Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance in Not Exceeding Ten Miles Square

Oct 12, 2020 Vipassana rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, urbanism

I started reading this book expecting to learn about the best practices in bike advocacy but was pleasantly surprised to read a memoir of a bike advocate. Adonia E. Lugo writes about her experience working on racial equity in bike advocacy as a mixed race Chicanx anthropologist. Bike advocacy, and transportation in general, is dominated by White engineers in the US, and focuses on solutions that disproportionately hurt racially and economically disadvantaged communities.

Focusing on urban des

I started reading this book expecting to learn about the best practices in bike advocacy but was pleasantly surprised to read a memoir of a bike advocate. Adonia E. Lugo writes about her experience working on racial equity in bike advocacy as a mixed race Chicanx anthropologist. Bike advocacy, and transportation in general, is dominated by White engineers in the US, and focuses on solutions that disproportionately hurt racially and economically disadvantaged communities.

Focusing on urban design, rather than people who inhabit and produce places, all too easily naturalizes their market-driven displacement.

Bike advocacy has largely become about infrastructure. While bike lanes are important, infrastructure that relies on enforcement allows for more discretionary policing of Black and brown bodies. In neighborhoods that have not seen investment in public space for years, bike lanes are also the harbinger of gentrification. What does equitable bike advocacy look like? We'd know if advocates such a Lugo weren't constantly thwarted.

Lugo's effort to create a Park(ing) Day, when people feed parking meters and set up mini parks on the street, in the predominately Latino neighborhood around MacArthur Park underscores the need of a racial lens in bike advocacy. As they set up a canopy, her group was stopped by police (view spoiler) They asked the group to get off the street and would not budge. In the Whiter and wealthier neighborhoods, Park(ing) Day was an unhindered success.

While policing is a problem on its own, bike advocacy's focus on solutions that work better for White people while tokenizing racial equity has only furthered racial injustice. Adonia E. Lugo's account of leading the racial equity work of the well-funded League of American Bicyclists was also interesting to read because of my own proximity to the DC bike advocacy community. Working on racial equity in a predominantly white organization is like walking on eggshells. (view spoiler).

Adonia E. Lugo devotes large sections of the book to the history of the Southern Californian land she grew up in, her identity as a mixed race person who found freedom with a bike, and the racist history of the bike advocacy movement. While she wrote her dissertation on the cicLAvia, a movement that temporarily closes streets to cars and gives it back to pedestrians and cyclists, she doesn't explicitly talk about her dissertation. I would have liked to read more about setting up cicLAvia because it is a rare example of North America adopting a program that originated in South America (Bogota, Colombia). She focuses instead on the process of gathering data and speaking to subjects for her dissertation. This book could have used a few more revisions but this is should be required reading for bike advocates and urbanists.

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