sprawlism.com
Transportation Tale of Two Women
The withdrawals arrived a year apart, for my mother and my mother-in-law. Two women, my mother in her early seventies and my mother-in-law in her early eighties, both Chairs of the Feds of their respective households, were informed by their doctors that the keys to freedom were no longer theirs. They would now be dependent on their husbands to drive them around. Their respective geographies offer the usual pantomime of alternatives: public transit systems designed for the lumpen, and bicycle lanes that are, in essence, paint masquerading as infrastructure.
Here in Essex, I have often mocked the local bicycle advocates—their sanctioned, police-escorted rides are a kind of rolling pageant, detached from the daily grit of errands and commutes. But the mockery is a shallow thing. I understand why most advocates outside Manhattan, particularly those who are not men, do not actually ride their bicycles. It is not a lack of conviction. It is because, as a cultural proposition, American bicycling has created a perfect engine for marginalizing utility cycling. If you are not a “roadie,” a middle-aged apostle of spandex and carbon fiber, your choice is to be painted as a pathetic figure, a street urchin signaling economic failure. There is no dignified, ordinary middle.
This false binary is no accident; it is the product of an advocacy landscape shaped in large part by the bicycle industry lobby, which skillfully pathologizes issues of accessibility, age, and body type. The very culture of bicycling, as promoted, severs the connection between the bicycle and the practical life. It turns a tool into a token, and in doing so, abandons those who want it simply to move through the world.
During slavery some abolitionists didn’t like Frederick Douglass. They felt he was bad for fundraising as he dressed a bit too nicely, looked a bit too attractive, and was too engaging of a speaker. How bad could slavery really be, if you could come out like Frederick Douglass?
I’m happy to share a station with such highly esteemed company.
“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts…” For me, Hannah Arendt’s words extend beyond overt tyranny. They permeate the propaganda of nonprofits, which demands a specific storytelling lens:
Stories of struggle.
Caricatures of struggle.
Stories where people learned their lesson and will now behave.
The messaging around utility cycling is discouraged and objectified. It suggests that only those who are ideally shaped, young, thin, and athletic can participate as full humans, while others must accept a stigma, to embrace the role of the bottom in the BDSM race gender play of nonprofit narratives.
When transportation is seen as either a luxury hobby or a sign of poverty, its political usefulness as a method of solidarity weakens. Capitalism will dismantle infrastructure for those deemed not to contribute to its goals. The root of supported cycling is the roadie with the barest of defensible sliver of infrastructure—unless it is for the algorithm of food delivery, a utility permitted only because it services the market.
I note, with bitter interest, that my father and father-in-law, both deep into their eighties, remain unimpeded behind the wheel. You cannot so easily take a car from a man who has acquired wealth and status; you cannot, it seems, take the wheel from a man who has, in smaller or larger ways, been taught he is built to run and drive things. Of course, the doctors find them “fine.” And our mothers are fine, too. This is not about acuity. It is about control: who belongs on the road, and in what manner they may claim it.
The bicycling conversation needs more depth. It needs the nuance of lived reality, of aging bodies, of different genders, of simple errands in regular clothes. It needs to shed the spandex and confront the harder questions: of access, dignity, and who our streets are designed to celebrate, and who they are designed to erase. For now, the dominant culture of bicycling itself is part of the erasure, painting the mundane act of getting somewhere not as a right, but as a subculture, or a surrender.
