I decided to revive this.
In the decade since my last post, The twin Gods of Work and Play have given me the privilege to align my personal and professional interests, which let's me explore a lot of the original ideas* that sparked this blog.
Personally, I've became a landowner and a parent. In parenting, I'm often inspired to think about how I model behavior, navigate education, and discuss transportation (and/or) identity with Tomu ("Toh-mu"), who is now 8yo.
Professionally, after Tokyo, I considered pivoting out of transportation, possibly into arts organizing, or education, but I eventually came back to my True Calling, wanting more people to bike. In 2014, I landed in the Livable Streets group at the SFMTA, which focuses on bicycling and walking. I started on the WalkFirst team, improving intersections for pedestrian safety based on crash history. I also worked on corridor improvements and traffic calming.
In 2017, the Bikeshare Program drafted me for outreach as the system began expansion from 35 stations in one city corner to 320 stations citywide. The service now includes stationless and e-bike options. In a wonderfully unanticipated way, working on bikeshare allows me to explore bicycling and identity by listening to numerous people imagining the system's affect on their neighborhoods, along with a prime view of the macro level financing borderland of a public-private partnership model, through industry boom and bust.
Bikeshare is about bicycling, and it's also about sharing, ownership, and labor, and race, and gender, and sexuality, and class, and....identity.
Is there a bikeshare identity? If there's transportation identity, then there has to be bikeshare identity. So then what is it made of? Which benefits of bikeshare resonate with its users? And which parts of bikeshare threaten its opponents?
Who is Bikeshare?
