Summer is a season of celebration - a time when people gather under the sun and ideas bloom. At the end of July, Bikesummer will consume San Francisco for one month as people pedal in from points far and wide to celebrate the glories of the bicycle, advocate for a sustainable transportation balance, and explore how to bring about this velorution. Bikesummer is one of the most important environmental grassroots gatherings of the decade. By focusing the global momentum of the bicycle movement in one place, Bikesummer will promote bicycling and transportation concerns amidst an exciting month of actions and adventures, advocacy and celebration.

Why Bicycles? Why Now?

A pivotal environmental battle at the turn of the millennium is being waged over transportation. Transportation is more than an individual choice of how we decide to get from point A to point B - it is integrally tied to land use, air and water quality, habitat and wilderness loss, public health and safety, and even the rise of political and social apathy. We have built interstate ribbons of concrete that emptied our once-vibrant, compact urban centers, spilling humanity and our waste across the landscape in sprawling heaves of auto-oriented subdivisions and mega-malls. As our metropolitan areas grow several times faster than their populations, we are consuming vast tracts of wilderness, farmland, and open space and replacing them with oceanic parking lots, strip malls, and single-use isolated pods of tract housing and office "parks." The low-density world designed around the demands of the automobile - for space and fuel, as well as economic and psychological stresses-leaves room for little else in our communities and our lives.

We have subjugated all other needs-for safety, equity, community, health, and environment- to ensure that the automobile can chug along unfettered. And the irony of the whole system is that we are paralyzed in unending gridlock. Our current system focuses on the movement of the greatest volume of cars at the greatest speeds possible. All the while we have disassembled, underfunded, and neglected mass transit and marginalized any form of non-motorized transportation, including walking. We have made the corner grocery store, the pedestrian, the public town square, the bicycle commuter, and the blue sky all endangered species. We have forgotten how to move people.

The bicycle is the ultimate vehicle of liberation, of sustainability, of efficiency, of community, and of social equity. The environmental benefits of bicycling are unquestionable. Bicycles are inexpensive to manufacture and are affordable to families even on the most meager budgets. Bicycles require very little space compared to other vehicles. In tandem with mass transit, bicycles permit a city to keep itself confined to less area, keeping wild lands and open space unpaved, intact, and nearby. Bicycles fit perfectly in a human-scaled city.

Bicycling fosters an ethos of living locally-supporting local business, being nourished by local agriculture, appreciating local ecosystems. Community, cultural activity, artistic exploration, and political discourse need physical and public places to foment and grow, they require entropy and human contact. Public squares, neighborhood parks, sidewalks, marketplaces-these are the places where people mingle, ideas grow, and culture and community germinate. All of this requires a human-scaled built environment. The human spirit needs contact with others to grow and flourish. The bicycle is ideal transportation to travel this compact urban environment. Bicycling promotes social interaction at every turn. Cycling keeps the body fit and the mind and reflexes sharp. In this age of hyper-convenience and drive-thrus, we have let our health and vigor deteriorate. Cycling as everyday transportation is a simple solution to regular exercise. And of course, the simple acts of bicycling lifts the human spirit and revives our connection with air, land, and water.

Nothing short of a velorution on a massive scale will make people take note and think and begin to turn the wheels toward sustainability. Bicycling has been making incremental progress; it's time to take the campaign to the next level. Bikesummer 1999 in San Francisco is the first monumental wave of the coming sea change. The revolution will not be motorized.

-Josh Switzky

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