An Independence Day Manifesto
Today, in honor of our nation's Independence Day, I'd like to take a break from the more usual safety topics that this blog typically presents, and write a more personal reflection on personal independence and freedom of travel.
I'd always seen bicycling for transportation as a desirable option from both the environmental and fitness standpoint, but it never seemed feasible for me until 2002, when our family moved to Westbrook, only about 5 miles from my office near the Maine Mall. I checked out the bus system, and discovered that there was no direct bus route at that time. I'd have to take a bus into Portland and transfer to another bus back out to the Mall, making a 10-minute car trip into a 45-minute bus trip. Therefore I decided to try biking. I soon found that I liked it, and that it only took about 25 minutes. The rest, as they say, is history.
I'm happy that the Portland Metrobus system now provides a direct route between Westbrook and the mall, pretty much my exact route, and have used that as a backup on bad weather days. I can bring my bike along if I want, since all buses have bike racks. (How to use them) Transit is of course a valuable and necessary public service, but cycling provides the same schedule independence as a car, without all the financial and maintenance overhead associated with car ownership. Sure, cycling is generally slower than driving a car, but it can be on par with or faster than transit, by the time you take into account getting to and from the stops, time spent waiting, and all the stops that a local bus makes. You've got more options when faced with congestion. Parking is usually easy to find, and always free. And it's much faster than walking.
One of the best intangible benefits I get from cycling for transportation is the satisfaction of getting around totally under my own power. It just feels incredibly satisfying that I can go anywhere by bike that I can go by car, at least up to about a 10 mile radius, and many places I couldn't go in a car, on a vehicle that I can pick up and carry a short distance if need be, and all without buying gasoline. I have the fortune of having the use of a folding bike that I'm storing for a friend, and I have taken that on several long trips that include plane, bus, or train travel. It just feels so cool to pedal to a station and fold up the bike, then arrive at my destination city to unfold the bike and pedal on to where I'm staying. That is real independence!
I have even discovered an advantage that biking in a snowstorm, which I have done many times, has over driving a car. If I slide off the road, it's easy to get my bike unstuck and go on! (Done that many times too.) I have even stopped to help motorists dig their car out, then I just hop on my bike and be on my way. Very satisfying!
This is the inspiration for several local programs, and many more nationally, who aim to assist kids with life skills by teaching them to bike, and to work on their own bikes. In Biddeford, there is Apex Youth Connections, formerly the Community Bicycle Center, whose normal programs (pre-pandemic) include teaching safe riding and mechanical skills, and an "Earn a Bike" program. They also lead rides, and normally field a Trek Across Maine youth team. The Portland Gear Hub Bike School also incorporates youth riding and repair education, in normal times.
I took up writing this blog because I noticed an unprecedented number of bicyclists riding through my neighborhood as early as April, long before anyone but us "hard core" cyclists usually begins to even think about getting the bikes out of the basement or garage. Since then, it is confirmed that this country, and in fact much of the world, is in the middle of a Covid-inspired bicycling boom. Presumably many of you are taking up pedaling around the neighborhood for exercise, as gyms are closed, and most of us are still not doing as many other activities as we used to, while at the same time being encourage to exercise by walking or biking. Bike shops, deemed an "essential service" in Maine, are swamped.
My friends Wayne and Linda both post regularly on Facebook regarding their excursions around their areas, Westbrook Maine and Cleveland Ohio respectively. I always enjoy reading their thoughts and seeing their pictures. My friend and fellow member of the Westbrook Safe Mobility and Access Committee, Kimberly, also took up bicycling again a few months ago.
Last weekend, I hosted a cyclist from Idaho starting a cross-country tour, between his junior and senior years of college. He contacted me through the Warm Showers organization, kind of an "AirBnB" for cyclists who tour and are willing to host others doing so. He was using maps he had purchased from Adventure Cycling, an organization that has facilitated bicycling touring since 1973 (another bike boom year). More independence.
Several of my friends have experienced personal life/cycling journeys far more dramatic than most of us. My friend Hans undertook a 4000-mile cross country ride in 2017 accompanying a legally blind cyclist, Michael Robertson.They started Shared Vision Quest, dedicated to "connecting people with the drive to fulfill their dreams with those who can assist in that personal quest."
My friend and fellow cycling instructor Eli is likewise legally blind, and struggled to be personally independent due to his limited mobility options until he discovered how to "drive his bike" on roads with cars safely and effectively, through bicycle education including CyclingSavvy, which we now both teach. He writes, of his epiphany:
But the bicycling craze of the 1890s and early 20th century coincided with women's wakening desire to play a more active role in the economic and political life of their society. Besides just the personal freedom to be out and about on their own, without a man, which by itself aroused considerable suspicion and condemnation (not least because women cyclists helped to hasten the demise of hoop skirts in favor of scandolous "bloomers" - exposed a woman's legs, don'tcha know), bicycles were also useful for political purposes. British suffragette Alice Hawkins and her associates used their bicycles as transportation around Leicester and to travel to the nearby countryside and neighboring towns. During the 1911 local election, Hawkins and other cyclists from the Leicester "Women’s Social and Political Union" dressed in suffragette colors and staged an organized ride over to the Loughborough “Votes for Women” shop to distribute pamphlets. (Sheila Hanlon, "Alice Hawkins: Leicester’s Working Class Suffragette Cyclist")
In the non-political realm, the invention of the "safety bicycle" in the early 20th century, the first modern chain-driven device with two wheels of equal size, enabled the common person to ride more safely, and its popularity enabled mass production and brought the price down. Whereas the "high wheelers" were dangerous (Mark Twain famously said of them, "Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live."), and expensive to the point of mainly being used for recreation by gentlemen of means, the safety bicycle became known as the "peoples' nag", as more and more commoners purchased them for everyday transportation, before cars came into their heyday a few decades later. It provided more people with more independence of travel without the expense of keeping a horse.
With Henry Ford and the Model T, of course, cars became quickly adopted for even faster independent travel, and most cycling, especially for transportation, entered a latent period as the automobile became ascendant in the mid-20th century. The next bicycle boom, and most recent one prior to 2020, occurred in the 1970s, amid growing concerns over the environment which made the bicycle's simplicity, versatility, and less resource-intensive operation and infrastructure appealing.
Picking up the post-suffrage political narrative, a recent article in the Atlantic takes us further along through the 20th century: "One of Adolf Hitler’s first acts upon assuming power, in 1933, was to criminalize cycling unions, which were associated with anti-Nazi political parties. Brown Shirts were sent to villages to confiscate bikes, a practice that was repeated years later by German soldiers during the occupations of Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and other countries. Then there are the famous scenes, from 1989, of pro-democracy demonstrators in China pouring into Tiananmen Square on bicycles, and the macabre images of flattened frames and wheels that were left behind after tanks moved in to crush the revolt."
In the present day, bicyclists have figured prominently in the recent anti-racism protests following the killing of George Floyd, in some large cities such as New York.
The foundation of all of this, writes The Atlantic, is that "[the Nazi and Communist Chinese] regimes recognized the bicycle for what it is: an emblem of freedom. The invention of the bicycle was the realization of an ancient dream. It was the elusive personal-transport device, a contraption that liberated humans from their dependency on draft animals, allowing individuals to move swiftly across land under their own power. Long after its primacy was usurped by the automobile, the bicycle retained a unique appeal. It was a cheap, durable, versatile, compact, lithe little machine, capable of whisking a rider across town through chockablock traffic, or transporting that rider out of the gridlocked city altogether, over the hills and far away. A bike could carry you five or ten or two hundred miles; when you got home, you could carry the bike into your apartment. To an authoritarian government or an occupying army, the bicycle was a menace, a tool of resistance that could be used by dissenters to sneak up and speed off, to organize and mobilize and elude."
Speaking of the recent anti-racism protests, it is important to acknowledge the recorded history of the bicycle as being tainted by racial bias in the same way that the rest of American society is. The high wheelers of the 1890's were primarily the domain of well-off white men, and its contemporary suffragette movement was composed mainly of white women. Like other sports, bicycle racing was primarily white (men), with the notable exception of Marshall "Major" Taylor, a black cyclist who dominated racing between 1896 and 1910. His presence of course created major racial tension and harassment, including a major bicycle advocacy organization adopting a whites-only membership rule in 1894. Its successor organization, revived in 1965 after decades of dormancy, only became aware of the original rule in 1999, whereupon it was immediately disavowed.
I'm sure there is much history of black and other minority bicycling of which I am unaware, as well as much that was simply never recorded or has been lost. There has been a renewed awareness among white middle class bicyclists (such as myself) and bicycle organizations in recent years of the need to recognize and acknowledge the participation of bicyclists who are more varied not only in ethnicity, but also in class and gender identity. Bicycling magazine ran an article on this just last week.
I'll close by again quoting the Atlantic article:
My Cycling Journey
I am primarily a transportation bicyclist. I do sometimes to take longer recreational rides, and last summer I did a week long 320-mile bicycle trip to New York State, "unsupported" (unaccompanied by any support vehicle, just me and my bike). But mainly, I just pedal 11 miles round trip each weekday to work and back (before the pandemic), and anywhere else I need to go for meetings and errands in the Portland region.I'd always seen bicycling for transportation as a desirable option from both the environmental and fitness standpoint, but it never seemed feasible for me until 2002, when our family moved to Westbrook, only about 5 miles from my office near the Maine Mall. I checked out the bus system, and discovered that there was no direct bus route at that time. I'd have to take a bus into Portland and transfer to another bus back out to the Mall, making a 10-minute car trip into a 45-minute bus trip. Therefore I decided to try biking. I soon found that I liked it, and that it only took about 25 minutes. The rest, as they say, is history.
I'm happy that the Portland Metrobus system now provides a direct route between Westbrook and the mall, pretty much my exact route, and have used that as a backup on bad weather days. I can bring my bike along if I want, since all buses have bike racks. (How to use them) Transit is of course a valuable and necessary public service, but cycling provides the same schedule independence as a car, without all the financial and maintenance overhead associated with car ownership. Sure, cycling is generally slower than driving a car, but it can be on par with or faster than transit, by the time you take into account getting to and from the stops, time spent waiting, and all the stops that a local bus makes. You've got more options when faced with congestion. Parking is usually easy to find, and always free. And it's much faster than walking.
One of the best intangible benefits I get from cycling for transportation is the satisfaction of getting around totally under my own power. It just feels incredibly satisfying that I can go anywhere by bike that I can go by car, at least up to about a 10 mile radius, and many places I couldn't go in a car, on a vehicle that I can pick up and carry a short distance if need be, and all without buying gasoline. I have the fortune of having the use of a folding bike that I'm storing for a friend, and I have taken that on several long trips that include plane, bus, or train travel. It just feels so cool to pedal to a station and fold up the bike, then arrive at my destination city to unfold the bike and pedal on to where I'm staying. That is real independence!
I have even discovered an advantage that biking in a snowstorm, which I have done many times, has over driving a car. If I slide off the road, it's easy to get my bike unstuck and go on! (Done that many times too.) I have even stopped to help motorists dig their car out, then I just hop on my bike and be on my way. Very satisfying!
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| Best winter cycling cartoon ever! (c) Rick Smith, YehudaMoon.com |
Other Cycling Journeys
Do you remember when you first learned to ride a bike? Most of us can recall many happy hours spent riding up and down the streets in our neighborhood as a kid. On my red Schwinn Sting Ray with banana seat, I looped endlessly down a small hill in a parking lot across the street when it was empty in the evening, and spent more time than was necessary riding back and forth past the house of a girl I had a crush on who lived around the corner, trying to get up the nerve to knock on her door. (I never did.) The bicycle was, for many of us, our first taste of freedom, exploring our environment, out of sight and yelling distance of our parents (and no cell phones in my day).This is the inspiration for several local programs, and many more nationally, who aim to assist kids with life skills by teaching them to bike, and to work on their own bikes. In Biddeford, there is Apex Youth Connections, formerly the Community Bicycle Center, whose normal programs (pre-pandemic) include teaching safe riding and mechanical skills, and an "Earn a Bike" program. They also lead rides, and normally field a Trek Across Maine youth team. The Portland Gear Hub Bike School also incorporates youth riding and repair education, in normal times.
I took up writing this blog because I noticed an unprecedented number of bicyclists riding through my neighborhood as early as April, long before anyone but us "hard core" cyclists usually begins to even think about getting the bikes out of the basement or garage. Since then, it is confirmed that this country, and in fact much of the world, is in the middle of a Covid-inspired bicycling boom. Presumably many of you are taking up pedaling around the neighborhood for exercise, as gyms are closed, and most of us are still not doing as many other activities as we used to, while at the same time being encourage to exercise by walking or biking. Bike shops, deemed an "essential service" in Maine, are swamped.
My friends Wayne and Linda both post regularly on Facebook regarding their excursions around their areas, Westbrook Maine and Cleveland Ohio respectively. I always enjoy reading their thoughts and seeing their pictures. My friend and fellow member of the Westbrook Safe Mobility and Access Committee, Kimberly, also took up bicycling again a few months ago.
Last weekend, I hosted a cyclist from Idaho starting a cross-country tour, between his junior and senior years of college. He contacted me through the Warm Showers organization, kind of an "AirBnB" for cyclists who tour and are willing to host others doing so. He was using maps he had purchased from Adventure Cycling, an organization that has facilitated bicycling touring since 1973 (another bike boom year). More independence.
 |
| Sunset over Lake Erie, from my friend Linda's recent bike ride |
Several of my friends have experienced personal life/cycling journeys far more dramatic than most of us. My friend Hans undertook a 4000-mile cross country ride in 2017 accompanying a legally blind cyclist, Michael Robertson.They started Shared Vision Quest, dedicated to "connecting people with the drive to fulfill their dreams with those who can assist in that personal quest."
My friend and fellow cycling instructor Eli is likewise legally blind, and struggled to be personally independent due to his limited mobility options until he discovered how to "drive his bike" on roads with cars safely and effectively, through bicycle education including CyclingSavvy, which we now both teach. He writes, of his epiphany:
It was as if I was no longer disabled. . . I was still [legally] blind, but ignorance, not blindness, had been my disability all along. I had been healed. I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I could do all of the normal things that other people did. I could live a full, normal life. I could go to choir practice.As a CyclingSavvy instructor, I was privileged in 2011 to instruct and befriend Michie, a deaf and balance-impaired artist who had recently purchased a recumbant tricycle and wanted to expand her riding beyond her neighborhood streets. She writes of her experience "As a person who has mobility challenges, buying the trike and getting out every nice day to ride is simply one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. It’s healthy, empowering and – most of all – fun."
Emancipation and Empowerment
I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a bike. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammelled womanhood. - Susan B. Anthony, 1896Imagine the life of a late 19th century European or American woman. Hoop skirts were the fashion, and a respectable woman's place was in the home.
But the bicycling craze of the 1890s and early 20th century coincided with women's wakening desire to play a more active role in the economic and political life of their society. Besides just the personal freedom to be out and about on their own, without a man, which by itself aroused considerable suspicion and condemnation (not least because women cyclists helped to hasten the demise of hoop skirts in favor of scandolous "bloomers" - exposed a woman's legs, don'tcha know), bicycles were also useful for political purposes. British suffragette Alice Hawkins and her associates used their bicycles as transportation around Leicester and to travel to the nearby countryside and neighboring towns. During the 1911 local election, Hawkins and other cyclists from the Leicester "Women’s Social and Political Union" dressed in suffragette colors and staged an organized ride over to the Loughborough “Votes for Women” shop to distribute pamphlets. (Sheila Hanlon, "Alice Hawkins: Leicester’s Working Class Suffragette Cyclist")
Many a woman is riding to the suffrage on a bicycle - Elizabeth Cady Stanton,1895
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| Two suffragettes with their bicycles in 1914. Photograph: Corbis |
In the non-political realm, the invention of the "safety bicycle" in the early 20th century, the first modern chain-driven device with two wheels of equal size, enabled the common person to ride more safely, and its popularity enabled mass production and brought the price down. Whereas the "high wheelers" were dangerous (Mark Twain famously said of them, "Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live."), and expensive to the point of mainly being used for recreation by gentlemen of means, the safety bicycle became known as the "peoples' nag", as more and more commoners purchased them for everyday transportation, before cars came into their heyday a few decades later. It provided more people with more independence of travel without the expense of keeping a horse.
With Henry Ford and the Model T, of course, cars became quickly adopted for even faster independent travel, and most cycling, especially for transportation, entered a latent period as the automobile became ascendant in the mid-20th century. The next bicycle boom, and most recent one prior to 2020, occurred in the 1970s, amid growing concerns over the environment which made the bicycle's simplicity, versatility, and less resource-intensive operation and infrastructure appealing.
Picking up the post-suffrage political narrative, a recent article in the Atlantic takes us further along through the 20th century: "One of Adolf Hitler’s first acts upon assuming power, in 1933, was to criminalize cycling unions, which were associated with anti-Nazi political parties. Brown Shirts were sent to villages to confiscate bikes, a practice that was repeated years later by German soldiers during the occupations of Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and other countries. Then there are the famous scenes, from 1989, of pro-democracy demonstrators in China pouring into Tiananmen Square on bicycles, and the macabre images of flattened frames and wheels that were left behind after tanks moved in to crush the revolt."
In the present day, bicyclists have figured prominently in the recent anti-racism protests following the killing of George Floyd, in some large cities such as New York.
 |
| Bicyclists in NYC anti-racism protests. Photo by Ian Reid in Vogue |
The foundation of all of this, writes The Atlantic, is that "[the Nazi and Communist Chinese] regimes recognized the bicycle for what it is: an emblem of freedom. The invention of the bicycle was the realization of an ancient dream. It was the elusive personal-transport device, a contraption that liberated humans from their dependency on draft animals, allowing individuals to move swiftly across land under their own power. Long after its primacy was usurped by the automobile, the bicycle retained a unique appeal. It was a cheap, durable, versatile, compact, lithe little machine, capable of whisking a rider across town through chockablock traffic, or transporting that rider out of the gridlocked city altogether, over the hills and far away. A bike could carry you five or ten or two hundred miles; when you got home, you could carry the bike into your apartment. To an authoritarian government or an occupying army, the bicycle was a menace, a tool of resistance that could be used by dissenters to sneak up and speed off, to organize and mobilize and elude."
Speaking of the recent anti-racism protests, it is important to acknowledge the recorded history of the bicycle as being tainted by racial bias in the same way that the rest of American society is. The high wheelers of the 1890's were primarily the domain of well-off white men, and its contemporary suffragette movement was composed mainly of white women. Like other sports, bicycle racing was primarily white (men), with the notable exception of Marshall "Major" Taylor, a black cyclist who dominated racing between 1896 and 1910. His presence of course created major racial tension and harassment, including a major bicycle advocacy organization adopting a whites-only membership rule in 1894. Its successor organization, revived in 1965 after decades of dormancy, only became aware of the original rule in 1999, whereupon it was immediately disavowed.
I'm sure there is much history of black and other minority bicycling of which I am unaware, as well as much that was simply never recorded or has been lost. There has been a renewed awareness among white middle class bicyclists (such as myself) and bicycle organizations in recent years of the need to recognize and acknowledge the participation of bicyclists who are more varied not only in ethnicity, but also in class and gender identity. Bicycling magazine ran an article on this just last week.
I'll close by again quoting the Atlantic article:
Perhaps the bicycle is the noblest invention, the most benevolent machine; God knows I like my bike. In any case, the nobility and benevolence isn’t inherent. Freedom lovers ride bikes; so do fascists. The ideal of the bicycle, like the ideals of justice and democracy and equity, is a thing that must be fought for—day after day, and, sometimes, block by block.
Happy Independence Day!
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| (c) Rick Smith, YehudaMoon.com |
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