My wife grew up in Dakar, Senegal and never fully learned to ride a bike. Not that kids there don't, ever, but especially for girls it's not the given that it is here in the US. If anything, among better-off urban Africans, bikes can sometimes be seen as what you ride if you… well, can't afford a car.
Anyway, she's talked about getting on a bike for quite a while and finally we got around to the big moment yesterday. We went to the Capital Bikeshare station at the bottom end of the National Zoo, since it was closest to a nice quiet trail in Rock Creek Park.
What immediately became apparent is how not learning to ride as a child makes cycling a surprisingly difficult balancing act (literally) as an adult. She was very unsteady at first and tended to veer wildly in unexpected directions. But with the help of her youngest sister - who does ride - she kept at it and had a few really nice runs near the end. Great job!
Following up on yesterday's post, my friend Mike sent me this video of James Howard Kunstler's TED talk from 2004. If you don't know Kunstler it's a great intro. If you're already a fan, you'll remember why. A few brilliant laugh out loud lines, woven into his trademark deconstruction of the American Way. At least, our Way of building places and spaces over the last few generations.
What do his urbanism concepts have to do with bikes? I'd argue 'everything'. Bicycling goes hand in hand with the holistic world we create, or more precisely, the world we choose to live in. The world of, say, the pre-1960s naturally gave birth to a cycling mindset that today we might refer to as citizen cycling but then was just cycling.
Today, what North Americans typically think of as normal biking - faster, longer distances, hunched over, often with recreation or sport in mind, wearing specialized clothing and gear - was born of our very different world. People live farther apart, farther from work, in a more fractured and sprawling physical landscape, with time only on the weekends to ride for exercise or sport.
I always say biking is not just about bikes. In fact I actually don't care much about bikes themselves or biking per se as most people think of it these days. I care about cities, and the quality of life that a well-designed built landscape creates. A humane landscape that, incidentally, not only allows for more civilized biking but encourages it. Bikes, like birds or butterflies or good cafes or people walking around in a relaxed way, are a result, a symptom - when you see more bikes around, and people look happy, not grim, riding them, it means your city or town is doing many things right in creating a vibrant and harmonious human environment.
I happen to believe that a massive increase in biking - meaning getting non-bikers to consider getting on a bike - would cure a lot of what ails us. I think promoting the citizen cycling model is a good way to do that.
Better biking > better cities. Better cities > better biking (Copenhagen has a lot of bikes because it's a great city, and is a great city, in part, because it has a lot of bikes).
And no one is more about better cities than James Kunstler.
[...] the District has undertaken one of the most ambitious efforts in the country to promote the use of bicycles.
I've always thought that Capital Bikeshare fits perfectly into the ride-as-you-are concept. So great to see it taking off, along with increased bike use in general. Of course, if you check the comments in the Post piece, the haters are out in force. Incredible how some people can't tolerate the combo of beauty, efficiency, and fun. And as a friend of mine said recently, more biking is better for drivers, they just haven't figured that out yet.
Jim Sebastian, head of Washington DC's bicycle and pedestrian programme, says his goal is to make the nation's capital "one of the most bike friendly cities in the country".
"This is something that's clean, healthy, efficient," he said. "People are demanding it. It's going to bring people to the city and keep people in the city."
Great to see the explicit link between cycling and the vitality of the city itself.
According to a sidebar stat in the article, the US census bureau ranks Washington DC sixth in the country in terms of number of cycling commuters, at 2.3 percent. Seems like a pitiful number compared to the likes of Copenhagen, where upwards of 30 percent bike to work. But not hopelessly far behind Portland OR (5.9 percent) in the top spot, and well above the US average of .5 percent.
