Some Unsolicited Advice for My Employer

Officially, my employer is hugely supportive of bike commuting. I work for a university, and the official line is that the university thinks that bike commuting is just swell. There are two big reasons that the university officially would like people to bike to work and class. The first is that we have a pretty major parking shortage, and it's in the university's best interest to encourage people not to drive. The second is that the university is trying to hold the line on health insurance costs, and they're encouraging people to exercise because it's seen to promote long-term good health. Officially supporting bike commuting is only one of a whole slew of programs designed to encourage healthy habits and alternative transportation choices.

The problem is that, for all the official pronouncements of support for bicycles, my employer doesn't actually do much to encourage people to bike to work or to support those of us who already do commute by bicycle. They do provide outdoor bike racks, and they have a link on their webpage to the city office that allows you to register your bike, so it can be identified if it gets stolen. They have a couple of events for Bike to Work Week. And that's it.

So anyway, I had some thoughts about things my employer could do that would really support bike commuting.

1. Change the bike website
   On their website, my university has a handy page for bike commuters. Unfortunately, it's basically useless, and the tone is overly negative. Essentially, it treats bike riders as pests who need to be educated about how not to bother other people. There is a list of bicycle regulations (example:"Reckless operation of a bicycle is not permitted."), and a list of fines and other consequences for cyclists who fail to adhere to these regulations. There are some insipid safety tips (examples: "Share the roadway and walkways" and "slow down when riding near pedestrians.") The websites for car and bus commuters don't take this scolding tone, and they provide useful information. Bike commuters should be provided with concrete, accurate tips about how to ride safely, information that acknowledges that we are as likely to be the victims of traffic violations as the perpetrators. Lecturing us about "sharing the roads and walkways" is not nearly as helpful as pointing out that it's almost always a bad idea to ride a bike on a "walkway" and that you're more visible to turning trucks if you ride in the middle of the lane, rather than trying to "share the road" by hugging the curb.
   
   
2. Allow bike commuters to register with the Parking and Transportation Office
   
   The university offers benefits for people who participate in their bus and carpooling programs, something which is possible because the Parking and Transportation Office knows who those people are. Carpoolers are permitted to register, and bus riders sign up for discount bus passes through the office. Bike commuters should have the same opportunity to make ourselves known to the transit people so we can get some benefits, too.
   
   
3. Extend the emergency ride program to bike commuters
   
   The university has a program that offers emergency cab rides to bus riders and carpoolers who need to get someplace quickly. If you take the bus to work and your kid gets sick and needs to be picked up from daycare, you can get a free cab ride to the daycare center and then home. The idea is that people drive to work because they worry that they otherwise won't have flexibility in the event of an emergency, and free cab rides take care of that problem. Bike riders aren't eligible for this program. We should be. It's true that a bike is more flexible than a bus, but bike riders could still find themselves needing to go a long distance or pick someone up.
   
   
4. Showers
   
   In my perfect world, bike commuters would have free access to showers. That's probably not going to happen. The only showers are in the gym, and the gym recently started charging people to use their facilities. I suppose that maybe they could make an exception for registered bike commuters, but given that there's been a lot of controversy around the decision to charge for the gym, I think they probably wouldn't. What they could do would be to make some adjustments in the program that provides low-price gym memberships to faculty and staff. Right now, you can only get a cut-rate gym membership if you sign up for an entire year. Since many bike commuters only need showers in the summer, it would be helpful to offer cheap gym memberships on a monthly, not annual basis. They could also offer us a discount on locker rentals.
   
   
5. Bus passes
   
   Ideally, it would be awesome if bike commuters were allowed a few free bus rides every month, which we could use in case of bad weather. That's probably not going to happen, so I'd settle for a change to the reduced-price program for bus commuters, which gives users unlimited free bus rides for $10 a month. At the moment, you have to opt in for a full year. I don't use my bus pass at all in the summer, spring and early fall, but I get a lot more use out of it in the winter. It would be great if bike commuters could buy the $10 monthly bus passes on a monthly, rather than annual basis, so we weren't paying for months when we don't need to take the bus.
   

More on the Politics of Representation

Thanks to my bike-commuting co-worker, I recently discovered a new bike magazine, Bicycle Times. I bought issue #8 to read on the plane to my parents' house for Thanksgiving. And before I launch into this rant, I should note that I just subscribed to the magazine and am, in general, a big fan. It's aimed at casual and commuter cyclists, and it's a lot more relevant to me than most of the macho, racing-or-trail-oriented bike mags. They review products that I might actually buy. They have articles on subjects that interest me. They don't treat women like afterthoughts, and they don't assume that women riders are primarily interested in fashion. Really: it's a good magazine. You should check it out.


But I've got to say that the magazine made me think a little bit about the racial politics of the current bike resurgence in America. Put bluntly, in this issue of Bicycle Times, bike riding is very white. And I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with that.

This first occurred to me because there are two "international" stories in the current issue. One, which I found really compelling and informative, is about cycling in the Netherlands. You can read it in blog-post form here. The author accompanied a bunch of public officials from Northern California on a week-long trip to the Netherlands to learn about Dutch biking culture. Dutch people are treated as agents: they have a point of view, opinions, and practices that are worthy of emulation. The article has lots of good points about Dutch bike culture and how it might or might not be transferable to US cities.

The second story, "Storming the Dominican: my ride in the rain", can be found in blog-post form here. (Interestingly, it seems that a fair amount of Bicycle Times's content is culled from blogs.) This is a travel feature about a bike trip in the Dominican Republic. Like most travel journalism, this article ignores the perspectives of local people, except to note that the nameless local guide is "filled with admiration and apprehension" at the bike tourists' decision to ride in a downpour. Dominican people exist here only in very limited roles: they provide the bike tourists with authentic and traditional local foods, they give the bike tourists an opportunity to reflect on their good fortune to live in a wealthy country, and some local small children "r[u]n along next to us like we were riding in the Tour de France." Do people in the Dominican Republic ride bikes for fun or transportation? Is there anything that we can learn from Dominican bike culture? Who knows? There's no discussion of cycling in the Dominican Republic, because the article treats that country as a place for wealthy Americans to go on vacation, not as a place that has a cycling culture of its own.

And I actually think this is part of a pattern. Increasingly, American cyclists associate functional bike-riding with Europe and focus exclusively on cycling culture there. We utterly ignore cycling cultures in developing countries, except when we discuss developing countries as destinations for adventure travel. You can see the results of that in this comment in response to a post about opposition to bike lanes that appeared on the feminist blog Feministe:

Anyway, I would be interested to know how many of the people who want bike lanes are native NYCers vs non-NYC natives. Or even among people who come from countries where bikes aren’t affordable or available.

I kinda feel that my love for biking is a reflection of my privilege–my privilege of being able to grow up in a town where it was safe for a kid to learn how to ride a bike and ride it wherever to her heart’s content.

This person assumes that riding a bike is a privilege and that people in New York who favor cars over bikes may be immigrants from "countries where bikes aren't affordable or available." This is fairly bizarre: in every country in the world, bikes are cheaper than cars. In many developing countries, bikes are a major mode of transportation for poor people who can't dream of owning a car. In China, where members of the middle-class are increasingly abandoning bicycles in favor of automobiles, working-class people are more likely to embrace electric bikes, which are cheap and efficient and allow people to use the extensive system of bike lanes to bypass car traffic.


And yet when people in the US extol the virtues of cargo bikes, we're a whole lot more likely to illustrate it with a picture of a bike rider in the Netherlands than with a picture of a Chinese cyclist.

When they exclusively emphasize European cycle culture, publications like Bicycle Times contribute to a picture of cycle culture that is very, very white. In fact, if this issue of the magazine is anything to go by, it's almost exclusively white. There's one person of color in a picture that illustrates the story on the Dominican Republic, and I think there may be a few people of color in the background of the Dutch story. A reader sent in a picture of his daughter, whose race isn't readily apparent from the photo. There's one Asian person in an advertisement for handmade bike clothes. And other than that, every single person in every editorial and advertising photo in the entire magazine appears to be white. What kind of message does that send? Is that really how we want to represent bike culture in the US?

It seems to me that this depiction of bike culture, both in the US and globally, is kind of exclusionary. As the Feministe comment shows, it can also contribute to bike riding's unfortunate reputation as an elite activity, which doesn't serve us well in debates about whether governments should devote scarce resources to bike infrastructure. I think it's worth giving some thought to how to represent both global and domestic bike culture more inclusively.