Urban Adonia

Bike Infrastructure that Doesn't Help Bicycling

2012-01-26T15:24:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I'm riding along on a street, and I come across a piece of bike signage so confusing that I stop and take a picture. Here are a few I took recently:

This is 14th and Pike in Capitol Hill in Seattle. The key here is that neither before nor after this separated bike area is there actually a bike lane. Once a bicyclist pulls ahead here, she will again have to take the lane unless she wants to ride directly into that parked car. It's not safe to re-merge over and over with vehicular traffic when riding a bike. Maintaining a straight line makes you more predictable to other road users, and demonstrates that the street is a shared space. For city infrastructure to ask bicyclists to remove themselves from the traffic lane in the middle of an intersection seems like a set up for conflict.

I'm certainly not the first person who has noticed the strange use of sharrows in Seattle (for example, Elly Blue talked to Seattle Bike Blog's Tom Fucoloro on the topic in November), but I just can't get over how randomly placed they seem to be. Some of them do what's going on in the first picture, where they seem to tell people to pull up to the curb at intersections (again, from a safety and traffic flow standpoint, this is a bad idea). The sharrow pictured here is on a curving street in the Mt. Baker neighborhood, and it seems to be telling cyclists that we should get as close as possible to that bulb out so that cars can more easily make the curve. In both cases, the bike signage seems to indicate that your personal safety as a bicyclist rests on you getting out of the way of cars.

Bike infrastructure should not be about keeping bikes out of cars' way.

Signage like this perpetuates an idea that motorists should be able to travel as-fast-as-possible, that biking is nice, in its place.

Our streets are dangerous not because bikes and pedestrians "get in the way," but because this as-fast-as-possible mentality makes people outside of cars into externalities.

So what should bike infrastructure do?

Bike infrastructure should make riding a bike safer and easier. Infrastructure projects that take bikes out of car traffic only to dump them randomly back in when the paint or path stops do not accomplish this.

I was biking down in Portland recently, and it reminded me of just how big I feel when I'm biking in a city that has accommodated transport cycling. My body on my bike takes up the street, I'm not being pushed to the side and allowed to travel only where it's convenient for motorists. I love seeing sharrows that are out in the middle of the traffic lane, where they should be, rather than shifting along the street according to the expected movement of cars.

When I see a sharrow painted over a pothole or otherwise leading me into a dangerous situation, I wonder where it went wrong. Was it the worker painting the thing that decided to place it there? Was it a city planner who decided to place it there? And then I think, why would a design like this get approved? Is it because the people who made the decision to install this signage weren't thinking about how bicyclists would be using it, but about how placing bike infrastructure on these streets would affect property values?

Style Wars, Brought to You by the Internet

2012-01-19T17:06:00.000-08:00

It's not often that I see a movie so good I feel disoriented. But ever since seeing Style Wars, a documentary about the early 80s hip hop scene in New York, I'm having a hard time concentrating. I want to learn more and more about that moment in time, when just about the most disenfranchised young people made the city their own by covering subway cars in graffiti art, not to mention inventing breaking and rap.

The film gives a glimpse of New York when it still had tumbling down or burned out buildings, not a lot of people around, greenery taking over empty lots, kind of like Detroit today. People of different races share accents cause they grew up in the same neighborhoods. It's exciting to watch the young dancers and bombers talk about their craft, even though they were filmed before I was born. A successful ethnographic documentary communicates the feeling of some social scene, and this thing is driving me crazy wondering what it must have felt like to be part of that moment in time.

I can sit at home in Seattle during an ice storm and learn about New York in 1982 because of the information infrastructure called the internet that people have used to post details about figures like Iz the Wiz, Rammellzee, Lee Quinones, Crazy Legs, and on and on. People who believe in the value of the film have launched a fundraising campaign to restore Style Wars. What have they done to get the word out? Posted the film on Youtube. Letting copyright issues get in the way of sharing cultural history would be about as stupid as the city of New York washing graffiti off subway cars. It didn't make it go away, it just damaged some pretty impressive works of art.

How Much Consumer Waste is Fueled by the Fear of Looking Poor?

2012-01-04T22:20:00.000-08:00

Back in October, I rode a Greyhound bus home from Salt Lake City. If you're taking a long distance trip on the Greyhound, you end up spending an hour here and there waiting in stations along the way so that drivers can get breaks. My bus left SLC around midnight, and there were a number of people waiting to re-board. One such group was a mother and her little boy and girl, traveling with her boyfriend. Who knows how long they'd been traveling at this point. This lady acted playfully tough with her boyfriend and her kids. She seemed like she'd sheltered her kids through some ups and downs. The little boy slept protectively next to his sister, and the two got up with no complaints to file into the station when we stopped somewhere in Idaho around 5 am.

Recently I offended my mother by saying we'd been poor when I was growing up. She said she took pride in being able to take us to the doctor whenever we were sick and providing us with dental care. She didn't have these things as a child. My grandmother would wait until it was absolutely necessary to take her to the doctor. So I clarified: to me growing up poor meant knowing that we might not have enough money to make it through the month, and not asking too often for money to go to the movies or shows when I was a teenager. Being poor meant never mentioning the American Girl doll I wanted so badly when I was a kid. (She did learn about that a few years ago, and the next Christmas I found a Samantha doll wrapped up for me under the tree.) I didn't fly until I was 11, but then again we never rode the Greyhound or the train; we always had a car for long trips.

Later that week, I heard an Italian-American woman who has spent her life in a close-knit community north of Chicago describe how her family moved between rented apartments many times when she was a girl in the 1930s. She always made sure to stay away from home on the days when the movers came. Why? we asked. Because she was ashamed that her family didn't own their house. Eventually her parents did buy a house, and that's where she raised her kids and still lives today.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the shame of poverty and how it impacts kids. I don't want those kids on the Greyhound to grow up feeling like dirt. But you know what a lot of people might call them? White trash. I remember my sister and I convincing each other that we weren't poor poor; we just weren't rich. And we were saved from being white trash cause we were half Mexican. Now I try to throw that all away and talk frankly about what I learned from watching my mother struggle to take care of us.

In my life this means being part of an urban sustainability movement that helps families. I want eco practices like bike commuting and carrying tote bags to the grocery store to seem like good ideas, not symbols of class. I want to be able to tell other grad students I'm riding the Greyhound home without getting a baffled look in response. But how we consume, how we get around, and where we live mean a lot to us outside of their utilitarian qualities; parents work so hard to protect their kids from the hardships they faced. Our culture's contempt for the poor goes very deep, and it's a self loathing that leads to a lot of consumer waste. I hope that in 2012 I can go further toward helping build a green movement that fights urban inequality by respecting struggling families rather than one that creates affluent future cities serviced by peripheral slums.

Redefining Urban Space: Multiple Mobilities in the Automobilized City

2011-11-30T16:06:00.001-08:00

At this year's meeting of the American Anthropological Association, I was thrilled to present my research alongside a few other people studying the politics of mobility. (That last phrase isn't just jargony gibberish, but instead a way to talk about the fact that not everyone encounters urban space and transportation in the same way. Race, class, and ability impact our mobilities and how we conceptualize them.)

First up on the panel was Scott Brown, a graduate student in anthropology at the New School for Social Research in NYC. His talk, "Shifting Gears: Cycling Toward an Anthropology of Design," dealt with bike infrastructure design, and was based on his work with Parsons' UrbanBike program.

Then Lusi Morhayim, an architect working on a PhD at UC Berkeley, gave a talk on "Car-Free Street Events: From Counter-Public Opinions to Counter-Spaces." She has done participant-observation at Critical Mass, Sunday Streets, and Park(ing) Day in San Francisco, and had an eloquent take on how these events affect participants' ideas about public space.

From the University of Memphis came a paper entitled "'It Will be a Super-Highway for Drugs and Crime!': Neighborhood Perceptions of Greenlines, 'Urban Danger,' and Transportation Alternatives in Memphis, TN." I learned that the University of Memphis has a strong applied anthropology program where people can get MAs while carrying out community-based projects. In this case, Dr. Keri Brondo led a research team that partnered with Matt Farr, who works for the Shelby Farms Park Conservancy, to bolster public support for the Shelby Farms Greenline, which converted an old rail right of way into a multi-use path.

Matt read the paper, and has also started a website, Bikes Mean Business, that promotes biking by showing its benefits for local economies. Their paper argued that bicycling has a lot of potential to improve health in Memphis, but people see it as a vehicle for crime. This rang true for me; my experience listening to homeowners in Long Beach reject a bike lane while using euphemistic language about people of color and the poor was what first got me thinking about bikes and anthropology back in 2008, so I was glad to hear the Memphis group's research on this topic.

Next I presented my paper, "Diverse City: Situationism, Anthropology, and DIY Bike Infrastructure in Los Angeles."

My talk focused on the tendency among bike folks to think about infrastructure in terms of concrete, physical changes to built environments instead of thinking about experimental, human infrastructures. Drawing on the legacy of situationist "happenings," I framed ciclovías as an example of how you can create a temporary zone where biking is less harrowing, and how this could impact what people feel is possible the next day when the streets are full of traffic again. During the talk I showed a continuous playlist of videos people had posted to Youtube of their day at 10-10-10, the first CicLAvia.

After me came Nathalie Boucher, a PhD student at Montréal's Institut national de la recherche scientifique - Centre Urbanisation Culture Société. She read "Going Down to the Place of Three Shadows: Journeys to and from Downtown Los Angeles Public Spaces," a paper about her ethnographic research in different parks in downtown LA, and her experience spending the day with a wheelchair-bound homeless man.

Our discussant was Zack Furness, a cultural studies professor, author of One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility, and someone with a damn cool website. Since Zack couldn't make it to the conference, he sent us written comments on our papers, and I read them at the end.

Maybe one day I'll be surrounded by others who research bikes, but at this point in time it's pretty freaking novel for me to spend time with people who are reading the same theories as me and are experiencing the same bikey moments as me. My brain felt like this for the rest of the conference:

Too Little Time in Montréal

2011-11-27T16:15:00.001-08:00

Though I spent most of my recent trip to Montreal inside conference rooms listening to talks or inside bars carousing with other anthropologists, I managed to escape into the city for some drifting on a few afternoons. This was my soundtrack.

I saw lots of transport cyclists, people getting around on bikes without wearing sporty spandex outfits. I didn't see many people riding bikes on sidewalks, and didn't notice any altercations between bicyclists and drivers. The Bixi bike rental system appeared to have pulled most of their fleet out of service for the winter, but I could see that there were lots of convenient places to pick up or leave bikes.

Many intersections lacked pedestrian crossing signals, maybe because people just crossed the street as soon as possible, like in New York. I came across a lot of sidewalks that had been closed by construction. In these cases people just walked in the road until the sidewalk cleared. Drivers cut very close to me and other pedestrians in crosswalks.

I would have liked to ride the subway more, but the hotel where I stayed in the Plateau neighborhood sat on a convenient bus line.

The city has many neat public spaces, both indoors and out.

There were lots of juxtapositions in the landscape, old next to new and wintry branches framing modern monoliths.

I spent a very pleasant afternoon exploring Quays of the Old Port of Montreal, Montréal's frontage along the St. Lawrence River that has been converted into a series of public spaces. J'aime bien l'adaptive reuse.

I really enjoyed Montréal's bilingual culture, and it made me realize how little I know about the French colonial legacy in North America, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the politics of language. Where I grew up in Southern California, Spanish might be heard as often as English, but due to racism I can't imagine it becoming an official language. Hope I have an excuse to visit Montréal again soon.

Amtrak Habitus

2011-11-27T14:12:00.001-08:00

The concept of "habitus" allows social theorists to talk about the connections between seemingly insignificant actions we take every day and our perspectives on what should happen in the world around us. In my graduate research, I've used it a lot to think about why biking in cities like LA is possible for some people, but seems totally crazy to others. My favorite theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, wrote a lot about habitus, building on the work of another French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss. In the 1935 essay "Techniques of the Body," Mauss characterized the body as our primary tool for experiencing the world, focusing on the importance bodily practices can have in our worldviews. The things we do over and over in our everyday lives have a lot to do with what we think we should be doing.

I usually decide to take the train instead of flying to academic conferences because riding the train allows me to use a less ecologically destructive mode of transport and it exposes me to people I would not encounter in my life at home. I've created an Amtrak habitus for myself that allows me to stay comfortable while hanging out with strangers for days at a time. When I take a long trip, I bring lavender castile soap and a little French press. Brewing my own strong coffee and washing up with a pleasant scent make me feel at home on the train. Through my routine, I inhabit a familiar place while in motion. Riding long-distance trains still makes me seem like an eccentric, I guess, but it sure makes me wonder how other people get to know this enormous country.

I just got home from a trip to Montreal for the American Anthropological Association conference. My itinerary took me on the Empire Builder, Lake Shore Limited, and Adirondack trains. Some seatmates stuck out in my mind. One lady happened to have been an extra in Breaking Away, a go-to movie for bike-themed outdoor film screenings, when she was working on her anthropology PhD in Bloomington, IN. She had long ago decided against an academic career, and instead worked in museums. Another seatmate told me that she regretted raising her kids speaking only English. An Egyptian by birth, she spoke Arabic, French, Italian, and English when she married a Mexican American man who did not want his children to be multilingual. My last seatmate wrung my heart the hardest. A Navajo railroad repairman, he laughed at my jokes and showed me a video of his horse ranch. We chatted about Chinle and other Navajo places. Then he asked me for advice about his girlfriend, who was carrying their baby, and who had been posting on Facebook about late night carousing. He said that sometimes she slept and slept, and once when they'd kissed he'd been stung by something very bitter on her mouth.

Moving around the train breaks up long journeys and gives me an escape when seatmates get overwhelming. Usually I spend a day in the observation lounge. On this trip I had a morning chat with a young black woman on her way to see her boyfriend in a North Dakota oil town. She told me earnestly about her hopes for the baby she was carrying. After she reached her destination and took her bright smile off the train, I settled down to work on a dissertation chapter.

The lounge soon filled with the loud hijinks of a few white men intent on a spree. Since alcohol is sold on board trains, some people think of the trip as one long binge, and it's not uncommon for Amtrak to kick drunks off the train. These guys sipped on Black Velvet and beer and got rougher and rougher, and I started hearing jokes using the n-word. I took off my headphones, my heart pounding, wondering what I should do. Sitting there without saying anything made me feel like I was somehow complicit in their ugly repartee, not to mention unsafe as a person of color. Once they taunted a black conductor who passed through just after a fried chicken joke, I decided to do something. I caught the laughing eye of one man and said that they couldn't use such inappropriate language in a public place, that it was unacceptable and they should keep it to themselves. He immediately backed down, but his buddy, the wildest of the bunch, told me to go sit with the kids. "This is the booze car," he said.

A woman moved to the seat next to me and thanked me for saying something. We sat there for about an hour, each doing our own thing, while the same group continued with their banter but without the racist jokes. Later on I decided to tell a conductor what I'd heard. He let me know that they'd be escorting that passenger off the train at the next station. I wasn't the only person who'd been made uncomfortable, it turned out.

When I interrupt racist banter in the lounge car, I'm making a statement about what is ok on the train. Because I was there I could assert that this train was not a segregated space that tolerated hate speech. My Amtrak habitus has shown me how many different kinds of people ride the train. As a theorist and as an activist, I know that interacting with people unlike ourselves can have a positive impact on the world we live in. Riding the train brings one into a cosmopolitan space, which unfortunately might be a novelty for many Americans. I'm glad I've been able to make it my routine.

Learning to Fix my Bike: Brakes First

2011-10-28T22:33:00.000-07:00

I recently finished Bike Works' Adult Basics Class (ABC), where I'd been spending my Sundays for the last six weeks learning about basic bike repair. The teacher, stylin' bike advocate, comic book artist, and all around wonderdude Davey Oil, had started us out with some basics not about bike repair, but about the social dynamics of bike repair. He encouraged us to think about how the bike world does not necessarily interrupt the race/class/gender discrimination many people experience in their everyday lives. So, fittingly, he wrapped up the class by asking us to use our new bike knowledge to help people, not to bludgeon them with our insider status.

To me, Davey's observations were spot on. I've avoided learning much about bike repair even though I've been an urban transport cyclist since 2005. A big reason was having a partner who enjoyed learning about sprockets (guess who got the bike pump when we split up), but I also felt out of place in bike co-ops and other spaces where some people knew a lot more about how these machines functioned than I did. I tend to feel intimidated by my own ignorance, and it can get in the way of me learning new things. When I lived at the LA Eco-Village, even with the fabulous Bicycle Kitchen a few blocks away and many cooks as my neighbors, I didn't blossom into bike repair glory.

I did spend a few hours at the Bike Kitchen on a Saturday back in 2010, learning some bike maintenance basics. The thing that stuck with me, though, wasn't how to hang a bike on a repair stand, but that my front brake freaked bike mechanics out.

What we see here, folks, is a caliper arm that has been bent at an odd angle. Here's how it should look in context, the one marked 5:

Diagram source here.

Back in 2007, when I still lived in Portland, I came out of a shop on SE Hawthorne one afternoon, and discovered, as I tried to ride home, that my handlebars had a new shape and that the front wheel would turn only under duress. Baffled, I eventually decided that someone had attacked my bike with a blunt object. I took it in to the Bike Gallery on SE Woodstock, and they installed new handlebars. The mechanic there explained that though one of the front brake's caliper arms had been bent, it still worked just fine, so he wasn't going to replace it.

So I rode around for years, not having any problems with my brakes. I knew that my front brake looked funny, but usually I forgot about it until a look of horror crossed the face of the person-in-the-know examining my bike. Especially once I started doing outreach with day laborer cyclists, some of whom managed to get around on bikes with much bigger problems, I saw my front brake as a symbol of biking unpretentiously. Then, on the first rainy day I rode in Seattle this October, I discovered that my brake was all wonky. Living in a rainy, hilly city has made me more concerned about bike repair than I ever was in Portland or LA. When I asked Davey to take a look at it, his face reminded me about the bent caliper arm.

It turned out to be the quick release mechanism messing things up this time around, but on the last day of ABC, when we got to bring in our own bikes instead of learning on the kiddie bikes that Bike Works refurbishes, I knew what my project would be. Time for a new brake! In order to get the job done that same day with the shop's limited supplies, I ended up replacing my front brake with a simpler one that did not have a quick release for easy wheel removal. I gotta say, I felt pretty good about doing this thing myself. I even figured out that I could strip the replacement brake down to its centerbolt so that I could transfer everything onto the longer centerbolt that had attached the old brake to my bike.

I've got many more overhauls in mind for my bike, now that I feel more comfortable digging in and figuring this stuff out. If you find yourself learning about bike repair and feeling embarrassed, make sure you're in an environment that doesn't take itself too seriously. Davey really drilled us to accept that it's ok to not know what you're doing, and I also once spent a magical afternoon at the Bike Kitchen fixing a flat under the mad tutelage of cooks Eric Potter and Jonny Green, which showed me how fun bike repair can be with the right attitude. I mean, it was like Alice in Wonderland meets Mary Poppins up in there. Thrills galore!

A Brief Visit to the SLC Bicycle Collective

2011-10-26T23:01:00.000-07:00

I like to get a little fieldwork in when I travel. My trip to Salt Lake City culminated in one incredibly busy day, where I presented on a panel entitled "Transportation Mode Choice and Behavior among Immigrants" at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning annual conference, and also visited a local bike organization that does cool work.

This was my first time at ACSP, and I really enjoyed it. I ran into folks from my university, fell in with a flock of Canadian planning PhDs, and generally had fun. By going to panels, I also got a better sense of what I'd need to say to make my research about bikes, bodies, and public space in LA mean something to transportation planners. After listening to a rewarding roundtable discussion by recipients of the Paul Davidoff Book Award, I scooted out to the light rail and used the transit pass that had been included in my conference materials (what a great idea) to head south to the SLC Bicycle Collective. I was interested in visiting because their website talks about recycled bikes and serving low income communities. My research and activism focus on making connections between low income communities and the bike movement. Not only do low income cyclists exist in cities and suburbs, we should be doing more to promote cycling in low income communities. So I was excited to find out what's being done on this front in SLC!

Located in a light industrial neighborhood, several long blocks from a light rail station, the Collective has an impressive workspace full of bikey materials. When I arrived, there were only a few people wrenching, since they had not yet started their public hours. Over coffee at the vegan café down the block, I met with Jonathan Morrison, a co-founder of the space and the executive director, and learned a bit about their goals and programming.

Jonathan moved to the city in 2000, and met some other bicyclists through Critical Mass. Someone at a local government bike advisory committee suggested opening a tool cooperative, but the city passed on funding something like that. Thinking it'd be cool to have a place to fix their bikes, a kind of shared garage, a group of people decided to take the project on. They incorporated in 2002, and decided to focus on offering bike education to low income kids and promoting bikes as transportation. Almost ten years later, they're going strong.

Most impressive to me, the Collective has relationships with groups that support refugees and other immigrants in Salt Lake City. A person in need of transportation can get a voucher from a participating organization, bring it here, and walk out with a recycled bike. I like the idea of nonprofits working together like a machine.

And, similar to what happened in Los Angeles around the Bike Kitchen, the Collective's presence seems to have encouraged more businesses to open up in the neighborhood. The vegan café (where the very sweet server treated us to coffee) and another bike shop have opened up nearby since they settled into this location.

When we walked back over so Jonathan could open up the space for fixing hours, we found a group of people waiting to get to work. Before I left I happened upon a volunteer trying to communicate with a Latino man who spoke mainly in Spanish. Jonathan had mentioned that the collective hasn't yet managed to establish relationships with SLC's Latino community, and it did seem like this man was having a hard time getting started on his repairs. I tried to help facilitate understanding, but having gone months without talking about bikes in Spanish, I struggled too. Fortunately it seems like a space that would welcome more involvement by Spanish speaking volunteers, and I admired the effort the volunteer made to cross the language barrier.

As I walked back to the light rail, I thought about how if I lived in SLC, I would be volunteering at the Collective and helping bridge that gap, being human infrastructure to make their services work for Spanish speakers. Then I thought, how come I'm not doing that work in Seattle? Thanks for reminding me to take initiative in my community, SLC Bicycle Collective!

Notes on Salt Lake City

2011-10-23T21:49:00.000-07:00

1. Here industry does not refer to pollution or exploitation. It refers to group harmony.

2. The streets are very wide. My hostess told me an urban legend about the streets being made wide enough to accommodate wagons turning around. The city's grid centers on the LDS temple.

3. Because religion shaped the urban form, public and private space can be hard to differentiate. What look like city parks or shopping malls are actually church properties.

4. At one such park, the LDS church "honors" Brigham Young as a colonizer. They gloss over his polygamy though.

5. The sturdy old buildings remind me of other southwestern cities like Flagstaff and Denver.

6. Across the railroad tracks on the west side of downtown, you can find some industrial urban decay.

7. The City and County building looks like a fantastic castle. It's the grandest example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture I've met. The security guard inside let me wander around after giving me a mini lecture about the building's history (this dude was well informed).

8. They've got the most picturesque capitol I've seen, up on a hill commanding the valley. The interiors were very impressive, but it all felt too clean and neat rather than maturely aged.

9. The City Library blows my mind! Rooftop garden, check. Lots of seating next to windows, check. They also have shops inside an atrium, a very engaging layout, and a fantastic public space outside. Also it's open till 9 pm on weeknights. Last but not least, beekeeping in the rooftop garden.

10. There's a garden called Gilgal that looks kind of like a cross between a miniature golf course and the Watts Towers. Like the Watts Towers, it was developed over many years by one guy. My hostess described it as a different expression of LDS faith than one would find at the tabernacle complex.

11. As I left Gilgal, I saw a woman who was texting and driving very nearly run over a young girl riding a bike in a crosswalk. I don't think the texting motorist ever noticed the girl, she didn't slow down or look up from her phone. The girl had to stop short, about an inch from being hit. I tried to shake the chill from my spine. Later I discovered that the U.S. Department of Transportation has a campaign around distracted driving. Here's their website.

Overheard on the California Zephyr

2011-10-23T18:12:00.000-07:00

Amtrak's California Zephyr line runs from Emeryville near San Francisco to Chicago. It crosses the Sierra Nevada, the deserts of Nevada and Utah, and climbs again over the Rockies. I took it from Sacramento to Salt Lake City, spending a sunny afternoon in the observation lounge watching pines and mountains pass by. I read my book, but I also eavesdropped.

A large group of elderly people had boarded with me in Sacramento, apparently part of some paid excursion. My trips on Amtrak's long distance trains have shown me that many of the people with the wealth and leisure time to buy sleeping car accommodations have lived long enough to remember the glory days of passenger rail. This train, though, with its particularly scenic route, seemed to attract even more old folks than usual.

My ears caught the occasional murmured remarks of a man traveling alone who seemed to know an awful lot about the terrain through which we traveled. Perhaps he'd worked in some industry here? Though others listened to his words and sometimes asked questions, he never struck up a conversation with anyone, staring out the window as he spoke. Over the intercom a volunteer shared facts about our route, and the quiet man seemed to enjoy naming landmarks before we heard them announced by the official guide.

To my left I heard a woman with leathery, oversunned skin strike up a conversation with another woman. Their husbands played peripheral roles in the interaction. She assumed that this woman would share her Republican partisanship, and launched into an enthusiastic overview of her economic and political beliefs, probably culled from the radio pundits to which she claimed allegiance. "We go to the Tea Party," she shared, before claiming that "half the kids at Occupy Wall Street don't know what they're picketing for." Then she and her husband praised their favorite resort in Mexico, down south near "Kawsta" Rica. So cheap! In the same breath, they talked about how they wouldn't go near Ensenada or other towns near the border because of the drug violence. These people did not support "handouts" here, but they did not seem to grasp the exploitation people suffer in Mexico. What would happen to their suburban enclave in the bay area if they got their myopic way, destroyed all social services, and more people turned to lucrative trafficking of illegal goods? Maybe they don't understand that what they experience as affluence, the freedom to ride their motorcycles around the country and to visit all-inclusive resorts in parts of the world they can't pronounce, wouldn't be considered crumbs off the table of the people whose economic interests their twisted politics support.

After the talkative couple returned to their seats, I overheard the husband of the accosted woman express his frustration at the tanned woman's presumption. They had voted for Obama. "I thought she was nice," his wife retorted, going back to her seat alone in a huff.

Drifting in Sacramento

2011-10-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

The Coast Starlight chugged into Sacramento around 5 am last Tuesday. I picked up my things and went into the station and sat there until the sky lightened, around 7:15 am. Using my handy internet phone, I identified a source for caffeine and set out for Temple Coffee.

The café's overhead lamps reflected in the window.

As I've remarked before, I really like that layovers on the train happen in the middle of cities rather than in contained non-places like when traveling by air. I needed to be back at the Sacramento train station for an 11 am train to Salt Lake City, but I had a few hours for exploring. Despite having grown up in California (fourth generation, yo! My great great grandfather drove a streetcar in San Bernardino at the turn of the century), I'd never been to the capitol. So I knew my drifting needed to take me there.

The morning gloom burned off while I made my way around. I saw some neat buildings and public spaces, and lots of people biking, but also a surprising number of empty storefronts and decay. I found some helpful maps posted around downtown, so I didn't manage to get fully lost. Good thinking, city peeps!

Then I found the capitol by following a lovely pedestrianized avenue.

I went inside, expecting them to hassle me about carrying a backpack and full tote bag (no lockers at the train station, unfortunately. The only cities where I've been able to use lockers are Chicago and Portland, where you can find lockers in the adjacent Greyhound station). The guards didn't care, so I got to wander around the stately old halls. Pretty much by myself, too.

All up in your rotunda.

Fancy lamps in a stairwell.


I think this was in the midcentury East Annex.

Heading back to the train station, I saw a shopping mall. It could be that there are so many empty storefronts cause of this mall in the city center.

Personally I'd rather go to a store in a handsome edifice like this one.

Lots of lovely California architecture.

Getting to the train station, which is part of a regional transit center, isn't exactly pedestrian friendly. First you have to cross a street where they've limited your crossing options.

And then the public space in front of the station is filled with parking.

I made it back with plenty of time. I could see from the train platform that there was a secret passage to Old Sacramento.

Intrigued, I passed through. It's neat that there's a pedestrian connection to the park under a highway, but I felt let down when I got there.

I love old buildings, but in a case like this, where the city relocated old buildings to this spit of land between a highway and a river, what you have is a tourist trap and not a thriving neighborhood. My willing suspension of disbelief couldn't overcome the roar of traffic on the highway.

Flânerie at the Bins

2011-10-18T23:42:00.000-07:00

I went to the Goodwill Outlet, aka the bins, on 6th Street today. I wanted to find piles and piles of old wool sweaters to do some sewing experiments for winter bike wear, but I ended up with just a few accessories. (You can read about my projects using recycled materials on my other blog, Fashionrubble). I did get lots of flânerie (observing urban space) done though.

I've been to Goodwill outlets in Santa Ana and Los Angeles, California, in Portland, Oregon, and this one here in Seattle. You enter a big, sometimes open-sided warehouse, and see many people digging through big plastic tubs of items lined up along aisles. You walk over and start pulling items out, tossing them aside if they don't look promising, or holding onto them as you move down the aisle. The items come from Goodwill stores where they failed to find a buyer. Lots of times you find old tags on things as a reminder of this, and you think, good thing I'm not going to pay $6.95 for this! At the bins, you pay for most items by the pound. Today I bought a bunch of accessories and paid $1.63.

The bins mostly contain good surprises, but sometimes they can be gross, which is why some people wear gloves. The items get rumpled and broken by being tossed back and forth, and I don't know what happens during processing behind the scenes, but I've seen things in the bins that shouldn't be there. Things can smell weird, or people leave odd things around, like today I saw a plastic bottle half full of some brown liquid sitting in a sea of toys. Later I saw a women reaching into a pile of housewares, heard an explosion, and saw her pull her hand away quickly. An exploding cap? For people who work there, the ambient dust can cause health problems. My very friendly cashier today wore a face mask to preserve his lungs.

It's a pretty social experience shopping at the bins. You're working your way down an aisle, another person slowly makes it to your section, and you negotiate who is going to stay there and who is going to move, usually without exchanging words or even glances. Some people make money off of finding valuable things they can resell, so competition can be fierce when fresh bins get rotated in. The regulars pick up on some signal to which I'm oblivious and they position themselves to grab as many items as they can from the new assortment. Today I witnessed a slight altercation between a scruffy looking white hipster and an African man with a heavy accent. The African man would call out to his friend, and the white man would mimic him. Eventually the African man told him to cut it out, saying, "I don't like you." I couldn't tell if these people spent time together here regularly, but it seemed like they might.

People have fun there for sure. I see little kids dragging around exciting new toys they've found, and it's always satisfying when you see some promising thing poking out from under a pile, you tug, and it's even more amazing than you thought. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who feels this way, based on the glee streaming across the faces of the pickers dividing up the newest spoils.

I have this sense that somehow I'm supposed to grow out of thrift shopping, or at least out of shopping at places like the bins. As a professional, I should be buying clothes at Banana Republic and J.Crew. Guess what, I buy a lot of their clothes; I just wait till someone else has broken them in first.

Occupy Urban Space

2011-10-17T21:50:00.000-07:00

Seattle's really socking it to me right now, season-wise. Fall has always been my favorite season, even though growing up in Southern California it was less about colorful leaves and more about HELLSTORMS and UNCONTAINED BLAZES, aka fire season. A dry pile of leaves? Dangerous fire hazard, not a crunchy trampoline or, in Calvin's case, a talking monster. I'm so down to be living in a city where it's crisp and cold out, and even at the moment clear and dry! Whoop.

I finally made it down to the local OWS/99% encampment at Westlake Park today. Even though police had cleared all the tents this morning, there were lots of people sitting in the park, having conversations, and looking around. With the youthful and grungy feel to the crowd, it seemed like a European square rather than a disused plaza like we so often see in these United States.

Protests have a dual character. They put forth a perspective on some policy, but they also queer how people use urban space. Usually we flow through it instead of holding still. Often we're alone on our way to or from someplace, crossing paths with many strangers on other trajectories, instead of moving in a group with a common purpose. The power of numbers, of having a critical mass of people, doesn't just demonstrate something to observers. It creates a different kind of public space. I've written about this aspect of protest here, and in my dissertation I'm writing about the legacy of the Situationist International as it relates to creative uses of space like ciclovías.

As a sustainable-urban-living activist, I feel like protests tend to be a performance of a fantasy 1968, referencing rather than stimulating a political shift. It feels pretty energizing, but then everyone goes home, back to their lives, where they may or may not conceive of their everyday practices as relating to the things they were protesting. But occupying urban space can itself be an important statement in a country where people spend so much time alone in cars and subdivisions. I wonder if for many of the people participating in this ongoing protest, it might be as much about spending time with other humans as it is about resisting economic exploitation.

A few New York blogs have commented on Occupy Wall Street's use of privately owned public open space (here and here). I don't know what the situation is here in Seattle in terms of private or public ownership, but I do know that Seattle's public spaces sometimes feel lonely, even when there are people around. Westlake didn't feel lonely today. Walking my bike up Pike Street after leaving Westlake, I saw a large group of people on a corner. Protesting? No, waiting for the bus.

Salt Lake City Before Sunrise

2011-10-17T19:10:00.000-07:00

I'm going to write about my recent trip to SLC as a series of meditations on using sustainable ground transport to get around the United States, and how challenging it can be. Logistically challenging, and also frowned upon: I got a lot of strange looks from people I told I'd be riding the Greyhound.

First, a logistical challenge. Because a whole lot of beautiful mountains lie along the California Zephyr's route, Amtrak has scheduled that train to pass through the flatlands of Nevada and Utah in the middle of the night. When I bought my ticket to Salt Lake City last month, I kind of shrugged off the arrival time, 3:30 am. As my trip grew closer, I started to worry. The sun would rise in Salt Lake City around 7:30 am. What was I supposed to do with myself until then? What do you do when you get to an unfamiliar city in the wee smas? As a woman traveling alone, and as a grad student traveling on a shoestring, I rely on networks like couchsurfing.org to stay with locals, and I don't think it's at all appropriate to be like, arrival time: middle of the freaking night. All of a sudden I needed a 24 hour public space, and I didn't know if that was something SLC could provide. I did some Googling, and found that a nearby Denny's provided potential sanctuary in case hanging out in the train station wasn't possible.

For once I hoped Amtrak would run hours behind schedule, but we actually arrived early. I woke up at 3 am to see a ghostly salt lake outside the train window and thought, shiiiiit, time to face the music. The Amtrak station in Salt Lake City sits in a new complex that integrates local and regional transit, bringing together heavy rail, Greyhound buses, light rail, and city buses. Pretty cool! Still, not a cozy place to hang out before sunrise. The train station itself turned out to be a prefab box that only stayed open until 5 am, but people sitting there could mosey across the transit plaza to the Greyhound station, which would just be opening its doors at that hour. (I did some research, and Amtrak plans to move into a refurbished station soon. More info here on their Great American Stations website.) Since I planned to spend some time in the Greyhound Station the following night, I didn't really want to hang out there in the morning as well. On the map it looked like a short walk to Denny's. So I settled in to wait until 5.

I tried to follow along with the manic vignettes in the massive Pynchon tome I'd brought along, but instead eavesdropped as a sort of neorealist one act unfolded among others in the waiting room. One man sat near me and didn't talk to anybody. An older man, traveling alone, tried to figure out how to reserve a rental car to reach his daughter's house in the suburbs. A young family coached him through this. They listened as he made a reservation not for Salt Lake City, but for his hometown, having misunderstood what the lady on the phone meant when she asked for a zip code. Once he hung up, the young father asked him some questions to get him to realize his mistake, and he called back to correct it. Then they chatted some more, and it turned out that the young father worked as a commercial driver for Walmart. The time had nearly reached 5 am, so first the family and then the older man migrated out of the station. Somewhere in the mix the other man had left as well, so I found myself alone in the silent station. End scene.

I went out into the frosty air to start my walk to Denny's, and I found the ticket agent taking a smoke break. He advised me to take a cab instead of walking long blocks through an industrial area, and told me some stories comparing SLC to other cities. So I took a cab to Denny's and drank about six gallons of diner coffee. My Couchsurfing hostess picked me up there just as the sun began to lighten the sky over the mountains.

I feel pretty good that I made it work, but it'd be nice to live in a country where you weren't expected to vanish into private space as soon as you step off your train, while those of us without the resources to do so simply wait wherever we can for the sun to come up.

Post by my Mom: New Kid on the Train

2011-10-16T22:29:00.000-07:00

My mother, Laurene, agreed to share her thoughts about commuting by bike/train from San Juan Capistrano to Santa Ana in suburban Orange County, California. My posts about biking in Orange County are here, and posts about Laurene's forays into transport cycling are here and here. I really appreciate her keen eye for social dynamics, and how badass is she for trying this thing out at age 60.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I was involved in a car accident on September 14th on my way to work. To be more accurate: I slammed on my brakes and veered right to avoid, but ultimately crashed into, the Mazda truck that had suddenly stopped at the signal before the I-5 South off ramp. Just for the record, I was neither on my cell phone nor applying my makeup when this occurred. I had just looked down at something and then there he was. The enraged victim of my error jumped out of his truck and ran back to my collapsed Honda CRV where I sat rocking and holding my hurt knee. His expression transformed to sympathy. “Oh, you’re hurt … I’ll call this in.”

Quite promptly the heretofore pristine San Juan Capistrano morning air squealed with sirens. One would assume that a single police car and one truck with paramedics would have sufficed; instead, I found myself assailed by multiple police officers and a moving wall of fireman decked out for an inferno of cataclysmic proportions. When one rude San Juan Capistrano cop yelled at me to get off my cell phone (you are supposed to immediately submit a claim to your insurance company, right?) … I dissolved into tears. A very kind fireman rescued me and humanely guided me to the safety of a curb where I continued to sob between answers to his questions. As I sat there trembling, somebody to my left struggled to get my blood pressure (low) and to find a pulse. For a brief moment I wondered if I had died and was dreaming all this. The empathetic fireman, who happened to be my age, asked me if I had any previous aches and pains. We exchanged knowing looks before having a good laugh (in between my fits of crying). I find it extremely insulting that this accident has since been called a “fender bender.”

Now you know why I commuted to work last week by bicycle and train.

Day One: My daughter Vera's boyfriend blessedly offers to drop me and my trusty little folding commuter bike off at work in Santa Ana on his way north. (My bike’s diminutive size will be addressed later.) Awkwardly folded as it is to fit in the back of his car, he graciously carries it up to the third floor of my office building for me. We stick it in the storage room across the hall from my office. A pretty uneventful work day follows. My boss has approved me to leave at 3:45 in order to make the 4:16 train. I have previously biked the route to the Santa Ana train station once with my daughter Adonia, bicycle advocate extraordinaire, and another time I biked it alone. Piece of cake! (Think Billy Crystal in Forget Paris.) It must here be noted that neither time had I been under any real time pressure.

At 3:40 I shut down my computer and start to lock up my office. At 3:43 our accountant needs an immediate response to a question whose answer resides solely in my computer. At 3:46 I shut down my computer again. At 3:47 my boss “remembers” that I need to leave at 3:45. At 3:50 I cross the hall without the key to the storage closet. At 3:51 I cross the hall with the key to the storage closet where I realize that my bike needs to be reassembled. At 3:55 I escort my bike up the hallway, helmeted and apparently quite the novelty to every employee in the building I pass that wants to know why I am pushing a bike through the building. Finally on my way via neighborhoods, I ride past a middle school where a young man on a kid’s bike yells, “Cool bike!” Of course he thinks it’s cool – my lightweight commuter is bigger than his! He obviously likes teensy-weensy bikes.

I speed into the Santa Ana train station parking lot at 4:12, jump off my bike and look one way to see the three-deep line at the ticket machine and the other to watch the (supposed) 4:16 train stop, board, and leave. The next Metrolink train I am able to catch from the Santa Ana station only goes as far as Irvine. In Irvine I realize that if I wait for the next train that takes me all the way home to San Juan Capistrano, I will most likely be late for an (already rescheduled) appointment at 6:15. Therefore, I decide that riding my bicycle from the stop in Laguna Niguel is my best option. Piece of cake! (Earlier reference still applies.) Halfway up the gradual climb from Laguna Niguel to San Juan Capistrano, I discover that my back tire is very flat. Undeterred, I struggle home and make my appointment by the skin of my teeth. I fall into bed early and totally exhausted after prepping for tomorrow’s two-way bike/train commute. [Here's a map of bike routes in South Orange County.]

Day Two: Having meticulously prepared my backpack with necessary workday items, I pop out of bed at 5:30 am. I showered last night, so need only to stow perishable breakfast and lunch items. It is not quite daylight in San Juan Capistrano at 5:50 am. In the dark, I pedal down my hill past the library and all the way to the signal on Camino Capistrano. Sweating, I remove my light jacket while I wait for the light to change. After it changes and I pedal on towards the train station, the “thump, thump, thumping” of my back tire reminds me that it is still flat (see previous day). I hurriedly purchase my $6 day pass ($1 senior discount – I’m only 60, but that qualifies me) and position myself with the other commuters waiting for the train. I notice that most of them are farther up the tracks, but decide maybe I have a better shot at quickly getting on the train if I don’t join them. I have to run for the train. Aha! They do this every day and know where the train stops. Even after racing to find the bike symbol on a car, I am able to get my bike on and buckled in before the train doors close. Wow, this is great!! No other bikes but mine on the car!! One other cyclist gets on in Laguna Niguel.

When I arrive at the Santa Ana train station, I limp and thump my way somewhat fearfully up Broadway (a main street) to the closest gas station I can find. After pulling up to the air pump, I realize that the coin-operated machine only takes quarters. Side trip into gas station office for change (where attendant doesn’t advise me of the fact that it is illegal in CA to charge for air and they have tokens for this which I find out later from a family member) … successful pumping of air into flat … followed by early arrival at work. Uneventful work day follows. It appears that my whole life is focused on commuting successfully to work this week.

I leave the office at 3:45 on the dot and having discovered that Broadway is a more direct route than the one Adonia had shown me, I take it instead. There is more traffic on Broadway in the afternoon, so I use the sidewalk. Mistake. It is extremely stressful watching for cars coming out of driveways and turning into them; nonetheless, since I purchased a day pass in the morning I am actually early for the 4:16 train. This time when I get on the train there are other cyclists there before me. I am able to position my bike in front of the other three but receive dirty looks from the male bike owners as I try to set my teeny-tiny little bike next to their giant-sized monsters. They exchange knowing glances with each other and ignore me when I ask whose bikes they are and if anyone is getting off before San Juan Capistrano. I’m not sure, but there may be a male cyclist hierarchy on the trains. On my way to family pizza night I stop at the local bike store where I bought my little folding commuter and invest $66 in a bike pump, emergency tire patching kit, a water bottle holder and fee for replacing my back tire’s tube.

Day Three: Having learned from yesterday’s experience (bicycling is harder in a skirt and I didn't have enough time to bike to buy lunch) today my backpack contains: a change of clothes, my lunch, book, calendar, keys and heavy wallet. I realize that my ride to the station is all downhill until the signal at Camino Capistrano and so conserve my energy by coasting all the way there. As if welcoming me to my second morning of commuting, the signal gratuitously changes to green so that I smoothly coast through the intersection all the way to the depot driveway. Isn’t life wonderful?

After purchasing my day pass and positioning my bike closer to those who have been doing this longer than me, I notice my son-in-law Eric zooming to the ticket machine mere minutes before the train is due. He is riding his own BIG bike, and I now understand why. He started doing the bike/train commute to his own job in Santa Ana before me on Adonia’s folding commuter bike. He's a man, and if the hierarchy mocks my little bike, how much more humiliation must he have faced? Is this some kind of male private part size issue? Well, if so, I’ve resolved my penis envy, so I’m not getting hooked by it. Eric and I run to find a car with our coded symbol only to discover two bikes already there. We are able to bungee our bikes to them. Eric very kindly tells me that I can keep the bungee for the days ahead. The two guys from yesterday are just as mean to Eric as they were to me. Meaner. “Don’t jam your handlebars into my spokes!” gripes the one with the glasses and headphones. (Okay, so maybe I am feeling a little motivated to challenge this hierarchy, but it is definitely not penis envy. I still love my little bike.)

My days are now most assuredly geared around this new train/bike commuting paradigm. It is all I talk about, think about and plan for. I just try and get some work accomplished at the office in between. On the way home I discover that I can share Broadway with the other drivers instead of using the sidewalk. This cuts down on my time to the station also. Leaving work at 3:45 gets me there 10 minutes early with this shortcut. Yay! I saw another woman with a bike on the train home. I wonder how she is doing with the hierarchy. She and I smile at each other knowingly.

Day Four: Having learned from yesterday’s experience, I eliminate my calendar and wallet from the backpack. Needing entertainment on the train, I pack a book, but a paperback instead of hardback. Eric appears just in the nick of time again and we luckily find a car with only two other bikes on it. He decides to go check out other cars to see if every car is full of bikes after we discuss the possibility that there may be certain cars that the nasty bike commuters prefer and we can prudently avoid. Still and all, I am starting to feel camaraderie with my fellow early morning train commuters. We acknowledge each other with a nod as I walk my bike past them in the darkness. The other bicyclists continue to ignore me, though. Eric returns with information from another cyclist that it is always a crap shoot finding bike space on the train. We bid our adieus as he leaves the train in Tustin.

Riding down Washington is very peaceful all the way to Broadway. The parking lot at my office building has its usual three or four cars and is otherwise isolated. I love it. Another work day drones by as I look forward to my commute home. On the way back to the station on Broadway, I confirm to myself that sharing the road with drivers beats the sidewalks as far as safety. Overall, I believe that drivers on Santa Ana surface streets adapt better to me on a bike than pedestrians do on the sidewalks. I haven’t been honked at yet; conversely, I have experienced pedestrians purposely blocking me and I’m pretty sure that hostility exudes from them. The only negative behavior that motorists have exhibited so far is zipping around me or trying to beat me through stop signs. I sit in front of them, behind and between them at signals. So far I’ve encountered mostly consideration. Seeing multiple other cyclists on the streets leads me to believe that car drivers may be used to us.

Feeling confident about whipping my bike onto the train for my fourth ride home in a row, I am somewhat taken aback when the conductor tells me I have to find another car. “But there were only three other bikes” I assert as he escorts me quickly to the next car shaking his head. He enters through the handicapped side (bikes enter on one side of cars while the handicapped enter by the other entrance) and as I struggle to bungee my bike to the THREE others, I give him a significant look. I don’t make a nasty remark because he did hold the train for me after all. Following his “all aboard” announcement he comes back and explains to me that the new cars only hold three bikes, while the older cars can fit up to four. Now wouldn’t this have been good information to have the first day? There should be a bike-commuter trainer on board every train, methinks.

Day Five: My last day of forced bike/train commuting! I excitedly coast down my hill through the dark early morning and then past the library singing, “I did it … I did it …” under my breath. Yes, I’m bruised and scratched from hitting myself with my pedals and my muscles are sore, but I DID IT!!! Well, almost, anyway. Eric has Fridays off so I’m on my own this morning. The ride in on the train is uneventful. Although I take my now usual route up Broadway to work, I’ve decided to take the late train and take the long way through neighborhoods back to the station. My coworkers are very impressed that I have come through this experience intact and without significant incident. I sit in front of my boss’s desk and discuss the possibility of continuing this regime two or three days each week. She is agreeable.

I run into the only other bike commuter (she rides from home) in my building in the elevator. I’ve heard that she recently was hit by a car on her way to work. Although the office gossips told me about it in a “see how dangerous it is biking on city streets?” tone, she is back biking to work on a brand new bicycle. “I love it,” she proclaims to me. “I couldn’t wait to get back on a bike!” After five days in a row of biking through the same town, she is preaching to the choir. We walk away from our conversation with conspiratorial grins on our faces.

At some point during the day I get a text from my eldest daughter, Gia (Eric’s wife). “Guess whose car broke down?” I take a wild stab that it was hers. Indeed. Funny how many people around me have been affected by mechanical breakdowns of late. Eric had just resolved Vera’s car breakdown the night before my accident. Hmmm.

I work for some hours and then leisurely ride to the train station where I have time to eat a meatball sandwich [yum! sez the newly vegetarian editrix] at the café before joining my fellow commuters by the southbound track. At 5:30ish (train was due at 5:26 and is usually early) I notice small groups gathering. Around 5:35 I overhear one of the closer groups talking about our train. Apparently, it broke down at the Anaheim station and promptly began spewing some liquid from the engine. I gradually approach the closest group and begin asking questions. They include me in their conversation and larger groups form as we all start pulling together and sharing information. The only information we get is from those with Iphones … the speakers by the tracks are apparently also not working. I text Gia, “Guess whose train broke down?” She calls right back and we laugh hysterically as she shares that it has started to rain and I spot the clouds approaching from the south. When I get off the phone, I share this news with my fellow San Juanenos who have been eyeing me as I stood guffawing. We are bonding!!

Around 5:45 a southbound Metrolink stops and we all crowd around one door until someone tells us that it only goes to Irvine. Some get on, but most of us decide to wait for the next one. An Amtrak comes a little later and some of us with monthly passes get on that one. Finally, around 6:15, a southbound train boards the remainder of us (and those who usually ride the later train). The rain hits after we are safely on the train and only in Irvine. I wave goodbye to all my new acquaintances as we go our separate ways when the train arrives in San Juan Capistrano. In a funky sweetly melancholic mood I pedal up the hill home.

So, what have I gleaned from my week of going carfree? Principally, I have learned that human beings are very adaptable – much more so than one might generally assume. Most significantly, for me anyway, I have learned that riding the train and biking to and from the train stations is FUN. It is interesting to ride through neighborhoods instead of sitting in traffic on the freeway. I see and interact with people, both on my bike and on the train or waiting for it. When the train broke down we gathered together and communicated with each other. On the freeway when something similar happens people sit in their cars and bitch to themselves. I have time on the train to read or nap. By the time I get to work I have exercised and interacted with other human beings. Because I get to work early I have more time to get ready for my work day. I have discovered businesses along the way that I plan to frequent.

I have decided to continue to commute this way at least two days a week. My poor 2000 Honda CRV with over 236,000 miles on it deserves a rest and I can use it for the days I have appointments and such. I have met the challenge of being carless for a week and overcome!! Watch out male hierarchy … I’ll be back!

Train Stations: Seattle, Portland, Sacramento

2011-10-12T19:53:00.000-07:00

On my way to Salt Lake City, where I'm getting ready to present at an urban planning conference tomorrow, I traveled on the Coast Starlight from Seattle to Sacramento, and on the California Zephyr from Sacramento to SLC. Here are some pictures of Amtrak stations in Seattle, Portland, and Sacramento.

King Street Station in Seattle has apparently been under construction for many years. They're slowly revealing and restoring some original detail work.

The space will probably be splendid once they're done, but for now waiting there kind of feels like crouching in a cluttered hallway.
Over the ladies' restroom, a clock and a lightbox.

In Portland, where we had some extra time, I thought about running up to my favorite food cart, the Whole Bowl, and stocking up on tasty yums for the ride. But visions of running back to the station only to see the train pull away from the station with a final toot toot made me reconsider, so I just slurped from a Benson Bubbler and took pictures instead.

As in many old train stations I've seen, the bathroom has a large anteroom where ladies must have swooned it up back in the day. Now only carefully curated modernist furniture can linger.

This one also has a lightbox.

I arrived in Sacramento at about 5 am on Tuesday morning, so my first groggy impression was of an ornate cave. You have to wind your way through some tunnels to get from certain tracks to the station, so when I emerged into the hall it still felt subterranean.

Later in the day I got an exterior shot.

Historic mural and station clock.

The long wooden benches had been branded many years ago.

From the tracks, you have a better view of the station's Italianate style.

These stations have a grandeur left over from the pre-Amtrak era, when passenger rail seemed deserving of artful waiting rooms. My next stop, Salt Lake City, did not really size up, station-wise. More on that later.

Our Relatives' Impact on Our Transportation Beliefs

2011-10-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

Last night I tried something new, phonebanking! I called Seattle voters and urged them to vote YES on Proposition 1, which would use a vehicle licensing fee to fund street repair and transportation projects. More info here.

The phonebanking took place in an old office building downtown. How I love a good stairwell.

Through the hexagonal wired glass windows, some city views.

A few people answered their phones, but I mostly left messages. As I dialed number after number, I became familiar with the open static sound that would precede the jarring "dee dee dee" of the disconnected number message. I learned to pull the phone away from my ear just before the high pitched tones pierced my eardrums. Sometimes I reached the parents of young people who had moved out, I guessed from the curt "she lives on her own now" type responses. On one such call, the mother seemed confused. She asked if Prop 1 supported public transportation. Yes, it did, I replied. Well, then, she said, the voter I was trying to reach would be in favor, because we have to do whatever we can for that! I liked encountering a family commitment to public transportation. (Also I could hear a cat meowing in the background, points for that).

Recently my sister moved to Boulder, Colorado, a town with a thriving bike culture. She called me the other day to tell me how frustrated she felt by entitled bicyclists. One guy took up the whole lane! She had to stick her head out the window and yell cause he wouldn't move. I explained that taking up the whole lane is legal, and often necessary. Oh, she said, she hadn't known. By the end of our conversation she decided that instead of writing an angry letter to the town newspaper about ill-behaved cyclists, she'd be writing about the lack of education about our shared rights to the road.

How many motorists share her frustration, but don't have a bike advocate sister to call on the phone? Our families and friends have such an impact on what we think about transportation, and how we decide to get around. Living in a community of carfree folks made it easier for me to live carfree in Los Angeles, but come to think of it, I had started learning how to get around on public transportation there when visiting that same sister years before.

On that note, I am very happy to report that my mother, whose first attempt at bike/train commuting I wrote about last November, used a recent fender bender as an excuse to reflect further on her carfree commute in Orange County. I'm going to post her thoughts here soon.

Quick Note on the Safe Streets Social

2011-10-03T15:37:00.000-07:00

I spent last week writing an academic paper about how thinking in terms of human infrastructure can help cities become more bike friendly. So all consuming was this, I never wrote up the Safe Streets Social we had on Saturday, September 24.

Well, it went great. I spent the morning frantically preparing t shirts, starting at the Bins (Goodwill Outlet). It was like serendipity x1000 all up in there cause I needed about 8 orange t shirts, and lo and behold, I came across a mass of bright orange construction worker t shirts that already had bright yellow stripes! I took them home and painted on some heart sharrows, whipped out a hair dryer to expedite the drying process, and then headed down to the Moving Planet festival at South Lake Union to meet up for the ride.

I made it just in time to be part of the aerial photo that happens as part of 350.org events. Here are some examples from other events. Since I had on a bright orange dress, subtly giraffed, (by which I mean there are light brown giraffes on the fabric), I was placed strategically in the photo. Afterwards a nice elderly lady came up to me and said that when my grandparents were in high school, they loved to wear bright colors like my dress. She said that she had very bright sweater sets. Day Glo Grandma!

As the event wound down, people got ready for the Safe Streets Social. While people gathered on a grassy slope, co-organizer Davey talked a bit about the memorial character of the ride, and how we would be riding no more than two abreast on busy streets. We wanted to make a statement by sharing the road. This played out very successfully. I mean, of course I witnessed some aggressive driving, motorists darting quickly in front of our group, etc., but I also felt like we passed through the city thoughtfully. Deciding not to cork intersections meant that our group got divided by signals a few times, but stopping at each memorial site gave us a chance to rejoin each other.

I talked to some very fun people, and personally felt very cheered by spending time in a mobile social space. Here's co-organizer Tom's post about the ride on Seattle Bike Blog. In discussing it afterwards, Tom, Davey, and I agreed that we had succeeded in creating a space for people to remember the cyclists we had lost this summer, while also reminding us that we ride together. We're planning to make some more socials happen, starting with an info share on biking in the rain.

A Safe Streets Social in Seattle

2011-09-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

On a long road trip down to my hometown in Southern California, I noticed lots of things about traffic interactions. The social life of the interstate buzzed in my mind, as I grappled with my ongoing riddle of how infrastructure and behavior impact each other in traffic.

When I got home to Seattle, sadness awaited. Three people who got around on bikes had died, two killed by motorists in one week. This on top of another long time commuter killed by a left turning motorist earlier in the summer.

First I sat shocked, thinking about the futility of trying to make our streets safe when some motorists insist on deadly inattention. Then the tears came as I thought about the family of a young man killed while working. Then I just sat.

Later that week, a friend pointed out how his grief over recently losing friends to cancer mingled with his frustration about these cyclists' deaths. I knew what he meant. Even though I didn't know any of these people, as a bike advocate, as someone writing a dissertation about traffic interactions and cultural barriers to cycling, I feel overwhelmed by losing them.

When I visited Bobby Townsend's memorial, the tears came again. His mother left a large sunflower, and his employer, Jimmy John's Sandwiches, posted a sheet showing how much he'd loved his job (that kid delivered sandwiches like it was going out of style!).

He was biking down a popular pedestrian and bike street, the Ave. The driver struck him fatally next to a recently finished public space on Campus Parkway's greenbelt. This proved useful for holding a press conference calling for safer streets a few days after his death.

The young man driving a hermetically sealed SUV who menaced me in the crosswalk as I left the memorial may not have understood why I stared at him as I walked. His smirk made it seem like he got that I was being a self righteous pedestrian, but I don't think he could feel the pain coming from that ghost bike across the street.

There's going to be a ride on Saturday afternoon, meeting at the Moving Planet Seattle event at Lake Union Park at 3 pm. Riding together is a celebration of the social life of our streets, but it will also be a reminder that individuals who choose to overlook this, who gun their way through intersections inhabited by people on bikes and on foot, do not get the right to define our city.

More info:

http://seattlebikeblog.com/2011/09/20/safe-streets-social-slow-ride-to-honor-the-fallen-and-support-each-other-924/

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=249870145049006

A Spectacle on Wheels and a Seattle Ciclovía

2011-08-24T20:29:00.000-07:00

Deep in an email from Columbia City's Bike Works announcing various volunteer opportunities related to the upcoming Rainier Valley Heritage Parade and Summer Streets event, I was asked if I could see myself "pedaling a huge bike powered float."

Yes, yes I could.

So last Thursday we left our bikes at Bike Works HQ and took the light rail up to Beacon Hill, where this beast made by local bike mad scientist Haulin' Colin lives. Then we pedaled it down the hill to Columbia City. I was told that the pedal powered parade float, or Cyclopy, as we tried calling it, was made by stripping a Toyota truck. The transmission remains, so a driver steers, shifts gears, and brakes while up to seven sets of feet pedal.

Photo by Mark Canizaro

The afternoon was freaking gorgeous, and I sat back and pedaled while the locals planned a route that minimized blocking traffic and swooping down overly steep hills. We did swoop down Columbian Way, clocking 25 mph on the intact speedometer before a tire started making trouble, so we braked.

Photo by Mark Canizaro

Since the recumbent pedalers up front constitute the machine's bumper, I felt quite nervous hurtling down the hill. It reminded me of how scared I was to try Zoobomb last August. But as in that case, I came out unscathed. I'm a scaredy cat, so sue me.

What I really liked was what a spectacle we became. Most passersby stopped to take a picture, and many drivers smiled and waved. I first noticed what an impact an outlandish bike can have when I rode along with Bobby Gadda on his tall bike on Halloween 2009 in LA. People shouted from stoops to ask about it, and he practically had kids running after him through the streets of Echo Park. Bike spectacles make people smile, and that's worth a lot when bikes can be such a source of tension on our streets.

Pedaling that sucker up even slight hills took a lot of work, so there was quite a feeling of accomplishment all around when we made it Bike Works. Since one of their Volunteer Repair Parties was going on, we helped enjoy their break time ice cream. (More on the VRPs here.)

Then Saturday came around, and it was time to decorate and pedal the float in the parade.

Photo by Chad Hueter

I wore a corduroy moustache, slapped some fuzzy antennae on my helmet, and played a kazoo left over from a performance of "The Lonely Kazoo: A Synthetic Journey to Heaven." Riding in the parade, we waved to smiling spectators. I noticed that more adults than kids waved back. Most kids, upon seeing the Cyclopy, just dropped their jaws and stared. Too much awesome for little brains to comprehend!

Afterwards some pedalers celebrated with a very nice homebrewed stout in a very lovely backyard, and then I went out to see how the Summer Streets event played out. Like CicLAvia, Seattle's Summer Streets events use Bogotá's ciclovía as an inspiration to create temporary public spaces for walking, biking, and relaxing in the middle of the street.

I hadn't made it to one of the events yet, so I was pretty excited to see so many people enjoying themselves. An organizer told me that a previous event in Greenwood had been packed with many more folks, but personally I found the mix of communities present at the Columbia City event to be quite an impressive feat. At the event I again encountered a factoid I'd heard tossed about before, which is that the local zip code, 98118, is the most diverse in Seattle. While I'm skeptical of claims like that (what are they trying to convey? Having lots of people in ethnic communities doesn't mean the same thing as an integrated neighborhood, and income diversity means something different than ethnic diversity), I did see a variety of programming and participants that showed a coming-together of people who might not always spend time together.

So I liked it! Way to go City of Seattle, I didn't know that watching tiny kids perform ballet folklorico was what I needed to make my Saturday perfect. I did notice, though, that people did not seem to be using the full extent of the route (something like eight blocks). On either end, where the activities ended, big expanses of concrete yawned, just waiting to be activated by human life.

To end the afternoon, we biked the Cyclopy back up the hill to its home. The locals chose Cheasty Boulevard as our route, which is one of the "Olmsted streets," the parkways designed by the Olmsted Brothers to be part of Seattle's "emerald necklace."

Photo by Mark Canizaro

By this point I was, how do you say, completely exhausted. I had to give up my seat for a bit so I could take a break and walk. It took us about 2 and a half hours to get the thing back. I got to spend that time with some really neat people. Hooray!

Tapping into Local Bike Knowledge

2011-08-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

I want everyone to feel comfortable riding bikes. But sometimes even I'm reluctant to ride. Right now, months into living and mostly not biking in Seattle, it's harder for me, mentally, to go hop on my bike than it is to walk or bus to my destinations. I thought six years of riding in cities would ensure me against losing my momentum, but not riding my bike makes me... not want to ride my bike.

I mean, as an anthropologist who studies why people do or don't bike, it's not like I don't understand what's going on. Part of it is the ol' fear of traffic, thinking trepidatiously in advance about all the intersections where I'll have to negotiate potentially hostile drivers, but a big barrier is my lack of familiarity with my still-new city. I just plain don't know which streets are the best bike streets.

We're not yet at a point where a newcomer to a city can easily plan an excellent bike route. If you look at an overview of a city, you have no way of knowing what through streets tend to be high traffic. What looks like a quiet neighborhood street could turn out to be a traffic nightmare (ahem, 45th). Even bike maps lack authority, since city planning departments tend to be aspirational. Unfortunately designating a bike route on a map does not magically transform street conditions. On a designated bike route in my new neighborhood, I saw a sharrow painted over a pre-existing pothole. That = bad. It's like the time I biked from Long Beach to San Pedro following the LA County bike map, and discovered that the convenient route indicated on the map happened to run right through the Port of Los Angeles.

On the other hand, talking to local cyclists opens up a city of possible routes that wouldn't occur to the newcomer. For example, I needed to get down to Bike Works in Columbia City. Based on what I've seen from riding the bus, the way to get there from Capitol Hill would be riding straight down Rainier Avenue. Based on what I've seen from riding the bus, I'd rather not bike down Rainier Avenue.

I had asked Tom of Seattle Bike Blog to take me on a tour of my new neighborhood, Capitol Hill, so I could see what streets bicyclists prefer. He showed me some neat ways to get around high traffic streets and steep hills. Things were looking up. Then he showed me his route down to Bike Works, where we helped with a fun adventure I'll be writing about later today. Guess what, there is a way to get down there that involves zigzagging through gridded neighborhoods, some of them on a bluff overlooking Lake Washington. Another cyclist, Danny, told me about his first time riding down to Bike Works. Like me, he'd assumed Rainier Ave was the best way to go, and he went for it. Sounds like it would not have been my cup of tea.

Riding back later through quietly dark, tree-lined streets, rear lights flashing red and front lights flashing white, I felt like a million bucks. Knowing how other bicyclists get around makes a city more bike friendly. We're like troves of local knowledge on two wheels.

I know there are some sites out there that are designed to make this knowledge available to the general public, but I don't know anyone who uses them, so I've assumed they're mostly for recreational cyclists planning longer trips and not for people looking to get around town.

Being a Social Driver

2011-08-11T17:43:00.000-07:00

I'm almost done with the absolute mindf**k that is moving from one tiny apartment to another. The mixing bowls have found their homes, the cats have come out from under the bed, and I can only see four boxes. Triumph!

Seeking clever storage solutions, I set out on a thrift store odyssey last week that took me on a loop of northside Seattle, from Wallingford to Ballard to Crown Hill to Shoreline. I filled my boyfriend's car with shelves, bins, and eventually a countertop.

It's no secret that I don't like driving. Our dependence on driving has a lot of very nasty side effects that I don't need to get into here. But when I do find myself behind the wheel of a borrowed car, I try to act like a member of society rather than Rebel McSexy. Isn't it strange that being a courteous driver is seen as a choice rather than a requirement of using shared roads?

I remember getting a car ride home from a tour de force of LA's bike scene, Chicken Leather, and marveling at how he managed to stay a part of what was going on outside the car even while carrying on a conversation in the car. He stuck his head out the window, gesticulated at passersby, and generally kept us part of, not apart from, the city as we drove through Echo Park.

We've got a long ways to go before everyone feels safe getting around outside of a car, and my anthropological research on transportation makes me think that shifting how people drive matters a lot. Just cause you're alone in your car doesn't mean you're alone on the road; driving is a social activity.
As a bicyclist and pedestrian, I cringe when I see motorists breezing their tons of metal through intersections as though their time matters more than any fellow road user's life. So, on the rare occasions when I'm the person piloting the gas guzzler, I make a conscious effort to demonstrate my regard for people outside my vehicle. I call it being a social driver.

Being a social driver means that I let other motorists pull in front of me, I stop for pedestrians, I wait to pass bicyclists until I can give them a wide berth, and I obey traffic laws. I drive with a window open so I can hear street sounds. I don't necessarily take advantage of "right turn on red" opportunities cause they encourage motorists to look left, inching into the crosswalk, while the light may have changed and people are crossing the street. I also do a lot of hand signaling and try to make eye contact with other road users, whether I'm walking, biking, or driving.

When I lived in Portland, I felt annoyed that some motorists gave bicyclists right of way. Everyone I know who bikes there has noted the tendency of drivers to stop at the sight of a bicyclist, ignoring or ignorant of traffic laws that make bicyclists and motorists equals. If I were pedaling up to a four way stop planning to wait my turn to pass through, it messed with my rhythm to have a motorist stop unexpectedly to give me an imagined right of way. Over the years, though, as I've biked in cities all over the U.S., I've come to see Portland's courteous driving culture as a key reason why cycling has been able to take such a firm hold there.

So even if you don't think you can brave traffic outside a car, you should see yourself as contributing to the social life of the street.

Intuitive Cityness

2011-07-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

I left the house, the bus was late, the sky did its drizzly thing. I felt glum. Then, as we passed through Belltown, this funny thing started happening where people seemed to freeze for a moment while I peered at them through the bus window. It's like all of a sudden I could see how 3D their lives were, how ridiculous and amazing it is that so many people can be doing so many things as part of so many trajectories as we all pass through the same shared spaces. Seattle felt like a city.

Two teenage girls stood on a corner, one was dressed like the quirky character from an 80s teen movie, and she was pulling it off. A heavily made up blonde fed the electronic parking meter. A man jogged past, his craggy, dark face showing age and concern. A long, tall, gray haired woman took a smoke break outside a comic book store. I saw two different dudes ask a younger man for a cigarette, and knew from his gestures that the one on his lip was his last.

By the time I got off the bus, I felt glad to be joining in the fray, the bustle, of a downtown district at lunchtime. I was on my way to see my friend James Rojas (here's a piece LA scholar-activist Gilda Haas wrote about him last year) lead a workshop with some local kids. In James' workshops you use your hands to create your ideal city; he gives you many, many bits and pieces to choose from as materials, and asks you to tap into that knowledge you didn't know you had about what makes city life happy.

Today he'd be working with students at the Academy for Latinos Achieving Success (ALAS), a science and math educational program sponsored by the Latino community education nonprofit Campaña Quetzal. I got there just before things got going and met all the dedicated and creative adults who were making this thing happen. Once all the kids had a space at the table, James dumped out a big box of curlers, plastic Easter eggs, mismatched toys, farm animals, basically plastic pieces of every shape and color. The students spent a while building their cities, and then James asked them to tell us about them. Several of the kids spoke Spanish more comfortably than English, so we all listened in two languages while they explained their cities. One boy built "Ciudad Desconocida" (the Unknown City). Another built "Museum City," perhaps inspired by their recent trip to the Burke Museum at the University of Washington. "Green Lake City" also appeared, I'm guessing because that kid had visited Green Lake, which is a freshwater pond with a bike/ped path encircling it in north Seattle. The cities featured skyscrapers and parks, and, in most cases, freeways.

Like many cities, Seattle seems cut in two by a freeway. I say "seems," because I know of many crossing points that should make the freeway less of a barrier, but I still I avoid walks that would make me cross it. Walking across the freeway means passing above a thunderous flow for a few blocks, trudging through a non-place like a non-person. I'd rather take the bus. The moral of the story is that I-5 is loud and wide, very present, and these kids could not imagine a city without it.

As an urban planner, Latino urbanist, and public artist, James does workshops with a variety of groups. He facilitated one for CicLAvia in 2009, when we were still trying to convince people that a ciclovía would make LA feel great. This summer he's been working primarily with kids, most of whom he says have probably "never read a book or seen a map about their respective cities but have a great deal of intuitive knowledge." It's accessing this "intuitive knowledge" that makes me so excited about James' work. My dissertation fieldwork has been about how our bodies experience and create different landscapes through walking, biking, and driving, and how these differences can be so hard to point out because we don't talk about them, we just live them. James says that kids "walk, see, smell, touch and feel. Their whole body becomes a learning tool to understand the landscape," but without being asked to articulate this expertise, they may not understand the connections between their own actions and the shape of the city around them. James contends that "through play, they can tap into their knowledge and are empowered to change their environment." By the time the ALAS students had finished adding ideas to the large model of Seattle they'd created with James, they had been shown that our city is what we make it.

It made me feel more at home in Seattle to see one of the people who made my LA great in action up here. When I left the workshop, the sun had come out, if only temporarily. I rode the bus across the freeway to Capitol Hill.

Notes on Train Songs

2011-07-17T23:49:00.000-07:00

"Mystery Train" by Elvis Presley

When I first got a collection of songs that Sam Phillips had produced at his Sun Records studio, this song immediately struck me cause it's awesome. I think it conveys the chug-chug freedom of a long-distance train ride, the sense of motion and space as you whip across America. I'm not really sure if the train took his baby, and now he's sad, or if it took his baby, brought her back, and now things are peachy, but at least Elvis hadn't yet succumbed to the suffocating sound of pappity pap pap that money-hungry music execs served up for most of his career.

"The Train from Kansas City" by the Shangri-Las

Things are decidedly bad in this one, cause the train's arrival brings romantic complications. I very much appreciate the clips of a steam-powered locomotive that the poster added to this song.

Apropos of Kansas City, "Kansas City" by Wilbert Harrison.

It's not a train song exactly, but I always make a point of listening to it as we roll into Kansas City station on the Southwest Chief when I'm heading from Chicago to LA. It's usually around 10 pm, and the skyscrapers loom in the distance as I peer out the window and imagine fine lookin' gents strolling around with a fat paycheck in their pockets, waiting to find a lady to spend it on.

"I Often Dream of Trains" by Robyn Hitchcock

Unlike the other songs, wherein characters await trains, this one actually takes place inside the space of the moving cars. The narrator wanders through a shifting dream train, and the song's melody shifts accordingly. I think this would make a splendid lullaby if you wanted to raise a lil' Morrissey or Donovan.

"Tren al sur" by Los Prisioneros

Let's get poppy, train enthusiasts! Honestly, since I'm not a lyrics person so much as a melody person, this song remains untranslated in my mind. I kind of make up sounds that go along with the tune when I'm singing along, like I do with many of the rock en español songs that defined my teenage years. Anyway, I like how the song chugs down at the end.

"Last Train to London" by ELO

A different kind of train, a more commuter-style job, comes up in this song, whose scheduled departure threatens to end some idyllic night in the life of the narrator. And this video really illustrates why we should replace our current unsightly railroads with neon tracks.

"Train in Vain" by The Clash

Is this song even about trains? You should let it soothe your ills nonetheless.

Seattle Transportation Homesick Blues

2011-07-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

I started this blog because I spent the last few years as an anthropology PhD student and a bike activist in Los Angeles. This involved a lot of carfree travel in a region known for being totally car'd out to the maxxx. My biking, walking, and transit-using explorations of the city were possible not through an amazingly straightforward and accessible transportation infrastructure for bikes, pedestrians, and transit users, but through joining a group of humans who helped each other make carfree living a reality.

Urban Adonia has been my outlet for saying: It can be done, folks! You can live a helluva life in LA outside of a car. Plenty of people do it, too, but it doesn't seem to count somehow if they're not doing it as part of some identity politics: being "transit-dependent" has a very different meaning than being "carfree."

Living that way in LA, as a member of an intentional community and collaborator on exciting projects like CicLAvia and Ciudad de Luces/City of Lights that pushed the bike movement and the city to re-think the boundaries between biking as a survival tool and biking as a cosmopolitan pastime, I gathered many volumes' worth of stories and insights about our country's issues with transportation and class, race, and gender. I realized, though, that writing a well-researched and theoretically sophisticated dissertation about this experience meant that I would have to bow out of the ongoing, hectic world of activism.

So I returned to the Pacific Northwest. I'd lived in Portland as a college student and existential crisis-ridden young adult, and that's where I'd learned to ride a bike in traffic. When I moved up to Seattle from Los Angeles, I expected to find myself in a similarly bike-friendly city. I thought I'd get up here, stow my cats, whip my bike out, and join a parade of fun, happy bike commuters who practiced what they preached. Instead I found myself drenched and daunted by massive hills that make for fabulous vistas but a startlingly car-dependent populace.

It's been rather disappointing. I didn't think I'd be telling new acquaintances here about how much more friendly LA is in comparison with Seattle's social chill, or encounter more casual drunk driving than I did down there. Seattle's got some stuff that far outpaces LA, like more physical infrastructure for biking, and more affluent folks choosing public transit. But when the League of American Bicyclists announced last month that Washington led the country as a "bicycle friendly" state, I once again chafed at the bizarre dissonances that a lack of ethnographic research brings to urban planners' reports. Seriously, guys, does the everyday experience of individuals mean nothing? I can tell you as an experienced transport cyclist who moved here from "nobody walks in LA" that I find Seattle bike unfriendly. And again, it's not cause of a lack of infrastructure (the one area in which Washington got a D grade); there are sharrows out the wazoo on streets around here.

This has caused much reflection on my part. I didn't really know how to write about it on this blog, cause I'm still a newcomer and thus uninformed about local histories of activism and improvements, so I've been keeping quiet. A native Seattleite told me recently that infrastructure for bikes has grown tremendously since she was a kid in the 1990s, so there you go, I lack perspective. At the same time, since I'm a social scientist as well as a cyclist, I've noticed some things in my new city that have helped me articulate some key but overlooked features that make biking for transport easier or harder.

Here's what I've found:
1. Geography and climate matter. What works in one city may not work in another because of torrential rain and steep slopes that got developed into neighborhoods for some reason. In a sunny, relatively flat place like LA, people can make do with broken spokes, flat tires, non-functioning brakes, unsecured seatposts, whatever bike they can get their hands on for $10. In a wet, hilly place like Seattle, we have to transform our bodies with prosthetics like waterproof gear and enhanced bikes. These things can be expensive. I definitely do not see the large numbers of low-income cyclists in Seattle that I did in LA.

2. Human infrastructure matters. Who you spend your time with, who you talk with, who you travel with, have a big impact on what seems possible. In LA, I knew who to text to have a riding buddy home from a party. In Seattle, new acquaintances repeatedly offer rides even if a bus runs right outside. It's a big part of my dissertation project to describe how, practically and theoretically, human infrastructure made living carfree in LA possible for me. I haven't developed a network of bikey friends in Seattle, and I think that has a lot to do with my impressions of the place as bike unfriendly.

3. A liberal conscience does not make a car disappear. Seattle is known as a green city just as LA is known as a car city, but WTF, people drive a lot and sloppily up here. I constantly witness traffic violations like California rolling stops, drivers seeming quite confused about what a crosswalk is for (do I park in it? huh?), drivers pulling into intersections that are not going to clear before the light changes, etc. I could go on, but any sighted person could too. These little gestures that dehumanize other street users add up to a hostile landscape for non-motorized travelers, no matter how much money you give to MercyCorps or how organic those peaches are.

This last issue surprised me the most. For some reason I'd had this idea that LA's size posed such a barrier to bike commuting that there were people who really wanted to try it, but just couldn't. Here in Seattle, though, plenty of people live in neighborhoods very close to the city center, but make them suburban by driving everywhere.

I think Seattle gives a glimpse into LA's future if it continues on its current path of gentrifying central neighborhoods. Will it be more bike friendly if a bunch of people who've worked very hard to seem like rich guys move into the urban grid? Not if cycling is still seen as a last resort or a luxury sport. And is this really something we can fix through investments in bicycle infrastructure? Not if we can only think of infrastructure as concrete and paint. We should be considering the impact that our attitudes and actions have on our cities, and how to shift attitudes that endanger us all.

I'm looking forward to getting to know bicycling Seattle better when I move into a more urban neighborhood next month. Meanwhile, I gotta be a good scholar and learn about the work of other people who have been writing about concepts similar to what I'm calling human infrastructure, like AbdouMaliq Simone and Filip De Boeck.

Notes on Bus Songs

2011-06-26T16:42:00.000-07:00

"Roll Bus Roll" by Jeffrey Lewis.

In this song, Lewis talks about how on a long distance bus you can roll up a sweatshirt and use it as a pillow against a window. It's a quiet kind of bus song. Late at night on a Greyhound you see the sleeping forms of people bouncing as the bus speeds along the highway. I've had both decent and useless sleeps on the bus.

"You're Crazy for Taking the Bus" by Jonathan Richman.

Also about long distance busing. Jonathan explains to his friends that the bus just makes more sense for him cause his guitar can ride along right beside him. On a crowded bus, though, a driver might point out that bags don't pay, so maybe his guitar would end up riding in Jonathan's lap. Good descriptions of social life on the bus.

"Bus Stop" by the Hollies.

A man and a woman meet frequently at a bus stop, share an umbrella when it rains, and eventually fall in love. I like this song cause it's not about riding the bus, but talks about the thing you end up doing a lot when you're a bus rider, which is waiting for the bus. And they're not mad about it, like if the bus were late they could just flirt more.

"Kiss Me on the Bus" by the Replacements.

If you're a frequent bus rider, things like fighting with your girlfriend happen on there. The bus is a pretty interesting social space cause you're in close quarters with people who sometimes have very different ideas about what it's appropriate to do or talk about in public. Some people don't want to talk to anyone at all, and some people want to talk to everyone. Some people are drunk at 2 in the afternoon.

"Waiting for the Bus" by the Violent Femmes.

Unlike the flower children in the Hollies song, the Femmes are pissed about waiting for that damn bus. I love the details they give about who's on the bus and how they're all going to be late. Sometimes waiting for the bus can be a drag, and sometimes the driver's in a real bad mood.

Still, they are dedicated bus riders.

Recent Street Fun

2011-05-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

1. On May Day, May 1, I marched in solidarity with immigrants rights groups, labor groups, anarchists in balaclavas, etc. from Judkins Park in Seattle to the Space Needle. It was quite a long hike, but downhill, and boy did I love tromping along down the middle of the street! My favorite protest sign read "Proud Daughter of a Public Worker." That's me!

There was a heartening range of participants, from Latina mothers and their children, to union members whose friendships crossed color lines, to all kinds of young people. An old couple who I'd seen on the bus, the gentleman wearing a jacket proudly proclaiming his union membership. A bilingual little girl holding her mother's hand and chanting along with protest slogans celebrating the people. The march grew to a very satisfying size, and I'm glad I was there to add my presence to the numbers.

Being part of a protest march allows you to be part of a ciclovía, in a way. The streets are opened to people. You feel the scale of an urban center more acutely when you're walking in the middle of the street. Protests transform public space, which is a political statement in and of itself. I should learn more about the connections between Situationist ideas about public space and "happenings" and mass protests in 1968. The best part of the day came from a brass marching band that played some 60s R&B tunes. Next time I go to a protest I'm going to bring bubbles.

2. This weekend I went to the U District Street Fair, which again let me frolic among the little bumps that mark the center divider in a street. It had less of a sense of motion than the march since it was a festival, with many many vendors and people inching along looking at gourmet foods and jewelry. I enjoyed a hand-dipped corn dog, and gawked at a man who'd made himself a full body suit from mirror shards.

I also learned at the fair that there is in fact some kind of ciclovía program in Seattle, called Summer Streets. Their choice of name reminded me that I'm glad CicLAvia got named after the original event in Bogotá to point out its origins. Summer Streets calls to mind NYC. Also, it seems like Seattle's event must have been initiated by city employees rather than a grassroots group. We shall see, come summertime, how people up here like playing in the street. (My guess is that they like it a lot.)

3. Usually I find "street fashion" blogs disappointing, since they seem to be looking for people who could fit a fashion magazine's narrow standards for beauty and branding. I know The Sartorialist makes a point of showing that biking can be blonde and scantily-clad, I mean sexy, which is great, but I'm someone who values creative combinations of secondhand garments way more than sweatshop-produced and New York-policed high fashion. Enter Hel-Looks, a street fashion blog in Helsinki. They've got women of various ages and sizes and numerous mentions of the benefits of secondhand clothes. They've got gents who look like 30s sailors, and ladies who match seafoam and lilac. Be still my heart!

Who Says Driving is Adult?

2011-04-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

Here in the United States we have a lot of work to do just in revealing the ways in which driving goes unquestioned, let alone actually getting out of the car. I realized this anew this weekend in watching a movie that seems to have defined my new city's image in the national imagination.
I like to joke about how Seattle is the capital of the 90s, back when grunge ruled the airwaves and flannel covered hordes of teens. So I watched the movie Singles, which came out in 1992 and takes place here.

I expected to see some lampooning of alternative lifestyles, like in the current TV series "Portlandia." But what struck me from the first scene was an all-too-American belief in the car as a symbol of adulthood. A main character delivers a monologue about the significance of having her own garage, even as we learn that she works for an environmental organization. Her commitment to the earth gets displayed through a little globe keychain. Later her love interest talks about his work project at the local department of transportation. He's developing a "super train" that would get individual drivers out of their cars, yet his character also drives everywhere. There's even a car accident scene as a plot development.

One character tries to impress a date by getting decked out in a day glo spandex outfit, and gets shown biking all over town. Eventually she's a mess and she has a flat tire. The message seems to be: biking is not for everyone, especially not casual riders.

There are no scenes involving public transportation.

This was almost twenty years ago, but obviously there are many people who still feel that maturity = car ownership, even in urban settings where buses and feet are more effective means of getting around. This cultural attitude sure can lead to some hypocritical representations of what is supposed to be "alternative." Alternative to what?

I think it can be hard to see substantive differences in a world all too dominated by branding and its pretenses to identity through consumption, but there is in fact a difference between driving and not driving. There is a difference between environmentalism as a plan to shape the future actions of others and environmentalism that takes immediate action by reducing one's own dependence on driving.

It's like that couple at the grocery store that puts their organic carrots in two layers of plastic bags and then gets into an SUV to drive home. There's something...missing?

I Like My Urban DIY

2011-04-07T12:29:00.000-07:00

When I was in college I remember thinking that discussions about "diversity" rang hollow, that the word got used as a euphemism for political correctness. I've often been cynical about how I fit into diversity, like my value to some people lies in my apparent un-whiteness. Even while becoming a cultural anthropologist, learning a discipline that embraces human cultural diversity as its foundational principle, I felt like "diversity" continued to be a placeholder for disingenuous quotas.
And yet now, living in an affluent part of Seattle, I wish I had some spice called diversity that I could sprinkle on my food.
It's finally dawned on me that I couldn't leave a place as unique as the LA Eco-Village and expect to immediately find something like it in another city. At LAEV I found a mix of commitment to ecological sustainability, vibrant public cities, and social justice, and hot damn did I like it. As I spent the last three years developing a perspective on urban space, these issues intertwined in my mind.
Only recently did I start to think about the word "urban" and what the heck it even means. When I put it in my blog title, I meant to convey my interest in cities, moving through them, exploring them, living in them, changing them through activism.
But urban can also be a euphemism like diversity, pointing to something it's not PC to name (i.e., race). It seems like at some point a new meaning grew, one that points more toward luxury condos and Calvin Klein underwear (at least that's what a window display at Macy's told me the other day).
Wandering around a place like Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood, which appears to be a model of aspirational development for the creative class, it's obvious that some people mean "urban" to connote a controlled environment where consumption opportunities are convenient. It looks more like a simulated city than one that real people live in.
So is "urban" still up for grabs? Can I be Urban Adonia and argue for neighborhoods that have people of different incomes and backgrounds and races using them in visible ways? Or should I start using hair gel and save up for a "loft" in a building that also has a parking garage underneath it?
To me, an urban community means one where people help each other, where people talk to each other, where people co-create a reality rather than buying one pre-fab with their hefty salaries.
While "diversity" shouldn't be used as a gloss for race, I think it does describe something necessary to my kind of city. There's something inherently valuable about getting exposed to other ways of life, and this is what I'm talking about when I talk about urban space.

Wandering on the Seattle Waterfront

2011-03-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, accompanied by my visiting sister, I set out across windblown, wet Seattle to attend the Cascade Bicycle Expo. I thought I'd planned our bus route according to the directions on the Cascade Bicycle Club's website, but when we made our way to a massive parking lot, we found inhospitable signs directing us to a bike/ped path through an industrial area. It would be a two mile walk to get to the expo location.

And so, the expo lost two young lady attendees. We decided to head down the path to the waterfront, skirting Elliott Bay.

View Larger Map

The air blew freshly against our faces, eventually freezing our ears.

This silo greeted us on our left as we bobbed along.

And on our right, the scaffolding of a system for loading a container ship.

We stumbled upon the Olympic Sculpture Park, which my favorite architect-in-training had recommended. It's a pretty impressive public space, reminiscent of the High Line in Manhattan. Unfortunately, unlike the High Line, which affords stimulating vistas of a mix of buildings, this park looks onto the almost uniformly dull development zone called Belltown. I don't know if those condos replaced anything, but they already look dated and snooooooze. Whoops, just fell asleep.

Zing!

Riding the Bus in Seattle

2011-03-03T16:41:00.000-08:00

Recently I came across an interlude in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway that illustrates the exhilaration to be found in wandering around cities.

"And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so nice to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an omnibus"

"Buses swooped, settled, were off - garish caravans, glistening with red and yellow varnish. But which should she get on to? She had no preferences"

"She was delighted to be free. The fresh air was so delicious. It had been so stuffy in the Army and Navy Stores. And now it was like riding, to be rushing up Whitehall"

I've read a lot about the concept of flânerie, the activity of wandering through and reading the city and its inhabitants like a book. Usually it is the figure of a man who does this, the flâneur. In my own ethnographic research as a bike activist I've thought of myself as a flâneuse, and I always delight in finding others' descriptions of women experiencing the invigorating freedom of wandering, attentively, through an urban landscape.

This is what I've been up to in Seattle for the past few weeks, when I wasn't sick in bed (maybe my lungs needed to exorcise LA's pollution?). Like Woolf's Elizabeth, I've been riding buses. This is a city full of fresh wind, with bus routes leading all over the place. My limited adventures have led me to speculate about Seattle's public culture. Most people I pass on the street don't make eye contact, and the few times I've managed to smile at someone I've been met with blank stares. One exception happened yesterday, when a young mother pushing a stroller responded warmly. There seem to be lots of mentally ill people out and about, based on the muttering I hear on maybe one out of five buses I ride. Perhaps people button up to avoid confusing interactions with strangers?

Yesterday I marched all the way up to the crest of Queen Anne only to be nearly hit by a woman driving an SUV and talking on a cell phone. That, combined with the lack of eye contact among passersby, made me feel invisible. I grew resentful of the affluence evident in the manicured gardens and gourmet butchers of the neighborhoods I've explored. It's not my dream.

Today I rode buses down to Columbia City, hoping I would find a neighborhood with more diversity than the ones closer to where I live. As the 48 headed south of Capitol Hill, I started to see houses that had rough edges, not clean, fresh coats of paint. Yards looked disarrayed. There wasn't a tanning salon in sight. When I made my transfer to the 8 and continued south, the houses got further apart. So the urban density would not continue this far. I wondered if Columbia City would look like St. John's in Portland, a separate little town connected by neighborhoods to the larger city. It did. The main drag, Rainier, had lots of old buildings with character. There were a number of the clean, bright, storefronts that exhibit Seattle's peculiar style of manufactured quirkiness.

I ate a whole lot of pulled pork at Jones Barbeque, and then headed over to my destination, Bike Works. I chatted with a dude there for a bit about how central Seattle is much more segregated than the Los Angeles I know, and he told me that people of color and low-income folks are getting pushed further and further south into the suburbs.

I hopped onto a different bus, the 7, and headed up Rainier to downtown Seattle, where I transferred to the 16.

Seattle Skyline

2011-02-16T18:14:00.001-08:00

I moved to Seattle a few weeks ago, in the middle of a nasty bout of the common cold. Now that its phlegmy arms have released me, I decided to take my bike out for its first spin in my new neighborhood, Wallingford.

Cue the violins of frustration. I couldn't find my bike lock keys, nowhere, no how. Look under your couch cushions for me, would you? I really have no clue where the buggers are. So, instead of going to get fenders like I'd intended, I rode down to Gasworks Park to take pictures for my new masthead. Gasworks is down by Lake Union, off the Burke-Gilman bike/ped trail. It's got a bunch of big rusty tanks, like so:

That's a sunset shot from September, when I first started visiting Wallingford. Back then I only imagined moving here. Affairs of the heart took their course, and here I am.

Wallingford shares a number of characteristics with my old neighborhood in Koreatown. I still live off a busy street with mixed use buildings, both charming, old brick jobs and newer plazas. There's still a 24 hour grocery store nearby. Bus connections are good. Plenty of pedestrian traffic, also many bicyclists passing by, on both streets.

The differences: Vermont Avenue in K-Town is twice as wide as 45th Street in Wallingford. 45th, like many streets in the area, has sharrows running up and down its narrow traffic lanes. Vermont once had makeshift "share the road" posters, most having already peeled off the electrical boxes to which some vigilantes affixed them. Two coffee shops, two artisan booze depots, four sushi restaurants, and a cupcake store? Those are on 45th. Vermont has the AA Liquor, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and Bangladeshi restaurants, and a 24 hour donut shop that serves coffee.

Do these descriptions get at the glaring socioeconomic differences between my old and new homes? Wallingford has a lot of families that can afford SUVs and sturdy Craftsman houses. K-Town has a lot of families that ride the bus and live in studios where cupboards won't close because the hinges have been painted over so many times. There are things that make me feel comfortable and threatened in both neighborhoods. On my new block, I'm not the only one using a tote bag instead of plastic ones. On my old block, people didn't avoid eye contact all the time.

You know what I already miss about Los Angeles? There you can be an eco activist and be part of a mestizo community, cause mixing is all around you. There are beautiful people who shift between cultural identities in a graceful, fun, and conscientious dance. I don't want to backslide into a segregated world.

Which means I've got some exploring to do.

Women are Bike Activists Too

2011-02-12T21:20:00.000-08:00

An article on LA bike activist Stephen Box's campaign for city council came out in the LA Weekly this week. The author, Hillel Aron, appears to have decided to make the piece a slapdash attempt to cover the history of the bike movement in LA. For whatever reason, he painted a picture of an effort led by men, for men.

LA actually has a remarkably diverse network of people striving to improve conditions for cyclists. This is what makes our movement stand out in a country full of cities undergoing similar struggles to shift toward alternative transportation. This is the story that I will be telling in my dissertation on bikes, bodies, and public space in LA. Race and class are bigger components of the story, but, as the publication of Aron's erroneous article shows, it's not like we be living in some gender-neutral utopia.

I have had the privilege of working closely with women in the bike movement in LA since fall 2008. I have worked with them as staff at the LA County Bicycle Coalition, as neighbors at the LA Eco-Village, as like-minded bicyclists working to change LA. Beyond that I have heard stories about them bringing people together through Critical Mass, the Bike Kitchen, and Midnight Ridazz. All of these women failed to make the cut into Aron's article. Women in Aron's story happen incidentally, as hapless bureaucrats unable to be effective, or as the wife of the main character. I am quoted talking about CicLAvia, but my quote refers only to that event, not its context in the bike movement.

Bikey stuff in LA isn't just a dudes club, so it shouldn't be portrayed that way.

Driving in Someone Else's Paradise

2011-01-25T21:17:00.000-08:00

Tonight I decided to borrow my mom's car to attend a lecture on the need for a renewed commitment to public health in urban planning (revel with me in the pile of irony) at UC Irvine. It was about 6:30 pm as I made my way north on the 5 and then the 405 freeways. The first thing I noticed as I accelerated up to freeway speed was a giant SUV of domestic make hiked up on massive tires. The second thing I noticed was the sweat gathering between my palms and the steering wheel.
People kept jerking around in their cars, maybe distracted by cell phones? I could see a clear connection between bodies and machines as the cars veered across lines and then jerked back into place. Sadly it was a connection that further alienated those bodies from their environments, and I tried to remember that I've been driving this stretch of highway since I came of age. That didn't really make me feel safer.
On the way back from the lecture I saw a large, matte black SUV changing lanes willy nilly, and it made me think of fixie riders who dart between other road users like they're fixed objects. Here was a street, scaled up in size and speed, with similar dynamics enabled by our culture's belief in dominating rather than sharing roads.
I know South Orange County seems desirable to millions. Do they overlook the time spent dodging others on freeways, or is that part of what they love?

If on a winter's night a traveler watches Portlandia...

2011-01-15T20:52:00.000-08:00

I lived in Portland for six years, and now I live in LA. When I left Portland in 2007 I started to notice that when I told people I'd just left Portland they'd be like, oh man, my sister just moved up there, or oh man, I really want to move up there. I started to meet people who'd moved up there but had to leave cause the job market is bad news. I was terribly homesick for the place, especially as I started to confront the mass delusion that is transportation in Southern California, and dreamed fondly of the days when I could bike and feel safe at the same time.

So, because I wanted to live in a place I liked and not just suffer through LA as though it were a distasteful but necessary locale for my work (ahem Hollywood types who imagine New York to be the only real place in the universe), I got involved with bike activist projects and the LA Eco-Village. I've been riding a bike and using public transportation in LA for over three years now. I walk in LA everyday. I go to restaurants that serve organic food, and I hang out with interesting DIY types. In short, I've managed to find the same kinds of things I loved in Portland in LA because there are a lot of people here who also want to have a good quality of life and define "quality" in terms of sustainability, DIY, and enthusiastic commitment instead of ironic detachment.

There's this show on TV now called "Portlandia" that I heard about from a few friends who also hold Portland dear to their hearts. I was afraid to watch it, to be perfectly honest, because it raised my hackles to even know Hollywood had decided that Portland is trendy enough to try and make advertising dollars off of it. Le sigh. Anyway, I watched it and what's funny is that they don't even represent the same city I am familiar with.

Just a few quibbles about the first episode:
1. Real Portlanders go to Movie Madness.
2. Gilt is past its prime.
3. Where are the bikes?
4. Who's supposed to watch this show? And these are the best jokes they could come up with? What about street names like Glisan and Couch, folks?

Portland, through the eyes of these entertainment industry people, is Seattle; that is, full of gourmet food opportunities and alternative lifestyles, but without the minimalist aesthetic and excellent thrifted outfits. The Pacific Northwest has a regional character that is consistent across the two cities: you want Columbia fleece vests, you got em. You want Subarus and Priuses, feast your eyes. You want locally produced food, you're in the right place. But Portland has a character that I've not yet found in Seattle, which, granted, I'm just getting to know. Fortunately the show misses the point.

I'm about to get to know Seattle a whole lot better. My time living in Los Angeles ends in February. I'm moving to Seattle to start writing my dissertation about bikes, bodies, and public space in LA, so this blog's going to be about the adventures of Urban Adonia in Seattle pretty soon. A very nice friend already alerted me to a blog about public stairs in Seattle, so I'm all set.

At the Effect of a Bus? Oh the Shame.

2010-12-10T16:24:00.001-08:00

The Long Beach airport seduces LA travelers with its tiny terminal and Jet Blue fares. It's a bit out of the way, though, a few miles from the Blue Line regional connector train and even further from downtown Long Beach's relatively well-served public transit grid. My ex-boyfriend Bobby discovered some time ago that biking from the Wardlow Blue Line station makes the most sense for the able bodied among us. Today I was returning, bikeless, from a long trip to the South and the Pacific Northwest, so I would need to choose between an overpriced taxi ride or an inconvenient bus ride to get me to the Blue Line.

I'm not a fan of taxis; being a cyclist has made me very sensitive to aggressive driving, and most cab rides make me feel like I'm about to be party to murder. Plus the last time I took a cab from the Blue Line to the airport the cabbie and I got into an argument about the legality of him holding a cell phone to his ear as we careened madly down a highway. That didn't make me feel too good about the world, so this time around I decided to save $18 and take a bus for $1.25.

I bought a coffee so I'd have change for the bus, telling the guy at the counter my plan. He cheerfully commented that I'd be lucky to get home that day, and told me a story about having to eventually call in sick to work one day after the bus failed to come for hours. Didn't the bus service understand that working people rely on the bus?

Then I set out for the bus stop, a half mile walk away from the airport. This meant strolling down a sidewalk with an eight lane road on one side and various warehouses on the other, with my tote bag occasionally slipping off my shoulder and jarring the hot coffee in my hand. I started enjoying taking part in a deliberate disruption of this particular built environment, which had been designed to accommodate flows of automotive traffic. Whether intentional or merely shortsighted, this street erased people like me and the coffee shop worker from the equation, imagining the space to be used only by humans melted into sealed luxury capsules.

I caught my bus, fortunately, and headed to the Blue Line. For some reason the bus driver didn't want me to pay my fare till after we'd passed under the 405, where I saw some pedestrians walking across freeway on and off ramps without even a pretense of a sidewalk left.

After we passed Redondo on Willow the bus driver got off the bus and got into the driver's seat of a black BMW. A man smoking a long cigarette sat in the passenger seat. While the new bus driver adjusted herself the BMW zoomed away.
I think this sums up one of the biggest contradictions in public transportation. Operators make a middle class wage and eschew using the service they provide to other working people. What if the former poor had less contempt for the current poor? Would bus service be better? Of course I hardly think people can be blamed for slamming the door on what they consider to be low class (such as riding the bus) once they've raised their incomes. Is this not the American dream?

I've been riding trains, buses, and bikes long enough to understand that Americans have a horror of being perceived as inconvenienced. Waiting for a bus? Who would endure such humiliation? Spend two days on a train? It just doesn't make sense! Ride a bike instead of driving? It all smacks of disempowerment, even though people don't usually come out and say it. The self-determination implied by driving and flying act as a security blanket for people who know what it is to struggle.

Sunset Limited from Los Angeles to New Orleans

2010-12-01T13:05:00.000-08:00

Having registered to present a paper on my dissertation project at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting, I took the Sunset Limited from Los Angeles to New Orleans from November 17-19.

This train passes through the southern deserts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, before heading into the drab flats of Louisiana. I was in for two nights of upright sleeping. I hoped the train would be half sold so I could get more space than I'd paid for, but she was full up. I'm not the only one who travels around Thanksgiving, it turns out.

I got a seatmate at the first stop, and learned that she had spent three days traveling from outside Atlanta to Southern California for a doctor's appointment, only to turn around and get back on the train the same day. Yikes! This lady was quite nice, and had her reasons for undertaking such a trip. She'd never been on a plane, but suffered from anxiety attacks and didn't want to subject herself to a flight. The way the train schedules work out, you have to stay overnight in New Orleans if you wish to take the Crescent further into the south, which is what my seatmate needed to do. She planned to stay in her hotel for 16 hours rather than explore the city because she expected to be a crime victim if she left the building. This reminded me of the fears Michiganders expressed when they heard that I was biking through their fair state to Detroit. Their bright smiles at the spectacle of bike tourists would disappear into masks of disdainful confusion, accompanied by warnings to arrive there before dark. I started paying attention to race after talking to my seatmate.

As I've written on this blog before, I find the entrenched segregation of American cities strange to navigate as a Chicana bike hipster. Would there be visible and rigid color lines in New Orleans? Would I end up biking through some dangerous neighborhood out of ignorance? Would I blend into a mass of bike hipsters in some gentrifying zone?

The Sunset Limited leaves LA around 2 pm, giving a few hours of daylight for gazing out the window. The first morning on the train you find yourself looking sleepily at the shacks of Ciudad Juarez on one side, and at El Paso on the other. For many hours through the Texan desert you skirt the border, my cell phone's occasional texts alerting me to Mexican phone company prices told me.

I happen to be a big fan of desert landscapes, so I found the Texas day to be quite lovely.

You pull into San Antonio around 9 pm, and then the train hangs out there for three hours. I trekked into the city's historic/ tourist district with many other passengers, looking for a coffee shop, but all I could find were corporate franchise operations. Fuddrucker's, Hard Rock, and Denny's galore! Even the Starbucks was closed. Downtown San Antonio has been engineered to enchant. There are Cinderella carriages outlined in L wire waiting to chauffeur you about, the sunken canal lined with shops called the River Walk, plazas of historic significance, and the Alamo. It's a pretty place, but it sure felt impersonal.

Around midnight we continued east, and when I woke up the next day they were calling the flatlands outside the window Louisiana. I spent the day feverishly editing my conference paper, and we pulled into New Orleans on time at 3 pm on the 19^th. So would I again be an ambiguous Mexican in a land of black and white?

New Orleans has a fine old combined Amtrak/Greyhound station.

Mom Tries Carfree Commute, Wins x1000!

2010-11-05T11:26:00.000-07:00

I got up before dawn today and did something I've never done before: helped my mom commute via train and bike.

My mom, Laurene, lives quite close to a train station in Orange County, and some time ago I tried to convince her that she should try riding the Metrolink to work in Santa Ana. Her office in Santa Ana is a little under two miles from the train station there, which takes about forty minutes to walk or fifteen minutes to bike. No bus routes shorten the length, unfortunately. For a while we talked about her getting a bike and trying it out, and I made a map that showed a good route for the Santa Ana portion, but it fell by the wayside in the crush of our busy lives.

Enter CicLAvia and some unexpected back pay! My mom and my little sister cut short a vacation to make it to CicLAvia, and they walked the whole length of the route, starting with me at Hollenbeck Park in the morning and reaching the bicycle district right at 2:30 pm. Like everyone else who made it out that day, they got infected with the smiling disease and felt great about the whole thing. So great, in fact, that my mom invited me to go bicycle shopping with her. Yowza! When our earlier conversations about getting her set up with a bike stalled it was partially because she does not have the luxury of thumping down hundreds of dollars on a new bike, and I didn't have time to find her a good used one. Recently, though, she received some years of back pay, and decided that a bike would be a worthy purchase.

So we took a trip to her local bike shop, Buy My Bikes, and decided that a folding bike would be best since she needed something lightweight for lifting on and off the train. A folding bike could also be stowed under her desk as needed. Even though she works for a large organization, only one other person is bike commuting as far as she knows, and there is no bike parking or other kind of support available.

Last weekend while I was out of town I started receiving texts about how she'd bought the bike! My older sister took pictures and sent them to me, and my mom was just beaming up a storm in her new helmet. The new bike, a Giant Expressway, coordinates easily with everything because it is black, unlike my folder, a Dahon Speed that is grey and blue (perhaps this is unimportant to those who do not compulsively match, but it matters to me).

We looked at our schedules, and decided that this Friday would be a good time to try out the carfree commute. I went down to her house yesterday afternoon, and we got up in the darkness of 5:30 am to get ready. She needs to be at work by 7:30 am, so we got on a train that would leave us at Santa Ana station by 6:50 am. As I drowsily put myself together, I had to keep reminding myself that unlike other mornings when I've gone to work with her, we would not be getting in the car and we would not be sitting in traffic.

And then the fun began, by which I mean I realized anew that there are lots of little movements that I've learned that meld my body with my bike. Little movements that are hard to describe, and that I didn't think to mention until I'd look behind me and realize that I'd left Mom in some awkward tangle. Pedals, for example, do not automatically return to your preferred position for starting off again when you've stopped. In fact, if you're rusty as a cyclist you may not even know how to get going again as soon as a signal changes. Fortunately we didn't need to stop at any signals on our short ride to the train station in the cool, still morning.

Getting on the train stressed my mom out, she said, because we had to quickly lift and maneuver our bikes. How did I even know where to get on with my bike? I explained that I look for the bike symbols on the train doors, and position myself in the middle of the platform so I can see how many bikes are on each car before deciding what car to get on myself. Hmm, I thought to myself, this is kind of a lot of information to absorb in one morning.

We rode on up to Santa Ana and got our bikes off the train without incident. It was time to start some more serious, if still light, vehicular cycling. I briefly noted the sunrise streaks to the east over the mountains as we walked our bikes to the intersection where we'd be joining traffic. Nobody was waiting to go our way, so I got out in the lane and positioned myself to go when the light changed. All of a sudden my mom seemed surprised that we were going to ride in the street, and confusedly came out near me, but couldn't get herself going fast enough to catch the light. A very short signal cycle it was, designed not for a novice bike commuter but for speeding cars. I waited on the other side of the intersection, and she made it through with no problem the second time around. Then we headed up through a few four way stops, and made a left onto a low traffic street.

Strategically, I'd planned a route that crossed major streets with signalized intersections so my mom wouldn't have to deal with asserting her right to cross traffic. I shared tips as we rode along, and a teenage boy on a fixie flew past on the wrong side of the street just as I was talking about things to avoid. Nice and instructive, little dude! The route passed lickety split, and we'd made it to her office.

I left pretty immediately to get back to the station so I could come home to LA, and on my ride back I noticed a lot of things that made me feel frustrated. Drivers cutting off children in crosswalks, confused drivers assuming I would run stop signs, poor street conditions, traffic calming that makes it much harder for pedestrians and bikes to flow through into a wealthy neighborhood. And yet my mom is willing to join us bike commuters in our fight to make our roads safer for all.

I'm so proud of you, Mom!

The Polling Place of My Dreams

2010-11-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Voting Day, I moseyed across the street to a Korean church and followed the signs to my polling place. The large room had a stuffy feeling because so many people were there as volunteers or to vote.

First I was directed to a table by a middle aged Latino man. There an older Korean lady looked at my ID and directed me to another table. At the second table a young Latina woman directed me back to the first table. We figured out the problem; my license has my old address on it. We exchanged smiles as we got things sorted out, I signed in the book, and went on to an elderly Latina woman who I know from her active presence in the neighborhood. Armed with my ballot and her warm encouragement, I used the Ink-A-Vote to do my civic duty. Then a Chicano teenager helped me feed my ballot into the processing machine and gave me my "I Voted" sticker.

Instead of organizing into suburban enclaves according to ethnic group, the diverse residents of my neighborhood mingle in stores, on sidewalks, and in polling places. This is my favorite thing about living in Central Los Angeles. Sadly I think a lot of the diversity that I'm reveling in results from people's low incomes; maybe lots of them would prefer to be living out in the San Gabriel Valley. But I see in my neighborhood a vision of a future United States that embraces population density, that embraces difference, that does not prefer to isolate children in exurban bunkers connected only by trails of SUV exhaust.

My joy in seeing so many kinds of faces sharing smiles about voting really enhanced the already exciting experience of enacting democracy. Thanks Bimini Place!

Notes from a Street Corner

2010-10-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

This morning at about 6:50 am I dragged my sleepy, sweater-clad self a few blocks from home to help gather data for LACBC's sharrows campaign. I had been assigned to try and survey passing cyclists about their experiences cycling on 4th Street in Koreatown, which is one of the streets that LADOT marked with sharrows this summer.

I've been observing cyclists in Long Beach and LA for three years now, both as a fellow cyclist and as an ethnographer. Based on my familiarity with the region I expected to see, in this densely populated urban neighborhood I call home,
1) few helmets
2) mostly men
3) mostly Latinos.

The bicyclists passing 4th and Mariposa between 7 and 9 am this morning fit the descriptions I had in mind. However, anecdotal familiarity with who bikes in a region does not constitute the kind of data the bike coalition needs to build a case for sharrows having a positive impact on interactions between road users. Our transportation institutions' continued reliance on quantitative data means that numbers speak louder than narratives.

As part of my education in ethnography, I've learned to question the sovereignty of survey data. In this case, I wondered about whose opinions were being recorded. What kinds of cyclists are able to stop and take a survey during the morning rush hour? What if a volunteer had been posted who could not translate the survey into Spanish, as I found myself doing?

Despite the high winds roaring around yesterday afternoon, the city has not yet been dried out by seasonal Santa Ana winds, and it was crisp and cold this morning as I biked over to 4th and Mariposa. I met another volunteer, who handed me the survey forms, pamphlets with information about sharrows, and a bright green sign reading "Bike Survey!" Then I settled into the corner with my coffee, ready to flag down cyclists for two hours. I liked the idea of staying put in a place I usually zoom through on my bike.

I had quite a nice time chatting with passing cyclists, even those who did not have time to stop. That neighborhood had lots of other kinds of traffic, too, from morning dog walkers to parents walking or driving their kids to school. I didn't see any kids (or dogs, for that matter) getting toted on bikes, although I did see a teenage couple riding off down the sidewalk together on one bike.

Certain cyclists' voices get amplified while others never get heard, as many of my collaborators in the bike movement know all too well. I'm glad I got to help record the thoughts of some cyclists who may not have the time or interest to get involved in bike activism, but I'm also glad I got to help create quantitative data about biking in LA. In the United States bicycling has not yet proved its worth to those who would rather continue to view driving as the best way to get around. Being able to translate cyclists' presence and feedback into quantitative data helps legitimize activists' claims that simple signage like sharrows can make cycling feel safer.

My hope is that one day our cities will get out of this paradigm of having to prove, through numbers and checkboxes, that bicycling deserves support as a legitimate form of urban transport. One day when our policymakers look around they will see what the bicycle helps make possible: a bustling landscape of democratic transportation options, rather than wasteland of fear where people continue to drive because they feel unsafe outside their cars.

Amtrak, Why No Semi-Private Bunks?

2010-10-14T14:38:00.000-07:00

I've been planning a trip in November to New Orleans for the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association. The Sunset Limited from LA to New Orleans will take two days. I'm fine with that on the way to the conference, since that's probably when I'll be writing about my LA bike research for my talk. I definitely appreciate the fact that as a grad student engaged in fieldwork, my time is not so scheduled and I don't mind a long train ride. And coach tickets on Amtrak are cheap city. It will cost $136 to do that trip in mid-November. There's a big jump in price, though, if you want something more than basic coach. If I wanted a sleeping accommodation and meals, I'd have to add $324.

How come there's no middle ground? The Canadian rail system, VIA, has semi-private bunks and other combinations available. Amtrak only gives you a seat and no meals or a private room and all meals. I'd be happy to pay extra for a little bunk, but traveling alone it makes no sense to pay more than double the cost.

I wonder what led them to decide to offer only coach or roomettes and above on long distance trains.

Los Angeles Loves Being Carfree

2010-10-11T13:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got to witness the realization of a dream I'd shared with a few other people since October 2008. I got to see how many people would bike through this city, all too often dismissed as a non-city, if we opened our streets to them.

It hasn't quite sunk in yet, that we made it happen in LA, that CicLAvia brought out somewhere between 60,000-100,000 Angelenos and visitors.

This morning I've been perusing others' accounts of the event, and thinking about how I just knew, as soon as I went to Bogotá and saw the ciclovía there, that this would be a great thing for LA.

I didn't know so many people would agree.

As an anthropology student I've been grappling for a few years with the disjuncture between a preference for driving in LA and the concrete reality of the city, not suburb, that I inhabit. I'm just starting my dissertation fieldwork on bikes, bodies, and the city of Los Angeles. What a gift to be able to see tens of thousands of my neighbors enact the possibilities of a carfree LA as the starting point for my fieldwork! There could be no more reassuring confirmation that my goal of combining academic research with community engagement lies within my grasp.

I know a lot more now about what it takes to facilitate an open street event. I hope the people who attended CicLAvia on 10-10-10 clamor for more so that they don't have to wait for another two years to revel in our beautiful urban landscape. When we first started talking about holding a ciclovía in LA people would reminisce about ArroyoFest, the event that shut down the 110 freeway to Pasadena in 2003. CicLAvia will stick in Los Angeles' mind for years, but it should be because of an ongoing opportunity to live in our streets like we did yesterday for five hours.

Thank you, Los Angeles! More specifically, thank you Bobby Gadda, Stephen Villavaso, Colleen Corcoran, Jonathan Parfrey, Allison Mannos, Sandra Hamlat, Joe Linton, and, more recently and to great effect, Aaron Paley, Amanda Bromberg, and Jenn Su. The mayor's office and the offices of the council districts through which the route passed (CD1, CD4, CD9, CD13, CD14), the neighborhood councils that showed us support early in our planning process, and all the community groups that got excited about the idea, gave us an opportunity to change LA.

And of course, thank you Jaime Ortiz Mariño and the city of Bogotá for inspiring us to begin with.

From Bogotá to LA

2010-09-28T17:59:00.000-07:00

As a grad student in cultural anthropology, which is the study of modern human cultures and habits, I started studying transportation issues in 2008. Mainly, how LA can be hard to move through. Have you noticed? Maybe in a car it's easy to ignore, if you roll up the windows and pump up the stereo, but outside, on a bike or on your feet, you get the feeling that you're not a human anymore, but a target in a video game.

I started hearing about this thing called a ciclovía, a Colombian event that happens every week and gives people a chance to experience their streets without the push of automotive traffic. Thanks to a research grant from my university, UC Irvine, I traveled to Bogotá in August 2008 to check out this phenomenon.

At its least exciting, the ciclovía just looked like regular people enjoying a bike ride on a Sunday morning.

But then, on another Sunday, the whole city came out for a parade taking place on the ciclovía route, which travels right through the heart of Bogotá's busiest districts.

At CicLAvia on 10/10/10, I don't expect all Angelenos to organize themselves into parades. I mean, for our city, a bunch of people out enjoying their streets in simple ways will be a very exciting thing. In my mind what counts is seeing our city move toward supporting ALL modes of transport, not just automotive ones.

I can't wait.

Confusing the Cyborg by Changing the Bike

2010-08-25T16:31:00.000-07:00

In thinking about bicyclists as body-city-machines (cyborgs of a sort), I did a lot of writing this spring about the varying impacts of combining particular bodies, particular cities, and particular machines. This summer I've had the chance to play with this concept in the physical world rather than in the realm of theory because I left my own Panasonic 10 speed road bike at home in Los Angeles while traveling around the country.

Detroit found me on a cruiser with coaster brakes, an arrangement I'd not tried since 2003 or so. I rapidly came to enjoy the feeling of upright cycling, especially since Detroit's such a flat city that no hill seemed to big to conquer on my rusty steed.

Then I headed to Portland, where I borrowed a Nishiki one speed road bike. At first I felt pretty awkward on that guy, cause he seemed to be a wannabe fixed gear. Only the front wheel had a brake, and it was positioned on the inside of the right handlebar. I quickly realized, as I narrowly missed crashing the bike as soon as I tried it out, that I'm accustomed to stopping by bracing myself against my handlebars or pedals. In this case, since the bike had a freewheel and was not an actual fixie, there was no resistance from the pedals, and the position of the one brake on the inside of the handlebar made it impossible for me to stop gracefully at first. I thought I wouldn't be able to get over this problem, but then after riding the Nishiki for a while my body learned the right moment to put my foot on ground, and I started to feel pretty nimble.

In moments of stress, though, I would forget where the brake was. This made me pretty scared about using the bike to zoobomb, which I had decided I needed to try out for ethnographic purposes. Fortunately the hill people bomb down is not that intense if you're not on a kiddie bike (aka I'm a wuss), and even though the rain had just begun when I swooped down from the zoo a few Sundays ago, the Nishiki held fast and I braked up a storm.

I'm back in LA for the moment, with the use of my own dear Panasonic. Next week, though, I'm heading to New York to see about DIY bike infrastructure there. Who knows what kind of bike I shall borrow?

Flat as Art Object

2010-08-16T18:13:00.001-07:00

Two Sundays ago I biked to Pico Union to attend an art event hosted by g727, the downtown art gallery co-owned by one of my favorite LA artists, James Rojas. It was to be a conversation between James, who is also an urban planner, an artist, Carmen Argote, and historic preservationist Edgar Garcia. To be discussed were issues of space and domestic life.

I hadn't read the event details closely, so I was charmed to discover that the event was taking place inside the artwork itself, 720 sq. ft.: Household Mutations. Argote had transformed her childhood home, a flat in a typical LA fourplex from the very early 20th century, using white paint on the carpeting to highlight the shape of the place. The floorplan became the focal point.

James led us on a tour of the flat, pointing out details that indicated when it had been built, and how there probably hadn't been a large New York style brick apartment building next door when the flat's large windows were planned.

We followed him back into the bedroom, whose odd windows must have once looked out on a panorama of the San Gabriel Mountains. Now you can see a carport.

Then we headed into the flat upstairs for a more conventional discussion of the piece by the three experts. Apparently Argote's family has owned the fourplex since the early 70s, and has housed various family members over the years. Interestingly, some of these family members were present at the event and chimed in with details about the house and the neighborhood. Argote spoke about how the shape of that home had been burned into her memory through repeated actions, and Rojas and Garcia spoke about the impact of east coast-style floorplans on immigrant families' domestic rhythms, so to speak.

As someone interested in the interplay of infrastructure and behavior, I found the whole thing terribly fascinating. If I weren't such an itinerant grad student (read: broke traveler) I'd buy a print of the Craigslist ad they made for the exhibit.

The Social Life of Long Distance Trains

2010-08-03T08:08:00.001-07:00

When I first started riding trains in summer 2008 I knew a lot about the Greyhound and a lot about flying. The train contains a different kind of social life than those other modes.

I'm again traveling from Chicago to Portland on the Empire Builder like I did that first summer, only this time I'm a connoisseur. I know how to avoid long conversations when I'd rather stare out the window. I know to bring along a bottle of lavender Dr. Bronner's so I can feel somewhat refreshed.

Part of this knowledge is spatial, like knowing what types of interactions happen where. If you're traveling coach, you may have only a sliver of space to yourself. The "sightseer lounge" has lots of seating, but tends to get crowded and loud. I like to sit there if I'm working on a project, or if I want to have casual conversations.

I try to avoid talking to my seatmate if I have one because I like talking to strangers so much that I will keep talking as long as they're on the train. This can lead to things like watching Jennifer Aniston rom coms with someone who works for a coroner's office in suburban Chicago. While this is fun, I prefer to maintain a sense of solitude when I'm riding for days, especially because I always put together an ambitious list of writing, reading, or sewing tasks to accomplish while en route.

Besides figuring out a system for how to not feel crowded even in a very public space, the other thing that makes the train work for me is the ladies' dressing room. Each coach car has one. It's just a little room with two sinks and a couch with its own enclosed bathroom on one end, but brushing my teeth is made much more appealing when there's not an Amtrak toilet in the room.

It's tricky, though, cause there's no lock on the dressing room's outer door. I used to feel huffy about people coming in when I was using the room, but today a lady came in while I was performing my morning toilette and we had a lovely conversation about bikes.

People react differently to the social space of the train. I witness plenty of interactions between conductors and travelers clearly miffed about the fact that they'll have to share a seat.
I mean, it is a lot nicer when you don't have to share a seat, can't deny it.

But there's a lot of camaraderie, too. When I ride in a sleeper I always enjoy getting to know the people I'm seated with at meals, and I always overhear lots of getting-to-know-you conversations. I think there's one going on behind me right now.

Greenfield Village

2010-07-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

When I had had my fill of ironic distance from Henry Ford's simulacrum of small town America, I headed toward the exit. An old motor coach from the 30s or 40s was barreling down the road I was walking beside, and tooted its horn at some people crossing the road. One of the people, a young man, started running to get out of the way. The other person, a middle aged lady, stiffly stopped and waved the bus on. The bus driver seemed a little sheepish about this, but continued on after a brief pause. Then the lady finished crossing the street. I heard her grumbling to her companions about how she can't stop suddenly. Her legs were covered in swollen veins.

Greenfield Village could not shut out the tension between speed and social life.

Biking into the Belly of the Beast (by which I mean Dearborn)

2010-07-28T23:03:00.000-07:00

On Monday I rode my loaned cruiser from Corktown to Dearborn, ready to spend some scrilla on admission to Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum.

I used Google Maps' bike directions to figure out a route, and I had passed through Dearborn when arriving in Detroit from a bike tour across Michigan last summer, so I figured it couldn't be that impossible to bike there.

The first impressive thing I encountered was this massive pedestrian bridge project that connects Bagley Street across the Fisher Freeway.

Rather striking, Calatrava-esque. It was totally empty, though. And why are there so many bike racks? Who is locking up their bike at this bridge instead of taking it across the bridge to Mexicantown? Nobody, apparently.

This thing looked brand spanking new. There was also a mural.

I think it's probably supposed to celebrate international friendship, but it looks more like a yummy rendering of Detroit and Windsor as colorful pizzas. Also, it's a well known problem that you can't take a bike across either the bridge or the tunnel on the international border. A bit ironic, then, to have these fancy bike racks in the foreground of the mural.

Once I crossed the ped bridge I noticed that it creates a striking contrast with the iconic Michigan Central Station looming on the horizon.

I decided to stop in at Café con Leche on Vernor Highway in Mexicantown cause I wanted to see if it reminded me of LA. It did. Seems like a pleasant meeting spot. When I was leaving, having been latte-d to perfection, a strange young gent pulled his bike up by mine and asked if I was so-and-so's friend. Turns out he is on the board of directors of the Hub/Back Alley Bikes, and I was supposed to talk to him at the chicken races the day before, but I'd run off to enjoy a bike ride through downtown before sunset. It was a perfect illustration of the best side of Detroit's networked universe, at least relative to the vastness of LA. In LA you can be working on some problem at the same time as someone else and have no idea. For example, CicLAvia recently found out that the city of Santa Monica will be holding its own ciclovía on the same day as us (10-10-10! What fun it will be!). Who knows how long they have been planning this?
But in Detroit, it seems more likely that people cross paths when working on similar projects.

I rode on to Dearborn, passing through first a scrapyard area where I probably breathed in some metal dust, then a working class neighborhood, and then through some legitimately enormous industrial complexes.

I think I might have skirted the Ford Rouge plant.

I'm an experienced vehicular cyclist, so even though I was on a squeaky old cruiser and a few times I wondered if I'd accidentally turned onto a freeway onramp I didn't feel too uncomfortable with semis whizzing past. Plus, it wasn't heavy traffic, just a truck passing every so often with plenty of lanes to spare.

When I reached an area in Dearborn that seemed to be nothing but suburban office complexes and the most blandly exclusive subdivisions I could imagine, I did hop onto a sidewalk. But then I took a lane again once I saw street signs directing me to the Henry Ford stuff.

I felt a haughty pride as I passed under the gates of the park. My princess dress may have been drenched with sweat, but I'd ridden a bike to a monument of car culture tucked into one of the least human scale landscapes I've seen in a while.

I've been using an iPhone app called Cyclemeter to track my bike rides, so here's a record of how I got to the Henry Ford from Corktown.

View Larger Map

Detroit ≠ Détruit

2010-07-25T11:31:00.000-07:00

(I couldn't resist that pun, it cycles through my mind regularly)

This summer I'm doing a project where I compare formal bike infrastructure and DIY approaches to making biking easier in LA, Portland, Detroit, and New York. Why four cities? Yeah I don't know. Comparisons are seductive for anthropologists.

I'm researching bike infrastructure issues in Detroit now. There are a few off street bike paths here, but for the most part there are no bike lanes, no signage, nothing to indicate the presence of bicycles. There are a fair number of bicycles, though.

When I visited this place last summer, a few things struck me:
1. So many European intellectuals visiting at any given time
2. Everyone here knows each other
3. Bicycling is a horse of a different color here.

It all still holds. Detroit has become a laboratory for people curious about urban farming, architecture, decay, rebuilding a localized economy, and shifting away from cars. Living here seems hard in some ways, for instance the center city suffers from a lack of services. If you are alternatively minded, though, the opportunities for creative solutions to survival overflow.

The city's wide avenues work well for bicycling, especially because density is a hard thing to find here. The only crowd I've seen so far had gathered around a high school football game. I knew something must be up, cause I was riding along an otherwise empty street and came upon lots and lots of parked cars. Then I saw the game, which explained the people.

Bicycling here feels very free in some ways. The painted lines of the street seem irrelevant on a four lane street with nobody else around. I can turn in wide arcs instead of sharp darts. Oops, missed the turn; make a big ol' U turn, no problem.

At the same time, many parts of the city have been abandoned, creating grids of empty fields marked by one or two remaining old row houses. As an outsider I don't know how to gauge where it is a better or worse idea to travel. I like to drift around and explore unfamiliar cities, and it is so easy to bike here that it seems inviting to just wander around. The other day, though, I found myself on a block of ruins with no major street in sight, a disabled person sitting in a wheelchair in the middle of the road, a few pedestrians walking toward me, and one or two cars cruising past. Oh shit, it dawned on me. Am I safe?

Part of it stems from my Californian ignorance regarding Midwestern color lines. As a brown person, I do not understand how to negotiate the habitual divides between blacks and whites in this part of the country. What do Detroiters think when I ride by on a cruiser, clad in some turquoise dress, looking my most Mexican with my deep summer tan? Does race matter when one is clearly subculturally marked "hipster"? How does socioeconomic status get revealed through things like a vintage bicycle and pink plastic glasses?

The other factor I've encountered in bicycling in Detroit stems from an opposite problem to what we face in LA. There, I worry about not being noticed by drivers. Their lack of attention freaks me out on a regular basis. Here, the attention is a-flowin', but it's pretty sexualized. I am not accustomed to people talking to me through car windows, or trying to have a conversation with me as I ride past. When I'm riding in LA I feel pretty insulated from unwanted social interaction, like much more so than when I'm walking or using public transportation. In Detroit I haven't tried taking a walk cause it seems like there would be no buffer at all between me and every man who wants to comment on my body in some way.

In short, the experience of bicycling in Detroit becomes highly gendered because of cultural norms regarding attention to female bodies, and the requisite exposure of bodies in an activity like cycling.

I'm still enjoying being here and biking here, though, despite feeling like a spectacle from outer space sometimes. I went to an art festival on Belle Isle (America's largest city-owned island park) yesterday. The people contributing to Access Arts got to design installations around trees, fields, and other earth forms in the park. Visitors could pick up maps from various points around the island.

My favorite piece, Jacklyn Brickman's "Vernal Pond(s)," invited visitors to make sounds with various devices strung up in a tree or attached to a fence. A little booklet gave instructions on how to approach the noisemakers, and since the artist was on hand she explained that each sound derived from a frog call.

This part of the installation let you pluck a rubberband that had been strung across a plastic cup. We were instructed to wait ten seconds between plucks. Each cup produced a slightly different tone. I think this one referenced tree frog calls.

Then I rode back into town, and oh my gosh, the combination of the blue green river and the gorgeous sky, so lovely.

Cruisers...aren't...so bad

2010-07-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

I got to Detroit at 12:30 am last night, and was promptly spirited away to a wonderful land of showers and couches by my gracious hostess, Mary Beth.

This morning we headed to Ann Arbor, where she's been househunting in preparation for starting a grad program at University of Michigan in the fall. We took along some bikes so she could show me around the place.

I assumed Ann Arbor would be similar to Eugene, Berkeley, Austin, or any other college town I've visited. And it was, which is not a bad thing. Lots and lots of subdivided houses crammed with tiny units housing students sit in relaxed neighborhoods, and the numerous porches see frequent use. It reminded me that this part of the country seems teeming with life to me, what with all its humidity and greenery. I'm still digging this "exotic Midwest" thing for whatever reason.

We rode bikes around the university area. Mary Beth fixed me up with this pretty old Schwinn cruiser, the same kind of bike I'd just been bashing yesterday with a friend while having lunch in Chicago on my train layover.

As I am accustomed to hand brakes, and know how to get my road bike's pedals quickly in position to start off again, I found stopping and starting on this guy a little difficult. But I actually enjoyed riding it a lot more than I expected. It does feel awfully regal to sit up straight and pedal down the middle of the road, never fidgeting with shifters or bending over the handlebars to get speed.

Part of the pleasantness derived from the general behavior of Ann Arbor drivers, who appear to have surrendered to the inevitability of unexpectedly darting pedestrians and bicyclists. Even as I struggled to stop just so, or started pedaling in anything but a straight line, I felt pretty safe. Nobody honked, nobody swerved. I didn't notice much bike signage or even many bike lanes, but there still seemed to be a general attitude of acceptance of bikes. People freaking shared the road!

Grabbing lunch in a food co-op, I had a conversation with the cashier about the differences between biking in LA and in Ann Arbor because he had spent some time commuting from Inglewood to West Hollywood. This thing on my leg, which I keep forgetting about, keeps revealing my secret bike identity to strangers. Mission accomplished.

Southwest Chief, Over and Over Again

2010-07-20T15:47:00.001-07:00

I'm once again speeding east on the Southwest Chief, Amtrak's line running from Los Angeles to Chicago. My destination is Detroit, which can be reached from Chicago on a line called the Wolverine (grrr! Ferocious).
I can't remember how many times I've taken this train. Maybe this is my fifth ride in the last two years?
Perhaps my favorite part of train travel happens in the middle of the night, when I get awoken from my light sleep by a sudden lurch as the train stops. I look outside, and there sits some old brick town that has been slowly drying up since the demise of Route 66. This time I woke up at Needles, on the state line between California and Arizona, and beheld a massive ghostly complex sitting next to the tracks. I couldn't figure out if it was a ruin or some half finished parking garage with Doric columns as flourishes. It went on and on down the tracks, layer upon layer of colonnades.
Up top it read "El Garces," so I took advantage of my mobile phone and discovered that it is an old Harvey House that is being restored.
Fred Harvey built an empire on providing good meals and clean beds to rail travelers in that bygone age when enough Americans rode trains that it made sense to feed them something better than slop.
Now most of his hotels sit empty and decaying along the tracks, hopefully haunted by the hardworking eastern girls Harvey recruited and the travelers they served.
I just passed through Las Vegas, New Mexico in a thunderstorm and saw another Harvey House, the Castaneda. Its windows can't see for the boards covering them.
As I was leaving Union Station in LA I noticed that there will soon be a Subway Sandwiches franchise stinking up the place.
Fred Harvey, rise from your grave and comfort us weary travelers!

Drifting in East Hollywood

2010-07-19T21:33:00.000-07:00

My recent visit to Portland reminded me how much I like walking through streetcar suburbs while awash in delightful songs. On Sunday I decided to go for a solitary ramble in my neighborhood in LA, which sits at the convergence of Koreatown, East Hollywood, and Virgil Village.
First I cut up to Cafecito Organico at Hoover and Bellevue, the coffee shop run by a fellow ecovillager. Iced coffee in hand, I proceeded to bounce across the neighborhood while listening to two Marshall Crenshaw songs on repeat. I pretty much had it to myself. When I got near churches other humans would appear, but it was mostly just me, old houses, and broken sidewalks torn apart by upthrusting roots.
I walked over to the Bicycle District at Heliotrope and Melrose, then continued along Melrose under the 101. At the next residential street, Mariposa, I made a right and found myself on a rather charming block.

It had big trees and an honest mix of restored and dilapidated homes. Also, it's situated on a hill, so the views are nice. My phone camera was not up to the task of capturing them, though.
I turned right on Oakwood and made my way to the Beverly Hot Springs, which uses the same mineral waters that used to feed the Bimini Baths on my block. In typical Korean spa fashion, one entered through the parking lot. There was a little pedestrian gate into the lot, but it was totally blocked by the driveway gate that had been left open.

Hmmph. It was too hot for a spa day, so I plunged back into the neighborhood instead.
In total I walked for about two hours and saw lots of new blocks.
I had to write a lot recently about the different experiences of space we have if we bike instead of drive, but something I tend to gloss over is the difference between walking and biking.
For me the biggest difference is paying attention to other road users when I'm biking and paying attention to houses when I'm walking. I tend to bike AS FAST AS POSSIBLE, whereas when I walk I like to meander. It has a lot to do with the prevailing style of interacting on roads, too. In LA it's all ZOOM-SWERVE-SLAM BRAKES.
Meanwhile the neighborhoods beckon.

Embodying Bike Love: The Story of My Sharrow Tattoo

2010-07-15T19:29:00.000-07:00

[I wrote this for the LA Eco-Village Blog. Writing in the summertime seems less appealing than drinking white beer and staring at walls of sound, so I'm kind of slacking on the composition front at this time]

I’m an ecovillager who is studying to get a PhD in cultural anthropology, and my dissertation project revolves around biking in LA. I’m going to spend a lot of time in the next year talking to people and writing about the way our bodies become engaged with our city differently through bicycling than they do through driving or walking.
Since I think of bicyclists as “body-city-machines,” I started wondering about the boundaries between our bodies, our bikes, and our streets. How do they get stirred up as we ride? As an experiment, I decided to do some active boundary blurring and get a sharrow tattoo.
As many cyclists know, “sharrows” are share-the-road-arrows or, as they are listed officially in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), shared lane markings. They get painted onto roadways to remind cyclists and drivers that the safest place to bike is in the middle of the lane, not hugging parked cars. I really like the design of the sharrow, with its simply bicycle outline and two chevrons indicating forward motion. So a few weeks ago I visited New Rose Tattoo in Portland and consulted with Mikal Gilmore, who had just finished tattooing a friend.
My friend Kristen Cross documented the process for me.

Mikal developed this stencil by just going outside of her house and looking at the street, since Portland had just painted a whole bunch of bright, shiny new sharrows on many bike routes. The tattoo design differs a bit from the MUTCD regulation sharrow:

Let’s hope I don’t get fined for installing nonstandard signage. Not only does the symbol differ slightly, my tattoo is not retroreflectorized.

I felt like getting a sharrow tattoo would not only be a fun way to display my interest in transforming how we move in the United States, but also be a play on infrastructure.

It hurt.

It’s exciting to run around with this guy on my leg, especially since the City of LA just started painting their own sharrows due to the hard work of the LA County Bike Coalition. It also makes me feel like my commitment to bikes is something inalienable, something embodied.
Coming soon: a picture of the sharrow tattoo riding over one of LA’s new official sharrows.

(Mystery) Train (In Vain)

2010-06-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

I just spent another 30 hours on the Coast Starlight from LA to Portland, and it was one of my nicest train rides.

Central California, near the coast, brings to mind other regions. It reminds me of the fields of Michigan Bobby and I biked through last summer. Of course, here we don't have that soaking humidity, but through my train window every landscape has the same chilly aridity.

The sloping hills covered in tall grass also worked nicely as a setting for reading My Àntonia, Willa Cather's story about the struggles of immigrant farmers in Nebraska. Her narrator can never break free from the land of red grass hills and roads marked by sunflowers, or from loving the strong, vibrant daughters of the farms. Like Cather herself, he finds himself returning again and again to appreciate the abiding trust and joy of humanity summed up in Àntonia. What a satisfying book to read in one sitting!

Cather's stories gave me one of my earliest impetuses to chase some vision of American summer around the country on trains. It is fitting, then, that I should have slipped My Àntonia into my trusty yellow backpack alongside Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine as I left yesterday morning on my third summer quest to find American summer and revel in it. One thing I've learned: it can be found close to the ground where the growing things live, not on sale at Wal-Mart.

The third party in my set of train books has turned somewhat blah. I visited Hearst Castle recently with an itinerant gang of flappers and rogues, and picked up a Marion Davies memoir there. As publisher William Randolph Hearst's companion for many years, Davies acted out his fantasies of her as screen goddess to much critical scorn. The Hollywood set adored their parties, though. The Times We Had does not disappoint in pictures, to be sure; they're crammed in all over the place. It's just that Davies never really spills any beans. She never says an unkind word about the antiquities-obsessed father of five sons who fell for her when she was a Ziegfeld girl at age 16 (Hearst's age: 58).

I was hoping for a sharper account, a gore fest like Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon. Even Gloria Swanson, a contemporary of Davies', gives all kinds of juicy details about her affair with Joseph P. Kennedy in her own autobiography. That's what I like when reading about old Hollywood: stories about bachannalian indulgence, about attractive, charming people giving in to their basest desires, and staying pure and good in the American eye at the same time. Davies' book talks more about meeting European royalty (snooze) than about booze and criminal charges.

Back to my idyllic train ride: I woke up this morning in Dunsmuir, one of my favorite mountain towns, and then we chugged along on schedule to Portland. I slapped my pedals back on my bike, hooked on my panniers, and rode to SE.

An Angeleno at Sunday Streets

2010-06-25T18:48:00.000-07:00

(I wrote this post for the CicLAvia blog. I'm recycling it.)
Last Sunday, June 20, I stepped out of the Mission/ 24th St BART station with a friend, and immediately got swept into a steady stream of people. People on bikes, people walking, little kids biking, and one person in a pink gorilla suit. It was lovely. A man and a piano rode past us. There were lots of pretty girls and boys on pretty bikes.
For pictures of the event and a route map, see the Sunday Streets website.
We walked east on 24th Street, passing between rows of ficus trees and hearing music from various sources (here's a good visualization). There were lots of cafés that seemed to be enjoying an increase in patrons. One café owner had various jugos set up on the street and was calling out his wares to passersby. We stopped for a melon (mmmm! delicious cantaloupe juice), and I asked him how business was. He flashed a wad of cash in response.
Lots of families walked and biked past us. I talked to a few volunteers about practical things like bathrooms, and they directed me to an info booth on Harrison. Nearing the end of the route on 24th, we backtracked and turned south on Harrison. This street had far fewer people on it, since there were only houses and no businesses to attract foot traffic.
At the info booth, we met the Sunday Streets volunteer coordinator, Emma. She told me that they had 160 volunteers working for them that day, helping police officers direct traffic at intersections, riding around and assisting people as needed, and helping with set up and clean up. One volunteer at the booth said we’d come for an especially good event, what with the perfect weather and the neighborhood full of cyclists.
The Mission District in San Francisco shares a few characteristics with the areas LA’s CicLAvia will pass through: old housing stock, low income residents, an influx of new, sustainability-oriented residents, and Latino-owned businesses. We have wider streets, though, so there’d better be even more mobile musical instruments and families at ours!
Having sufficiently used the info booth, we returned to 24th Street and walked west to Valencia. On the way there we passed multiple musical performances, a group of girls dancing around a picnic table in the street, and had to make our way through big crowds. Valencia didn’t have as much traffic, probably because we made it there at the tail end of the event.
At 3 pm, a city employee drove down the route announcing that, “Sunday Streets is over. Please move to the sidewalk.” Immediately cars filled the lanes. Sigh. Valencia has bikes lanes, though, so plenty of bicyclists continued to flow along the street as we walked.
All in all, I didn’t expect such a palpable feeling of goodwill. It hit me as soon as we hit 24th Street, and stayed with me for the rest of the day. So many happy faces, so many people enjoying the street. How will Portland’s Sunday Parkways compare?

S is for Space

2010-06-06T20:04:00.000-07:00

Ray Bradbury is a cornball and a half. It's taken me a long time to accept that, because I love his books and stories so much that I wanted to believe that they transcended pulp. Humph, I would think, why must this work be relegated to the "Young Adult" section in the library? Really they're simple little stories, and when Bradbury tries to get too literary things do not go as well, in my opinion. It is his nostalgic paranoia I like best.

The Bradbury storyland most familiar to me blends a future where space travel seems commonplace with the summer pleasures of small town Illinois in the 1920s. Either the two worlds clash and the innocence of Bradbury's own childhood setting is destroyed, or what seemed like an unquestionably better modern life gets overthrown by the loveliness of Americana.

The nostalgic vision is not patriotic or anything, it's more about the senses engaged by the sights, smells, and tastes of small town life. And there's such a sense of individual fun that it manages to avoid the cheap suburban fantasy I associate with Thomas Kinkade paintings. In Bradbury's writing little boys read adventure stories, or freak out over cheap horror movies, then run home through quiet neighborhoods to porches crammed with swings and warm kitchens full of ice cream.

This is what is right with the world, he argues over and over; the simple facts of crickets and trolleys and nighttime walks. Bradbury's characters may travel to Mars and find this re-created, or try to re-create it only to find themselves consumed by a landscape beyond their ken. Suspicions gradually creep over his characters, who start to notice things skewing oddly. At first they or their companions dismiss these growing certainties that something is not right, but eventually they are overwhelmed by some alien force that sees them as a threat.

The paranoia tinging Ray Bradbury's stories guards against a world in which activities like reading books and walking through cities become criminal. He's a fierce advocate of libraries and bookstores, and proudly walks in Los Angeles. I couldn't admire this silly inventor more. Long before I thought of myself as a transportation activist his stories made me think about my own walks through San Juan Capistrano at night, with blooming flowers and swooping birds. Even though I was a little brown girl, a kid straddling racist divisions in a suburb built incongruously around one of the oldest European settlements in California, I knew just exactly what he meant.

Now when I revisit my favorite stories I can see that there is a mobility thread running through many of them. I just indulged in re-reading S is for Space, a collection of Bradbury stories that contains my very favorite, "Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed." I came across several stories that take place in future cities. One, "The Pedestrian," actually ends with the character who dares to walk through his neighborhood at night getting arrested by a police drone.

In a world where private living and private moving are the norm, those of us who like to stay outside our cars become suspects. This is what I hear Bradbury warning against: we must leave our landscapes open, lest we shut out the very magic that sustains our creative life.

He found mystery and surprise in the old fashioned, the forgotten. As a feminist and critical analyst of popular culture I've trained myself to question nostalgia, as it empinkens past places that weren't nearly so nice as they seem now. With mobility it's different, though. Riding a bike and walking can never be merely nostalgic, because they take you through a living landscape of other human beings who demand recognition as your present fellows. That is, as long as there are others out there, or else you'd just be walking alone. And then there wouldn't be anyone to help you when the police drone shows up...

Soon I'll be able to put away school and read Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. It's never failed to bring me summertime yet.

Sharing the Road Goes Both Ways

2010-05-24T18:07:00.000-07:00

As part of my cultural anthropology dissertation project on bicycling in Los Angeles, I've been thinking more and more recently about communication between different kinds of road users. How do bicyclists indicate their plans for the road immediately ahead to drivers, pedestrians, and other cyclists? Well, for starters, a lot of them just don't.

I have things like this happen quite often: I pull up to a signal, waiting in a traffic lane for the light to change so I can proceed, and a bicyclist rides past me through the intersection. Or I'm pulling up to a four-way stop in a neighborhood, and an oncoming driver who got to the intersection a wee bit before me is signaling a left turn across my path. I slow down and balance myself to let the driver pass quickly so I don't have to stop fully, but another bicyclist rides past me into the intersection. The driver stops, and at this point I've put my foot on the ground, and the driver waits for me to get going again before turning.

Does it annoy me that my efforts to share the road as a bicyclist get undermined by people who ride without paying attention to anyone around them? Oh boy does it ever. Do I also think that there's nothing I can really do about it? Yeah.

I think one of the biggest barriers to bicycling getting taken seriously as a mode of transport by drivers at large is that so many people ride bikes without knowing (or caring) about their rights and responsibilities as road users. Where are new cyclists supposed to learn about this stuff anyway? 14 year old boys in my neighborhood who decide to save up and customize a fixie probably aren't reading educational pamphlets about safe riding. And most schools do not offer bike education. Do they even offer driver's education anymore?

I wonder if the cyclists who don't follow traffic laws or use hand signals think that they are rebels for riding bikes in LA. I wonder if they feel that they have the right to ride however they feel, since drivers are their natural enemies anyway.

For me riding a bike means making a statement about community. Riding a bike does more to humanize my city than driving does, what with all its isolation and pollution. When I ride my bike, I pay attention to the ladies crossing the street in front of me with their grocery carts, I hear the silly music coming out of open car windows, I see the man waiting patiently for the cars to clear so he can cross the street mid-block. Biking makes me feel like I'm part of the landscape I'm riding through. So when people bike without respecting their surroundings, it looks more to me like the antisocial statement of driving than the social statement of biking.

There's definitely a fine line between respecting other people and being cowed by aggressive drivers, and I don't think cyclists should stand for intimidation from every 3,000 pound smoke belcher that wants to run us off the road. Maybe my fantasy about people respecting each others' rights to travel by making eye contact, using hand signals or blinkers, and even just talking when they're right next to each other must wait for some future where everyone's right to the road has been equalized through some magic formula.

In the meantime, I'm going to continue to wait for the light to turn green, 14 year olds on customized fixies be damned.

Whats up with Bike Share?

2010-05-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

Post by Bobby Gadda

In transportation circles, bike share programs are a hot idea for cities these days, almost up there with hosting ciclovias. Several US cities have installed bike share programs modeled after the Velib program in Paris, France. I happened to find myself in Denver for a business trip this week, where the largest US bike share program was installed last month. It's called Denver B-Cycle, and the bikes are still new and shiny:

The way it works is you buy a membership (a 24 hour period is 5 bucks) that allows you to check out a bike. If you park the bike again within 30 minutes, the ride is free, but if you go over that they charge you a couple of bucks. There are quite a few stations scattered around the downtown area and into some of the neighborhoods to the southeast. The idea is to encourage quick trips between stations and keep the turnover rate pretty high. This makes it pretty cheap if you stay under the 30 minutes. It also gives a kind of unpleasant manic fervor to your ride, as once you hit 15 minutes you have to start thinking about parking it in time.

I'll admit, Adonia and I are both bike share skeptics. I tend to think that lack of bikes isn't really much of an obstacle to increasing bicycle ridership - there are over a billion bikes in the world, twice the number of cars. Most people have a bike stuck in their garage or rusting on their balcony. Bikes are cheap, lack of them is not really the problem. Car share makes more sense, as cars are very expensive, and not having to make a big financial investment in owning a car allows people to see the benefits of a car-light lifestyle. Bike share seems like a hot idea just because it is a fancy technological solution to the bike "problem". Have fancy machines on the street to rent bikes automatically! Then people will ride bikes!

So, when I was given the opportunity to go to Denver, I decided to approach it with an open mind and see if I liked actually using it. As a business traveler, I happened to fit exactly one of their target demographics, the "Mile High Visitor" (Click on the "click for examples" button). I was staying in a hotel downtown that had a B-Cycle station right next to it.

Getting a membership was pretty easy - just swipe your credit card and enter your phone number. One quibble here is that the touchscreen was pretty low contrast and required a LOT of pressure to register your presses, so it ends up taking 30 seconds to punch in your phone number. Then all you do is enter the number of the bike you want and pull it out.

The bike itself is very nice, a Trek with a smooth shifting internal three speed hub, and a front hub dynamo that automatically powers front and rear lights. To get going all you need to do is adjust the seat, which has handy quick release with an extra large lever. As I am used to riding zippy road bikes, these bikes seem really heavy and rather ponderous to ride. The sturdy front basket is handy, though, and in a pinch can double as aero bars:

The bikes are also equipped with a lock attached to the front basket, which perplexed me at first, because I couldn't find the key. There were no instructions about how to use the lock. After a good half hour, I figured out that when you lock the bike, you turn a knob which pops out, that has the key built in to it. Having a little diagram of how this works (even just on the website!) would definitely be helpful for B-cycle newbies. The bike is also equipped with the most underwhelming bell I've ever encountered, really just not loud enough, emitting barely a "ping". On one bike the chintzy dinger had already broken off. Try again, Trek!

I used the bikes to explore the city quite a bit. It is convenient to be able to park the bike at a station and not worry about it. This allows you to bike to one destination, walk somewhere else, and pick up another bike later. This means that, unlike with a personal bike, you don't have to walk back to where your bike is locked up. This can make exploring by bike more flexible, and a benefit to bike share that hadn't occurred to me. I can also see it being handy if you live or work downtown for running errands - you could put quite a bit of junk in that basket. The annual membership is only $62, which seems ridiculously cheap to me. I would definitely buy one if I lived in Denver.

So, it sounds like I'm converted, right? Well, maybe. Since the system is so new, it remains to be seen whether it will suffer the same fate of the Parisian system, which lost 80% of its initial stock of bikes to theft and vandalism. Of course, Denver doesn't have the problem of gangs of immigrant youths burning cars, who apparently moved on to vandalizing the Velib bikes as a symbol of the bohemian elite. It will take continued investment to keep the bikes in working order, however.

B-Cycle is a collaboration between Trek, a health insurance company and an advertising company. I'm not sure what their plans are to "monetize" this system. Denver B-Cycle rounded up quite an impressive roster of sponsors and partners, such as Kaiser Permanente. The question is whether bike share is a better investment than building more bike paths, lanes, and sharrows, hosting civlovias, or even subsidizing private bike ownership. I suppose that bike share is a little more enticing to sponsors as there is something permanent they can put their name on.

B-Cycle has a "Who wants it more?" section of their site, encouraging people to vote for their city to be the next B-Cycle implementation. LA has a handful of votes for some neighborhoods. Sometimes I hear bike enthusiasts in LA advocating for bike share as the "next big thing" for bikes here. It's my opinion that we have to get more bike infrastructure on the ground in LA before bike share makes sense. Denver has obviously done quite a bit of work to reclaim their downtown and surrounding neighborhoods for peds and cyclists. Drivers are fairly respectful. I fear that installing this in LA right now would not be a big success because people are so fearful of traffic.

Overall though, I have to admit that bike share is a good idea for cities that already have a decent amount of bike infrastructure, if the funding and maintenance can be worked out. Just walking around I overheard a lot of people talking about it and the bike stations attracted a lot of attention. I did feel like kind of a dork on the bike, but after a while I enjoyed playing the part of the clueless tourist on the bright red B-Cycle. Watch out!

OMG, I have to slow down while driving during rush hour in the middle of a crowded city? Blame the bicyclist! Honk honk honk.

2010-05-20T18:12:00.000-07:00

View Lame Stretch of Glendale in a larger map

Usually I ride the Red Line home from Union Station in the afternoon. Sometimes, though, getting off the Metrolink and feeling the warm air and bright sunshine, I'm less inclined to descend into the tunnel and wait for the train to carry me home. I stand on the platform for a minute, debating between the fear and harassment inevitable when biking in LA during rush hour, and the boredom of sitting down below on a train full of tired folks.

When I bike home, I think of myself conquering my route in little stages. Stage 1: Union Station to Los Angeles Street, passing alongside Placita Olvera and the civic center. Stage 2: turning right onto Second, passing through the famous tiled, echo-filled tunnel (how do people manage to sleep in there? Ah yes, necessity). Stage 3: riding along Glendale under the 101 and turning left onto Beverly. Stage 4: Climbing up Beverly to about Westlake. Stage 5: zooming down Beverly to Commonwealth, avoiding the frequent ruts in the road. Stage 6: Turning onto 1st, slowly climbing the hill and heading home.

Although drivers will do menacing things like accelerate and swerve around me at any point on the route, it's especially bad during Stage 3. I always expect people to honk at me in the tunnel, just cause that would be especially loud and startling, but the honking doesn't start until Glendale. As a vehicular cyclist, I ride in the middle of the right hand lane, avoiding the broken glass drunk drivers' crashes have left along the gutter. This infuriates strangers on a regular basis. How dare I cause them to drive at a slightly slower pace? And outside of a car too?? Honk! The engine roars as the driver self-righteously pulls around me, perhaps clearing up any ambiguities that might remain by yelling at me as s/he passes by.

Different people do this in the same place every time I ride this way. I know it is near a 101 off ramp, but where do people get off menacing bicyclists like this? How do people justify such hideous behavior? Really? You need to honk your horn loudly in the naked ears of someone busy navigating shitty roads as though you have some kind of prior right to the street?

You don't. Bicyclists are SUPPOSED TO RIDE IN THE ROADWAY. On this particular stretch of road, there are two lanes in each direction, so it's not like I'm comically blocking a huge line of honkers. I think what usually happens is someone a few cars back gets frustrated, bursts a honk, swerves around the car behind me, and then car behind me gets frustrated too cause not only are they behind me (a worthless, carless piece of trash) but now they're getting honks.

Driving makes other road users into enemies, blockages in what's supposed to be your personal artery of smooth sailing. How have we gotten our heads so far up our asses that it's socially acceptable for people to treat each other like this? I mean, it's beyond socially acceptable, I get looked down on by a lot of people I meet in LA because I choose not to drive. It is socially expected that you get into a car every day.

Not all motorists menace bicyclists, but the jerks sure make me remember that driving is a selfish waste of resources that millions in this region justify every morning. And it's so absolutely normal to drive that I'm sure most people who are witnessing the horrific destruction caused by oil drilling in the Gulf are not making the connection to their gas tanks. Or, if they are, feel helpless to change their commutes. Well, the thing is, we're all in this thing together, so the sooner we start treating each other like human beings, the better it will be for all of us.

And those of you who see the rest of us as mere barriers to your all-important journey, why don't you go build your own roads somewhere else? Cause, you know, those ones outside? The ones you drive on everyday? They belong to us.

Bicycling as a Civil Right

2010-05-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

It's common for bicyclists to complain about being treated like second class citizens. We are expected to get out of the way so that motorists can pass us; we get treated like barriers to speed, not humans. I don't think anyone who has not been shouted or honked at while riding a bicycle can fully grasp the visceral combination of fear, anxiety, adrenaline, and anger that swells up in our bellies during these moments. And those of us who have been killed by drivers can't speak up at all.

Yet: second class citizens? I've been thinking for a while about bicycling as a civil right, and comparisons have been made (mostly unfavorably) between the bike movement and the civil rights movement. It seems that the issue here is race: white people should not be able to claim that their civil rights are being violated, or that their struggles warrant comparison to the historic, heroic struggles of people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Oh, but wait, not all bicyclists are white.

A lot of people bike because they're too poor to drive. Guess what color they are? Guess who gets killed while biking? Does it make it more okay to talk about bicycling and carfree transportation in general as a civil right when you bring brown people into the movement? It seems like it, since the Bus Riders Union has enjoyed years of full support from academics and liberals for their fight to improve bus service for the majority-non white bus riders of Los Angeles.

So if the bike movement gets some brown people on board, and pushes them out in front of the cameras, would that make it seem more okay to call the bike movement a struggle for a basic human right?

That's bullshit. The fact that our country's roads and laws make it easier for cars to pollute our natural and human environment than for our bodies to travel safely through our cities is unfair. It is a violation of the basic human right to move freely. I don't care what color bodies we're talking about, and you'd better take off your damn blinders if you're in Southern California and you think white people are the only ones biking.

If you're a white person, maybe riding a bike gives you your first experience of being treated like a worthless individual. I wouldn't know; I'm not white. Is it a bad thing for people who we assume benefit from all kinds of unquestioned privilege to compare their struggle as cyclists to the struggle for equal rights for people of color? Doesn't it just highlight how we are all human, and we all have rights that can, unfortunately, be violated by systems of power?

Bicycling should be a right for ALL people, regardless of race. The symbolic power of car ownership as a marker of status means that the people who are working the hardest to show that they're not trapped by poverty do not want to ride bikes. Let's address this issue instead of claiming that people who are risking their lives to change the dynamics of our streets do not deserve to be associated with the civil rights movement.

Anyone who thinks that the color of their skin protects them from being involved in the disastrous effects of our society's addiction to driving needs to shake off the stupor from all those sexy car ads and pay attention to the world around us.

Charming City by the Sea/ Just Ignore the Homeless People

2010-05-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

San Diego sits on a bay and looks more like San Francisco than LA. It is chock full of simulacra. A simulacrum, which I learned about through reading the wacky French theorist Jean Baudrillard, questions the reality of authentic life in that it exists as a reference to something that isn't there. I've found it tremendously useful to describe the silliness of Orange County, which brims over with themed subdivisions that use cheap stucco detailing to refer to Tuscany, Spain, whatever.

Recently I've learned about the existence of enchantment engineering, a concept urban planners use to trick you into thinking you're having a good time. Because apparently you can't actually enjoy your city, you just have to trick yourself into thinking you enjoy it. Weird stuff, especially for someone like me who works hard to unveil the interconnections of all aspects of my life.

Case in point: Old Town San Diego, a state historic park, features many old adobes facing each other across a central plaza. It's got all kinds of old timey stuff you can look at, like wagons and reconstructed interiors. The most fascinating spot, though, is the edge of the parking lot behind the adobes. People sit in traffic to find parking in dirt lots, and then they leave the everyday world to enter the realm of Old West fantasy.

If you ride a bike like I do, the boundaries between real and fake life get blurry. I use my body to propel myself through space, rather than traveling in a climate-controlled capsule from one pleasure zone to another. So when I get somewhere and need to lock up my bike, I notice that tons of space has been given over to SUVs, and that people are streaming from the very modern, congested parking lot into the quaint space of the park just a few yards away. I find it difficult to ignore the harsh juxtaposition of driving and freeway life with public spaces filled with people.

In downtown San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter, clubby club club zone 3000, ladies in micro minis and gentlemen bathed in aftershave manage to find each other sexy despite the presence of many homeless folks seeking change. Again, enchantment engineering: you have to be able to overlook the real conditions of a space; forget addressing the social problems at hand, the point is to have a good time.

When I say that San Diego is full of simulacra what I mean is that there seem to be nothing but overlapping themed spaces, where you can sit and sip your coffee while your status dog contains its desire to run around, right next to the SUV you drove there in, or down the block from the new glass and steel loft you live in, which replaced an old Victorian building infested with poor people. You can take pictures of your children in front of blooming flowers and Spanish arcades in Balboa Park, keeping this guy out of sight:

He was one of the only bicyclists I saw in San Diego who did not feel the need to be decked out in clothes clearly marked "exercise."

It seems that few people bike in San Diego, despite its lovely climate. Maybe it's because of the hills that sit under the city. People who don't bike seem to think that it's a serious undertaking, like you gotta wear lycra and you're going to sweat so hard you'll need a shower immediately afterward. That's actually not true. If you're going to ride a few miles to get somewhere, you can take it easy and enjoy yourself. Biking requires less energy than running, and there's this momentum thing that keeps you going with little ongoing effort (one big reason bicyclists tend to run stop signs; stopping and re-starting takes a lot more energy on a bike than it does when you're just lifting your foot from one pedal to the other in a car).

Driving everywhere has a really negative impact on public life. It creates interstitial zones inhabited only by the people who can't afford to drive, and in San Diego it has led to a city totally split by the 5 freeway. Its on and off ramps curl around buildings and interrupt streets. And what does an official bike route look like in San Diego?

It looks like an eight lane highway, because it is one. An officially signed bike route along a high speed, eight lane highway. In a big city. Shameful. That bike infrastructure gives the city some kind of credit toward more federal funding, I'm pretty sure, and it's f-ed up that they can claim that this is a useful bike facility. Way to make biking abnormal, unsafe, and undesirable, San Diego.

More people should bike in San Diego. It's not hard, it's a good way to make a statement against oil, and, coming at you out of left field, Jesus would do it if he were alive today. He certainly wouldn't be driving a monster truck home to his subdivision in the outermost burbs where the largest LCD flatscreen awaited him, having spent the day in a simulated pleasure zone next to the freeway.

The Herky Jerky Dance of the Scholar-Activist

2010-04-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading, writing, and avoiding my way through the most intense period of my PhD program. In June I will spend a few hours convincing a panel of experts, selected by me, that I am sufficiently familiar with the discipline of sociocultural anthropology to embark on the dissertation project I have designed. This is called the oral examination. I must prepare for this performance by researching four topics relevant both to my project and to the discipline, and writing bibliographic essays describing my knowledge.

My project challenges the traditional separation of university and field site because I have merged the two. Instead of traveling thousands of miles once a year to visit the field, I travel dozens of miles four times a week to visit the university. This act of situating myself between the field as an activist and the university as a scholar sometimes works better on paper than in real life.

To me spending long weeks alone, grappling with text and creating new forms of it, seems selfish. It certainly gets lonely. Sometimes my ability to move fluidly from the private, monastic world of my textual research to the human world of my home and field site gets jammed, and I end up feeling like a space creature clinging to nonsense in an impenetrable enclosure.

This retreat from the space of everyday life to one of reflection has been something I wished to avoid, so I came up with a project grounded in bike activism. And right now the bike activist in me would be better used writing grants to fund the ridiculously awesome bike cooperative City of Lights/ Ciudad de Luces has started at a day laborer center downtown.

Yet I can't do it all! I can't simultaneously devote myself to moving toward becoming a PhD candidate and do substantive work on the activist project that forms an important part of my dissertation research.

A while ago I figured out that many academics would like to be more involved in politics and public opinion, but they get swamped with the institutional requirements of working as professors in the United States. Committees, publishing, mentoring undergrads and grads, having families (ha!); only a few manage to secure their livelihoods and then go the extra mile to frame their work for wider audiences. We sit on the sidelines and grumble at what passes for knowledge disseminated through national media outlets, and that's about all we have time for.

I've been fortunate enough to find myself in a doctoral program that not only pushes me to expand academia beyond the Ivory Tower, but also offers me excellent examples of people doing this work, like my adviser, Dr. Michael Montoya, who strives to use anthropological knowledge to impact public health debates and practices.

But when push comes to shove, if I want to be an academic, I will have to go through these periods of intense separation from the everyday world. A PhD still has some value to it, even in this era of crowdsourcing and near total surrender to conspicuous consumption. Right?

Who Are They Landscaping For?

2010-04-19T11:36:00.000-07:00

I rode my bike the long way to school today, detraining at Irvine station and rambling through the maze of creek trails and freeway overpasses that makes up this conspicuously gridless simulacrum.

Often recently I've had to leave the wide bike lanes that signify some ancient (1960s or 70s) vision of a bicycling way of life here because of landscaping trucks parked along the strips of sidewalk. Irvine appears lush and pillowy, as though water in Southern California flows plentifully. This blatant lie can only be maintained through constant manicuring, with who knows how many Latino workers trimming, shaping, watering, and planting the grass and shrubs that line all of Irvine's winding streets.

These streets usually have a greenbelt between the sidewalk and the street, and on many streets bicyclists get confusing indicators that they are also welcome on the curving paths that wind through the grass along the road, despite the clearly marked and wide bike lanes. Most of the time when I ride here, though, these sidewalks lie empty, a mere concrete line wiggling along with the cars as they speed past. Bicyclists do not get contiguous facilities; bike lanes invariably disappear near freeways, exactly where we most need infrastructural support to navigate the transition of drivers from a surface street mentality (if they even have one anymore) to a freeway mentality.

I really think Irvine maintains all of these greenbelts and park-looking spaces so that the people ripping through their city at 60 miles per hour can see something that appears pleasant to their conditioned eyes as they gaze through their windshields. I don't think they do it for the humans who actually attempt to use their legs to ambulate through this "town," cause I see a lot more two legged creatures on the off-street paths that have little attempt at landscaping running along their asphalt lengths.

In Irvine grass is meant to be seen through glass, air is meant to be breathed through an engine, and those who use other modes of transport must remain secondary to the automobilized vision of paradise. The sidewalks and bike lanes can be there because they refer to some pretended interest in quality of life, and we can even use them, but make no mistake, the landscaping is not for us. I remember that every time a landscaping truck ends the bike lane and every time I must ride between drivers speeding onto freeway onramps on my right and drivers speeding past me on my left.

Recent Adventures in Transit

2010-04-02T17:45:00.001-07:00

1. Every month I buy a Metrolink commuter pass. It's awesome, it costs a bunch, but it lets me ride any Metrolink or Amtrak train between LA and Irvine, in addition to being my LA Metro pass. But every month I put off forking over $250 until the first of the month, which means I end up having to buy a ticket for the subway to get to Union Station so I can buy my new pass. This slight inconvenience (which I bring on myself) often leads to waiting in line to buy my ticket at the station while I hear the Union Station-bound train arrive and depart from the platform below, its usual two minutes ahead of schedule. Well, this time around, as I did my 1st-of-the month-disgruntled-wasting-$1.25 shuffle, I happened to complain about missing the train we could hear down below to a security guard. He spontaneously made the machine spit out free tickets for me and the guy in front of me at the ticket machine too. I still missed the train, but that was pretty nice.

2. Then I made a stop over at the public library downtown, and picked up some academic books (hooray for the library!). LA does not offer transfers for transit users, but subway tickets are good for two hours from the time of purchase, and they only list the origin station. So if I'm traveling in one direction, make a brief stop, and then continue traveling in the same direction on the same line, I feel okay using the same ticket. I hiked down from the library to Pershing Square. Down at the bottom of the first set of escalators, where there's still daylight coming in, there are these ashtrays that fill with the garbage of passersby. Someone had apparently flicked a lit cigarette into one of these puppies, and the junk food bags inside lit up. I poured some water on it, and felt kind of cool as I passed into the station. Then, as I was boarding a train down below, this guy said, "have you been putting out fires your whole life?" Zing!

3. When I got back to Vermont/Beverly, Metrolink pass secured, I noticed that they'd installed a mosaic that wraps around three walls, each panel featuring...women's shoes. Shoes shoes shoes. It's quite an injection of color into a drab station.

Food Trucks and Greening the Poor

2010-03-28T09:30:00.000-07:00

In Southern California food trucks, particularly taco trucks, have been around for a long time. The first time I remember seeing one was at a light industrial park in south Orange County where my dad worked when I was about four. It stuck out in my mind because of the corrugated metal siding. They just blend into the landscape here.

As I understand them, food trucks have fairly stable locations and the same workers patronize them everyday for lunch in places where other options are lacking. They're an ingenious way to correct for a lack of mixed use development, where food was an afterthought. In LA they seem to also be a night time thing. The taco truck near my Metro station often feeds me when the delicious aroma of carne asada and onions stops me in my tracks and erases all other dinner plans from my mind.

These everyday food trucks are emerging as something cool, and now people track food trucks via Twitter, and chase them around town. I appreciate the emphasis on valorizing street food as part of a return to urban street culture, but how many people drive to food trucks? Isn't there something fundamentally bizarre about driving to a food truck? Their whole existence relies on the notion that there is a group of people in some location that will want to eat a meal, but now they broadcast their locations to anyone willing to drive to meet them. There are websites that categorize the trucks for your pleasure, and clearly many people have decided that a food truck is a worthy business venture. Not just for immigrant families anymore?

I wonder how long the trendiness of the trucks will last before it's just back to tacos and workers eating a mundane lunch. Or maybe this will be a permanent change as part of our adjustment to cities marked by constant referral to geographic tracking technology? While in the past foot traffic was the limiting element of business growth for the trucks, now anyone interested can make them into a destination and they are free to change locations as demand shifts without losing customers?

Maybe there will be two food truck markets, like the older ones run by immigrant families that serve neighborhoods, and the glossier ones run by venture capitalists who serve the growing number of young urban professionals tied to their smart phones and willing to drive across town for fusion food. One adds to place, while the other adds to smog?

This is weird, though, not least because the turn to food trucks here is marked by a focus on the "green" practices of poor people. For example, this street food-themed restaurant emphasizes sustainability while also creating an environment where the low income families that make and consume street food do not spoil patrons' enjoyment of their meals with their pesky poverty.

How green are food trucks that encourage customers to drive around town? How is it appropriate to call the practices of the poor green when you've hidden the economic constraints that lead to their low use of resources?

Lucky for the world that things don't have to make sense, especially when they make money instead.

Ecovillagers at Barnsdall Art Park

2010-03-22T10:35:00.000-07:00

Up above East Hollywood rises an incongruous hilltop, crowned by the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Hollyhock House and some city art programming buildings. Barnsdall Art Park has a view of the Hollywood and Silver Lake hills, with the Griffith Observatory and another FLW house looming across Los Feliz.

There've been some recent bike-related shows going on up there, but since I've been mostly out of town on the weekends I didn't make it up until Sunday's closing of "The City Re-Emerged When We Arrived," a music-film collaboration between several of my neighbors at LA Ecovillage.

Aurisha Smolarski-Waters and Somerset Waters, the violin and cello voices of Telematique Ensemble, composed a score to accompany images by Doran McGee, a video artist. Federico Tobon also contributed, to the visual element, I think.

So here's how it worked: one person mounted a rusty old stationary bike repurposed for the exhibition and another two perched on the cart behind it. Whenever the bicyclist wanted the cycle of photographs and moving images to go forward, she pedaled forward. Backward, backward, etc. Across the screen flashed images of an older Los Angeles, pastoral landscapes inhabited by pretty ladies in 1920s garb and bursting flowers that bloomed in time-lapse acceleration. The images visited Bimini Place, home of the ecovillage and the site of the Bimini Baths.

The sounds followed the rhythm of the cyclist as well. Musically, the strings interplayed deep tones from the cello and piercing strands from the violin, frenetic at times according to pedal speed, and sometimes contemplative. Telematique manages to capture registers of serial composition and melodic pop, according to their whim, and in this case they sounded appropriately like Philip Glass, their counterpoint heightening the pathos of Los Angeles' many years of burying its own legacy of natural splendor.

And of course, the bicycle. The bicycle allowed the participant to make connections between a rich history and a present landscape marked by barriers to its passage. In the exhibit, the bicycle moved me forward into a past where there was an opening not taken, that moment before the car usurped the bicycle as a vehicle for urban transport. Now we have an opportunity to reclaim that possibility, to enact our own vision of a more splendid and equitable city where we share space instead of bypassing it.

Many thanks to the artists who made my Sunday even more pleasant. I'd already hiked up to the observatory with my mom and little sis, and we caught the weekend trolley back down to Vermont/ Sunset station, which is around the corner from Barnsdall. So they got to enjoy the piece as well before they Metro'd back to Union Station to get the afternoon Metrolink home to Orange County.

Streeeeeet Summiiiiiiiiiit

2010-03-20T12:46:00.000-07:00

(voiced in a monster truck rally announcer style)

I knew I would be late, so I rode fast on 7th to downtown from Koreatown, and then headed south to LA Trade Technical College, the location of this year's Street Summit and last year's Bike Summit.

As I approached I ran into two gentlemen cyclists I know, and we cruised into the bike valet area adjacent to Trade Tech's brand spanking new facility. It took me a while to extricate all my belongings from my bike, since I had an overstuffed pannier full of presentation materials and my video camera, along with my tripod strapped to the rack. I've been enjoying bike valet quite a lot recently (thanks LACBC!), and it certainly is nice to leave my bike in a safe area. I don't even have to tote around my helmet (although I do remove my lights, habit), I can just leave it on the bike.

Inside the breezy main hall of the new building (it had a cool jigsaw puzzle wooden ceiling), Carl Anthony of Breakthrough Communities spoke on environmental justice to an audience that spilled out the doors. I crept in and listened as he made connections between low income communities and the fundamentally unsustainable automobilized conditions under which they live. He pointed out that in a place like Oakland, long the home of a proud Black community, more and more families are moving to the suburbs. As they leave dense areas well-served by transit and situated on grids for cul-de-sacs far from services, they become more reliant on cars to get around. I didn't know there would be such an excellent prelude to the presentations I'd be involved in later in the day, where I would make clear my own commitment to confronting issues of class and race in alternative transportation and quality public space.

Soon we broke for lunch. The organizers incorporated street food into the event, since it is hip in LA to eat from food trucks and those trucks exemplify a more full use of public spaces. This meant I finally got to try Korean fusion tacos, something I've been hearing about for quite some time (Verdict: meh. I guess you might find them mind blowing if you're not accustomed to f-ing delicious carne asada, with which, as a So Cal native, I am more than familiar). I picked up my tacos and kimchee and made my way over to the artificially grassed lunch area, where I met some urban planning grad students. One studies billboards, and the other is developing a project on bicycles.

After that we reassembled in the main hall and listened to Charlie Gandy give an update on the legitimately awesome bike stuff happening in Long Beach, where urban planner Sumire Gant initiated remarkable cooperation between city staff, politicians, and local advocates that is changing the way bikes fit into the landscape there. Then there was another talk on the need to consider low income communities in alternative transportation, given by Lydia Avila of the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC). Basically they want to stave off displacement of the low income, Latino community in Boyle Heights, which is being pumped full of redevelopment in the next decade.

(There's something funny going on with redevelopment, gentrification, quality of life, and burgeoning interest in alternative transportation among wealthy, educated people. More on that in another post.)

And then, finally, we moved on to workshops. I got to participate in cicLAvia's presentation, which went very well. Several people in the audience had attended ciclovías or similar events around the world, and shared their own enthusiasm about the concept. Now that we have a signed letter of support from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and are fundraising to hold our first event on September 12 (fingers crossed so hard they might break!!!), it felt much more professional than when we presented at last year's Bike Summit (although that was also very fun and led to good things).

After that I had to rush in to wrangle with computers and projectors so that I could help present on City of Lights/ Ciudad de Luces, the outreach program I helped start last year that connects the bike movement with low income, Spanish speaking cyclists. I presented with Allison Mannos, the program manager and all-around superstar of City of Lights, and Andy Rodriguez, who organizes educational programming. We gave our history and current program spiel to a packed room and had some good questions about how to get started with connecting to low income cyclists in other areas (hooray!).

Unfortunately the Summit had only three workshop cycles, so since I presented during the first two, I only got to attend one other workshop. This was a presentation on walkability assessments given in part by urban planning student/ alt trans researcher extraordinaire Alexis Lantz, who showed pictures to illustrate common impediments to walkability and gave a vocabulary lesson on pedestrian improvements (chokers and chicanes for all streets!).

The closing speech for the day came from Ryan Snider, a transportation consultant here in LA, who was careful to preface his fiery call to action with the understanding that this was about advocacy, not policy. Then he proceeded to argue, persuasively, for a culture change at LADOT. Since the Street Summit's opening address was given by Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner of NYCDOT, we'd all been made painfully aware of the possibilities of a more progressive department of transportation. If our own DOT embraced the (sooooooooo obvious) need for a new approach to congestion and safety in Los Angeles, how much easier would it be to get simple and affordable bike and pedestrian infrastructure projects off the ground?

So then the day wasn't over, even though my brain was frizizzled, and we rode en masse to La Cita near Bunker Hill and enjoyed their back patio while decompressing. Then it was time to try out Angel's Flight (more on that later).

To see a more human Los Angeles manifested by the advocates who are working to bring this reality to more city residents inspires me to keep on plugging along.

Furniture Doesn't Move Itself

2010-03-17T21:07:00.000-07:00

I've been fiendishly productive since about 4:30 pm yesterday. New things live in my house, such as a broken toaster from the Goodwill (I gambled and lost), a second metal breadbox for hiding earrings from inquisitive cats, a handsome kettle, clean clothes, and groceries. The drawn-out, acquisitive wrangling involved in moving house has become more manageable.

Most purchases come home in my backpack or in my arms, but furniture still sticks it to me with its car dependence. This morning I borrowed a neighbor's car to visit the St. Vincent de Paul outlet store in Lincoln Heights, a somewhat reliable source of used furniture that costs less than $50 per item.

As usual when I get behind the wheel, I was reminded that on the inside of a car, the sound of an accelerating engine doesn't signify ill will toward those outside. You can feel the engine straining, and the faster you accelerate the less it strains, especially if you're driving a finicky old manual car. But when I'm on my bike, I tell you, that sound viscerally disturbs me. I feel like I'm running through a jungle and it is a lion's roar as it pounces on my back.

With some LA party station funk pumping out of the radio, I swung onto the 101 and 110. A few months back I got a ride home from downtown with LA's own bike celebrity, Chicken Leather, and got a different perspective on driving. He had his windows down and talked freely to other road users; there didn't seem to be as much of a separation. That's one thing that I think has to go if we are to create a more humanistic public mobility: driving with the windows up in fine weather. I know it's the dream to be in one's own isolated, climate-controlled, noise-controlled shell, but that's no way to travel at speed through a peopled landscape.

So I left the windows down, but I still found myself driving without paying attention to the speedometer. And of course that insidious frustration with traffic crept in, amplified by my anxiety that people behind me would honk if I didn't cut around things and impeded their own passage through the city.

The car expedition left me more exhausted than running errands on the bus or on my bike. It takes a lot of mental energy to drive. Since I try to do it mindfully now, instead of just relying on the habitus I acquired in ten years of driving (plus 16 years before that of being a passenger in a car-dominated landscape), I think it takes even more energy because I have to guard against glazing over.

LA = Field Site, Portland = Home?

2010-03-08T11:18:00.000-08:00

When I first moved to LA and my homesickness for Portland was in maximum overdrive, I used to think about a scenario in which I would be able to travel through some kind of wormhole to a specific part of Portland. Would I still want to do it if I could only visit, say, SE 82nd Avenue between Holgate and Stark? I could never decide if people would be able to come and visit me in this space, or if I would be unable to communicate with my Portland friends.

I think I got the idea from the Arabian Nights, like it would be the product of me finding a genie and wishing to go to Portland, but somehow misspeaking and then the genie would laugh evilly at my human folly.

Today as I get ready to return to LA yet again I wish I could hide from my flight like I used to hide from my mom when she would come to pick me up from friends' houses. It always seemed like maybe if I could hide well enough in some closet or behind some pillows, she'd give up and we could resume playing with gusto.

I doubt that Horizon Air will come hunt me down if I go hide in a big patch of daphne odora and inhale its sweetness till I pass out. However, hours later when I would awake in a puddle of rain, I would remember that I'm not a little kid and that I do love my LA project, as challenging as it is most of the time.

So it's back to the field I go. After all my years of yammering about how racist, colonialist, scientistic, unethical, etc. it is for anthropologists to leave their homes and go study the native others in Vanuatu or whatever, I've ended up replicating the pattern by feeling as bitter as Malinowski about going back to LA.

(Invariably, though, LA wins me back within a few days of returning from lilting, porchy Portland with its palimpsest of lives and smells and colors.)

New Jet Technology Makes Instant Gratification More Possible

2010-03-05T15:03:00.000-08:00

It's funny that you can ride your bike to Vermont/Beverly station in Koreatown at 7 am, ride the Red Line to 7th/Metro, board the Blue Line to Wardlow, and then ride through charming California Heights to the deco Long Beach Airport. You get there at 8:15 am.

And then at 10:30 am you walk out on the tarmac, cause they're small-scale like that, climb one of those sturdy staircases, and board a little jobby to Portland.

Two hours later, jobby lands and you board the MAX to the Hollywood Transit Center in NE Portland. Then you climb aboard bus #75, which runs along 39th Avenue. Soon you can get off at Woodstock Boulevard, enjoy wieners at Otto's, lattes at the Woodstock Wine & Deli, and ogle the current crop of Reedies making the trek up the hill to Woodstock for lunch at 2:30 pm.

I'd been traveling long distances solely by train from September 2008 till January 2010, so pardon me if I marvel at the magical time/space bending capabilities of modern jet travel!

Shazam.

European Views on American Landscapes

2010-03-04T09:59:00.000-08:00

I like to collect outsiders' impressions of American sprawl and highway systems. As a child of Orange County, I've long struggled with my simultaneous love of Southern California and revulsion at the way the gorgeous landscape has been carved into intensely unoriginal if immensely profitable tract homes. Something in the alternately adoring and satirical reports of my land by particular Europeans resonates for me.

Jean Baudrillard's America got my goat because I found it being used as an academic representation of postmodern Southern California, and while I won't give it that authority, I do like the voice of the sophisticated tourist.

Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies surprised me with its attention to historical context, but it dismissed as unfathomably boring the part of LA where I live and will be studying for my dissertation project. What he calls the "Plains of Id," the vast flat stretches of the LA basin that reach from the mountains to the sea, encompasses the old urban core of LA, the part I like the best and where lots of bicycle change is happening.

His vision of "Autopia," though, rings true, and gets represented visually in Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. This film, starring the winsome Harry Dean Stanton, came out in 1984 and splits its time between sweeping Texan landscapes and an incredibly uninteresting suburb overlooking the Burbank airport. Harry Dean and the boy who plays his son escape from the suburb and spend days driving back to Texas, with the camera following their passage through country highways and the interstates of Houston.

Before that, though, Harry Dean comes upon a man screaming on a freeway overpass in the early light of dawn. His rant dooms the whole San Fernando Valley and its inhabitants to a future outside the "safety zone," and the freeways along which they flow are roads to nowhere. I appreciated finding a bit of critique tucked in between all the shots contrasting pink and green neon in portrayals of an aestheticized West of the road.

Heritage Square Short Cut

2010-02-21T21:04:00.000-08:00

Post by Bobby Gadda.

When Adonia and I decided to check out the Heritage Square museum, we were dismayed to discover that there is not a direct way to walk there from the Heritage Square Gold Line stop. You actually have to walk pretty far north next to the noisy highway, and then double back. I noticed from the satellite view there is an intriguing dirt road that goes directly there on the east side of the arroyo. We thought we would check it out. Here is a map of the route we took, with all of the fence-hopping points marked:

View Heritage Square Short Cut in a larger map

First, we walked down Pasadena Ave and crossed the 110 and the arroyo. We found the entrance to the dirt road blocked by this easily hopped fence:

I could see a dumpster down the road, so I figured it was one of the many county access fire roads that tend to follow the arroyo. We hopped the fence and walked down the road.

Since it has been raining so much lately this area is very lush and green, with pretty big trees and bushes on both sides. The arroyo drops off to the left and there are the backyards of houses up on the hill to the right. It is a very nice walk through the greenery.

As we walked along we started to notice debris from old houses, such as these rusty bathtubs.

I recognized these weights as the signature debris of old-house retrofitting; our building in koreatown also has a pile of these out back. There are the weights to balance windows that go over pulleys, I suppose an antiquated technology that is made obsolete by modern energy-efficient windows. Our windows still have them and you can hear the weights rattling around inside the window frame when you open or close the window.

At this point it became clear that the museum must control this right of way since it was full of their stuff - why couldn't you walk to the museum this way? Adonia and I got our pedestrian indignation on as we ranted about how they had named the metro station after the museum, yet failed to provide an easy way to walk there from the station. All they have to do is open the gates and there is this great path!

Eventually we reached a fence that had barbed wire and was therefore too challenging for us to climb. Directly to the left of this fence, however, we noticed that the fence on the arroyo was bent over where other people had crossed it. We took this as an invitation and hopped that fence into the arroyo:

In this part of the channel the sides aren't too steep so it was pretty easy to walk on. We walked past the museum until we reached an actual hole someone had cut in the fence. This fence hole, and footprints in the arroyo led me to believe that others had trod this path before us:

Now we were at the museum entrance, and I asked the proprietors why the gates aren't open to allow easier access from the Gold line. They said that it simply is a matter of lack of volunteers and money - they would need people to staff the other entrance as well, and money to upgrade the path and entrance on that side. After seeing the advanced decay of some of their structures, I saw how this access might not be the most of their worries right now. I suppose what really needs to happen is for the city or county to put in a path here, and the museum could just fork over 8-10 feet of their right of way. Then the fence along the arroyo could just be moved in a bit and there would be a nice pedestrian and bike access along this stretch of the arroyo. This would be similar to the first stretch of the arroyo seco bike path, just a mile or so up the road.

When we were leaving they were nice enough to offer to let us out the back way, and some very friendly volunteers opened the barbed wire gate and walked us back to the Pasadena Ave entrance. No fence hopping required! So if you aren't comfortable hopping fences, you can at least leave this way.

Luckily For Me There's Heritage Square

2010-02-21T18:51:00.000-08:00

On the edge of Montecito Heights in Northeast LA sits Heritage Square, an odd hodgepodge of stately old homes that have been spirited here from various sites in the region.

A lovely tour guide in Victorian garb led us through some of the houses. She said that the park started in 1969 with two relocated mansions from Bunker Hill, but those burned down. (Later we saw some fragments of fireplace tile, their grisly remains.)

First, the Mt. Pleasant House, a rich family home built in 1876. I like the corner details that look like giant pieces of Pez made of chalk. Our tour guide pointed out ornate hinges and door knob rosettes. We didn't get to see much of the interior of this guy because a group was setting up for an event. This is an important source of income for the park.

Next door sits the Hale House, a Queen Anne number from 1887. Oh the ornate woodwork, the lincrusta paneling! Each chandelier had been outfitted with both gas jets and electrical sockets, and both energies flowed down the same channel, yikes.

At some point in time (maybe the 1970s?) the house got painted a bunch of different colors as an advertisement for a paint company, and stayed that way until some official insisted that Heritage Square repaint it. Supposedly it caused a number of accidents on the 110 Freeway, just across the channelized Arroyo Seco waterway from the park.

Miss Victorian Tour Guide classified this house as working class, while the Mt. Pleasant House typified a custom home of wealth, and the Hale House was a middle-class tract home. It had originally sat near Lincoln Park and the Selig Zoo. It may have had a lion or two pass through.

This Methodist church on one end of the lot seems to have an evil glow emanating from its core. The interior's cavernous waste cannot be accessed by visitors.

Though they look like archery targets, these are actually part of the Heritage Square Manhole Collection. Really these drive home the point that for many years in LA our history has been something to sweep aside, maybe into a confined zone where the diehards can go and salivate over broken bits that got in the way of endless progress. Heritage Square was founded at a time when rampant redevelopment changed the character of Los Angeles' landscape, burying Victorian splendor beneath towers of Epimethean postmodernism.

But wait, there's more!

A carriage house.

An exile from Angelino Heights, replete with the elaborate woodwork of John J. Ford. This home had been built as a tract by the Beaudry Brothers, but Mr. Ford embellished his family's home with his own handiwork.

One other gem of a house sits on the lot, but I didn't find the exterior impressive and no pictures could be taken in the interiors of the buildings. Octagon House! Bobby described it as a proto-Bucky Dome. You walk in the door, and immediately lose your sense of direction as two rooms mirror off the entryway. Plus there's a little tower on top.