Bikeshare as Nonmonogamy: Bikes Aren't People & Bicycling Isn't Sex

When I talk to bicyclists about bikeshare, sometimes they say, “I don’t need bikeshare. I have a bike. I love my bike.” 

 

I get it. You love your bike. It's the perfect bike for you. Why would you need bikeshare? I love bikes too. Bikes are beautiful. There are lots of bikes to love--old ones, new ones, fast ones, slow ones,

 

Long ones, tall ones  

Short ones, brown ones 

Black ones, round ones 

Big ones, crazy ones.

 

To be clear, bikes aren't people, and bicycling isn't sex. But it's a seductive lens.

 

What is monogamy, and how do love and commitment compare between people and bikes?

 

How is desire informed for each?

 

What is transformative desire? How do we radically love them?

 

The Monogamy Dance

 

In my mid-40s, I’m surrounded by all ages of people entering, enjoying, exiting, or avoiding monogamy. Considering monogamy relationally, rather than institutionally, I think of it as an intimate dance where two people try to keep dancing with only each other. Sometimes one person leads; sometimes the other. As you dance, you figure out how to move together, communicating what you like and don't like. You attempt to read the other person’s moves while you also try to inspire and make room for each other to keep the dance going.

 

If it sounds exhausting, that's because it is. But it can also be exhilarating if it’s going well. It’s a labor of love. Sometimes the dance is fun, sexual, and adventurous. It can be dinner and drinks, a visit with the in-laws, something new in bed. Other times, it can be a scary trip to the emergency room, arguing and forgiving each other, or trying to fall asleep knowing the other person is still angry. A good dancing pair plans on how to keep dancing into the future.

 

Hopefully they enjoy it. There are other dance floors and other dance partners to choose from. Some are dancing around you on their own or in larger groups. At any point, one or both in a couple may decide they don't want to do the dance anymore. Then they should stop. No one wants to be dragged, or be dragging someone else, around the dance floor.

 

My parents separated when I left home for college. Later, they got back together. You might get tired of your partner and need a break. Maybe you’ll dance with each other again. Maybe you’ll dance with more people, or just by yourself. Autosexuality might be an even truer form of monogamy. Dancing with yourself can be very satisfying. Riding a bike could be seen as a satisfying intimate solo dance. 

 

Cheating on Your Bike, Bikeshare and Ownership

 

In monogamy it's cheating if you have sex with other people. If you want to do a different dance, like nonmonogamy, or polyamory, you owe it to your partner to figure out what’s next. Riding a different bike doesn’t count as cheating, but a committed relationship to a bike or a person might feel similar. 

 

You love them. But sometimes you love them less. And do they love you back the same all the time? Sometimes they break down. They may need a quick fix, but you don’t have the time or energy to handle it. They can become physical and emotional baggage. Maybe you don’t want to be with them everywhere all the time, up and down stairs, out and about, onto buses and trains. 

 

You stick with them because you’re committed, and they’re beautiful. What about others? You might fall in love with something new. Or someone else might have eyes for the object of your affection? What if they’re stolen away? Nothing keeps another person from being as enamored with your muse as much as you are. What you desire, others will also desire!

 

Bikeshare is useful here. It’s conveniently available, ready to ride without guilt or baggage. We hook up, ride around, have fun, and then we're off on our separate ways, the bike to the next rider and me to the next bike. Bikeshare doesn’t get mad that I love my own bike. It's chill. Bikeshare is just glad I’m riding. It's okay if it isn't the only bike I ride. It's okay if I don't want to always ride it. Maybe my bike at home is glad I’m riding and it gets to rest. It eases the pressure from my intense burning bike love.

 

Bikeshare becomes a kind of nonmonogamy with bikes. Monogamy is often confused with mutual ownership. The end and beginning of monogamy are often punctuated by a transition into or out of shared ownership. 

 

That's mine; this is yours. - RIP Bruno Kirby, Carrie Fisher, and Nora Ephron

 

Bikeshare challenges traditional ownership. It feels foreign because there aren’t many other systems where people have as frequent intimate casual use of large machinery. The next large-scale sharing economy example is the public library. After that, the next example might be grocery carts.

 

 

The Politics of Desire

 

In The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan interrogates the confluence of misogynistic vectors, like the manosphere, incel culture, mainstream pornography, and established patriarchy. These align to amplify and normalize violence towards women from men with the misbelief they have “The Right to Sex.”

 

Srinivasan points out how sexual desire is socio-politically informed, based on power and beauty standards, which are mostly constructed around traditional hierarchical systems like racism, class, heterosexism, abelism, ageism—dimensions of identity. 

 

Beauty privilege necessitates a beauty-underprivilege. And Srinivasan touches upon this in a reply to her critique, which complicates the politics of desire as a reality for the undesirable.

 

One of the more arresting emails I got about ‘The Right to Sex’ was from a man from Sydney — a multicultural city in a country notorious for its racism. Originally from Sri Lanka, he was adopted by two white parents. ‘I reassure you,’ he said, ‘that I’m no psychopath like that mixed-race kid who underpins your thesis and massacred those poor souls after rejection based allegedly on his race. I’m rational enough to accept my fate and try and make the best of my short existence.’ He said that it was heartbreakingly difficult to date as a non-white man. He said that dating profiles, including those of Asian women, list ‘Caucasian’, ‘white guys only’ and ‘no Indians’ as their preferences. He said that he had once posted a critical comment on a YouTube video called ‘Why Filipinas like White Guys’, and that a white woman had replied ‘Suck it up, the truth hurts.’ He said he was profoundly lonely, as were his other Asian friends, and that he had taken up various hobbies ‘to stymie the spectre of undesirability’. He said that many ‘white-guy-ethnicgirl relationships must be love’ but asked whether some were not 'a re-enactment of colonial conquest and rescue’. ‘And if it is?’ he said, ‘Well that’s their right. It’s consensual. Us ethnic guys just have to suck it up. Besides, if we were good enough they’d stay with us. Love is immune from scrutiny, even when it’s political.’ He said, ‘I certainly don’t feel the right to Sex, nor do I feel the right to Love. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.’ He said, ‘I suppose I have the right to feel hurt.’ He said, ‘I haven’t come across many women, ethnic or otherwise, that acknowledge what us Ethnomen face. They just think we’re all backward. Sophistication is a province only found in Caucasia.

 

As an Asian American man, this resonated a lot. It plainly shows how there is a human desire to be desired. An unresolved tension emerges. The politics of desire works by objectifying more vulnerable demographics towards abuse. At the same time, undesirability can become psychosis, driving a person to depression or worse.

 

The safest conclusions regarding desire, whether sexual or platonic: No one has the right to be desired anymore than they have the right to sex; it feels good to be desired—so long as it isn’t manifested as violence or subjugation (which it often is); and it’s especially nice when desire is mutual.

 

Srinivasan arrives at the politics of desire in a coda. Where do we go from there? The corollary questions are entangling. Since no one has the right to sex or to be desired, and since the politics of desire are fraught with problematic standards, what if anything can be constructively said about who/what we should desire? What is revolutionary desire? How do we desire transformationally?

 

Reflectively, useful questions arise from Srinivasan’s earlier chapters. If misogynistic vectors amplify and perpetuate status quo politics of desire, how do we break the cycle?

 

How do we mind the context from which desire emerges? What parts are hegemony, and what is desirable about other parts?

 

How do we rewire who/what we desire?

 

What porn aren’t we watching?

 

Answering these questions could be fraught and thorny, implicating and loaded, possibly ugly and vulnerable. Thank goodness bikes aren't people and bicycling isn't sex.

Traditional Bike Desire

 

Historically, bicycle marketing leans into the tour-de-france or cargo bikes, a combination of efficiency and utilitarianism. These are desires we’ve internalized from cars, and general transportation culture. We are told that vehicles are fundamentally freedom and virility. 

 

 

The Roots - marketing is increasingly hypersexualized.

 

This predictably culminates in the e-bike: Harder Better Faster Stronger. Socially constructed desire for eBikes is mostly rooted in transactional exchange, maximizing output while minimizing individual time and energy cost. 

 

Radical Bike Love

 

There is a sad alternate future we should try and avoid where bikeshare is only for rich people who don't care how much it costs, simply that it meets their desire for speed and efficiency. The privilege to not worry about storage, theft, or maintenance becomes priced at a premium for the elite who can afford it.

 

But efficiency, speed, and utility are only part of the bicycling experience. What’s desirable about other parts?

 

A wide variety of bikes appeal to us for a multitude of reasons. Bicycling isn’t simply a mode of efficiency. It can be one of style, playfulness, and alternative function. It can provide a new vantage point or make you laugh. It can be a form of protest, or a celebration of reuse.

 

  

 

Radical bike desire means embracing various bikes for all they are and deprioritizing the economic transportation framework of time/money-based efficiency oriented around speed and power. 

 

Bicycling is appreciation of neighborhoods you ride through. It's the fun of riding in a group. It's the refreshing resonance of childhood joy. It's an opportunity to slow time down and enjoy connection–to prolong the present, knowing you'll be in the future somewhere, looking back at this momentary triumphant feeling. It's also the physical labor that moves you slowly up the mountain, every push helping you grow stronger and simultaneously more exhausted. Time well spent. 

Nonmonogamy Bike Desire: A Coda

On the subject of pleasure and speed, circle back to sexual desire. Musically, sex is sung of slowly, with SLOW JAMS. Sex and Sensuousness are something to enjoy stretched out in time, worth the wait, a thing in which time ceases to matter.

 

 

Boyz II Men - Let's go slow. I ain't got no where to go.

 

In bikeshare, the “classic" regular pedal bikeshare bike is often criticized as heavy and slow. It doesn't respond like a light road frame or give you cyborg powers like an e-bike, but it succeeds in reminding us about the best part of bike love--the part where you are the engine, and your muscles move you as much as your will. 

 

Bikes aren’t people, and bicycling isn't sex, but the joy of bicycling comes from how it celebrates humans, the way that love and desire should too.

 

Dirty Old Bikes

A dirty old bike is a glorious thing.
Rusty but rolly, when ridden, it sings:

"Hey all you shiny bikes come out to play.

Your owners must love you and clean you all day.

Flash me those parts with a fresh virgin sheen

You may think you are human but you're just a machine.

You were made to be ridden, to get dinged up and scratched

Though your owners fondle you like a chick that's just hatched.

Your metal and paint will grow old and decrepit

Especially because your rider's intrepid."

A dirty old bike is proud and it's zealous.

It stares at the young bikes, and ages ever jealous.

 

 

Shoup Euology - Teacher Rockstar Parking Scarcity Borderlands

Donald Shoup was a brilliant storyteller. 

One of my favorite Shoup bits is about dogs & cats. 

It starts with how most transportation folks are like dogs obsessed with moving cars, chasing them, barking at them. 

Not like cats. Cats only really look at cars when they're stopped. They walk around them, sit on them, nap on them. He'd grin, "Cats like parked cars."

He was excellent with an audience, a crafted polished lecture with good timing. He let you fill in the blanks. I always wondered if he had a dog or a cat.

Shoup on his Sprite, me on a lowrider, and classmate Charlotte Burger Troy, outside the School of Public Affairs.  

Photo credit: Marcel Porras

 

Teacher to rock star

 

When I started UCLA in 2005, I had no clue who Donald Shoup was. The High Cost of Free Parking had just been published, and I hadn't been into economics or parking. I was focused on bicycling. But soon after classes began, everyone in my 60+ cohort was talking about him.

 

He wasn't a celebrity yet. Students were buzzing about his teaching style because he made the material accessible. I qualified out of the econ survey, but now I was wondering what I was missing. His approach was deceptively simple--to reframe parking as real estate, a marketplace transaction around land. The idea was so sticky and relatable. By taking the universal story of needing a parking spot and reducing it to convey supply, demand, and price, he demonstrated modeled the most important part of teaching and learning: How do we ask good questions?

 

The last time I saw him in person was in 2014. He gave a presentation at the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley. By then he was a planning rock star. I felt a little anointed that night because he remembered me. I believe I was the first to call him Shoup Dogg. 

 

Who was the last Planning Rock Star? Some bike/ped folks might nominate Janette Sadik-Khan. JSK is possibly the most contemporary influential champion renewing the urbanist transportation movement, but her name doesn't ring out that far beyond New York or the transpo realm. Our last rock star was power broker Robert Moses (representing motor vehicles and wealth, but also public gathering open spaces). And his fame was really from being the front-man for a chart-topping duo band with Jane Jacobs (representing walk/bike livability, humans, and middle-/lower-income communities). That was 70 years ago. 

 

Shoup was on Broadway. He was a star on Twitter, Youtube, Facebook. He was probably on TikTok. He was everywhere. He'll always be everywhere influencing our hearts and minds. 

 

Parking and scarcity

 

What's weird is we've only just begun to internalize Shoup's lessons. When I began at SFMTA, staff warned me: people are sensitive about parking loss. Almost a decade as a Shoupista, I was confused. Didn't we have SF Park? Haven't we explained the high cost of free parking to everyone? "No. SF Park failed," they told me, "People hate paying for parking." That's no surprise. Why doesn't SF have Shoup's Community Parking Districts? Shouldn't we locally share the wealth of the land with the revenue going back to the merchants and residents?

 

Ahhh, but SF Transportation Code dictates all parking revenue be routed to support Muni. So we can never get to what Andy Thornley calls "the third leg of the Shoupian Stool" because we've weaved this web between transit monetary need and parking's monetary value. Chaining parking to transit funding doesn't make long-term sense since transportation systems might be improved with more space for transit and biking to encourage mode shift. Shoup never talked about the inherent limitations within a monetization narrative!!

 

This is where we've been trapped. Parking is still the biggest conflict in SF, whether it's for bikeshare stations, daylighting, or the Valencia corridor. I’ve had to argue for single parking spaces with merchants who oppose bike corral requests by other merchants. Even in places with ample oceans of parking, and incoming parking structures, the first cry from everyone becomes "There's not enough parking!" Without the option of shared benefit from priced parking, explaining the tragedy of the commons must shift to emphasize our shared scarcity. We need to reframe the story, reset the baseline with a sad woeful message THERE WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH PARKING.

 

 Artist: Leon Ferrari

 

Prioritizing cars takes up a lot of room. They need roadways to go fast. They need storage, room for large delivery vehicles, room for drivers who need room for things like wheelchair access, room for large emergency vehicles, room for more parking in case all the parking is taken. Because if people don't have parking, then how will they come to your store?

 

Have you heard about the Freeway Revolts? They were sparked when cars hogged so much space they were messing up neighborhoods. Making room for cars started to subsume joyful communities. Do we need a future where people build more parking garages instead of residences, and it incites Parking Garage Revolts? Why can't we at least just have smaller cars so that they take up less space? Why do cars get bigger and bigger in some demented kind of Mutually Assured Destruction? How are cars like guns? 

 

The curb as border and transaction 

 

Shoup's comically logical interpretation of parking as land transaction helped spawn the Parking Day celebrations, which point to deeper cultural consideration. What is the curb zone? And what are the transportation identities surrounding it?

 

   

 

 

If curb space is land, then the curb is at least the borderland between people moving in the roadway and people on the sidewalk and in place. It's useful to remember everyone is both, constantly transitioning between moving and being in place.  With all the problems we have and all the change needed for improvement, our guiding question into the future can't be "How do we keep everything the same?" That doesn’t work for individuals as we get older, and it doesn't work for cities as we grow denser.

 

We should ask: How do we want to move? What should we keep and what should be left behind? How do we grow, cherish the things we love, and balance resources to get there?

 

Borderland studies traditionally focus on international border dynamics, which can range from cooperative mutual benefit, or competitive rift and conflict. Some theatrical interpretations include The Bridge and Counterpart. Borderlands are an exploration of discreteness and continuity. Inclusion and exclusion. Tariffs. Migration. These are the forces that often embrace other humans as fellow people, or reduce them to tribal interpretation. How do we want to see other people through and across the border of the curb?

 

Shoup reminds us how defaulting to a parking framework compels us to regard land as transactional exchange rather than a source of possibility and potential for a new model of public realm utility. 

 

Bicyclist

 

Shoup was a bicyclist. He rode a Raleigh Sprite from the 70s. He'd had it for a long time, and it was clean. It was the perfect complement to his tweedy professor drip. It tickled me to think he'd made his career in the marketplace of ideas with theories about parking. But, he'd actually divested himself from their transaction entirely. I like to think it was the bicyclist part of him that helped to objectively observe people talk and puzzle out parking.

 

There aren’t a lot of bicycling celebrities. The last one infamously flamed out, which was fine cuz no one needed a lycra role model anyway. The only other one I can think of is David Byrne who almost shouldn't count because he's already a rock star anyway.

Alignment

The coolest thing about Shoup's style was how he aligned all of himself--teacher, economist, bicyclist, cat-appreciator. With that ingenuity and integrity, I'm sure he also found enlightenment.

Mistakes with Time and Money - Bicycling Dependability

LA is known for flakiness because of transportation. The unpredictable driving conditions make people less dependable. You might set a time/date to meet up a week in advance, but when the day comes, if traffic is bad, you're tempted to cancel rather than struggle through bumper-to-bumper. Do it enough, and you become an Angelino. After flakiness, the next worse scheduling faux pas is being late.  

 

When I lived in LA, friends and acquaintances would assume I'd be late because I rode a bike. To be clear, I was almost never late. But the truth was backwards to non-bicyclist understanding: BECAUSE I rode a bike, I was hardly ever late. Biking in LA traffic means....No Traffic! Bicycling is usually a predictable trip duration.* It might take longer to get places, but if I plan ahead and give myself enough time, I know I'll reach my destination comfortably and punctually. Merely planning to go somewhere via bike added the intention to show up on time.

 

How does transportation identity affect interpretation of transportation cost?

 

We measure transportation cost the way we measure most costs--with time and money. How long will it take? What's the price? There are more exact and objective ways to measure things--like by distance, weight, or energy, but economic frameworks begin with minutes and dollars. If you look up directions online, it gives you estimated time and fare.

This guides policy. For transportation modeling, we convert travel time into an individual's hourly wage--minutes into dollars--the assumption being that rational behavior will do the thing that maximizes income. This is not morally or ethically "rational," just profit-driven. It regressively assumes that the time of someone-paid-a-lot is more valuable than the time of someone-paid-a-little. This is intuitively wrong. People who get paid more need less time to work. People who get paid less per hour need more time to work, and often desire more time with family.

 

These approaches are myopic. Focus on time and money is a clear mistake with an expanded view including variable trip duration and perception of time. These ideas can also be combined when trip duration feels variable with perception of time. Bicycling can constructively align the two.

 

Variable Trip Duration

We typically imagine bicycling as slower than driving or transit. This may be true under controlled circumstances, and it leads to thinking that trip duration is fixed. Sure, over a certain distance, motorized speed is faster than non-motorized. However, in the wild, traffic is irregular and dynamic. Delay factors make trip duration variable. Motorized travel is complicated by chemical, electrical, mechanical, and human systems. Have you ever been in a car, bus, or train, and something delays you from reaching your destination? It could be....traffic congestion, fuel deficiency, machine malfunction, passenger interruption, law enforcement, operator error, vehicle collisions, road construction, mistimed transfers, parking competition, etc.

 

Trip duration variability abounds on transit networks depending on how they're designed. It almost seems silly to consider all the things that can go wrong on a bus or train without grade separation, or exclusive right of way. Potential delays include all the things that could go wrong with a transit vehicle PLUS all the things that could happen to delay cars in the way.

 

 

 

Neglecting to think of trip duration as variable biases us towards motorized vehicles because we imagine they go faster even though they're more subject to delay. We even start to tune transportation systems in attempt to maintain speeds and reduce their trip duration variance, like progressive signal timing, or mandating minimal parking requirements. Bicycling and walking are more dependable since there are fewer external factors. Sure, you might catch a flat tire, or get distracted by an eye-catching window display. But those are still less variable and certainly lower risk. Additionally, the pleasant distractions for bicycling and walking can affect perception of time.

Perception of Time

This one is self explanatory. But I'll reference a famous physicist regarding how time warps depending on what you're doing.

 

 

We perceive time depending on what we're doing. When you're driving fast, that probably feels good, until it gets too fast. When you're in traffic, it feels like losing time. On transit. Sit next to a pretty person, the trip goes by too fast. Sit next to someone unhygenic or impolite, it feels like forever.

 

Bicycling becomes predictably enjoyable as you get used to it. Ask a bicyclist. Is it always fun? No. We have to ride on streets with traffic and crazy drivers all upset they aren't going faster. But then why do we still do it? Well, because once you get good at it and learn to predict how dumb drivers behave, you're cautious enough to go slower without having to worry. You learn to buffer enough time and space to safely react to other road users even when they behave badly.

 

Temporal Alignment

Bicycling reduces trip duration variability, and the more you do it, the more comfortable and enjoyable it becomes.It helps answer the question "How much time is enough?" You know how long it should always take. You know how much you'll enjoy it. The more you do it, the more you slow down time to enjoy it. 

Bicycling is cheaper, takes a more consistent amount of time and makes life more predictably enjoyable. It makes life and people more dependable.**

 

*on rare occasions I may've been waylaid by a flat tire, but even then, it was an opportunity to practice speedy tube repair skills, which was affirming. even better, use bikeshare.

**bikeshare augments this fruther by eliminating other variables for bicycling, like maintenance, storage, or theft--assuming the service operates as intended.