A Brief Visit to the SLC Bicycle Collective

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

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.

Salt Lake City Before Sunrise

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.