It Could Happen Here - Making A Safer City

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

James and Gare talk to John Stehlin about bike lanes, critical mass, and how we can make cities that are safer and more sustainableSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast which by popular demand today is about livestock, as we will be going forward. It's me, it's Garrison, and we're talking about species of sheep. Not really, we're not talking about species of sheep, much to my disappointment.

Not yet, but that will be coming. We're going to be getting into clins, texels, mules, that kind of thing, big sheep stuff. But today we're actually joined by John, and John has been subjected to my weird introduction, but we're not talking about sheep today. We're talking about active transport infrastructure, and we're talking about how cities tend to build that in certain communities and not in others. So welcome to the show, John. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'll say that my partner would have been overjoyed

if the podcast was actually about species of sheep. She's tired of hearing me talk about bikes, I'm sure. But here we are. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm John Stalen. I'm an assistant professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Great. So I think to start off with, if you could kind of outline what sort of like, I guess people might not be familiar at all with bike infrastructure certainly um if they live in some parts of the u.s or like more rural areas sort of what it looks like and what cities have been doing in the last few years building bike infrastructure and then how that relates to the i guess the income disparities within cities

yeah i mean that's a that's a big question. Something that I tackled in my book, which came out in 2019, but then I haven't kept up with it quite as much. I've been trying to start working on other projects, but I keep tabs on things a little bit. I mean, basically, if we're talking about the standard rundown of infrastructure, I would say the most common thing that people think about and probably the most common thing that's built in part because it's quite cheap, especially over the, say, the last 20 years is the bike lane. You know, a bike lane is usually about three to five feet wide, and it's in to the far right of the roadway if you're in the United States or if you're driving on the right.

It tends to be where glass collects. It tends to be where car doors are. tends to be where car doors are um it and so that nevertheless was you know very common uh in places that were building bicycle infrastructure that's what was being built um in i would say the last 10 to 15 years there's been a push to do more what people might call Dutch-style protected bike lanes. Either they're protected by a buffer of plastic posts that don't prevent an emergency vehicle from getting where it needs to go, but also don't prevent drivers from just driving into the bike lane, really. You'll see those and then, you know, parking protected bike lanes. So the protected bike lanes sort of became the big demand from bicycle infrastructure, planning practitioners, especially in cities like Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago,

New York City, etc., etc., something that is actually protected by a curb. Usually, really, usually, it's still like some kind of a plastic curb, right? Or cars, right? And you're not seeing a lot of, you know concrete or brick curb work like you'll see in in the netherlands or something like that and then interestingly enough another piece of infrastructure that there was a funny kind of mea culpa or not mea culpa but um a uh re-evaluation of it was the shero uh which is just a sort of a Chevron symbol in the middle of a car lane intended to remind drivers that cyclists are allowed to be there, but sort of put cyclists in a location where they would sort of garner the most hatred. And there was a recent editorial

from Dave Snyder of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. He was a big pioneer just in general bicycle infrastructure. I interviewed him for my dissertation, and he talked about how they don't work. That was a mistake. It was a mistake kind of splitting the difference, making it seem like you didn't have to take any space away from cars in order to fit bikes into the roadway. So I don't know if that's kind of more

than you wanted from that no no that's great because i think a lot of folks might not have seen all these different things certainly like uh if you're like me and you ride your bike every day you notice each of these different things and some of them make you feel safer some of them don't and some of them are just kind of tokenistic i think a lot of this kind of gets to a bigger discussion which which is one maybe we can touch on, which is like who the city is for. When we're building cities in this country, certainly it seems like we built them around cars

with a few exceptions, like older cities and stuff. And increasingly, like if you ask for space and you are not a car, then to include people wanting to live on the streets, right? Like cars have free places to go at night, but people don't. And so like this reallocation of space, I think gets to a bigger question, which is, yeah, maybe something you could speak to. Yeah. So, I mean, the question of, I think you can think of who both in terms of the mode of transport, right? It's very car dominant society, right? And car driving is even on the rise in places like Copenhagen, right?

There's kind of a lot of fretting among bicycle advocates in Copenhagen about the rise of car usage. So there's the sort of the mode of transport, but you know, cars aren't people, right, as you sort of pointed out just then. And then so there's another layer to it that intersects with it, which is cities being increasingly sort of oriented towards attracting higher income residents, right, kind of creating an attractive urban environment. There's a kind of an intersection with the interest in attracting kind of high-tech or creative or knowledge-intensive types of jobs, right? Your software programmers. I think it was Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, I use this in

lectures all the time. And he said something like, um, you can't be for a high tech, a creative city economy and not be pro bike. Right. So there's this, there's this idea that, you know, may be a little bit spurious, or it be kind of loose causality but there's this idea that the kinds of workers that you want in your city that are either going to take high paying jobs and increase the property tax base or themselves create new startups, entrepreneurial energy, arts, culture, and things like that, right? That they're attracted by bicycle infrastructure or bicycling or bicycle culture in some respects. So there's that kind of...

The irony, of course, is that those workers, you know, guilty, I have a car, right? Typically bring cars with them, right? And so, yes, maybe they don't want to use them on a daily basis. Like, I don't use my car on a daily basis. I don't use my car to get to work, right? right um but they you know are often kind of having it both ways right in a lot of ways in terms of you know buildings will be built with garages right and that's only recently starting to be eroded right as just a you know a one-to-one parking ratio and a transit connected uh building yeah and so when we're talking about it the combination of these two things right like affluent areas or cities trying to attract affluent people and cities trying to build bike infrastructure and something i've observed where i live which is san diego is that we've built a lot of bike lanes but only connecting privileged communities to places where people do high income work.

It seems like increasingly riding your bike safely is a privilege that's only afforded to a certain group of people. Is that something that's broader than just in my town? I'd say so. I think you see this in where I did a lot of my research, the San Francisco Bay Area. I also did research in in philadelphia and and detroit and austin as well that's not in the book but yeah that's it's common and there's a few different there's kind of a there's a degree of uh cumulative causality as

we would say in economic geography right you have, going back to, say, the 1990s, you had bicycle advocates, primarily recreational, primarily middle class, largely white recreational cyclists, or, and you start to see participants in bicycle advocacy organizations, also being kind of bicycle commuters, the kinds of jobs that were growing in urban centers in the 1990s and 2000s, or, you know, the first decade of this millennium, right?

Are the kinds of, you know, if not high tech uh the sort of uh professional technical type of employment right growing in urban centers um and there's relatively affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods that makes it feasible and and desirable desirable, actually, that you could, you could, you know, find a fairly affordable house and be able to bike to work, right, two to three miles, right, rather than the commute in from the suburbs, or the commute out from the urban center to jobs at the suburbs, right? So, I think that you get a lot of the initial energy around the bicycle movement. If you look at Critical Mass, if you look at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition in its early days, again, these are things I'm familiar with. A lot of this sort

of the political mobilization is around making those types of journeys easier, more doable. Right. You also have the phenomenon where the neighborhoods that are getting gentrified in this time are your sort of classic innermost streetcar suburbs developed around 100 years ago. Fairly walkable themselves. They have a mix of commercial and residential. They aren't, by and large, industrial neighborhoods, right? The industrial neighborhoods where you still have a lot of truck traffic, where industry begat more industry or de-industrialization really hollowed out the economic base where you have you know large roadways you have you know disinvestment and uh kind of a mix of small retail etc etc um lower income population uh those were not um those were not areas where there were there were attracting the kinds of people who would be

listened to when they're demanding bicycle infrastructure, right? Uh, there are still lots of cyclists in those neighborhoods, um, in a place like East Oakland, uh, or, um, uh, North Philadelphia or something like that, right. Where there are a lot of people who ride bicycles, uh, but they don't, they're not organized politically, uh, under the sort of the block of, of, of cyclists. Um, and so there's this sort of paradox or in the, the way that I came around to this project was I was working in a bike shop in Philadelphia, and I was sort of one of those white hipsters on fixies, right? and helping people fix their bikes, mostly Latin American immigrants who were working as dishwashers or delivering food, buying bikes at Walmart because it's what they could afford, even though they knew that they were crap, they just couldn't afford anything better, trying to get the most out of those bikes. And so there's this funny dichotomy on the one hand, it's like you have the cool bike already

creative scene that is sort of trying to be encouraged maybe. And on the other hand, a lot of the people who are actually making do, um, on bicycles are not sort of part of that vision, I guess, for, for the city. Right. Um, when I think about things in spatial terms as well right if you imagine going back to the journeys to work from a sort of close-in residential neighborhood that is experiencing a lot of turnover a lot of middle class you know mostly white but not necessarily exclusively white in migrants um the types of journeys that a lot of you know i'll i'll take durham for example where i live now which is um not there's not a lot of good bicycle infrastructure there's a little there's not a lot of good bicycle infrastructure but there's some job growth in the downtown area. There's certainly a lot of job growth in the sort of the suburbs.

But in terms of the kinds of jobs that, you know, like working class jobs that are being created at Amazon fulfillment centers, those are at the urban periphery, right? They're not places that even in a kind of a gentrifying neighborhood, even if bicycle infrastructure were created, this sort of the directionality of the feasible commute kind of runs against the feasible bicycle commute sort of runs against the very kind of spread out and scattered commutes in the sort of retail wholesale warehousing manufacturing etc etc the the sectors that are experiencing job sprawl rather than a sort of a concentrated um concentrated job growth in in the sort of the urban center right so that's another aspect to it as well. Welcome, I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the

Shadows, presented by iHeart and Son Sonora an anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America gasoline counters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app apple podcast or wherever you get

your podcast bike advocacy is very interesting to me right like i was a bike messenger uh i was a bike racer like these i've made my living riding a bike i've also just ridden my bike to get to work and bike advocacy really hasn't reflected a broad swath of cyclists for a very long time do you think that's why we don't see like better infrastructure in some some of these like de-industrializing areas for instance and does that lead directly to it being more dangerous like i you would be the person to ask are there statistics to show that to it being more dangerous like i you would be the person to ask are there statistics to show that like it's more dangerous to ride your bike so i'll say a couple things um the uh the the the directionality or the causality is a little bit complicated i would say certainly there was some evidence that bicycle advocates weren't in the early days. And there was a big sort of cultural shift in bicycle advocacy in

the 1990s. Part of the 1990s, you have a lot of cyclists who are actually opposed to bicycle infrastructure. We still have, they are still a loud boomerish voice in san diego yeah exactly the vehicular cyclists right yeah yeah can you explain that sure so vehicular cyclists um it was a philosophy expounded by uh john forester might have his book right here yeah uh in the book and it's not in the book effective cycling um where it was the idea was that cyclists should be riding like cars right which means riding fast center of the lane um behaving exactly like a car uh and they were very opposed to any infrastructure that would sort of be created, especially for bicyclists, on the basis, which bit of actual talk among legislators and planners that bicyclists would be kept off of main roads. saw the creation of bicycle infrastructure at that time as basically designed to get cyclists out of the way of motorists right and so it was mainly to advance the interests of motorists right uh but they were very hostile to um they're very hostile to a sort of a Dutch style model, which like, you know, these were

guys who like to ride fast and like, you don't, you can't ride fast in the Netherlands. Yeah. Not, not everyone's physically able nor really wants to go 40 miles an hour on a road next to cars. Exactly. Right. So, so it was very much around a strong fit confident cyclist who knew all the laws of the road rode really fast was very assertive um it obviously lent itself towards uh a sort of a a boomer type right um a sort of adventurous type um and it was very much that we that bicycle advocates should advance the interests of cyclists not try to grow the number of people cycling right and so the shift towards that maybe the critical mass moment is not the only thing, but that's sort of a good moment to kind of tag it to the 1992 first critical mass era. But, you know, Earth Day, vehicle for a small planet, all of this sort of growing interest in bicycling.

The shift towards more people should be doing this yeah can you explain critical mass to people who haven't like participated because i think it's quite a unique and interesting phenomenon sure yeah absolutely so um critical mass began in san francisco in i think the first critical mass was 1992. And it was began sort of as like a group of people working, you know, broadly working office jobs who were sort of kind of culturally anarchistic or, you know, had these sort of anarchist or situationist kind of ideas and who were kind of organizing amongst themselves to ride home as a group. Right. And they started getting this idea of sort of having these monthly ride together happenings.

Right. They call it they didn't call them protests and they weren't organized rides they were um uh sort of rolling festivals was the idea i think the first the first name that they came up with which mercifully didn't stick was like the commute clot right so it was also about kind of jamming up the regularity of the Friday evening commute. So it would be like the first Friday of every month at commute time, right? Some of these, I think, still happen in Portland. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Critical mass still happens.

There's a, you know, one of the chapters in my book i sort of trace this arc of critical mass through to the more kind of bike party oriented exactly exactly the slow roll type of model which i think is interesting because it's a little bit it's consciously less confrontational. It's not held at a time that would clog up evening traffic. It's designed to attract kind of families, people who aren't trying to have confrontations with drivers or police, right? One of the things that sort of really put bicycle infrastructure on the agenda in San francisco was this mass arrest of critical mass in 1997 um supposedly because the mayor of san francisco willie brown at the time got stuck in one in his limo and was like furious and so asked the police to crack down next time it was a huge uh it was it backfired massively politically but it also

created this opening for the the san francisco bicycle coalition which actually was an organization sanfrancisco critical mass was not an organization right it gave them this opportunity to say well what cyclists want is you know to actually build out the bike plan that supposedly exists, but nobody's been doing anything about, right. So, I mean, that's probably maybe more than you wanted to know, but the sort of that, that arc of critical mass as this sort of counter-cultural moment that created this opening for a more formal bicycle planning and advocacy organization or set of organizations to emerge. Right. And maybe it's unfair. I think I'd probably do it in the book.

It's a little bit unfair probably to call it a kind of depoliticization, but there was certainly a degree of kind of like explicit politics of sort of reclaiming the city more broadly from a kind of left perspective that does disappear somewhat in the sort of the rhetoric of the bike movement yeah it's definitely it's definitely lost some of that like radical edge where these types of these types of you know when when when like 100 or 200 people on bikes take over streets in portland every once in a while it is way more in the form of like a big party. It's like, it's, it's, it's like, it's like a, it's like a roving block party.

It does not have that same level of like, yeah, almost like situationist creating a happening or creating a situation that, that, that affects the regular politics and affects the regular way that the city functions. Yeah. I mean, that being said, the, the, sort of the successors like Bike Party in San Jose was a huge one.

And that Bike Party model kind of spread throughout California were often much bigger than critical mass, right? Sure, sure. A lot of times more diverse as well, right? So there's a really interesting kind of politics around is the politics in the sort of explicit slogans or is the politics in sort of like showing people that there is a kind of collectivity that they might be part of simply by virtue of like moving through urban space in a different way. And for a lot of people, it was their first time riding a bike in the city because they were so afraid of cars otherwise, right? You have the safety in numbers.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. I know for a lot of people that was the case. Like I've done some critical masses. In the UK we had reclaimed the streets as well, which is like a similar vibe. I remember in the the early i guess the first decade of this century like um there would be critical mass rights before anti-g8 protests like i remember in octarada in scotland and things or not in octarada before that and like before other g8 protests would be mass rights and it's a very different scene to like bike advocacy now right yeah yeah and you saw this a little bit with like the occupy movement uh the at least my experience of the um the sort of early wave of the black lives matter movement in 2014 with the killing of trayvon martin um there were a lot the bicycles seemed like an intuitive protest mode for many people.

And that's probably sort of some of the cultural political tools of critical mass that sort of surface here and there. But I think for the 20th anniversary, Chris Carlson, who was one of the early organizers, called it, talked about critical mass all over the world and that San Francisco felt kind of like the hole in the middle of the donut, right? Like it sort of created this reverberation, but then it had actually withered to a degree in the center. And often the narrative is, well, you're winning, right? So critical mass is no longer necessary because you're getting bike lanes, you're getting investment, you're getting attention from planners, et cetera, et cetera, right? Obviously, the gains, whatever they are,

are pretty kind of geographically circumscribed and that kind of relates back to how we kind of started by talking about how you know some cities are putting more development into bike infrastructure but how it's being developed is not actually serving people who like like have to use a bike to commute because they don't own a car and they can't afford a car like it's it's getting used to people who actually already have a lot of resources. And an interesting case in point in this is the Beltline in Atlanta, which started off as an idea in 1999

with wanting to create a giant loop using public transit, having rail going around the city, having bike paths going all around the city, being able to connect the city with these spaces for green space and affordable housing. And instead, the project kind of manifested as this project that was head up by real estate companies to replace a whole bunch of low income neighborhoods with the massive amounts of like expensive restaurants and luxury condos and, you know, putting, putting the belt

line and as a path to, to create these like expensive gentrify, like gentrifying, um, areas around the city. And it's how like these ideas can start off so good. And then when they get, And it's how these ideas can start off so good. And then when they get actually done, it's manifested in a way that is really kind of interesting how it is this it it is this huge investment in the reconversion of infrastructure right to sort of restore the value of the land surrounding it right sort of old rail old industrial infrastructure. And that's something that I don't think that you can, you're ever, you know, people, there are studies here and there that try to demonstrate the kind of the economic value of bicycle infrastructure, the contribution to tax, tax receipts, etc, etc. But it gets pretty hard to parse the causality um especially when you're you know

especially when compared to something that is really sort of overhauling the space right i don't it you know the belt belt line is it's i think probably its success from a sort of a financial perspective has to do with it being a multi-use path right yeah yeah rather than it being bicycle infrastructure um and sort of being being framed as this much broader type of thing right rather than um a bike lane on a street right yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not great to ride down like at least on the weekend because you'll just be slalom full of full of people it's full of like i when i when i was visiting last year during the start of summer i went with a friend to the area by ponce City Market, which is kind of a great example of the gentrifying force of the Beltline. But also, yeah, there's people who are trying to ride bikes around,

but there's kids on roller skates everywhere. It's pretty packed. It's getting pretty warm. But there's other parts that are more isolated, where it is much more of a a of like a commute path um but it's interesting it just like it like weaves in and out of these like retail and luxury apartment um you know pop-ups restaurants all along it exactly and and all that stuff is is is like relatively new for all the stuff that is like specifically surrounding the surrounding like the construction of the belt line yeah and

i mean the um i think that you maybe see this just a little bit with like you know the direction that i've taken this the thinking about it is more the sort of the types of urban strategies that have begun to incorporate bicycle infrastructure, right? Or active transportation more generally as the kind of big driving forces rather than like, is this bike lane here causing gentrification? It's usually, it's often the other way around, right? Bicycle infrastructure sort of emerges

as a result of gentrification, right? Or as a result of the in-migration of people who are going to be listened to, right? Because of their status, because of their income, because they have kind of existing capacities in organizing for these types of things right um it's i think what's interesting is one of the one of the positions i've sort of come around to right is thinking more about um not like should we do bicycle infrastructure because it might kind of create the perception

of gentrification or cause gentrification or something like that and instead like you know what one of the things that gentrification results from when you're thinking about amenities that sort of lead to the revalorization of of urban space is that they are in some way special right right? And so if the question is the specialness of this particular place, you know, Garrison, as you said, what makes a, you know, the kinds of places where you can safely ride a bike are fairly unique, right? They're not well distributed, right? And so from my perspective it's sort of the more routine they become as an include as as you know including them into urban space the less special the places where they are built become right and it's and so routine that it wouldn't be worth mentioning, right? It's like mentioning that there is a sewer line, right?

It's like mentioning that it has connection to city water, which, okay, yeah, at the urban edge where I live, I don't live at the urban edge, but at the urban edge in the Southeast, there isn't always connection to city water um yeah like trying to get it normalized to the point where it's like obvious that it's something that is like a part of the city it's like yeah like right of of course it's it's just as normal as like a sidewalk or a road or like a power line which to be fair i don't have any sidewalks on

my street and most of the streets around me have a sidewalk on one side only. Portland also has very few sidewalks. Yeah. Yeah. We do have those. Yeah. I lived in Belgium for a while when I was racing. I lived in a town that was very much just like lots of Belgium is shitty gray coal mining towns.

I love Belgium, but this is a thing. And like, yeah, they would never have beat, you know, the bike infrastructure was unremarkable. It was just a thing that everyone used to go to the shops or go to school. It wasn't, you know, less like selling point for a branch restaurant. Yeah. And I think it's this kind of thing where it's bigger than just the infrastructure, right? A lot of the places where bicycle infrastructure has been really successful, right, are these sort of dense, relatively dense areas, actually not the densest areas, right, where everything was in is in walking distance,

but the areas kind of just beyond there, right? Where, where there are, you know, shops, places of employment, services, etc, etc. All sort of within reasonable biking distance, or maybe long walking distance, right? But too short to really merit a trip on a bus or a train, right? And, you know, short enough that maybe some of us would feel a little bit silly getting in the car to go do it, right? So that kind of zone is also not terribly common in the United States, right? A lot of those places got destroyed to build highways, right? Or got destroyed to build kind of suburban style shopping malls. And so that's part of their specialness. And so that's part of their specialness.

But going back to the idea of people in the places where people were really relying on bicycles, right, that there isn't necessarily infrastructure. It's partially a data issue, going back to your data question, right? The way that we collect data on bicycling is people bicycling to work, right? If people aren't in the workforce or they happen to not have a job, that is not counted in the census, right? Even if you bicycle to the train like I do, like if I get to fill out the census, I'm going to fill out train, right? Because that's the bulk of my journey when I commute. toward places that where people are commuting by bicycle right um rather than you know commuting is only a quarter to a third of all trips right rather than all the other trips that we we don't know about right and sometimes we measure them with passive measurement like pressure sensors in the street sometimes active measurement like people doing bicycle counts on particular days right there's a whole

history of that now we're using strava but then we're getting a small like we're getting a very rich data set about a small subset of cyclists and hoping that that extends to most if not all cyclists um and then to your question sorry and i'll i'll pause right to your question about the the the the data question right how how deadly or how dangerous are various streets that don't have uh bike lanes there is a big problem of the the missing denominator right we don't know how many people cycle so we don't know the rates of injury uh on these particular roadways in the way in the same way that we do know car volumes and can have a better sense of the rates of injury uh in based on collisions right but you you do see clusters of collisions in places where um you know where they're large roads meeting where basically no very few if any traffic

engineers would sign off on taking away some of that car capacity to create more safety for cyclists. And of course, those kind of compound, those factors kind of compound, right? You maybe have an industrial area, it's a big interface with a large urban arterial or an off-ramp to a highway, right? These kind of all go together with potentially a sort of lower income area or sort of a lower, less pressure to improve that area. Yeah. So I'm thinking, when I think about how the bike movement missed an opportunity to be better, I always think about like how the bike movement missed an opportunity to be better I always think about like this moment in 2020 when this man called Dijon Kizzy was killed by police

in LA and the the incident which which led to the cops shooting him began because the cops tried to pull him over for running a stop sign on a bike right which is a thing that tenth of thousands of white dudes in spandex do every single day in this country and not a not a word was spoken by the bike movement at least that i saw um by bike folks you know in in sort of solidarity or opposition to what had happened right it just it was just another thing that that went mourned by thousands of people and ignored by others so like it made me think about how we build maybe it's wrong to think about how we build a better bike movement and maybe it's better to think about how we make it unremarkable that you bike right we make it like not an identity thing

but how do we make cities where people are safe riding bikes i guess regardless of whether they're wearing spandex or they're just trying to get to the shops? Yeah. I mean, that's a really kind of an important question. And in my research, a lot of people were grappling with that. There was an incident that mercifully didn't result in someone being killed or seriously injured, but a guy was pulled off of his bike by police, beaten up in san francisco and there was a big march afterwards and some of the some bicycle advocates did show up but it was not framed as this is something that you know is affecting us as cyclists right this is or that affecting some of us as cyclists right and an injury to one is an injury to all right that's

not yeah that's not was not the kind of the frame that that people were were using to my from what i could tell right um and you had bicycle you know black bicycle advocates in east oakland who didn't really frame themselves as bicycle advocates necessarily in the traditional um or the mold that is sort of determined by the sort of the hegemonically kind of white middle class advocacy organizations right but they were very much bicycle advocates who you know um a lot of were a lot of a lot of what they did was sort of like teaching people to ride correctly so that they would have fewer interactions with police right or um kind of managing interactions with with police and you know hopefully becoming well enough known as cyclists that they weren't kind of subject to

the kinds of interactions that you know where police end up killing somebody right um now that i live in a place where very few people bicycle to work or for much of anything right i'm thinking a bit more holistically about uh you know it's now kind of a buzzword but you know a kind of a more car optional um city right where you don't need to have a car to do various things you know i'm i'm involved with bicycle advocates here but like when i when i look around i see like a bus stop that is a stick in a median, right? There's no bench, there's no sidewalks to get to it. There's no crosswalks or anything like that. And I mean,

I think that one of the bigger, one of the bigger questions is to make a place that's safe for cyclists, safe for people walking, safe for people walking their bikes or safe for people walking to transit right um is reducing the kind of the space and the the way that space and speed go together right that are devoted to cars and and a lot of that is like um reducing the the the distances that people need to travel right for various things right this gets into the sort of the 15 minute city stuff which is it's been really wild to see it being turned into this like q anon type you know, agenda 21 UN black helicopters type of conspiracy theory, right? Because I think

of it as a very kind of milquetoast type of policy framework that's honored in the breach, right? Sort of like complete streets. There's a carve out for, unless a traffic engineer says it's not really feasible, and then we won't really question that judgment we just won't do it right so um i mean i do think it's bigger than modes of transport are really bigger than people's individual decisions or even like what the sort of once you are in your mode of transport what the sort of behavioral matrix is right it's sort of like, what, what does your life consist of? Right. Um, what, what do you do to like preserve your dignity with your coworkers? Right. All of these kinds of things that feed people towards, towards driving, except in, you know, very specific places that, you know, have been, have become special in the United States.

Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the shadows presented by I heart and Sonora an anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America gasoline counters with shape-shifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcast. I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot to say, right? It is really, it's much bigger than, than bicycling. It's the sort of the, the built environment. And I think one of the things that, what I land on in the book, maybe belatedly, right. Because these, these, these things take years is, um, is this the way that bicycling is still kind of this interstitial, um, solution, right. It's sort of like kind of picking up scraps here and there in the built environment, right? It's like picking up some of the loose ends, right? In how cities are organized

that makes them frustrating, difficult to navigate, right? And, you know, I think a lot of the energy, not exclusively, certainly, and bicycle advocacy has become much more diverse in part through like listening to a lot of the voices of advocates of color and, and, uh, women advocates and, you know, um, kind of thinking beyond that sort of stereotypical, you know, not just the, the middle-aged man in Lycra, but like the, the sort of stereotypical you know not just the the middle-aged man in lycra but like the the sort of middle-aged guy on a surly right you know that that maybe successor to the middle-aged man in lycra right i'm certainly calling myself out um but the it's still very kind of an interstitial thing right um? It's, and the thing about the urban transportation

systems in the United States is that they leave a lot of interstices, right? There's a lot of areas that are poorly served by anything but cars, and honestly, poorly served by cars. You know, in Oakland, you had people, a lot of the sort of the, maybe not anger, but certainly annoyance at, at bicycle advocacy and bicycle infrastructure, um, would be, and I think you see this in Portland too, where it's like, well, we've been asking for sidewalks. We've been asking the city to, to like fill these potholes. And instead there's these bike lanes that people who just got here are asking for. Right. And so maybe that's a failure of solidarity on people coming, you know,

people moving to a neighborhood. They're like, why is it so torturous to get somewhere by bike rather than kind of maybe stopping and saying, all right, what, what's, what have people been demanding here before I got here? Right. Um, and how can I sort of contribute to that as well and sort of kind of merge our agendas potentially. Um, but it is this sort of, it's a, it's an interstitial, um, solution. Right. And so from, for me, you know, the bigger, the bigger questions are sort of what role will bicycles play when we start to really take seriously the kind of broader urban structure? So you don't have these sort of islands of bikeability inside a sea of automobility, right? islands of bike ability inside a sea of automobility right um do you have a situation where it actually becomes more practical to walk and take transit than it is to bike right i would call that a that a win right and i think you know there's a there's a there's a degree to which

we can get fixated on on the particular mode of transport i think because we all kind of like fell in love with bicycles and that was the sort was the sort of the gateway drug into thinking about like transport and cities and how people move around and the sort of the history of urban planning, right? So, I mean, these are all, I don't know if I really kind of offered anything that sort of puts it all together nicely, right? But the idea that it really does need to become normalized. And if it actually sort of disappears in the process of being normalized, and it stops being a signifier of environmental rectitude or something like that. And, you know, if I could walk to a grocery store, instead of having to bike to a grocery store, I would prefer that, honestly, where I am right now, right? Even though I love

cycling, right? And it's something that I'll never stop doing, right? So I think kind of thinking more holistically about what kinds of cities we need to have to move beyond uh move beyond automobility both from a climate perspective and a social justice perspective um and just a almost like a thermodynamic perspective um so i mean that maybe that's the moving up to the level of physics is where one one kind of place to end yeah no i think that's very good yeah is there anything you'd uh you'd like to plug maybe uh people where people can find your book where people can follow you online and i think like that any sort of projects you're interested in sure yeah so um my you can find me on twitter i'm at j-o-s-t-E-H-L-I-N. My book is, now it's a few years old. It's 2019 with University of Minnesota Press. It's called Cyclescapes of the Unequal City.

the politics of highway removal. So maybe scaling up in terms of infrastructure, thinking about sort of bigger, kind of the great clanking gears of urbanism rather than, you know, this little tiny stretch of pavement on the side that's full of glass and car doors and stuff like that. But of course, they all kind of fit together. The sort of what are the, how does the fabric of the built environment have to change in order to grapple with climate change, inequality, and sort of making us

sort of a more human type of city? Yeah, I think it's great. I think it's a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much for giving us some of your afternoon, John. Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time and it was a really fun conversation.

Hi, podcast fans. It's me, it's Jones. And it's just a tiny little pickup that I wanted to add to the end of this episode because I neglected to mention that Cyclista Zine did call out the police killing of Dijon Kizzee very explicitly and had an excellent piece on it as they do on lots of other things.

They are incredibly wonderful and you can find them at cyclistazine.com. They are not representative of the rest of the bike media so well worth looking at if you like and not the police murdering people. They're a wonderful publication. Okay, thanks. Bye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here

updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. of right an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lord of latin america listen to nocturnal on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast