The Biking Life: Is It the Fault of Hipsterization or Social Media?
Matt Yglesias makes an interesting observation in this post about the normality of biking in Copenhagen.
Thirty-seven percent of Copenhagen commuters use bikes. And given that presumably some people are walking to work, some people are using the bus, some people are using the Metro, and some people are using the S-Tog the resulting situation is one in which cyclists and drivers are really equals.
It’s actually impressive to a degree that’s somewhat unsettling. Regular bicycle commuting in the United States is, among other things, a somewhat meaningful identity category. Initially it’s thrilling to see so many of “your people” everywhere. But looking closer you start to see exactly what was explained to me—the whole reason you have so many people biking around is that cycling is totally mainstream in Copenhagen and doesn’t constitute an identity at all.
I think this constitutes an obstacle for becoming a bike commuter in America, over and above all the infrastructure obstacles and the safety issues. Biking in the U.S.—much like, for example, shopping at farmer’s markets—constitutes an identity many people want no part of even though it offers an ostensibly healthier and/or saner way to live. You have to become one of “those people”; you enter a peculiar spotlight and invite all sorts of assumptions about what you are like. People may treat you as though you have a Greenpeace sticker pasted on your forehead. They may assume you are some sort of free-range zealot brimming with judgmental self-righteousness when all you are is someone who doesn’t drive a car. When I bike, I’m not doing it for attention, but the thought that someone might reasonably draw that conclusion inhibits me. I don’t want to involuntarily be attributed to belonging to anyone’s “people.” Maybe I am too sensitive.
I wonder if at any point it would have been possible to arrest this development of biking into a lifestyle—is anything “nonconformist” doomed to be seen as an attempt to self-promote? Or is that the fault of hipsterization? Of social media?
As I was writing this, I came across a timely Metafilter link to Copenhagenize, a blog devoted to replicating Copenhagen’s success in encouraging biking commuters, and to this essay by sociologist Dave Horton about cycling fears. What I thought was interesting is the way he shows how ostensibly bike-friendly promotional campaigns may actually serve to dissuade would-be riders—much as efforts to make biking cool turn it into a dubious lifestyle.
Horton contends that the fear of cycling is deliberately produced, with safety lessons and helmet-wearing campaigns tending to increase a potential rider’s sense of vulnerability. “Danger comes not from cycling, but from cars,” he says, but this notion is systematically suppressed. Similarly the creation of safe spaces for bikes reinforces the notion that bike-riding is an exceptional activity to be set off from the spaces of routine life. “‘Normal’ roads are no place to cycle; they are to be feared.” He also attempts to show “how the identity of ‘the cyclist’ tends to invoke fear,” arguing that cyclists have been culturally marginalized and stigmatized, becoming gutter trash since they have been forced to ride in the gutters on the side of the road. Cyclists have become “strangers”—which now, I think, makes cycling seductive to certain identity questers seeking activities that can typecast them. So though I think this is true:
People’s fears of cycling will become more real and powerful as the prospects of their cycling grow greater. And people will feel and fear the loss of a way of life as it has come to be lived, as automobilised. When these anxieties become intense and the calls that cycling is too dangerous become really vociferous, we should I think take them as a sign that - as a culture - we are getting really serious about once more getting on our bikes.
I disagree completely with this:
Many people who cycle today - racing cyclists, touring cyclists, cycle campaigners, bike messengers - belong to cycling cultures which produce and reproduce positive experiences and representations of cycling.
No they don’t—they make biking seem weird and aggressive and annoying. And I can’t think of anyone who has has a “positive experience” with those douchebag bike messengers in New York; it’s far more likely that they have run you over as a pedestrian or yelled for you to get out of the way while they were blazing through a crosswalk while running through a red light.
We don’t need “positive representations of cycling”—we need cycling to seem inevitable and inescapable, as normal and boring a part of our environment as cars and advertising.
UPDATE: Yglesias links to a site called Copenhagen Cycle Chic, which has made me much more afraid. The campaign to make cycling boring must begin.
Comments
Interesting. I’ve lived in Portland, Oregon, Detroit, Michigan, and Denver, Colorado. Plus I’ve visited cities such as Amsterdam. Detroit and Amsterdam are as opposite in terms of acceptance of transportation variety as two cities can get.
Portland and Denver, of course, are somewhere in between. For much of the downtown populations of Denver and Portland, the bicycle as transportation is a normal thing that is never given a second thought. Suburbanites tend to have a slightly different perspective, which is more along the lines of a Detroit one. That perspective is, cars were invented to allow one to travel faster and farther, and that can only be a good thing. Furthermore, the thinking is that roads were invented for cars, which is of course wrong, and bicycles are toys, to be used for fun or at most exercise.
A large portion of this country was developed after the advent of the automobile, and would have been very difficult without it. Bicycling is not part of the American way of thinking. It can change, but will have to overcome the machismo, red blooded, frontiersman American myth. That will take several generations of younger Americans coming of age when cycling is not “uncool” like it was when my parents grew up.
While bicycling may be part of a hipster label, it is becoming, at least in cities like Portland and Denver, an acceptable form of transportation for everyone. The hipsters, racers, and messengers may be obnoxious at times, so are many of various forms of drivers found on the roads. I don’t believe that the current fixie/hipster cycling craze will do any harm to furthering cycling in this country, and may in fact make cycling appear “cool” or at least acceptable for younger generations.
Comment by motorless from denver — October 6, 2009 @ 1:53 pm
Wow, motorless, I think you may have just completely missed the point of Rob’s post. The notion that promoting bicycling is part of a larger cultural project to stigmatize traditional masculinity is, to me, hugely problematic. Not because it shouldn’t be stigmatized, but because whenever you set up an alternative to the status quo, you become invested in maintaining your cultural distinctiveness.
In reality, all countercultural identities that nominally oppose the mainstream aren’t really trying to win. They just want to keep the battle going on as long as possible because it sustains their identity as rebels fighting for a cause. Winning the war is reframed as “selling out” to ensure that it never happens.
So isn’t it true that the countercultures themselves are the biggest obstacles to achieving what they claim to be fighting for? This is exactly like the Matrix: the Zion rebels and the One aren’t there to destroy the Matrix, but to keep it functioning.
Comment by mike — October 6, 2009 @ 3:14 pm
That’s well-put, Mike, thanks. The problem I’m worried about here is biking becoming a battle lifestyle bikers don’t want to win because it will rob them of their countercultural identity. That they would experience more people biking as a loss rather than a gain and ramp up their flamboyance in efforts to discourage others from invading their turf. Like when Johnny Utah gets beat up for surfing someone else’s break by guys who “live to get radical.” Identity-bikers perhaps think of themselves as living to get radical. They will never get the spiritual side of it.
Comment by Rob Horning — October 6, 2009 @ 3:50 pm
On a practical note, I have a mostly negative experience dealing with bicyclists in the suburbs of an American city. The roads here are not the same as the streets of a European city. It doesn’t seem reasonable for someone on a bicycle to compete for space on the road with heavy steel vehicles going more than twice their maximum speed. It doesn’t help that many of the bicyclists that insist on sharing roads with motorized vehicles routinely ignore the traffic laws.
The inadequate public transportation system and the development of and distance between suburban, exurban, and rural communities in the United States makes the normalization of bicycle commuting unlikely in the near future.
It would be far more progressive to develop new “green” vehicles than to rely on 19th century technologies and the attendant identity issues.
Comment by Nick — October 6, 2009 @ 9:39 pm
Rob, I think you are spot on in a lot of ways here, but I do think you are a bit over the top on just how hardfast this identity construction thing is. I run a company that makes clothing based on the premise that biking is the best form of transit in a 21st century city, so I’m out navigating these margins all the time.
Yeah there’s a little bit of defensiveness in some bike communities, and yeah there is also bit of pigeonholing that comes from non bikers. But these are the softest of borders, people might occasionally mumble or groan about too much bike traffic, or the new style bike lanes slowing them down, or about how badly the new riders ride, but that’s about the extent of resistance. There are very very few active cyclists I’ve met that are not in favor of more cyclists. And while the worst might snear at your bike or riding style, even they are almost certainly happy that you are riding and not driving.
Comment by Abe from New York — October 10, 2009 @ 12:06 pm