What is a Bike Movement? Here's the Deal with labikemvmt.org

When I started my anthropology PhD program in September 2007, I planned to study the politics of rock en español. Then my bike and Los Angeles intervened. I didn't like the way motorists treated me when I biked in L.A. I also knew that there was major status displayed in transportation, and that bicycling could be a symptom of just how marginal some people of color were. Something needed to change in L.A.'s street culture, and I wanted to help. But I didn't know how change happened. I started formulating a new dissertation project in spring 2008, when I decided to make becoming a bike activist into an ethnographic project.

For the next three years, I learned about how culture change happens through collaborating on some projects that experimented with bicycling in L.A., most notably CicLAvia and City of Lights/Ciudad de Luces. Then, when I moved away from L.A. to write the dissertation in 2011, I realized that those projects were able to emerge not just because some people had bothered to organize them, but because they built on the human infrastructure created by the L.A. bike movement. People had been fighting for years to show that not only could you bike in L.A., you could have FUN (F.U.N.?). It could be something that made people feel like part of a secret world, it could be something that connected people to the city's history, it could be something that you did in a costume, it could be something that you did with your kid, it could be something that changed your community. At the same time, it could be something you did because you couldn't afford to do what you really wanted, which was drive, or because riding a bike was just what people did back home.*

My dissertation is called "Body-City-Machines: Human Infrastructure for Bicycling in Los Angeles." Dissertation committee-willing, I should be done with that project in about a month. Because I don't really finish projects before I start new ones, I got this idea in my head that there needed to be more documentation of the kind of cumulative effect I experienced in organizing bike projects in L.A. There's a lot of information online about different projects and groups in L.A., on both the culture and advocacy side (any bike nerd who hasn't spent hours on Don Ward's amazing Midnight Ridazz Ride Calendar should go there immediately), but I thought it might be useful to put together a timeline of events people considered important to the development of a bike movement. I also knew that because I'd chosen to make my ethnography about my own trajectory as a bike activist instead of about the history of the L.A. bike movement, there were many things I didn't even know about. I was going to need a lot of help.

I bought the URL labikemvmt.org as a starting point. Then I put together an event for April 12 at the L.A. Eco-Village that would provide some oral history about the particular thread that I have followed in my own understanding of key elements of the L.A. bike movement:

Critical Mass -> LACBC and Bike Kitchen -> Midnight Ridazz -> Bike culture being more visible -> Bike advocacy being more vocal -> CicLAvia getting sanctioned by the city

That's a huge oversimplification, but that's the basic skeleton I had in mind. I chose April 12 because a lot of people who study things like urban social movements and cycling would be in town for the Association of American Geographers conference, and my Bicicultures collaborators and I had decided to put together our own shadow conference about the relationships between bike research, advocacy, and community.

As soon as I had announced the event, I started getting feedback that I had not invited key people who had insight into the bike movement. My first response to that was like, no shit Sherlock, ain't no way I can include the entire universe of people who have made bike change happen in L.A. in one event. Then I got over myself and started thinking about two important questions: Who counts in a social movement? Who gets credit for culture change?

Who counts in a social movement?
The event I'd put together, "Building a Bike Movement in Autopia," started with a panel of the usual suspects, so to speak: the founders of LACBC and the Bike Kitchen (Ron Milam, Jimmy Lizama, Ben Guzman, Kelly Marie Martin), people who had been around for the early days of Midnight Ridazz (Marisa "MaBell" Bell, Don "Roadblock" Ward), people who have done bike policy work in L.A. (Colin Bogart, Aurisha Smolarski-Waters, Alexis Lantz), and people who are bringing biking from places beyond the Bike Kitchen-Bikerowave-Bike Oven sphere like South L.A. to the forefront of the movement (Tafarai Bayne, George Villanueva, John Jones III). Ron, who was also the facilitator, framed things as an improv-style "yes, and" exercise, where people could interrupt each other after someone had talked for a few minutes to add their perspective. People had a great time talking and listening. There were about 60 people sitting around the ecovillage lobby, and I for one felt electrically charged. Then, with much left to say, we cut it off so we could have time to add events to a group timeline I'd posted around the room.

Jimmy Lizama gets the Chicken Leather treatment. Photo by Lois Arkin.

Facilitator Ron Milam and J. Swift. Photo by Lois Arkin.

The founders of the Bicycle Kitchen. Photo by Lois Arkin.

Ecovillager Lara Morrison and San Francisco artist LisaRuth Elliott. Photo by Lois Arkin.

Colin Bogart and John Jones. Photo by Lois Arkin.

Me and ecovillager/longtime L.A. messenger Randy Metz. Photo by Lois Arkin.

Things got loud! I've posted the updated timeline to labikemvmt.org, feel free to make suggestions there.

As I circulated and talked with different bike folks I'd never met, I learned that thanks to Sahra Sulaiman at LA Streetsblog, there were some people in attendance I hadn't expected to see that night, like J. Swift of Black Kids on Bikes and Stalin Medina of Watts Cyclery. Then I was bowled over to see Yolanda Overstreet-Davis, the force behind the documentary RIDE: In Living Color, who I'd been starstruck to meet at the National Bike Summit in March. I think, in retrospect, the event I organized on April 12 was more of a performance of the fuzzie-wuzzies people can feel when they're part of a subcultural network than it was an inclusive statement about the bike movement in Los Angeles. I wanted to show a particular community to other bike scholars, and feel a part of it myself again after living away from L.A. for two years. The other side of community belonging, though, is exclusivity. The evening became disorienting for me when I was reminded that the L.A. bike movement seems exclusive and privileged to some people. I felt pretty invisible, as a self-identified woman of color who has been arguing for equity in bike advocacy in L.A. and beyond since 2008. But I also felt like maybe it was an accomplishment that I'd created a moment where a room full of bike advocates would clap enthusiastically when Stalin said that Latinos riding bikes in South and East L.A. should be seen as part of the movement too.

Who counts as part of a bike movement depends on who you're talking to. Not everybody has the means to be part of the conversation, when the people talking are part of a limited circle. Bike advocates who have privileges of race, class, gender, education, social connections may not connect with every cyclist using streets in L.A., but they do speak for them in policy processes. Is it up to a movement and go out and recognize people as participants? Or is it up to like-minded people to find each other? Both? Maybe it makes more sense to talk about a multi-sited movement, where people developed their own communities around bicycling, rather than one cohesive thing to which many people belong. In a city like Los Angeles, where there are huge disparities between what's happening in different parts of the metropolis, it's an open question how much concurrent developments influenced each other.

I'm now thinking about the urban L.A. bike movement as having three threads: culture, advocacy, and usage. The people living these threads cross over between the different categories all the time, although not everyone does. 

Culture
The first time I experienced L.A. bike culture was riding in from Long Beach for the second All City Toy Ride in 2007 that met up at Olvera Street. It was a powerful turning point for me because I saw with my own eyes how many people wanted to have fun on bikes in L.A., and I saw them doing it not on the beach, not on some creek trail, but in the historic urban core of this so-called non-city. Based on what I've found from researching and talking to people, I would say that downtown L.A.'s messenger culture can take the credit for starting a social life around bicycling in the central city. Then Critical Mass brought together people who were interested in bike commuting but weren't necessarily part of the messenger culture. After the downtown messengers were no longer the only people socializing around urban cycling, one way to consider the growth of bike culture in L.A. would be linking it to the three oldest bike co-ops: the Bicycle Kitchen (East Hollywood), the Bikerowave (Westside), and the Bike Oven (NELA). A keen observer will note that a lot of the info I have on the timeline as of now is skewed toward the Bike Kitchen's circle of influence, because that's what I was more socially connected with as an ecovillager. I'm especially hoping to hear from folks who have key events in mind associated with the other co-ops, and from co-ops that started after the mid 2000s bike boom.

Advocacy
Ron Milam and Joe Linton had already been working in sustainability advocacy before they came together through Critical Mass in the late 90s. So Ron was ready to listen when Chris Morfas at the California Bicycle Coalition hinted that L.A. needed its own bike coalition. LACBC was founded in 1998. Many cyclists were politically activated by the DNC Critical Mass arrests in 2000 that disproportionately targeted women. Bike blogs, and especially the mobilization around the Bike Writers Collective that Stephen Box instigated, show the growth of political organizing around L.A. cycling after 2007. By the time I showed up in L.A.'s advocacy scene in September 2008, it was gaining speed. Speaking of bike advocacy, Angelenos should fill out Bikeside L.A.'s bike friendliness survey, which is accepting responses till Tuesday.

Usage
This refers to the fact that there've been bodies on bicycles getting around L.A. since the first bike boom in the 1890s. Maybe they weren't organizing themselves around urban cycling, like developing styles together or lobbying at City Hall, but their bodies have been out there on the streets whether motorists liked it or not. By 2005, when Dan Koeppel published his "Invisible Riders" article about Latino cyclists in Bicycling, urban bike culture and advocacy in L.A. were flourishing, but without necessarily reaching cyclists beyond subcultural circles. For me, as an activist and a researcher, thinking of bike usage as a component of a bike movement is about radical inclusion. It's about turning around and confronting our movement with its own tendencies to reproduce existing power structures and saying, no, we are going to go out of our way to call attention to the other people who aren't getting the credit for culture change that comes our way more easily. To say that the bodies of jornaleros, or the people biking in Inglewood and Boyle Heights, matter less than the mobs of Ridazz in this street story is to give in, yet again, to the idea that the city belongs to one group over another. The city is ours because we put our bodies on the line to make it what it is. No loft developer can design that into the street, no matter how much green paint they throw down. If we, as a movement, turn our backs on this tendency for human practices like urban cycling to become sites of value for some people and not others, we are the ones being exclusive. We are the ones making those riders invisible. When we don't expect to see cycling in places like Watts, we overlook the organizing going on there, the ways that people are using bikes to empower their communities.

Who gets credit for social change?
As I've been amassing dates, events, and names for the timeline, I've spent a lot of time searching through internet archives and seeing how newspapers like the L.A. Times portrayed alleycats in 2003, when they tagged it as "entertainment," and CicLAvia in 2013 being associated with public health. Talking about a social movement means talking about change, and change happens in ways that are hard to quantify. We decide, afterwards, what was important, what was a turning point. Sometimes we feel the excitement in the moment, and we think, everything will be different after this. Sometimes it's really clear who had an idea, and how that idea had ripple effects beyond an immediate circle. Sometimes people with more privilege, due to gender, education, race, any number of factors, position themselves to be the recipients of credit when there are others behind the scenes that everyone would admit had something to do with making things happen. How do community-based projects get converted into individual credit? There's not always a clear answer to the question, but the people who get named in newspapers, in conversations, in policy documents, travel into new situations where they can have an impact beyond the people who did not get credit.

It is a well-documented fact that women do not get as much credit for their activism as men do. For example, Lee Sartain's 2007 study of women in Louisiana's NAACP from 1915 to 1945 is called Invisible Activists. Closer to L.A., Mary Pardo's 1998 study called Mexican American Women Activists acknowledged the way that men frequently took the public stage in the Chicano movement. My point here is that who gets "credit" for projects tends to follow lines of power in a given situation. For this reason, I think it's especially important to consider issues like race, class, and gender in determining who counts in something like a bike movement. The timeline I've posted on labikemvmt.org is an attempt at tracing a chronology of accumulated energy more than it is a catalog of credit. 

Many thanks to all the people who came to the Biking Autopia event, especially Ron Milam who acted as facilitator and Kelly Marie Martin, who gave the timeline a big starting boost. I'm also grateful to the scholars on the Bicicultures listserv who contributed their thoughts to the question of what counts as participation in a bike movement, to Ben O'Donnell for coding the timeline, and most of all to Sarah McCullough, who brought the idea of an archive to my mind and who continues to be an invaluable collaborator.

*Note: I've never investigated the roadie or mountain bike cultures in L.A. I know there's definitely crossover between the urban bike movement and those social networks, but I'm not the person documenting them.

Experimenting with Para-Ethnography in Los Angeles

How does an ethnographer check in with a social movement? I spent two and a half years absorbing the zeitgeist of Los Angeles bike activism by participating in it. Then I spent two years thinking and writing about those experiences. After so much time away from a rapidly changing field site, I've started to wonder how closely the timeline of bike movement history that I developed aligns with the narratives of other activists.

On Friday night, Ron Milam and I are co-hosting an attempt at a group ethnography called "Building a Bike Movement in Autopia" (7-9 pm at the L.A. Ecovillage). I wonder how the people who have created a vibrant bike counterculture in Los Angeles think of their relationship to the city. Can we, as a group, trace the outlines of the bike movement, which on its own cannot speak and exists only through the collaborative actions of multiple individuals? I've learned that media coverage of community-based movements often leaves out the complicated webs of human infrastructure that bring subcultural interests into mainstream reality. People in the street, advocates taking their concerns to political offices, people who work behind the scenes in public offices, and elected officials combine in social networks that affect policy outcomes. This gets glossed over as "political will" rather than an ongoing process of transforming popular opinion and policy through visible shifts in how people use space. What do bike activists in L.A. think propelled the movement forward, and how do they connect that growth with the gains in bicycle policy seen in LA today?

The L.A. bike movement experiment on Friday is an extension of the "para-site" concept developed at the Center for Ethnography at UC Irvine. It is calling upon people who experience/d the changing state of bikes in L.A. to reflect on their agency. To my mind a group ethnography extends the participant-observer role to others in the field, asking interlocutors to become what Douglas Holmes and George Marcus have called "para-ethnographers." When we're interacting with people as anthropologists, we're hardly the only ones aware that there is a larger system that give everyday actions meaning. I want to know what others find significant.

However, ethnographers also agonize over making representations of what they find in fieldwork, and I don't think creating a collaborative representation of something with multiple participants like a movement can be anything but tricky business. Activism in a city as massive and varied as Los Angeles has many layers and milieux. Who might be left out? For example, choosing the ecovillage as the location for the event reflects my own embeddedness in the field; I was an ecovillager during my fieldwork, and it's still my home when I come to L.A. Because the ecovillage has loomed large in bike activism, though, it may cast a shadow on the work of others, as a westside advocate who has accomplished a lot for biking in L.A. pointed out to me.

There's no way Friday's event can encompass the sheer volume of people and projects that make biking in L.A. such an exciting world. But maybe with a group ethnography, incompleteness can be seen for what it is: a starting point rather than a part masquerading as a whole. My goal for Friday is to create a timeline of important events and moments in L.A. bike movement history, combining many individual perspectives into one partial narrative. There's already a tremendous amount of information about various bike groups online (the Midnight Ridazz online calendar alone is a treasure trove), but maybe there's room for a knowledge archive on a movement-wide scale that would gather stories from many sides of the city.

"Building a Bike Movement in Autopia" is sponsored by the Center for Ethnography and is part of the Bicicultures Roadshow, a mobile conference bringing research on bike cultures, advocacy, and community into one conversation this April.

Models for Culture Change in Bike Advocacy

Last week, I attended the League of American Bicyclists' National Bike Summit in Washington, D.C., where bike professionals from around the country gather to discuss trends and strategies each March. I've been co-organizing a conference, the Bicicultures Roadshow, that considers the relationship between bicycling and culture change, and I talked to lots of people at the Summit about it. I had a number of interactions with people where I said I do "bike research" and I can tell what they heard was "urban planning or engineering research about bicycles in traffic." Much bicycle research fits into the technocratic system we have constructed to democratically govern our enormous population, with studies that are designed to count things and conclude that numbers show something. Policy decisions can depend on popular approval or disapproval demonstrated through statistics and other forms of quantitative analysis.

The kind of bike research I do is different. I talk to people about bicycling, and listen while they talk about bicycling. I try to be an activist (showing that change is possible) and an ethnographer (showing what people think is possible) at the same time. Unlike researchers, who adhere to a disciplinary structure for producing knowledge, activists are pragmatists; they use various tools to achieve some end goal. In this case, the end goal is getting more people on bikes. The current strategy in bicycle advocacy is trying to convince powerful people (elected officials, corporate leaders) that getting more people on bikes is a good idea because bike projects have economic benefits. The main way they're working to demonstrate this is by using numbers: sales figures, the lower cost of bike infrastructure projects versus highway projects, the numbers of people on bicycles passing through major intersections or riding on bike paths. In a movement so convinced of the necessity of using numbers to make a case for bicycling, what can an activist ethnographer do?

I had an enlightening conversation at the Summit with Luis Vivanco, an anthropologist who just published a book about bicycling, and Harry Brull, a League board member. Luis was explaining that anthropologists often question taken-for-granted phenomena, looking for complexity in seemingly simple places. I started talking about how I'd noticed that so much of the effort of bicycle advocates and researchers was dedicated to showing that bicycling is a good thing, and that increasingly I've been more interested in talking to people who don't like bicycling. I realized that I was doing a typical anthropological trick in trying to use ethnography to show that some people think bicycling isn't a good thing.

I don't want to prove that bicycling is bad, I want to prove that people's ideas about what is good and bad can change. It's a starting point to asking different questions about advocacy strategies. The issue isn't that bikes have economic benefits; it's who gets to enjoy those benefits. If bike projects are used as an urban redevelopment tool, historical divides might well be reproduced as longstanding residents are priced out and new, more desirable "creative workers" take their places. This is a shame because the bicycle should take us into the future, not down the same dead end streets.

What it boils down to is this: we need to change our transportation habits. What needs to change first, the design of our streets, or the demands of our street users? Should we assume that the only way to change our transportation landscape is to engineer different streets? If people were clamoring for bike infrastructure, we wouldn't need to prove over and over and over that bicycling is a good thing. It would be a popular fact. Here are some working models for change that I've been thinking about, and that I heard operating in presentations at the Summit:

The policy model was dominant at the Summit. The latter model I have pieced together through what I experienced in Los Angeles, what I experimented with in the Seattle Bike Justice Project, and what I have heard from other activists using bicycling as a community-building tool. One contrast these models illustrate is that community-based bike projects might not take the form of infrastructure, while infrastructure projects might involve going into a neighborhood and telling people that bikes are good for them without taking their current views into account.

Besides working to quantify the future benefits of bicycling, a possible direction for bike advocacy is finding out what people think about bicycling now. At the National Bike Summit I saw why numbers matter, but I also saw that there's an opening to talk more about culture. Attitudes and experiences have real impacts on how people use city streets, so they should be targets for advocacy too.

How I Learned about Human Infrastructure in Seattle

Twice recently, I've heard people involved in transportation planning tell stories about their first time walking or biking in a place where they'd only driven. Both stories ended the same way: and that's how I learned that the city needed better transit or bike infrastructure. These conclusions made me think about the difference between navigating a new space alone and getting oriented through other people. Locals don't approach built environments the same way people unfamiliar with them do; necessity and other pressures cause people to bike on the sidewalks of busy roads, to wait for hours at transit stops next to massive parking lots. In short, people use existing infrastructure wrong all the time, so trying to guess their practices from the shape of the street leaves out the specialized knowledge they're carrying around with them. Local knowledge is one aspect of "human infrastructure," the big idea I'm writing about in my dissertation. The concept coalesced for me, not coincidentally, as I was trying to feel at home in a new city.

When I moved to Seattle in February 2011, I had some notion that I'd be stepping into a sylvan writer's retreat, where I could get away from the hubbub of my Los Angeles bike life and compose a dissertation about it. But after a few months of malaise, I learned that now that I was an activist, there was no going back. I couldn't settle down and write because I felt like a big ol' pile of wasted humanity. I could see that lots of people in Seattle rode bikes, but I didn't feel very connected to them.

So I sent some emails to people at Bike Works, an organization I found online. I got a response from someone with the unlikely name of Davey Oil, and I made an appointment to visit their headquarters in Columbia City. I didn't really know what I was looking for, but fortunately I found a kindred spirit. Davey and I jumped into a long conversation about our ideals for bike activism (Bike education as a means to fight oppression: yes! Biking as an exclusive subculture: no!), and he explained the work he'd been doing as the volunteer coordinator at Bike Works for several years. Once I started volunteering, I could see that Davey didn't just keep track of volunteer hours and positions; he kept people excited and involved. He made every volunteer feel like the few hours s/he gave to the organization were a vital contribution. I noticed early on that I was not the only person energized by Davey's personality. Every time I went to a Bike Works event, I watched how people's faces lit up when they talked to this guy.

A skilled mechanic, Davey had also overhauled a weekly event at Bike Works called the Volunteer Repair Party (VRP). Unlike the bike co-ops I'd been familiar with in LA, Bike Works was not a place where you brought in your own bike to repair. They used the "recycle-a-bicycle" model, where donated bikes are refurbished and sold or given away to kids who take repair classes. The VRPs were where some of the repair work happened. Regardless of what I knew about wrenching, Davey assured me, I was welcome to show up at a VRP and knowledgeable people would help me as needed to get the little bikes in working order. The VRPs I've attended have been lighthearted and cheerful, and educational to boot. (As I've written about on this blog before, riding home from VRPs with friends also showed me better routes for biking around hilly Seattle.) Halfway through, everyone would break for "circle time," which meant eating ice cream and answering three questions: name, gender pronoun preference, and someone's idea for an icebreaker question. Everybody there contributed to the atmosphere of defiant goodwill, but it was easy to trace its origins to one person: Davey Oil.

Among his many other endeavors, Davey also stayed connected with Critical Mass in Seattle, and Tom of Seattle Bike Blog and I joined him there one month. After we parted ways with the whippersnappers in Ballard, the three of us ended up at Gas Works Park, watching the glowing Seattle skyline. Then we biked back up to Capitol Hill through Interlaken Park, lights off for the maximum effect of the damp green darkness of the urban forest. By the time the three of us organized a ride in September 2011 to mourn recent bicyclists' deaths, I felt less like a waste of space and more like my activist self. In June 2012, Davey invited me to sit in on one of the first iterations of Bike Works' program that brings bikes to adults at community-based organizations. I had never helped a grown up learn to ride a bike before, but now I know that middle aged women get as gleeful as little kids when their bodies start to grasp what it means to balance on a bicycle.

And then last August, I left on a monthlong trip and never really returned to the routine I'd established in Seattle. Now I mostly sit at home working on my dissertation and other projects, content in the knowledge that I can be an activist through my writing. Recently I attended a Bike Works volunteer appreciation party, and saw once again what a warm community thrives around that organization. Since Davey was moving on to start exciting new endeavors, the party became a sort of farewell event. People stood up and talked about their experiences with him, emphasizing again and again how welcoming and fun he had made things for them. Too shy in the moment to stand up and say my own piece about Davey, I sat thinking about how well he exemplified the concept of human infrastructure, a figure who shapes the conditions of possibility for what others can do. And then I realized that Davey was more than an example of this: he'd been a catalyst by showing me that I needed to express the idea in the first place.

Seattle isn't in my dissertation, but biking here, and talking to bicyclists about biking here, has shaped my ideas about Los Angeles. It's kind of surreal to try and formulate a theoretical concept through experiencing it, but that's what anthropologists do. Our work develops as our bodies move, and I sure appreciate my fellow travelers like Davey.

Boats and Trains and the British Isles

Pulp's "Boats and Trains" seems like an appropriate theme for this picture show.

At the end of August 2012, my partner and I traveled from Dublin to London using a ferry and a train. I documented the trip in pictures. (There's a wealth of information about this "SailRail" journey on the Man in Seat 61's website if you want more logistical details.)

Early on a Friday morning, an enclosed gangway fed people into the massive ferry called Ulysses in the Port of Dublin.

The perplexing Joycean theme continued inside the ship, which had a shopping mall and a "James Joyce Balcony Lounge."

Smokestacks belched as we pushed across the Irish Sea.

Lifeboats splashed against the water down below.

In the distance, Wales loomed.

Disembarking meant passing through another industrial tunnel.

Now we had reached a transportation hub on the Welsh island Ynys Môn, or in English Anglesey.

A fancy pedestrian bridge connected travelers with the town of Holyhead.

The clearly expensive bridge contrasted uncomfortably with the struggling "pound shops" lining the high street.

At Holyhead's center we found the church of St. Cybi, whose namesake was buried here in 555. The Cornish saint is also commemorated in the town's Welsh name, Caergybi.

The medieval church was built on a Roman fort, whose still intact walls seemed to whisper "helloooo" as we passed through the churchyard.

(Then we looked up and saw the grinning faces of two boys who were lying across the top of the stones and whispering to spook the tourists. It was some A+ pranking, well done little Welsh boys.) 

Back in the railway station, intricately decorated brackets held up the roof. This reminded me of a strong impression from my only other trip to Europe, when I was 17: functional things were prettier there than in the United States.

We climbed aboard our train, which was run by Virgin under contract with the government. It was not very clean inside, or comfortable. The dirty windows made it impossible to take decent pictures of all the castles passing by outside.

The ticketing system in the UK required us to purchase seat reservations along with our travel passes. Partway through the journey to London, the computerized system failed and all new passengers had to grab whatever seats they could find. It was interesting to see how chaotic this seemed, whereas on Amtrak finding a seat on the fly is the norm. Once people rely on a system, its failure complicates what might otherwise be a straightforward process.

And then, finally, we arrived at incredibly bustling Euston Station in London at about 17:00. Waiting for our hostess to meet us, we got to see crowds of commuters having the weekend's first drink at old gatehouses that had been cleverly converted into watering holes.

London, I harriedly learned, had teeming masses on a scale that made the New York City we'd been in just a week earlier look like a movie set. London, with its spoils from centuries of global financial domination and colonial exploitation. All of a sudden I felt very small.

Life and Place in Southern California

I was standing on the platform at San Juan Capistrano station this morning, waiting for a Metrolink train to carry me to school. I've been feeling low on this trip, reading about the unforeseeable changes we've set into motion on our planet through our unconcern over resource consumption, and meanwhile seeing people drive alone in trucks with monster tires and four door cabs. I've pumped $51 into my mom's car's gas tank, and I've had the goods I've purchased shoved into enough bags to create my own little corner in the plastic sea. Just before the train arrived, a man rode up to the platform on a bicycle. That made me feel a little more hopeful.

View of the San Bernardino Mountains from the train.

Riding the train north from San Juan, I always take a seat on the right side because if there's not too much smog I can see the spread of the San Bernardino Mountains to the east. I think about the grape ranch my great grandparents established in the foothills of that range, where they sold under the label Our Girl and put a picture of my grandmother on the crates. That is, they did until my great grandfather Otto Meyer died in a car crash in 1929, leaving a widow and two small children to weather the Great Depression on their own.

Otto Meyer and his little girl, Kathryn Holmes, who became my grandma.

I think about the picture I've seen of my great grandmother's father, Ernest Everett, at work driving a streetcar in San Bernardino in the early 1900s. I think about my great grandmother herself, Vera Frances Cassen, who remarried and with her bricklayer husband built a brick cottage in Corona Del Mar in the 1940s. My mother has told me about the trips Grandma and Ben, as she knew them, would take her on to then-remote brickyards, which today would be easily accessible from the interstate and the suburbs that branch off of it. Great Grandma knew the names of all the plant life. She was my living link to this past, staying with us until she reached 101 years in 1996. Great Grandma kept a tidy garden and cooked delicious meals for her extensive brood late into her 90s.

My Great Grandma on the right, next to a tree her second husband Ben Cassen cultivated. Walt Disney purchased the tree and brought it to his new theme park, seen here in 1962.

I think about my mother's other grandfather, the Norwegian Lars Holm who emigrated to New York as a little boy in the nineteenth century and became the American Lawrence Holmes. He had a carob ranch in Riverside County and, as an inventor, devised a unique system of dams to irrigate his land. Later he lived in Los Angeles, after the Metropolitan Water District had seized his land and put it under a reservoir, Lake Mathews. His unsuccessful lawsuit to regain control of the land left him penniless, and the family was supported by his wife, Gertrude, a voice coach to the stars.

Even though nobody in my family continued to farm after my grandmother's brother tried and failed to revive the Our Girl grapes land, I grew up with a distinct sense that burying this land under houses and water was suffocating something. I felt sorry for the coyotes I heard yipping in anticipation of the train coming into our valley, and hoped they would feast on the cats of the wealthy people who bought the readymade mansions encroaching on their territory. When I was a kid, every time we drove out the Ortega Highway to hike in the Cleveland National Forest, we saw houses reaching further and further into the wilderness.

I've been to their churches, their jumbotronic stadia with where they worship some charismatic leader standing acres away from their nosebleed seats, who sanctions their confusion of greed with prosperity, of fear with humility. I saw a car yesterday that was the size of a small bus, and on the back were not one, not two, but three of those metal fish that people display to show their solidarity with Jesus. Secured in a cocoon made of consumer waste and held together by the self-serving scripture falling from their false idols' mouths, they rot in front of their plasma screens, watching the Real Housewives of Orange County they wish they could be.

Or not, I can't speak for others. But I see the effects of their lifestyle in the whistling emptiness of sidewalks and bike lanes next to their massive SUVs. I see the way people drive on neighborhood streets like they are on the freeway, weaving between cars that dare to obey the speed limit. Nevermind the children playing feet away from their squealing tires. There is an utter selfishness expressed in this culture of closed capsule travel, where any undesired interaction can be avoided. Being alone is somehow the prize; or being together, but only with those so like oneself that you'd think there'd been a downpour of frosted tips and status handbags.

What will happen if they don't wake up? In a place where community centers such as churches breed as much hate as the freeways where people rev their customized engines at each other, what future can there be but destruction? Will it come to the battle to the death over dwindling resources that some people seem to desire as confirmation of their belief that humans are selfish beyond all else? I wish all these intruders would leave, leave the land to the coyotes and the jackrabbits and the cougars they shoot for attacking people out of desperate hunger. I wish they would give up their overmortgaged stucco castles and return to whatever place they came from. But they're not going to do that. They have their own relationships with these places, as different from my own as they may be. And my family stole land from others who lived here before them. There are many different places struggling to occupy the same spaces. This is human history.

Just after I started thinking of myself as “carfree” in 2008, I attended the Toward Carfree Cities Conference in Portland. At one panel about some sustainable transportation issue or other, what really stuck with me was what somebody said during the Q&A. With a calm, unironic face, this person said that workers simply need to move closer to their jobs. This will reduce their commute distances and oil dependency. Ha, I thought, you're gonna make a lot of friends with a stance like that! People form ties to the places where they live, and the idea that they can just pick up and move doesn't seem to take this into account.

I have no claim to this land, besides the graves of Meyers that fill up a corner of the Mountain View Cemetery in San Bernardino, and the grave of my grandmother sitting on a hill facing the sea at Pacific View Cemetery in Corona Del Mar. Other family graves lie on land we no longer own, some of which has been developed into housing subdivisions. Who knows what those sleeping pioneers would think about their little half Mexican descendant, ranting and raving about bicycles. I wish I could just go away and ignore Southern California, and hope like so many spiteful others that it would wash away into the sea. But I can't give it up for lost, despite the drive I see throughout this basin to burn through all resources with no concern for tomorrow. Every time I return it smells like home, it feels like home. This enormous basin between the mountains and the sea causes some chamber within me to resonate with joy, critical as I am of the region's dominant lifestyle that sees no contradiction between a temperate climate and constant entombment in cars.

When I was biking to the Tustin train station on Monday, I had to leave the wide bike lane on Harvard Avenue in Irvine because a landscaping truck was parked in it. Up ahead, I could see a Latino worker, walking slowly down the bike lane. As I got closer, I realized he was spraying weed killer onto small plants that had sprouted in the crack between the roadway and the gutter. I wondered if those plants would be there without the sprinklers used to keep the lawn next to the road green. All of these efforts to create places where life is totally controlled. To what end?

Moving from Subaltern to Sustainable Transportation

Yesterday this 2011 post from Thought Catalog about tips for riding transit in LA, by a woman who is a longtime bus rider, made the rounds in my corner of the internet. As I have noted lots of times on this blog, most recently here, I'm not a fan of the notion that using transit in LA is for disgusting losers, so I appreciate finding positive writing on the subject. At the same time, it is an undeniable fact that for many years our culture, and the public policy our cultural beliefs shape, has treated transit users like worthless criminals who don't deserve quality service. Advocates like me are trying to transform how Americans think of riding transit, walking, and biking, but that doesn't mean we can erase that history.

Down in the responses, I found this comment by a guest user: 

[Y]our perspective of L.A. buses may be valid but it's a very privileged point of view. youre white.. you got your ipad and charmed sense of self. My family didnt have a car for my entire childhood and being able to drive instilled a sense of pride for me and my family. It sounds superficial, but when you grow  up in a working-class, immigrant household, being in charge of you and your family's mobility means something. My parents are undocumented but I was there anchor baby. I grew up in L.A. and almost all my friends grew up taking the bus.. it was always shitty.. you were not growing up here in the 90's, buses were dangerous back then. Before you go on thinking you know everything about L.A. and its people.. take a step back from your ipad and learn to be more sensitive to the fact that some people on that bus want nothing more than to be the "trapped" people with a car.   

Rarely do I see so explicit a condemnation of privileged people using sustainable transportation. I'm not a mind reader, so I don't know this poster's motivations. But to me, this comment illustrates a tension I have witnessed many times, explicitly or implicitly, as I've studied bicycling in U.S. cities. It's the reason I stopped riding the bus as soon as I could when I got my driver's license at 17. When you've been the person standing at the bus stop for hours while people drive by in their cars, when you've had someone try to rob you when you got off the train, when you've been riding on the same bus as someone who smelled so bad that another stranger started yelling about it, when you're someone whose skin color or accent or clothing means you're going to be judged by strangers, you know the nasty truth about our disinvestment in public spaces and transportation in the U.S. Riding buses for many years has been a punishment for those in poverty, a further reminder that if you don't make much money, you don't deserve a good quality of life. That's something that stays out of the picture in a lot of sustainable transportation marketing.

The new, positive image of bicycling and public transportation at Union Station in Los Angeles

In the Thought Catalog piece, the writer seemed to be trying to frame riding transit as a rational choice; driving in LA is very stressful, so it makes sense to use the extensive network of buses and trains. I know a lot of people who use this kind of justification for going carfree. I wonder if this only strengthens the image of sustainable transportation as a symbol of privilege. So what am I saying, that everyone should drive because some people couldn't afford to for a long time and that reinforced their social marginalization? Not at all! Driving may be a status symbol, but that road leads off a cliff.

Rather, I think that robust sustainable transportation promotion projects should acknowledge the fact that our transportation systems and histories reflect our social inequalities. Trying to leapfrog over that legacy might be interpreted as just another attempt to impose an outsider's definition on someone's reality. The bus isn't scary, it's easy to use! Biking isn't a transport mode of last resort, it's a great way to exercise! To me, ecological sustainability means recognizing our interdependence. That means we need to build new definitions of sustainable transportation together.