Bikeshare and Gentrification - race, class, and vulnerability

Gentrification pulled me into bikeshare. 

In 2015 San Francisco electeds unanimously supported expanding the bikeshare network citywide. But 2 years later, when stations started appearing in The Mission, housing advocates--fighting ballooning land values and evictions--said bikeshare was yet another inaccessible amenity for the invasive rich techies, not the community. The SFMTA needed someone to meet opponents. Mostly they needed a human shield who could get beat up, come back smiling, and ask for more. So they got me.

I wasn't sure what to expect. In some ways, talking about bicycling in the Mission felt like homecoming. I'd waded into bike advocacy 15 years earlier as a wrench for the SF Bike Kitchen. During its early days in the Mission Village, I helped people learn to fix their bikes. It inspired me onto the transportation planning path, intrigued by the diverse and colorful range of people who either liked bicycling, or were just starting to bike. Some folks were fanatical recreation and utilitarian riders out to prove a political point, others biked as an economic means, and others did it purely for fun. Because of the location, most were Mission denizens.

When I met with Mission advocates for bikeshare, I didn't talk about my history in the Mission. I didn't think spending some of my 20s in the Mission should give me any extra street cred. Nor were the advocates interested in anything I had to say. I was there to listen, not talk. And I reminded myself that I had been sent from the SFMTA sacrificially. Some folks said The Mission wasn't a bicycling community, that it was a "low-rider culture." After numerous testimonials to the ongoing challenges of a neighborhood under siege, and examples of why then-branded Ford GoBikes weren't for historical residents, one advocate introduced themselves as an ethnic studies major and accused me of being a token person of color sent by the city to appease them. Others in the room nodded in agreement.

That hurt, especially as an Asian American because our "color" card is so often questioned in the backdrop of the Model Minority Myth. (I've written about the MMM and bicycling before.) Calling me a token reduced me to my race, as if I wasn't actually someone who believed bicycling was good, AND at the same time, it denied the possibility of how being a person of color might help me in thinking about bicycling. With a single knock, I had been faulted for two core identities--being a bicyclists and being Asian, even though I'd worked hard to integrate them. I was reminded that it didn't matter what I thought. Race is often in the eye of the beholder, and all that mattered at that table was how I represented institutional power. My race was a simple way to dismiss me as a sell out.

The Mission advocates were effective. Having the ear of the District 9 Supervisor, they successfully blocked bikeshare expansion in the Mission. To this day, it remains my biggest Bikeshare Program failure. We have ~320 stations all over the city now in every district. But we still have a large hole in The Mission.

In Bicycle Race, Adonia Lugo writes about how Race and Bicycling interact in a way that parallels race and everything else. Race is in large parts a proxy for class and culture, and just like we have to unpack its complexities to address other social hierarchical power structures, the bicycling movement is doomed to repeat the same racist problems unless we deliberately embrace antiracism.

When I talk about bikeshare in historically poorer neighborhoods (mostly of color), people complain about how bikeshare is for rich people. When I talk about bikeshare in rich neighborhoods, people complain about how it's dirty, or attracts unsavory people--which is a rich euphemism for poor people. This is silly.  Bikeshare and bicycling are in the middle. They help grow the middle class. Bikeshare is an affordable way for more people to do something that is better for themselves and everyone else.

Rhetoric against bicycling has pushed it to the extremes it occupies, framed as both a luxury lifestyle for people who can afford it, as well as a necessity for people who can't afford anything else. Bicycling exists at its paradoxical extremes of class expression.

Bicycling is actually a glaringly full-spectrum activity, bridging numerous dimensions like language, culture, class, race, gender, sexuality, and age. It does occupy an awkward paradoxical space that resonates with race and class dynamics. Bicycling is paradoxically liberating and empowering, while also vulnerable and exposing. A bicyclist feels free and unshackled from things like road traffic, or the hunt for parking, or the petroleum industry. But bicyclists are forced to be vigilant and fearful of the drivers who could easily kill or maim them, either deliberately or out of negligence.

Audre Lorde writes:

It is within our differences that we are both most powerful and most vulnerable, and some of the most difficult tasks of our lives are the claiming of differences and learning to use those differences for bridges rather than as barriers between us.

In this way, vulnerability of bicycling echoes vulnerability of race. It exists because we perpetuate systems of oppression by inflicting auto-centricity and/or racism upon others and ourselves.

Some questions to further explore race and bicycling: 

• How does bicycling vulnerability intersect with antiracist vulnerability? 
• What is the impact of bicycling vulnerability on people who don't regularly consider racism? 
• How do we orient a bicycling movement as an experience couched in vulnerability, especially with communities that are already vulnerable in other ways?