Who Is the Marginal Person on a Bike, part 2

Who is the marginal person on a bike? I use the word “marginal” to describe the very next person getting on a bicycle. I want to know who this person is, because as a bicycle advocate, I am hoping that more people get on bicycles, and I would like to know who they are and what their needs are so I can support them with my advocacy.

When I went over this previously, I suggested a couple possible alternatives for occupational or residential criteria to identify the marginal person. I have thought about this a little more since then, and it seems to me that the most intriguing way to look at this person is to ask whether he or she is riding for recreation, or riding for errands and commuting. As I see it, advocacy efforts for each of the two genres of bicycle use are diverging, like Darwin’s finches.

Recreational bicyclists are tiresomely described as riding expensive bicycles and wearing bright, stretchy clothes. Bicyclists who ride to get from place to place many times choose to emulate elderly Northern Europeans, wearing suits, carrying umbrellas, and riding bicycles with 19th-century accouterments like skirt guards and enclosed chains. In terms of advocacy efforts, recreational riding has the three-foot passing rule, which is steadily making its way across the U.S., and transportation bicyclists boast of efforts to create protected bike lanes. Lost in the mix are the so-called invisible cyclists, the immigrants without drivers’ licenses who are bicycling to get to work from home without benefit of lights, reflective uniforms, or rear luggage racks.

Why is this important to determine who is the marginal person on a bike? Because bicycling is a technique, and the people who are on bicycles are using the technique. The marginal person on a bike, in one view, is the person who just learned to ride a bicycle. This is a person who is now riding, who wasn’t riding this morning. To follow through with the argument, in order to get more people on bicycles, it would make sense to teach them to ride.

The flip side of this is that riding a bicycle doesn’t mean that the person is going to be running errands on his or her bicycle. Is that OK? Reading Michael Andersen’s blog post about People For Bikes’ Isabella, the tween whom we envision using our coming-soon bicycle infrastructure, I see her world as described in the blog post to be weirdly utilitarian. It’s full of destinations, but the journeys don’t merit a mention.

I am the father of two small children, and I can confidently aver that the journey is often the most exciting part of the trip. So I’m confused. Isabella needs bicycle infrastructure so she can get from place to place, but not so she can actually enjoy riding a bicycle. As Andersen points out in his blog post, “The ultimate goal of the Green Lane Project — and, we’d argue, of all modern bicycle infrastructure — is to get Isabella where she wants to go.” There’s no mention of active transportation here, so presumably Isabella’s bicycle and her neighborhood’s Modern Bicycle Infrastructure is just a placeholder until we can get the magic-carpet thing worked out.

As I have mentioned before, it is bizarre to discuss bicycle advocacy without the slightest nod toward the joy inherent in bicycle technique. Bicycling, even in a motor-vehicle-free nirvana, can be time-consuming, arduous, and uncomfortably sensitive to weather conditions. When it’s a nice day, however, it’s a joy to be outside, moving, using your body. Bicycle advocates who do not emphasize that more bicycle infrastructure permits joyful bicycle riding at will are like contraception advocates who fail to mention that birth control can enable more joyful sex.

So, as an advocate, I will confess that my ultimate goal is to get more people on bicycles, because it’s fun to ride and I want to share that with others. My goal is greater than providing people with an alternative way to run errands. The whole point of commuting by bicycle, as I see it, is to allow more of that joy into your life, substituting the autonomy and physical pleasure of bicycle riding for either a dull and listless mass-transit journey or an expensive and alienating motor vehicle trip.

Experiential joy of cycling, new wheelset edition

wheelset

I could ride anything, really. I’m sympathetic to a classic-looking design, just because I think the safety bicycle has proved itself as one of the all-time winning designs and a precursor to all kinds of other design innovations, from Marcel Breuer’s chair to the Centre Pompidou. If the insides are on the outside, in some way it resembles a bicycle.

So I admit to being a little bemused by the constant susurrus over the question of what kind of bicycle to ride, or the source of a bicycle and its components, the caliber of questions that arise when bicycles are treated like any other consumer product, say, for instance, coffee beans. Check the comments for one example. Sure, there are plenty of ethical issues that bicycle acquisition lies tangent to, just as with any consumer product. I wouldn’t buy one, cheap, from some skeevy-looking street person. I wouldn’t buy one welded together by eight-year-old girls in China. But beyond those cautions lies a deeper stratum of decision-making, apparently, that ranges from slow, heavy, comfort bikes with fenders, chain covers, and dress guards, epitomized by the Dutch “granny” bike, to sleeker, lighter, more “aggressive” (read hunched-over) single-speeds and racing bikes. If the bike is too heavy, it’s inconvenient for hill-climbing and longer distances; if it’s too fast, it makes the rider too sweaty to function in other activities of daily living. Advocates of the comfort bike posit that Americans don’t ride because they can’t find those bikes in stores; advocates of the single-speed affirm that Americans don’t ride because the bikes they can find are boat anchors that are too slow to enjoy riding.

I can rattle off to you my own recipe: mixte-frame, hard saddle, short cockpit, straight bar, three rings on the front gearset, wide, slick tires, fenders, a luggage rack, two locks and clipless pedals. That denotes the “helicopter,” my beloved commuting bike, which has gone through four different frames and at least three separate drivetrains. The “fixed-wing,” named in opposition to the helicopter, is the single-speed I rode in the secret city, viz. men’s frame, hard saddle, drop bar, single-speed, no derailleur, freewheel, racing tires, toe clips, and pedal straps. After a week of riding the helicopter, coasting the fixed-wing down the hill by my house on a Saturday morning feels like being shot out of a cannon. The helicopter, though, can hold more baggage, and its wider tires and lower center of gravity simulate driving a tank, if you could envision an oatmeal-fueled Abrams.

As you’ve just noticed, dear reader, an experiential approach to describing a bicycle is far more rich and absorbing than a prescriptivist one. I find the prescriptivist arguments a little stifling and airless. Whatever bike you ride, the experience of riding it is completely and uniquely yours. What I’m sharing with you this week, however, is that the quality of the parts can make a big difference in the quality of that experience. I just invested in a new set of wheels for the helicopter, and tires to match, which all told should cost about $200, or far more than I spent on the current frame. This morning I rode down to the job site and it was approaching transcendence until I met the stop light ten blocks away from my destination. The new wheelsets have made the ride smoother and tighter. It still feels like a tank, but a tank that can ride the center of a mechanical-pencil-narrow line. The braking is firmer because the rims are new, and the fenders don’t scrape the out-of-true wheels as they used to do. It makes quite a difference.

So, you can buy a bike at many different price points ($10 at a yard sale, $50 on an internet board, $150 at a department store, $250 at a bike shop) and get out riding, but eventually your pleasure in the experience will be compromised by the deterioration of your equipment. Replacing with better quality parts may appear quixotic, more expensive than replacing the whole bike, but two hundred bucks spent on wheelsets bolted to your original frame will boost the quality of your ride more than you might imagine.