Feature Article

Is This Bike a Pipe Bomb?

by James Thompson

I always wondered what that little bumper sticker on the punk and scene kids’ bikes meant.  I figured it for some clever but meaningless provocation.

Later I imagined it more elegantly as a political statement.  It said to me that the mere act of cycling in a sometimes cycling-unfriendly world is not just a lifestyle.  It is positively charged with action and advocacy.  Even explosive.

I was a little right and wrong on both counts.  

My introduction to cycling advocacy was in the same place I first saw that bumper sticker.  At Library West on UF campus in 1997 I attended a loosely organized and anonymously civil disobedient word-of-mouth event called a Critical Mass (CM) ride.  Hundreds gathered to ride in the streets without permit, blocking car traffic during rush hour on a Friday.  

Like our bigger city peers we had no obvious leaders, no social media, no maps, and no authority.  That way, no one got arrested as a ringleader.  Of course some did go to jail, usually for streaking, or getting into fights with motorists.  Even anarchists need leaders it seems.

Like the cycling advocacy movement, CM has matured and diversified.  Local riders like Gainesville’s Rider “Dueease” and Rider “Stubbington” to your left try to get along with our City’s Finest during CM events, and not to upset motorists overtly.

Reflecting back on my first steps in bike advocacy, and how so many more young people are now involved in it, I realize I was wrong on many counts about Critical Mass as an advocacy tool.  It mostly upset motorists the way we did it back then, and little political action came from it to my memory.  No one ever asked anyone to do anything else afterward.  It was mostly a carnival.  The call to action was simply to ride your bike.

And that begs a question.  Is cycling in and of itself a political act?  I’m not talking about lobbying or marching on the Capitol for bike lanes.  What about just riding, commuting, hitting the Hawthorne Trail with a friend?

Spoiler Alert . . . the answer is Yes.

As the cycling movement matured in general, Critical Mass has simultaneously evolved into more civilized and varied forms.  Where it needs to be radical and when no one listens, CM can still be disruptive.  Where it needs to moderate, it separates into less disruptive neighborhood rides.  Where it can afford to be gracious and public after a long presence in an established cycling town, it even has its own facebook page.  It is without a doubt a political animal, responding to the needs of the moment, its history, and its goals.  

It wins.  It fails.  Some even say it has been so successful it is irrelevant in some places.  I wouldn’t say that an orange double decker bike, or the absence of adversarialism with police makes a cyclist “irrelevant” or even terribly political.  Not enough context to decide.

But in this regard, the contemporary CM is just like anything in life of a questionably political nature.  It can appear naive and fun.  It can be organized, political, righteous, or contemptuous.  It can eschew authority or hunger for it with passion.  It can be sexy or carnivalesque, serious or strident.    

As with a CM event, we hope in politics those things happen in a manageable way over time.  A time to plant.  A time to uproot.  A time for peace.  A time for change.  A time for everything.  

Hopefully, never a time for pipe bombs.

But, Stoicism aside, neither CM or the larger cycling advocacy movement can responsibly sever politics from everyday cycling.  

The facts are that we sometimes have no control over what motorists think of us, or the jealousies our co-workers have because we are fit and active and having fun, nor the actions they take in response.  And we certainly have little control over the socially destructive hatred of the anti-bike crowd.  By merely turning a pedal stroke in public, especially in a group of any kind, you participate in a political theater, if not of your own making.

In materialist terms, the parsing of the political from the personal is even more difficult.  The residential area your house was zoned in so you could have quiet streets.  The rules your apartment makes about locking bikes up outside in the weather.  Laws about lights at night.  The contractor’s license it took to build the bedroom you sleep in before a race or a commute.  The signage alerting drivers to the presence of you and your kids and coworkers and fellow students.  The city streets you turn onto and how wide they are and whether they have bike lanes.  Whether your kids learn about cycling in school, or whether they even learn Driver’s Ed.  All these things are decided by politics, advocates, and organizers.  Machines, politicians, and corporate money.  And also those with power driven completely by ideology, be it left, right, utopian, fascist, anarchist, or NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard).

We stand on their shoulders, all of those political creatures, every time we ride.  We will never meet most of them.  Those that built what we have and those that aborted what we don’t can only make historical appearances as time passes.  

Would it surprise you to know the idea for the Archer-Braid Trail connecting Archer to Haile to UF to downtown was hatched more than fifteen years ago (twenty depending on who you talk to)?  

Many of us will remember winning back the Haile portion after getting our local cycling club and community charged up.  It was a nauseating and complex political event.  The report from one meeting would confound a seasoned analyst of local politics.  And ours was but a small and recent part of the political effort to build that infrastructure.  The planning went through multiple political regimes, multiple fundings and refundings, and finally the temporary detachment and quick reattachment of its body parts we witnessed and overcame.  

A dream imagined it.  Politics determined its life or death.

Given the arguable global revolution in cycling taking place, much of it inspired surprisingly by industry leaders from North America, the question of cycling’s political nature is moot for many.  Ask New Yorkers or citizens of many political stripes in Britain.  Indeed, ask most any growing city in North America (the footnotes in the wiki on Mapes’ book lead to some excellent scholarship).  It’s hard not to be political when you are talking about or doing cycling.

Even if you are a purely recreational cyclist, with no interest in politics or social interaction of any kind, you can’t avoid brushing up against a politically edifice, usually a paved one.

Indeed, every single group ride that the Gainesville Cycling Club does--be it a limerock County Road or a paved bike lane with a rumble strip--represents a political struggle and process in which players and interest groups organized voices, research, money, elections, and political muscle.  That’s no different for an Alley Cat bandit race or a CM ride.  

Tom Petty’s dream of a song, “American Girl”, didn’t conjure up that pavement, those rumble strips, regulation bike lanes, and nature overlook on our storied Highway 441.  

All of this is true as well for the larger issue of multi-modal advocacy, of which cycling is perhaps the most critically progressive1 feature.  It is good to know that at times local representatives of the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Home Builders present census and industry data showing a trend away from automobile use and a desire for transit among home-seeking, salaried, executive, and entrepreneurial Americans between the ages of 20 and 40 years.  They did so at our last County Transportation Summit.  

But local (and national) anti-transit, anti-bus, anti-bike politicians rarely care about logic, data, public input, and facts, or even whether multi-modal transit is more affordable.  What they care about is organizing politically, appealing to emotion, separating us out as people that don’t drive or pay taxes or that hate cars, and vilifying the transit movement as a homogenous beast destroying the American Dream.  More than anyone, they want us to avoid associating cycling with politics, or doing politics at all.  Because that would help them move back the line in the sand that cycling has become in a major culture and political war largely fermented by the American right wing and eagerly fertilized by the left.

This is all sounds so serious, doesn’t it?  

But cycling advocates are not trying to take the fun out of a sport or recreation.  More than anyone we enjoy, participate in, and organize recreational activities that sway far from politicking.  We lead group rides, teach new riders, gaze at flowers, do Alley Cats, host the Tour de Gainesville, clean up local trails, help get bike racks put in downtown, plan holiday dinners, organize picnics, and, I can promise you, engage in a fair amount of self-deprecating humor.

Advocates only ask that we remind ourselves occasionally that we enjoy what we have because of the the political actions and organizing of those that came before us.     

If you want to be a part of it all, you don’t have to be a blowhard.  And you don’t need to be an encyclopedia of data.  You just have to speak and act in public from your lived and social experience.

Most important, you don’t have to be a partisan.  While there are Party and partisan tendencies in transportation advocacy, cycling tends to be one of the most unifying interest issues in transit politics.2  We saw that locally when we won back the Haile section of the Archer Braid Trail, and with the diversity of political and partisan leanings of our many and growing advocates.  

Here are some tips in the Gainesville Iguana about how to get involved (scroll down to page four on the pdf).

I was a little embarrassed to discover years later that This Bike is a Pipe Bomb is a popular and politically-tinged folk-punk band active from 1997-2011.  I felt pretty uncool musically, but I was happy to been inspired by this band I did not know of.

One thing is certain, my bike is not a pipe bomb.  

But my cycling always will be, in some way, political.

1Partisan abuse of the word “progressive”, and the diluting of its complicated and troubled history, demand a definition.  By progressive I mean someone who believes that reason, rational argument, research, and socially intelligent design of laws and institutions can make the world a better place.  You can therefore be a progressive Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, ad nauseum . . . .  This progressivism is also informed by history, not ideological futurism or absolute faith in either science or religion.  It is not naive or innocent.   

2I hesitate to use the word advocacy here.  We use the term “advocacy” in polite company as a stand-in for “politics.”  Advocacy could be construed as a subset of politics that is devoted to the furthering of an issue rather than a wholesale control of a system.  But in the end any advocacy that is not politically engaged is like playing touch football with a team allowed to tackle.  A politics without advocacy is like being the tackling team, leaving a trail of destruction in your wake with nothing left to control.