What Can I Do to Put You on this Bike Today?

I hate the notion of a "cycling community". People never speak about a "motoring community" or a "bus riding community", yet the idea that by hoisting yourself up onto two wheels makes you part of a confederacy. A subculture, where you're either one of the rare few who "really gets it" and was doing it "before it was cool", or one of the mass of poseurs just following the crowd. A face in a sea of tickets.

This recently manifested itself in a comment (which I replied a bit snarkily to) on a story Huffington Post Chicago ran on my friend Martha's photoblog Bike Fancy. Now, I don't mean to call out Mr. or Ms. Randomphantom (if that IS their real name) individually, this is an all-too-common attitude. Essentially, "You're not doing it right". That's pretty much how all subcultures operate, but as for me, the bike that I ride is not my identity. It's transportation, pure and simple. It's the same if I drive a car or take the El, I'm just trying to get somewhere, and to look like a normal person in the process.

Personally, I don't really care what kind of bike you want to ride, or what you want to wear when you're doing it, or how fast you want to go. If you've found what's comfortable for you, that's fantastic. I'm much more interested in the people who would ride a bike but presently do not. I have quite a number of friends who fall into this category and when asked, will invariably give one of two responses.

The number one answer is "safety". Most normal people simply do not want to ride a bike in car traffic. I am among them, I'm pretty used to it by now but some days it just sucks. Any city that is serious about increasing mode share has to install segregated cycletracks. That'll upset the vehicular cycling champions out there, but so what? That tactic will only ever appeal to a small minority of cyclists anyhow, if the goal is to get people onto bikes in the first place you have to give them a place of perceived safety. If this was pure conjecture, and the Dutch and the Danes hadn't already proven how to do it, I would say, "Well, maybe". It'll take a city leadership with a clear commitment and political will to make such a drastic infrastructural shift to disprove any naysayers, but it's the only real way. When I visit the Lakefront Trail in Chicago, I'm usually astonished by the sheer numbers of cyclists who use it for their commutes. For me, it's a destination since it's too far out of the way to make sense for commuting, and it makes me wonder how many would be lured out if the proposed trail along the North Branch of the Chicago River or the Bloomingdale Trail were ever built.

The second has to do with the bikes themselves. I've had several people tell me (especially women--an "indicator species" as I've mentioned before) that they would prefer to ride a bike which gives them an upright position on the saddle. When most of the bikes that people see on the roads are racers of one sort or another with somebody hunched over the handlebars, that alone is enough to turn many people off. Of course there are many upright bicycles on the market, but novices are usually not well-informed enough to understand the different styles of bikes, let alone the pros and cons of each. Myself, I know a thing or two, but when folks start talking about forks or cranks or the Tour d'France, I tune out. I know that I am hardly alone in this regard.

Mikael Colville-Andersen and others have written at length about the importance of normalizing bicycling, and I would firmly place myself into their camp. As much as we may hate to admit it, the United States is a solidly consumerist nation, and as such people are highly susceptible to marketing and image. And face it, the image of the self-righteous cyclist in bright safety gear and spandex will never be "cool". The proponents of vehicular cycling strike me as essentially making the argument that if more cyclists "take the road", drivers will eventually leave their cars at home out of some odd sense of self-interest. When neoclassical economists made the same assumption about consumers in our capitalist system, it more or less led to our current morass. It may be a strained analogy, but just as we need new thinking to dig us out of our economic hole, we need new thinking on how to solve the problem of getting people onto bikes.

Big Government

In Every Dream Home, a Heartache

Just finished reading this piece from the New York Times Magazine on the trend toward smaller house sizes. In summary, the jury's still out. Houses aren't selling hotly as a rule, and buyers don't seem to know what to make of a "small house" of only 1700 square feet--the average new home size thirty years ago. This got me thinking about the spaces that we live in. My parents' house (which seems huge to me when I visit) was just a shade bigger than average when they bought in 1980. My girlfriend and I reside in a circa 1905 two-story house, which we estimate around 1500 sq ft. That would have seemed palatial to the average Chicago tenement dweller; not as glamorous as the boulevard mansions being erected a few blocks east, but within much closer reach. The later bungalows are even smaller, yet they too represented a huge increase in personal living space for families cramped in minuscule apartments.

To understand how a house that sometimes feels too big can be considered smaller than "small", we have to look at what has become the new normal. The Times piece cites pre-crash model houses topping out at over 6000 sq ft, and a 2007 average of about 2500. By contrast, the average new house in Denmark is only about 1400 sq ft and only 825 sq ft in the UK. The American psyche looms large in these statistics. Our nation's identity is closely linked to a frontier mentality, a notion that there is an inexhaustible supply of both land and resources. This would have made perfect sense to early settlers who happened upon seemingly endless tracts of virgin forest and vast herds of bison. Of course, we hit the west coast 200 years ago and have been steadily populating the gaps ever since, but the myth still lingers. Buy a house for your 2.5 kids, tend a chemically-treated lawn, drive everywhere even if you don't need to, before eventually succumbing to suburban ennui. This is what "normal" people have done for fifty years in this country. (Interestingly, one nation which has kept up with American home sizes is Australia, which I would argue possesses a similar frontier mindset.)

At some point, things went topsy-turvy. I remember as a kid in Southern California, before the real estate bubble that burst in the early 90s, lots of new construction homes going up near where I lived. When my parents bought, the area was the very definition of "exurb", but the suburbs kept on their steady march. As I've alluded before, the subdivision was zoned to keep horses, so the yards were quite large. I grew up on a half-acre lot (it's very unpleasant to mow that much grass in the midst of an Inland Empire heatwave), while new houses were going up with double the square footage on a fraction of the land. The yard...the psychological "land" that ordinary people had envied for centuries, was now a postage-stamp afterthought to a hermetically-sealed living space, replete with formal dining room and four-car garage.

What really bothers me is that I can't even imagine what people do with that much house. As the minimalist aesthetic has never had many American adherents, having a lot of empty space leads to a desire to fill it with stuff. This is turn, drives overconsumption. The bigger the house, the more stuff you need to buy to make it look like it's inhabited. Furthermore, I would suggest that the "breakdown in family life" decried by many social conservatives has less to do with rap music or video games, than by giving kids too much of their own space. When large families lived together in one room, they couldn't avoid spending time together. It's also no coincidence that these sprawling exurban locales are the seat of right-wing support.

But who am I to tell people what kind of house they should want? The house-buying public will, eventually, understand that bigger is not always better. I think that it's a generational shift which is only beginning. If cities are serious about attracting a supposed "creative class", much attention needs to be paid to the state of public schools. It's one thing to get childless twenty-somethings to move in, it's quite another to get them to stick around when they start having kids. The schools are not unfixable, but it will be expensive. South Koreans sacrificed an entire generation of prosperity to invest in their education system, I doubt we could ask the same of the American public. It may be possible to enact such targeted austerity measures on a local scale though.

It's difficult to see the world outside of my liberal urban bubble sometimes. I know it's out there. I've lived there, I know the people. I also feel like I escaped.

Storm in a Teacup

I've been at a loss for words recently. I've got the skeletons of a few posts rattling around in my brain but I've been too crippled by a Jimmy Carter-sized malaise to flesh them out. Every morning I read (too much) news and it fills me with dread. I'm not a depressive person by nature...I'm often characterized as being overly negative, but I see myself as a realist with a utopian streak more than a pessimist. That's probably what has drawn me into the planning profession (or at least the fringes of it), the promise of making concrete, positive changes on society, however small. That said, my aim is not social engineering. The earliest cities grew organically, but as societies became more advanced and complex it became clear that some sort of method needed to be applied to the madness. The desire to escape the reality of life as it existed in the slums of Chicago/New York/London of the nineteenth century (or the Lagos/Manila/Mumbai/etc. of the 2010's) is as much to blame for our modern planning ills as any government-subsidized highway program.

This is at the root of why libertarian populist movements like the Tea Party seriously disturb me. I share some of their reservations about "big government", but for me those spring from more of a post-Watergate/X-Files angle than a "taxes are bad, mmkay?" platform. It's the military-industrial complex, domestic intelligence agencies, corporate influence and religious zealotry, all cloaked in the unassailable armor of American Exceptionalism, that terrify me, not the wonks at the Department of Transportation or the do-gooders at the EPA. When I read that an (admittedly tiny) group of Tea Party activists are now backing Chris Christie as their candidate du jour, almost solely based on his decision to defund the construction of a new rail tunnel across the Hudson River, it gave me pause. Infrastructure should not be the enemy of the people. The demand is great, and yet the "free" market is not about to step in and offer us some salvation from our national transportation nightmare. Some projects may be misguided or overpriced, but a truly open and transparent debate process would separate the wheat from the pork. There are plenty of ways of reducing the size of government (perhaps a few of the 700,000 civilian employees at the Department of Defense?) or cutting spending (corn syrup subsidies?), but when human lives are lost in bridge collapses, when congestion causes countless millions of dollars to be squandered in lost productivity and wasted fuel, and when anybody with half a brain can tell you we need to wean ourselves from fossil fuels for a host of reasons both environmental and strategic, my level of appall at the arrogance of the opposition is matched only by my disgust at the ineffectiveness of our supposed champions.

My already fleeting optimism is wearing ever thinner. The coming election looks to be shaping up along good old-fashioned scapegoating and fearmongering lines, rather than any serious discussion of What Must Be Done. I think it's a myth that modern political discourse is cruder than in the Good. Ole. Days, but the levels of anti-intellectualism and anti-science are just straight-up depressing. I think we might have reached Idiocracy levels a few centuries early.

Dirty Old Town

In lieu of the actual post I had planned on writing today (coming soon, promise)...I give you a friend's Facebook status update: