Bikes Point the Way to a Sustainable Future

By Chris Carlsson, AKPress. Posted December 18, 2008.

It has long been a curiosity that mainstream, "middle-class" bicyclists have been obsessed with law-abiding behavior and have been so quick to denounce other cyclists for flouting their sense of propriety. Mainstream bicycle advocates maintain that cyclists as a group must be extremely law-abiding, in order to reinforce the self-congratulatory fantasy that bikes are angels in the transit universe, compared to the (automobile) devil … Once again, even among bicyclists, we run into a neo- Christian moralism that seeks to impose a black and white, good and bad dichotomy, warmly embracing those who shop and ride correctly, and casting the rest of us into a purgatory of illegality and disrespect. It's reinforced by an ideology called "effective cycling" developed by a Stanford rocket engineer (and bicycle enthusiast), which declares that  "Outlaw" Bicycling  bicyclists should strive to behave like cars on the streets of America.

In the U.S., the prevailing cultural norm still sees the bicycle as a toy. As children we are given a bicycle when we are deemed "ready," and it is often our first experience of self-emancipation from the narrow confines of home, of our street, and of parental supervision. Suddenly, we are mobile. On bikes kids quickly expand their territories. Neighborhoods that were once far away are now close and spaces for new independent adventures open up. Who can forget the exhilarating freedom of zipping along on a bicycle with a group of friends, or even alone, at a young age? Mastery of a complex urban environment starts to seem possible as our new mobility alters perspectives, horizons, and expectations.  

Of course this new freedom is tempered by streets jammed with death-dealing vehicles. Our first liberation is eventually forgotten as the promise of "true freedom" behind the wheel of a car is pumped into us before we can even walk, shaping the imaginations of children from an early age. The bicycle is usually seen as a mere stepping stone to the real thing, one's first car. And few people eschew that path and refuse to drive; for many, in spite of the financial burden, getting a car is an urgent priority of growing up, of establishing maturity. The bicycle is left behind as a child's plaything, or maybe in our overweening athletic culture it retains some use as a device for exercise. But American society, dominated by the car and oil industries for most of the past century, has been unwilling to accommodate the bicycle as a vehicular choice, as a reasonable means of daily transportation.  

Nevertheless, the bicycle has been enjoying a resurgence in the past 15 years. Daily bicycle commuting has expanded dramatically in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and other cities where the monthly seizure of streets by bicyclists known as Critical Mass has opened space and imaginations, and given people a safe and enjoyable way to reconnect with urban bicycling before venturing out on their own. For most of these new bicycle commuters, the choice is self-reinforcing. Once tried, bicycling is much more pleasant than sitting in traffic in a car. Moreover, it is much cheaper, and the rhythms of regular cycling can improve mental and physical health.   Underneath this broad move towards bicycling is a burgeoning subculture that is reaching down to kids and teens, diminishing the gender gap, and making bicycling and things bicycle-related hip in unprecedented ways. This subculture is largely a do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenon, based on word-of-mouth, homemade zines, informal parties and events, and a deliberate sharing of basic technical know-how. The zine explosion, a quintessential DIY movement based on increasingly available reproduction technologies in copyshops and at corporate jobs since the mid-1980s, was crucial in spreading the new bike subculture. Megulon-5 attributes his own entry into the subculture partly to Greta Snider's infamous zine Mudflap:  

I was living in Portland, reading Mudflap and BikeCult and a lot of zines, and countercultural books. There was just this culture out there that I felt really isolated from, living in Portland. Now I don't feel so much that way, partly because I think we've -- C.H.U.N.K. 666 and other people unrelated to us -- made our own culture.

The bike subcultures provide important social space. Unlike the chain stores and malls that dominate the U.S., the bike culture is participatory, unpredictable, and open-ended. Robin Havens moved to San Francisco in 1996, knowing no one and not yet a bicyclist. But thanks to her roommates she found herself immersed in the bike messenger scene, and before long she was publishing her own occasional zine, Rip It Up!, about "bikes, beer and boys." Eventually she became a bike mechanic, founded a bike repair workshop for kids in San Francisco's Hunters' Point, and now teaches bike repair as part of a public high school curriculum. She declares:  

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