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