Cyclescapes of the Unequal City: Bicycle Infrastructure and Uneven Development by John G. Stehlin. University of Minnesota Press, $27
On a sunny afternoon in early June, I took a long, multi-borough bike ride. At the time, protests after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were filling the streets from dawn until dusk, and the mayor had imposed a curfew. Part of an organized ride led by Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizers, I pedaled with a group of mostly white 20- and 30-year-olds through neighborhoods including Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, and Williamsburg.
We rode through predominantly Black and Hispanic communities, working class sections of Brooklyn experiencing rapid gentrifi cation. Like so many hipsters and yuppies, we chose the bike, the emblem of white and economically privileged newcomers. In fact, the vehicle and its dedicated green lanes point to key political and economic tensions unfolding in the contemporary capitalist city. This is the premise of John G. Stehlin’s 2019 book, Cyclescapes of the Unequal City: Bicycle Infrastructure and Uneven Development. Indeed, these vehicles are highly visible symbols of changing urban realities, and Stehlin takes this fact — something anyone can observe — as the basis for theorizing “cyclescapes,” or the infrastructures and associated practices that have grown around bicycling in the city.
If the hipster with his fixie is synonymous with gentrification, bike lanes usher in waves of upwardly mobile professionals, changing the economics of neighborhoods in New York and beyond. Debates about bike lanes rage at community meetings and online.
Yet, despite all this visibility for bikes, it’s actually a quite marginal form of transportation. In 2015, biking accounted for one percent of commutes in New York City. Its prominence on blogs like Bloomberg CityLab, Streetsblog NYC, and 6sqft — and even in the mainstream press — points to the high visibility of an issue that, on the face of it, affects a very narrow subset of the population. Nevertheless, it is precisely because of biking’s marginal numbers and outsize visibility that it is emblematic of larger contradictions in US cities.
For one, who is visible within debates about bikes cuts along the race and class lines that define urbanism in cities like New York. Stehlin writes that “the image of the bicycle has shifted from a vehicle of last resort (signifying racialized urban poverty) to a symbol of choosing a cosmopolitan, less carbon-intensive life (making visible the return of the largely white middle class).” In fact, when people of color using bikes have come up, they’ve been demonized. For example, in 2017 Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city would crack down on businesses that use e-bikes, the vehicle of choice for largely Black and Brown food delivery workers. The press conference was held on the Upper West Side.
While the creation of bike lanes began in earnest under the Bloomberg administration, bike shares are still fairly new. Citi Bike, a private bike share system that debuted in New York in 2013, continues to expand, on offer to the seasoned cyclist, tourist, or first-time urban rider alike. Not all cities have private bike share systems, but New York’s proudly bears the logo of a bank. Following the trend of privatized public infrastructure that has defined recent urban development in the US, Citi Bike is urban biking marketed to the middle class. As is often the case, the middle class is code for white. A 2019 study by the McGill University School of Urban Planning found that 16.5 percent of people of color in New York have access to a Citi Bike station and that stations do not exist in 75 percent of neighborhoods with extreme poverty. In other words, according to the report, 83 percent of people of color in New York have been “shut out from Citi Bike.”
As we rolled through some of the poorer sections of Ocean Hill, there was no avoiding the notion that cycling is inextricably linked to whiteness. This is not because Black and Brown people do not ride bikes; they do. This is not because working class people do not ride bikes; they do. This is because the creation of bike lanes and Citi Bike stations so neatly tracks with the gentrification of our city. They are, after all, some of the most visible investments to transportation infrastructure to be added to neighborhood streets in recent memory. In this sense, Stehlin points out that “contemporary advocates think of bicycle facilities as not for people who bicycle today but for people who do not yet bicycle.” Who might that be?
In the context of New York, bike infrastructure is most certainly at the service of gentrification. While Stehlin stops short of claiming bike lanes and bike shares cause gentrification, he does find that they are more than coincidental mirrors of economic change. With ridership still hovering around one percent, the bike lanes and bike share docks installed on Brooklyn streets are primarily for the people who have not yet moved there — an enticement, a reassurance that this neighborhood is coming up. His fieldwork on the rollout of bike lanes in San Francisco suggests that these revamped corridors, with green infrastructure and increased space for pedestrians and cyclists, were “intended to complement other placemaking efforts aimed at ‘positive activation’ with ‘eyes on the street’ to crowd out what are deemed antisocial uses of the street by the poor.”
Another way to say this: bike lanes and bike shares, which have been heralded by planning organizations like the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), are a bet on a whiter and more affluent future. Citi Bike stations don’t so much go in areas that are gentrifying; rather, they serve as a scattershot urban design tactic linking disconnected, aging, and racialized transportation infrastructures, like buses, to subways and central parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan — making gentrification possible. It’s easier and cheaper to paint the streets green than to fix the subway. Decent mass transit is a must for neighborhoods to attract a new class of renters. According to Stehlin, these new systems contribute “to gentrification dynamics rather than just reflecting them.”
Like many of the protests this summer, our ride ended at Barclays Center, symbol of gentrifying Brooklyn. The target of years of organizing by housing advocates, the plaza in front of the SHoP-designed arena has become a place of congregation for political rallies, in an odd reversal of meaning. All public space, no matter how it was produced, can be appropriated by the people. Indeed, Stehlin believes that more space for pedestrians and cyclists equals an expanded public realm, and this a net positive for any city. While the “whiteness of bikeshare users is unignorable,” he points to the work of bike advocates of color like Tamika Butler, a queer, Black woman from Nebraska, who was recently hired by the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. With most bike infrastructure yet to be built, her work and that of other equity-based advocates are emblematic of a necessary shift in the conversation about bike infrastructure from how it is designed to one of “for whom it is produced.”