First, the bicycle is seen as positive and progressive; riding a bicycle will make one healthier and help curb vehicle pollution. Second, bicycle advocates seek to promote the positive and progressive elements of bicycling. Well-intentioned bicycle advocates spend a lot of time making urban spaces safer for bicyclists. Third, the crafting of bicycle infrastructure has a very low impact on the existing urban landscape. Not only are bicycle lanes cheap and easy to construct, bicycles have almost zero impact on the road conditions. Bicycling makes few demands on public funds for the cost of infrastructure construction and maintenance. And fourth, the bicycle is seen as "helping to promote a safe and pleasant local environment." For example, an increase in people bicycling decreases the amount of space taken up by vehicles on the roads. Bicyclists often report the calmness and happiness they feel bicycling, leading to fewer stress-laden commuters on the road.
For all of these reasons, it is hard to see what there is to critique about the bicycle and the bicyclist. It is true that the ways in which the bicycle impacts communities are not as obvious as a freeway running through a historically black neighborhood. However, a discussion is warranted about how bicycle infrastructure can reaffirm existing societal inequalities because of the subtle, problematic impacts the bicycle has had on various communities. There is nothing about bicycle technology that lends itself to race and class divisions. It is largely an equal-opportunity form of transportation for people with able bodies. In parts, this book traces a burgeoning directive of city governments handling bicycle infrastructure and advocacy. There are certainly positives to this directive (mainly financial), but by governments focusing on bicycle infrastructure that will please an already privileged demographic, many marginalized bicyclists will inevitably remain in the margins.
The Political Power of the Bicycle
The bicycle is not an apolitical, neutral form of mobility. It carries with it a diversity of signification depending on its location in time and space. A set of two wheels can symbolize both community and conflict. Communication can either flourish, as neighbors reminisce about their community bicycle event, or it can be strained, as neighbors fight over the necessity of bicycle amenities in their neighborhood. The popularity of bicycling can influence the construction of beautiful paths and trails, but it can also be a signifier of gentrification. The visible figure of the white upwardly mobile bicyclist who dominates mainstream urban bicycle culture can marginalize other types of people who bike through cities. This is reflected in mediated images of bicycling that systematically under-represent people of color and in the gentrification of "bike friendly" cities that alter a neighborhood's demographics.
This book is a collection of place-based case studies that investigate the varying ways communities and cities interact with bicycle-based initiatives. The case studies grapple with questions such as: How can a bicycle work to build tight-knit communities while also working to disempower other communities? How can a technology built for ease in mobility, minimizing environmental pollution, and improving the health of its riders also do harm to people? What can possibly be wrong with an educated white person riding a bike in the city? Are bicyclists not already situated in a marginalized position, in direct conflict with the dominant U.S. car culture? The answers to these questions rest in privilege and power. A community's level of perceived privilege and power can reflect their understanding of bicycle culture. In many cases, communities' varying understandings can feel like polar opposites.
Bicycle advocates have gained substantial power in some cities, popularizing this mode of transit and leisure through independent and state-sanctioned channels. But the way that bicycling has materialized in places like Portland and Minneapolis works to communicate delineations of who belongs in these bicycling spaces. "Advocacy of any sort has the capacity to frame certain issues in a way that can either directly or indirectly marginalize interests that exist outside of an established rhetorical framework," bicycle scholar Zack Furness argues.5 The white upwardly mobile people who often make up bicycle advocacy groups can (and do) utilize their cultural privilege and power to control how their advocacy will materialize in cities. This includes controlling what areas of the city get bicycle amenities and what these amenities look like.
The Signification of the Bicycle
A major reason that mainstream bicycle culture and advocacy does not speak to a larger bicycling demographic is because the bicycle has a wide array of signification across cultures, demographics, and places. The idea of signification is found in communication studies theory. Scholars like John Fiske use signification to explain how an object can include a tangible sign, a mental understanding of the sign, and an external meaning created from the sign. The bicycle itself is a sign, a physical object with a meaning. It is the external meaning, or signification, that can change depending on who is reading the sign. If a bicycle is understood to have different signification then that allows room for some people to see it as a progressive, earth-friendly tool and other people to see it as a marker of poverty or nuisance on the road.
It is helpful to understand the bicycle as a rolling signifier because the bicycle's meaning changes in different spaces, with different people, and in different cultures. I argue that the "rolling signification" of the bicycle contributes to its ability to build community, influence gentrifying urban planning, and obscure and reify systemic race and class barriers. The bicycle has cultural understandings embedded in it, and these understandings are seen as natural by those in power positions. For example, a lot of bicycle advocates in urban spaces understand bicycles to be a superior mode of transportation due to their lack of reliance on oil, and thus they demand street alterations to make room for them. But this argument does not resonate in cultures where cars are a status symbol or a necessity. Bicycle advocates who push the dominant cultural understanding of bicycling have a hard time grappling with community members who question this view.
Present cultural understandings of the bicycle are also impacted by historical understandings. The bicycle, as a cultural artifact, has denoted different meanings across time and space. For example, the bicycle was once a source of panic in the 1890s as wealthy women mounted the two-wheeled machine and rode away from their domestic responsibilities. And when the mass production of bicycles took hold in the early 1900s, white elite cyclists dismounted so as to not be connected to the poor black people riding in the South. In middle- to upper-class spaces the bicycle is largely understood as an alternative form of transportation, a tool of leisure, and part of elite sports. In lower-income spaces the bicycle can be seen as a marker of poverty. Therefore, there is nothing static about what the bicycle represents. Rather, its signification changes as it rolls through different socioeconomic and cultural spaces and time.
Bicycle Scholarship and History
My research is a response to a lack of intersectional, critical, and political scholarship about bicycle culture and related infrastructure planning. Literature on bicycle culture tends to begin from one standpoint such as gender, social movements, history, advocacy, or technology. The focus on one-dimensional, celebratory, and apolitical research has created a body of work that has ignored major cultural and socioeconomic factors that impact what bicycling looks like in various spaces. For example, Furness's 2005 dissertation "'Put the Fun Between Your Legs!'" contends with the differences embedded in different cycling groups. "These differences essentially boil down to ... those of cultural identity and political enfranchisement." Furness's work is more focused on the radical political potential of the bicycle. For example, he looks at independent media that fosters a bicyclist's "political identity," with his analysis rooted in bicycling's anticapitalism possibilities rather than classed or racial inequity in the bike movement. This book does not focus on anti-bicycling narratives, and it does not argue that bicycling is a positive cultural artifact for society because much of the recent research on bicycling does this work already.
I find the arguments about the political potential of the bicycle compelling and inspiring, but I do not seek to expand those arguments here. If a reader has stumbled into this book still skeptical about the role of bicycling in society, it may be best to review the politically informed bicycle scholarship. Just because I am critical of very specific bicycling moments in this book does not mean that I am critical of bicycling as a form of political resistance, breaking down cultural barriers, leisure activity, or exercise. Readers can assume that I approach my research from a pro-bicycling standpoint. It is because I see bicycling as a positive cultural artifact that this book exists. My concern is that bicycling is getting a bad reputation based on who is selling the positivity in neighborhoods and across cities.
Even though I do not wish to expand on the Leftist political potential of the bicycle in this book, a review of that literature will help clarify my starting point as a pro-bicyclist critic of U.S. bicycle advocacy. Scholars such as Luis Vivanco, Furness, and Dave Horton argue that the bicycle is important to study and should not be dismissed as a child's toy. The literature also argues that the bicycle has spurred political movements and called into question the United States' dominant culture of automobility.
Horton investigates how social movement actors have used bicycles to promote their politics. To do so, he looks at what he refers to as two "former" Western social movements, First Wave feminism and socialism, and two "current" social movements, anarchism and environmentalism. He explains that socialists in the 1890s and 1900s used bicycles to transport literature about their political platform, trying to "convert the masses" and often travelling to working-class communities. The bicycle proved to be "an ideal means of spreading the message of socialism to far-flung places." After many decades of automobility being the dominant form of transport, some social movements worked to disrupt this hegemony vis-à-vis the bicycle. "Contemporary anarchism and environmentalism are complexly interconnected, and perhaps nowhere more than in the politics of transport." These descriptions suggest that the bicycle as a technology has always politicized mobility. Horton's discussion of socialist and working-class reactions to the bicycle is an anomaly in bicycle scholarship and an important addition to bicycle history. But his work largely fails to be intersectional because his discussion of gender ends when he talks about feminism and there is no discussion of ethnicity or race within any of the movements he studied.
Beyond theorizing the bicycle as a material and conceptually political form of technology and mobility, scholarship has also dealt with the bicycle's political intersection with automobility. In One Less Car Furness explores the politicization of the bicycle as it intersects, struggles, and triumphs within car culture, the largest example of which being automobility in Western culture. Furness's argument that bicycle culture cannot be studied in isolation from power supports my argument that bicycle advocacy is always wrapped up in its cultural, spatial, and political surroundings. It also supports my position that the bicycle is a rolling signifier — as the bicycle moves in and out of different places, its relationship to power changes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bike Lanes are White Lanes by Melody L. Hoffmann. Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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