Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation

Biking for all?

Aaron Golub, Melody L. Hoffmann, Adonia E. Lugo, Gerardo F. Sandoval, Aaron Golub, Melody L. Hoffmann, Adonia E. Lugo, Gerardo F. Sandoval

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317362326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Développement durable

As bicycle commuting grows in the United States, the profile of the white, middle-class cyclist has emerged. This stereotype evolves just as investments in cycling play an increasingly important role in neighborhood transformations. However, despite stereotypes, the cycling public is actually quite diverse, with the greatest share falling into the lowest income categories.

Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation demonstrates that for those with privilege, bicycling can be liberatory, a lifestyle choice, whereas for those surviving at the margins, cycling is not a choice, but an often oppressive necessity. Ignoring these "invisible" cyclists skews bicycle improvements towards those with choices. This book argues that it is vital to contextualize bicycling within a broader social justice framework if investments are to serve all street users equitably. "Bicycle justice" is an inclusionary social movement based on furthering material equity and the recognition that qualitative differences matter.

This book illustrates equitable bicycle advocacy, policy and planning. In synthesizing the projects of critical cultural studies, transportation justice and planning, the book reveals the relevance of social justice to public and community-driven investments in cycling. This book will interest professionals, advocates, academics and students in the fields of transportation planning, urban planning, community development, urban geography, sociology and policy.

1 Introduction

Creating an inclusionary bicycle justice movement

Aaron Golub, Melody L. Hoffmann, Adonia E. Lugo and Gerardo F. Sandoval

DOI: 10.4324/9781315668840-1

Introduction

For much of the past century, the bicycle was not taken seriously as a means of mass mobility – overshadowed by the car almost as soon as the bicycle became affordable due to mass production in the early 1900s. After smaller waves of interest over the past century, a recent and seemingly sustainable bicycling boom in the U.S. and in many cities worldwide has caught the attention of transportation planners, policymakers, and the public as more people turn to the bicycle for mobility and exercise. Even though rates of cycling in the U.S. remain relatively low, especially when compared to other Western countries, there has been a noticeable increase in people using a bicycle for transportation. Growth in the number of bicycle commuters in the U.S. is now far outpacing the growth of other modes; between 2000 and 2012 when the total number of workers grew by 9 percent, bicycling to work grew by 61 percent while driving to work grew by 10 percent (Pisarski, 2013). In some cities, the growth was much greater; between 2000 and 2009, cycling to work more than doubled in Chicago and Portland, while cities like San Francisco and Minneapolis saw similar increases during the 1990s (Pucher et al., 2011).

A panoply of factors contribute to this growth in ridership, including improvements in cycling infrastructure in many cities, recognition of the health benefits of active travel, a cultural turn toward reduced environmental impact and petroleum dependence, and significant demographic and economic shifts which challenge traditional patterns of car ownership and licensure especially among younger age groups. A new profile of urban cycling has emerged, one associated with the middle-class whiteness that was once more at home in suburbs and SUVs, but is now venturing, mostly by choice, back into the city riding buses, trains, and bicycles. But this mediated profile of the upwardly mobile bicyclist is misleading. The greatest share of bicycle commuters in the U.S. fall into the lowest U.S. Census income bracket, Latinos have the highest rates of bicycle commuting, and African Americans doubled their rate of bicycling between 2001 and 2009 compared to only a 22 percent increase for whites (McKenzie, 2014; League of American Bicyclists and the Sierra Club, 2013). There are thus striking contrasts between the widely touted cycling renaissance as a signifier of being hip and the bicycle's more realistic utilitarian character as a low-cost transport mode for a broader range of riders and needs.

Bicycle advocates promote the bicycle as a form of freedom or emancipation from the doldrums and dilemmas of a car-dominated life—a choice made among various transportation alternatives often linked to larger displays of lifestyle or politics. But for many people in the U.S., the bicycle is not an emancipatory tool—it is not a statement about style or politics – but an outcome of oppression, leaving the bicycle as the only reasonable travel option due to inadequate public transportation, complex travel needs, or low wages and high transportation costs. Furthermore, street harassment and crime, sexual solicitations, and police violence are likely experiences that marginalized communities suffer from when they need or choose to ride a bicycle (Minnesota Healthy Kids Coalition, 2015; see also Coates, 2015). Common infrastructure tools used to lure new bicyclists such as off-street trails and protected bicycle lanes cannot address these common threats and vulnerabilities many experience in the public realm everywhere and every day. Thus, bicycling has varying potentials to be both an emancipatory and oppressive practice. Coming to understand how individuals, communities, and experts locate bicycling between these extremes, and how this shapes their own practices, sheds light on what “bicycle justice” could mean and how community advocates can strive to achieve it. That is the goal of this book.

Indeed, many communities are defining “bicycle justice” for themselves and in recent years a diverse range of people and projects have broken new paths toward making bicycling inclusive and accessible to all. The case studies collected in this book call attention to overlooked riders and what their invisibility means for bicycle advocacy, planning, and policy. Their lived struggles connect bicycling with larger issues of inequality in health, wealth, voice, and security. The dismissal of these struggles as irrelevant to bicycle advocacy and planning has allowed this affordable and flexible technology to become a symbol of urban gentrification, whiteness, privilege, and choice. This introduction continues with a framing of the overall issues and tensions at play in the process of broadening the voices and beneficiaries of bicycle advocacy and planning. We then describe the challenges of developing inclusionary and emancipatory bicycle justice and argue that it is vital to contextualize bicycling within a broader justice framework if public investment in the practice is to serve all street users equitably. We then present an overview of the chapters, and conclude by delineating themes and highlighting problems and solutions.

Transportation and the dimensions of injustice

Contemporary issues of bike planning and street design need to be understood in a context of uneven urban development which excludes and oppresses along class and racial lines. Transportation planning, policies, and investments shape and are shaped by these uneven and exclusionary processes and impact the geographies of opportunity for many communities and individuals. These transportation impacts are often racialized, with people of color routinely bearing the brunt of the exclusion. For example, freeways, integrated into other processes of “urban renewal,” created concrete physical barriers in communities of color, facilitating the suburbanization of whites while destroying thriving neighborhoods and displacing entire communities (Gibson, 2007; Mohl, 1993). East Los Angeles was reshaped by the construction of multiple freeways and was “encircled, cut up, and glutted by freeways” (Avila, 1998, p. 18). Despite bicycle advocacy's inherent opposition to the automobile “system” and all of its injustices, inefficiencies, and externalities, many transportation justice advocates still connect bicycle planning with whiteness and privilege and thus see it as a continuation of this history of injustices, rather than a break with it (Maus, 2011–2012).

The pragmatic actions illustrated by some of the case studies in this book emerged in the context of and in response to these unjust urban processes. In fact, the U.S. Civil Rights movement emerged in part around transportation inequalities and injustices. In the early 1950s, African Americans in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, staged the nation's first successful bus boycott to protest their unequal treatment to whites on busses. From Rosa Parks to the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, to modern transportation justice movements such as the Bus Riders Union in Los Angeles or the national Transportation Equity Network, justice activists have demanded that transportation systems end their practices of discrimination against low-income and minority communities (Bullard et al., 2004; Grengs, 2002; Transportation Equity Network, 2015). The Bus Riders Union relied on the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prove that the Los Angeles County transit authority was actively discriminating against bus riders, overwhelmingly people of color and low-income, through the disparities they experienced in quality of service and subsidy levels compared to whiter patrons of rail systems in the region (Grengs, 2002). This case made it clear that transportation systems, including the outcomes of plans and investments and the planning processes themselves, are important civil rights issues.

While transportation justice movements were successful in elevating transportation as a civil rights issue, including bicycling in this framework has been complicated by images of bicycling as a lifestyle choice, by the delineation of bicycle advocacy as a white and middle-class space, and by the entanglement of bicycle investments in processes of real-estate upgrading associated with displacement and gentrification. An inclusionary and socially just bicycle justice practice will have to overcome these hurdles which we distill into two key challenges: (1) the othering of certain riders within organized bicycling, and (2) disparities in the benefits of bicycle investments.

The othering of certain riders within organized bicycling

In the U.S., bicycling takes place both where it is welcomed by attitudes and infrastructure and where it is not. Many bicyclists have cycled with or without the bicycle lanes, signals, and markings that advocates and planners view as crucial to luring drivers out of their cars (League of American Bicyclists and the Sierra Club, 2013). Largely invisible or maligned in popular imagery, professional practice, and the mainstream cycling movement, these actually existing cyclists are generally poorly understood by the dominant trifecta of advocacy, engineering, and policy (Koeppel, 2005; Fuller and Beltran, 2010; Zavestoski and Agyeman, 2015b). It is also troubling that the pro-bicycling cultural and demographic shift occurring in U.S. inner cities is structurally linked with the gentrification and displacement of inner-city residents who are low-income and people of color, the exact population that is dependent on cycling as an affordable mode of transport. Through bicycle justice, we focus specifically on these othered riders and challenge the bicycle advocacy and planning norms which focus on white and middle-class commuters.

Understanding the socio-cultural elements of bicycling today can be a challenge amidst the various efforts to associate cycling with predominantly white, middle-class urbanism and lifestyles. Scholars have tracked the promotion of bicycle gentrification in Los Angeles and Minneapolis (Hoffmann and Lugo, 2014), Portland (Lubitow and Miller, 2013), and Memphis (Smiley et al., 2014), and the San Francisco Bay Area (Stehlin, 2015). “Bicycle gentrification” refers to the process through which bicycle infrastructure contributes to or accompanies a neighborhood's property value increases and resulting displacement effects, and the trend where key figures use bicycle infrastructure strategically to rebrand areas of the city in preparation for real-estate investment or redevelopment. Additionally, there has been a proliferation of bicycle iconography in U.S. advertisements and consumer goods and controversy about urban bicycling in the news media (Furness, 2010). These images, whether evoked positively or negatively, work to establish a hegemonic understanding of who bikes and who does not. Dominant images include the scofflaw bicycle messenger, the lycra-clad racer, or the bicycle commuter dressed in professional attire. The promotion or condemnation of these subcultural stereotypes as bicycling mascots skews public perceptions of who is actually using bicycles for transportation.

The gap between bicycling as image and as practice can be explained in part by the racial and socioeconomic homogeneity of professional bicycle advocates and planners. Promoting bicycling is a networked practice that includes the act of advocating and participating in transportation planning process and also participation in conferences, email lists, consuming and creating bike-related media, and coordinating advocacy activities across many cities. The result is what we here call organized bicycling in order to differentiate it from the basic physical activity of riding a bicycle. Organized bicycling could be a catalyst for social inclusion of diverse community needs, but in the past its push to “normalize” bicycling has tended to “other” bicycle users who do not participate in organized bicycling's self-selecting and exclusive social spaces. Currently, most of its efforts simply do not account for the economic and discriminatory challenges still faced by many in the U.S., including individuals for whom bicycle transportation is a survival strategy and not an enthusiastic choice. Within organized bicycling, there has been discussion about socially marginal “invisible riders” for some time (Koeppel, 2005). What we suggest here is that continuing to mark some bicyclists as a separate category of users does not disrupt exclusion. Instead, we draw attention to organized bicycling's process of othering that consequently produces outside riders. By confronting this problematic categorization, we hope this can be a site for change in bicycle advocacy work.

The production of outsider bicycle users in organized bicycling can be seen in data collection. Bicycle advocates who want to increase investments in bicycling rely on quantitative methods that do not capture existing diversity among bicycle users. For example, bicycle counts, a popular model for tracking the rate of bicycling in U.S. urban spaces, uniformly do not record a bicyclist's race, ethnicity, or income. The count methodology assumes that a street user's gender can be ascertained visually but avoids guessing other statuses. Aside from this small concession to monitoring the gender gap in bicycling, the methodology posits that all bicycling bodies are equal. This flattens diversity among bicycle users, turning their bodies into a data point that experts use to lobby for changes derived from their own qualitative experiences of bicycling. It is not a method for gathering data on lived experiences of bicycling which are often mediated by class, gender, and racial inequities. Furthermore, counts are often made only in main, radial, commute corridors into and out of central activity centers and not in peripheral areas or on key connections to major low and medium skilled job centers such as airports, suburban shopping malls, or light industrial sites. This further biases planning and investments toward already privileged commuters (often traveling in corridors already served by the best public transit services). In these ways, ot...