Gonna buy a Schwinn Pixie
Gonna buy it brand new
It's gonna have a Snoopy horn
And sparkly grips, too
I'm going to cut quite a figure
Cruising down the avenue
Oh yeah
On my brand-new shiny pink
Schwinn Pixie
-- Song I'd sing to myself while assembling bicycles at Lodi Schwinn, circa 1980-88
There's no nicer place for learning to ride a Schwinn Sting-Ray than the vineyards surrounding my grandmother's old house in St. Helena. I remember crashing into the hot soil dozens of times until I got the hang of it. Once I was able to keep my balance, I made sport of running over the vineyards' softball-size dirt clods. They were crisp and powdery, and popped when I hit them.
Later, during grade-school summers, my friend Jerry Tallerico and I took five-hour bike rides along Kidder Creek and the Scott River and on a dozen or so other routes crisscrossing Scott Valley in Siskiyou County. Jerry died of AIDS 20 years later. As I looked at his embalmed skin in a San Francisco mortuary, I recall imagining, fondly, the faded blue paint of my old Hercules English 10-speed.
At 14 I rode my navy blue Raleigh Grand Prix from Elk Grove, Calif., to Caldwell, Idaho; day after day, I went hoarse cursing head winds. I missed my last year of high school racing bikes. Later, during college, I taped French verbs to my handlebars to study on the way to class.
So it was that throughout my life, important memories have always included bicycles. And like good thinking people everywhere, I've come to see bicycles as one of the keys to making a better, more peaceful world.
This week is Bike to Work Week in San Francisco. Thursday is Bike to Work Day. There may be no better moment to say the obvious: Isn't it about time this city's bicyclists relegated Critical Mass to the memory bin?
Critical Mass is, of course, that monthly festival of traffic-ordinance-breaking that, participants say, will somehow, someday, convince people to give greater rights to bicyclists. A thousand or so bicyclists gather at Market and Embarcadero the last Friday of each month, then ride together through congested streets at rush hour, briefly tying up traffic by blocking intersections.
I've cast my mind back over the six years since the famous Critical Mass demonstration in 1997, when police ran amok and over bicycle protesters. And I can't for the life of me figure out how breaking traffic laws -- which are the only real friend bike riders have when it comes to surviving amid cars -- is supposed to make streets friendlier for bicyclists. The monthly demonstration infuriates motorists, and most voters in San Francisco, for good or ill, are motorists. It pisses off the police, and police are the only people in San Francisco charged with enforcing laws on the street. It undermines bicyclists' claim for equal rights. (It's hard to ask for equal protection when you're breaking the law without expecting to be punished.) It's made hoodlums of bicyclists, who, in any other city, are considered a wholesome, all-American group.
Mainstream environmentalists routinely denounce their nasty, tree-spiking little brothers in Earth First! AIDS activists publicly distance themselves from radical groups such as ACT UP. What better way to celebrate Bike to Work Week than for bicycle activists to likewise jettison their own nasty, mud-throwing little brothers?
Leah Shahum, bless her heart, is the energetic, earnest, affable executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, the nonprofit group that lobbies for bike lanes and bike racks and other public accommodations that will spread the joy of cycling throughout the land. I was talking with her last week about the group's attempts to help police do more to crack down on automobile drivers who harass bicyclists. In the past, cyclists have complained that police systematically fail to pursue motorists who hit and injure those who locomote on two wheels.
"I've been working with the police four years on this same thing; the same things will happen with different people every year," says Shahum. "There will be a new traffic captain every year. Every time we sit down with them -- and I can't tell you how reasonable we are with them -- what we hear from them every time is, 'When you guys stop doing Critical Mass, maybe we'll help you.' We have to explain to them, 'We're not Critical Mass. We're the Bicycle Coalition.' We would basically have to do this every year. It's one of the biggest problems we have."
Don't you know it. There isn't a week of my life when I'm not reminded that bicyclists are regarded as arrogant hoodlums here. It's an attitude I've found in none of the other dozen or so cities where I've lived, and when I ask non-cycling people about this view -- that cyclists are irritating brigands, at best -- sometimes the non-cyclers explain by invoking the drug-inspired bicycle messengers of San Francisco legend.
Usually, though, the anti-bikers bring up Critical Mass.
Here's my theory: Despite this city's pacifist pretensions, many people live here precisely because San Francisco is a permanent war zone. We have dog wars, back-porch wars, dot-com wars, AIDS wars, tree wars, live-work-loft wars, park wars, library wars, freeway wars, museum wars, rent wars, homelessness wars, taxi wars, and bicycle wars, to name just a few. It's possible to move to San Francisco in the late spring, join a fight that summer, and by fall possess an interesting group of energetic, fighting-mad friends. In San Francisco, this is known as "making oneself at home."
Our acrimonious political culture has emerged from a proud tradition of fine-grained participatory democracy and hair-trigger dissent. But the tradition has been accompanied by the myth that squabbling is the best way to advance the commonweal. Plenty of other cities and counties have managed to make themselves bike-friendly without bicyclists making a nuisance of themselves. Here, the bicyclists protest mightily at the end of every month, and manage to set their cause back mightily in the process.
It's actually possible to promote bike use without irritating people. Bicycles, after all, are by nature not nearly as irritating as cars or trucks. Bikes never jackknife on freeway ramps; when they run stop signs, they don't kill pedestrians. When bikes suffer mechanical failure, they don't close whole traffic lanes. Bicycles don't generate 5 million deaths per year. Automobiles do.
In Sacramento, local officials consider bicycles' nonirritating essence a potential engine for downtown economic development. The city is turning dozens of wide, fast, automobile-oriented streets into bike-friendly routes, in part to make life more pleasant for residents living on those streets, and to lure more people downtown.
"The exciting thing in Sacramento is that the city is considering taking three-lane, one-way streets, knocking them down to two lanes, or one-way with bike lanes. Others are being restored to two-way with bike lanes. You're talking about taking space away from autos and giving it to people," says Chris Morfas, executive director of the California Bicycle Coalition. "We are blessed here in that our mayor, Heather Fargo, has gotten religion in creating walkable and bikeable communities."
Other cities are getting similar religion. Midlane bicycle stencils -- signaling that bicycles have the same right to street-space as cars -- are now on streets in Berkeley, Oakland, Chicago, Denver, Cambridge, Gainesville, Portland, Las Vegas, and Brisbane. In Marin County, police, the sheriff, the district attorney, the highway patrol, and the Human Rights Commission have gone to extraordinary lengths to establish safe roadways for bicyclists.
Awhile ago, some bicycle activists from the Bay Area went to Sacramento, hoping to launch a Critical Mass there.
"I don't want to talk about that. It was basically a mess," Morfas says. "Basically, it was 50 people acting like real jerks."
Two weeks ago I was riding to work along Grove Street, where the Department of Parking and Traffic has painted green, midlane bicycle stencils as a pilot project in advance of Sacramento-style, citywide stencils. A man driving a San Francisco Unified School District step van swerved at me dangerously; I came up beside him and said, "Careful, you came pretty close there."
The fellow started yelling at me to get off the road. I told him I had a legal right to be there. He yelled over and over again, "I don't give a fuck about the law. Get the fuck off the road, or I'll run you off."
I told him I'd have him arrested if he did. He laughed and said, "Right. Get me arrested." Lo and behold, two blocks later he swerved at me swiftly, sharply, all the way up to the curb, attempting, it certainly appeared, to run me off the road.
In 30 years of bicycling I'd never called the police to report a motorist, but I called this time, because the fellow seemed to be using school district property in an attempted assault. I didn't catch the license plate number, but I got the school district vehicle number off the side of the van. The police dispatcher said if I got the guy's name from the school district, there would be sufficient information for an incident report. Through a series of phone calls, I learned that district officials, to their credit, actually tracked down the driver and questioned him. But they didn't give me his name, and a district spokeswoman said the fellow had denied my version of events, though she didn't say what he'd said.
Even so, I took this information to the police station on Fillmore Street. There, a desk officer took time to enlist another officer to look up applicable laws, review departmental memos about road rage, and otherwise handle my case in the most thoughtful possible way.
Which leads me to suggest: No More War.
Though bicyclists see the police as their enemy largely thanks to the 1997 crackdown on Critical Mass, hostility between the two groups is not the result of conflicting essential natures. Traffic rules like the ones that make road rage illegal are the most important allies bicyclists have -- regardless of how many bike riders think they should have the right to run stop signs. (On an interesting side note, Chief Alex Fagan's son -- that's right, the famous, fajita-linked one -- is an avid cyclist.) There's no reason to think the Police Department couldn't be persuaded to do more to make our streets safe.
Bike lanes, midlane stencils, and other bicycle-friendly measures should, and probably would, be an easy sell here, but for Critical Mass-generated animosity.
The Board of Supervisors is led by a bike-friendly Green; Supervisor Sophie Maxwell is herself a long-distance bicyclist. The mayor has been heard saying he sees bicyclist protections as a civil rights issue. Fifty percent of San Franciscans own bicycles, according to a recent poll. And there's a history of success: Valencia Street merchants actually appreciate the wide bike lanes that were painted there a few years ago; the lanes have calmed traffic and made the street friendlier for shopping.
Yet in San Francisco people who ride their bicycles to work and in so doing reduce automobile congestion on the streets are seen as a bunch of irresponsible, arrogant outlaws -- thanks, in large part, to Critical Mass.
Someday I'd like to look back on this Bike to Work Week as the moment when San Francisco's bicycle movement grew up and abandoned Critical Mass. It would make for a pleasant memory.
