Bicycling
A Serious Pleasure
A Partial Revolt

Bicycling is a physical act, moving oneself by bicycle for pleasure or utility. BikeSummer has been launched to focus attention on bicycling as a political act. Many bicycling activists seek to change the design of cities, our transportation priorities, and our relationship to energy and urban sustainability. Perhaps the most important fact lurking amidst our political embrace of bicycling is that it is just plain FUN! Some people are suspicious of pleasure as a basis for political action, certain that sincere political commitment means embracing hard work and sacrifice. But the magical spread of Critical Mass across the planet, and the upsurge in cycling and related political expressions is compelling proof of the power of pleasure as a motivational force. BikeSummer builds on this by presenting daily events over the next month that are fun and whimsical, as well as pointed and political, sometimes combining the two in the same event!

June 1999 Critical Massers head to the Wave Organ as sunset approaches over the Golden Gate

In our political embrace of bicycling, and by extension the bicycle, we stake out positions on transit, energy, urban planning, ecology, and finally the economy itself. Bicycling can be seen as a radical rejection of the capitalist transit deal. We Won't Pay! When you bicycle you are engaged in a brilliant act of self-reduction. (In the 1970s, Italian housewives, fed up with inflation, invaded supermarkets by the hundreds and seized goods for free, in what became a widespread movement of self-reduction.) By bicycling, the individual drastically reduces their personal cost of living, and the extent to which they continue to participate in the transit system, which steadily transfers wealth from the bottom to the few hands at the top. Bicyclists also benefit from personal autonomy, solidarity, better health, face-to-face experiences that promote conviviality, and communication.

Nevertheless, bicycling advocates do not share a clear set of ideas or criticisms of the status quo (for previous essays addressing some of these issues check the web at www.sflandmark.com/cm). When individuals "opt out" of the car culture by bicycling, they improve their own economic status by forgoing the expenses of maintaining a car. But even for the numerous cyclists who continue to own and use a car for things that are difficult to do on a bike, the savings in money, time and health club bills can be substantial. Reducing the cash flow to GM, Ford, Chevron, et al can't be bad in itself. But once the cost of living has gone down this way, the individual has more freedom to reduce or change work, to spend time and money on freely chosen activities (often called 'hobbies' but as often as not, a more meaningful kind of work). The self-control, self-confidence ,and conviviality that accompany bicycling for many people also promote a growing shared consciousness. People join together in new ways outside work, in this case "getting around." New kinds of associations, whether around bicycling, community gardening, alternative music clubs, whatever, are incipient expressions of our desire to make a world worth living in. If we can develop a popular dialogue on the notion of 'worthwhile work' we will quickly find that bicycling is a form of 'worthwhile transit to get to work', but the utility often stops at the workplace door as we enter to carry on the empty rituals of Multinational Capital.

The large downtown businesses are the real targets of mass bicycling. The battle for the hearts and minds of the population is also at stake, but bicycling is as hard to oppose as apple pie (of course there are thousands of people who love their cars like an old shoe, as a private room or even a surrogate home, and bicycle advocacy can be threatening to them). The real targets are auto companies, oil companies, insurance companies, all the corporations that have a stake in the businesses that profit from the car and road industries, many of which are in the highrises of downtown San Francisco.

We like to think that the rulers of this society are afraid of a mass defection to the bicycle. I suspect they are not the least bit concerned, and insofar as the movement for bicycling remains so outwardly moralistic and self-righteous, I'd have to agree that they have nothing to fear. There has been a six-fold increase in bicycling since the early 1990s, but it would have to go from the low thousands into the 100,000s for them to start to feel threatened by falling sales. Bicyclists as bicyclists will have a very difficult time producing a sustained pressure beyond the monthly turn of the screw known as Critical Mass. If the counter-values implicit in the Bicycling Revolt can be extended into workplaces, where the wheels of commerce can actually be stopped, we will have more leverage. If the counter-values implicit in the Bicycling Revolt can find a coherent political expression, a movement could coalesce around it that can use the power at work towards a fundamental redesign of how this society gets around AND what it does when it gets there!

A lot of ecological politics are fueled by the conviction that we can act locally while thinking globally, and the best way to do this is through rigorous attention to our personal consumption choices (cycling, vegetarianism, etc.). We've all been on the receiving end at one time or another of a tirade from a self-righteous "correct chooser" who lectures us on smoking, eating meat or even dairy, driving a car, what have you. What is the psychological and political impact of this kind of human interaction? Who feels what during this exchange, how did it feel when it happened to you? What are the political, historical and social arguments FOR a politics that confronts individuals with moral imperatives whenever they shop? It's one thing to argue that you can increase your personal autonomy, political impact, and immediate pleasure in life by bicycling. It's quite another to argue directly or by tone and implication that the person who doesn't embrace your choices is dumb, or duped, or a moral failure.

Moreover, situating the crucial decisions of our lives at the point of personal consumption ignores (while rigidifying) our lack of choice about the shape of the world and the choices we're offered (from basic science and technology to specifics like how things are made, what is made, how we get around, communicate, etc.). In other words, we go to work and reproduce a world of bad choices and then try to change it by making the least bad choice while shopping.

Bicycling is attracting lots of people for a myriad of reasons. As we find elements of shared experience and sensibility and express them in action we are engaged in an altogether new political experiment. It has similarities and overlaps with predecessors such as the labor movement, anti-nuke and anti-war movements, gay liberation, and is permeated with some of the better assumptions of New Age/deep ecology: the Earth is a living being and all its inhabitants are key pieces of a complex web of life; what goes around comes around so you have to be nice (!), and more. In general these days, movements of social opposition or social vision are arising in the ad hoc associations of citizens. Critical Mass took this to a new level of dis-organization by eschewing even planning committees or ongoing coordinators. People come together on their bikes once a month. What happens when they get there is always a mystery, even though dozens of people know what they'd like to have happen!

Clearly masses of bicyclists have the power to clog streets and wreak havoc in urban settings, if they so choose. But the people drawn to cycling in Critical Mass or BikeSummer are not more radical or angry than most folks. They probably share a critique of the automobile culture, maybe a more generalized critique of irrational capitalism, but finally it is a community comprised of strangers who are engaged in an acceptable and peaceful ritual. The potential disruption itself is no threat to the ways things are. The rare and sporadic riot or traffic jam is easily turned into a propaganda victory for the powers that be.

The threat lies in a powerful social movement that can challenge the organization of life at its roots, where we re-create it every day, at work. Our cultural embrace of bicycling is part of discovering ourselves anew in self-forming communities, from which can grow the vision of a different way of life. Eventually our shared vision can lead to larger initiatives that "wield meaningful social power." But it will have to extend itself beyond mere bicycling, which is at best only a small but important part of a larger cultural, political, and economic transformation. As we ride together during BikeSummer, we have a wonderful opportunity to make new friends, discover new ideas, and explore new visions of how life could be. Bicycling has come a long way in the past half decade, but it has a long way to go to change life!

-Chris Carlsson, July 11, 1999

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