The segregated city - urban taxonomies

The city is full of boundaries.  Messages about the space we are inhabiting, telling us where we are allowed to stay put, and where we should keep moving;  where we can and can’t enter, and under what conditions;  messages about how we should behave once inside. 

Sometimes these signals are obvious – a fence with a locked gate tells us we are not meant to enter somewhere.  Some signals are more subtle – a change in the texture of the paving tells us that we are moving from public space to private property, where our legal rights are very different, dictated by the landowner instead of a democratically accountable council or government.  These messages are sent out by urban infrastructure like radio waves, and continually reinforced in our minds by the behaviours of those we see around us.   

And they are indeed messages:  not accidents of construction, but actions carefully considered  by town planners, architects, corporations, local authorities, etc. 

We now rely on a complex web of signals and signposts to guide our interactions with the city, and with each other.  Road markings, traffic signs, positioning of kerbs and speed humps, bollards, railings, fences, walls, the design of junctions and roundabouts, phasing of traffic lights;  anti-skateboarding devices, anti-pigeon devices, anti-youth devices that emit a high-pitched noise, benches designed to repel homeless people;  anti-climb paint;  positioning and availability of facilities such as street lamps, public toilets;  the design of buses and bus stops, and the layout of their routes.  There is even an example of a town in Essex that painted yellow lines on the pavement to guide where people should walk.

These layers of mediation between our inner thoughts and our external environment have the cumulative effect over time that we stop making decisions and relating our judgements to our direct experiences of the place and our memories.  Instead, we check the signals.  Or rather, we don’t stop thinking altogether – but our thoughts maybe lack nuance, and our ability to critically interpret and respond to new situations is diminished. 

Our diminished ability to think critically about situations leads to our becoming isolated from other people in our immediate surroundings.  People stop being individuals, and become specimens of a given category.  When we drive along the road, we’re looking out for drivers in front and behind us, checking to see if they’re indicating, whether they’re speeding up or slowing down, performing pre-determined movements that imply particular patterns of behaviour.  We’re not thinking about what that person is like;  what sort of day they’re having;  how they’re feeling;  etc. 

And fair enough – if we spent all our time wondering what the driver next to us was going to have for dinner, I’m not sure it would help our driving.  But I still think it’s important to note the trade-off that we make in this process of dehumanisation.

Our removal from other road-users is all the more stark in relation to people in different categories.  People on the ‘other’ side of the boundaries that mark up the city.  For example, if we travel along the road in a car, we are not only bodily separated from the outside world through the physical fact of the car’s shell.  We also a gulf apart from pedestrians inhabiting the parallel dimension of the pavement. 

The visual language of the division between the road and the pavement is powerful enough that we are able to drive along and see people on the pavement in a completely different category to those driving the car directly in front of us.

We’re aware of those pedestrians in our peripheral vision, but as long as their body-language doesn’t indicate they’re about to make a mad dash into the road (into our world, colliding with our reality), we are able to ignore them. 

This isn’t an argument that we should abolish kerbs, and there are many good and helpful reasons that symbolic and physical signs and barriers  – though there have been some interesting experiments in removing these.  But I do think it’s interesting to interrogate the effects of excessively taxonomised mindsets on the relationships between different users of urban space. 

What makes us visible? Perception vs the physical

My friend Katie recently posted a link to a tutorial on how to make your own light-up cycling jacket.  You basically sew a load of LEDs into a(n otherwise perfectly wearable) jacket, hook them up to some batteries, and wire an on/off button into the cuffs. 

This got me thinking about what it is that makes you visible to others on the roads.  Is it simply about some part of you being brightly lit?  Or is there some interpretive element to how we see, and respond to, other road-users?  How does your ‘physical visibility’ relate to your ‘interpretive visibility’?

Katie’s hi-vis jacket provides the wearer with two light-up arrows, pointing left and right, which can be switched on independently, allowing the wearer to signal when they’re about to turn left or right, in the same way as a car’s indicator lights. 

Or does it?  Although the designer and wearer of this contraption knows that the arrows mean ‘I’m turning right’, what does the car-driver see?  I suspect that – at least initially – they’ll just see some flashing lights.  Maybe if the cyclist is slowing down and approaching a junction, the car driver will – in a few seconds – put two and two together, and consciously think “Oh, they’re signalling”.  But this calculated mental reaction is very different to their response to a car’s orange indicator light, which all drivers the world over know – without even consciously processing it – to symbolise ‘I’m turning’.

I think the ‘arrow jacket’ also contains a second barrier to the process of realisation, as the driver has to process the symbolic meaning of the direction of the arrow.  Car indicator lights, kind of ingeniously, don’t require the observer to make this mental calculation – they just rely on the orange light being on the side of the car that the vehicle is about to move towards.  Arrows require an extra layer of decoding – and if the observer isn’t expecting to have to do any decoding of new languages invented by other road-users – which they’ve never seen before – then I wonder what impact it will be on their perception of what they’re seeing.

This is no criticism of the jacket or its designer.  I think it’s quite a clever idea in many ways, and I find something about the craftivist / hacking element kind of aesthetically appealing.  But I do think it raises interesting questions about visibility in urban space.

I think similar issues are at play in other new lighting contraptions I’ve seen emerge recently.  Revolights insert hoops of LEDs into the wheel rims, which are synched to the speed of the bike to only light up only the front half of the front rim, and the back half of the back rim. 

But what do your eyes and brain do when they see two 2-foot high arcs of light glide along the road surface?  What does it mean? 

More prosaically, a friend recently pointed out how weird it looks when you see orange pedal reflectors bobbing up and down.  Similarly, we’re used to seeing jackets, bags, lycra gear etc, with all sorts of patterns of silver reflective material built in.  We suppose that it makes us more visible.  But when I ride along wearing my black leggings with the silver writing on the calves, what message does it send to someone behind me when they see the disembodied word “Altura” bobbing up and down in front of them?  Maybe they correctly interpret this signal, and perceive a cyclist whom they should treat with caution and respect.  Perhaps they muse upon the spectacle of a ghost whose only connection the earthly realm is a shining brand name? 

Admittedly these symbols are never static – if enough people start adopting these technologies and forms, they will over time become their own visual language.  Perhaps one day everyone will become used to seeing a red and white arc, or a flashing LED triangle, as ‘cyclist’ without thinking about it, just as we see a pair of disembodied headlights and think ‘car’. 

But I think that in the meantime, the cracks in the continuity and clarity of this language can act as useful tools to help us consider what it is about our physical form that allows us to be processed as symbolic forms.  This in turn will help us to think about how we can start to construct cyclists not just as objects that can be seen, but citizens who are treated with respect and humanity.  

Musical alphabet soup

[This post was written back in June 2013 - now less topical, but still relevant]

Comparing this year’s Glastonbury line-up with that of Barcelona’s Primavera festival, I notice an interesting difference. 

Glastonbury categorises the bands by the stage they’ll be playing on (therefore implicitly by genre), and within that, arranges them in order of presumed fame / importance.  Primavera on the other hand just list the whole lot in alphabetical order.

What’s the meaning of these two systems of categorisation / promotion?  And what do they say about the way we’ve started to listen to music in recent years? 

Festivals listing bands in alphabetical order is a relatively new phenomenon.  The first time I encountered it was about four years ago in the Field Day festival, which takes place in East London’s Victoria Park every May.   Until then, festivals had followed the traditional ‘Glastonbury’ approach. 

This was born of the pre-internet era, when people found out about new music through a small number of sources, mainly controlled by a handful of wealthy media barons and music industry big-wigs.  Accessibility of music was also dependent on what was in stock in record shops, so the most easily available records became the most widely heard.

This meant that the size and demographic of a band’s audience was fairly predictably connected to the extent and type of exposure they were afforded by this industry/media partnership. 

It also meant we searched for music not by using search engines, but with magazines and TV shows.  The format of these media is inherently geared to reinforcing hierarchies of fame, with the most prominent bands gracing the front pages of magazines, or the suspenseful finale of the weekly Top 40. 

(Who knows or cares about what’s in the top 40 these days?  Is it even still a thing?  The last time I heard the phrase ‘Number 1 In The Charts’ was when a pub quizmaster bemoaned how difficult it was to set music trivia questions for the last decade, due to the absence of quantifiably ubiquitous songs.)

These days, it’s far easier to find out about new music through peer groups online, and access almost any song in history (for free) on Youtube etc, as recommendations for similar artists.  We also search directly (and actively) for specific songs / artists, instead of waiting to the end of the chart show to be told who’s Number 1 that week.  (Of course there’s still a huge music industry pushing a few major artists on TV, online, in print, etc.  But the context is very different.)

We’re also now accustomed to personalised and self-selected content across many platforms, rather than ‘one-size-fits-all’:  Twitter timelines, Facebook feeds, RSS feeds, Last.fm scrobbling, Tesco Clubcard points for selected items, BBC iplayer, ‘build-your-own’ student prosptectuses and corporate reports – the list goes on.

In this landscape – notwithstanding  the fact that events organisers obviously make curatorial decisions about which bands are playing in the first place – why would it still make sense for them to choose for us which bands individual audience members will want to see?  Why would it still make sense to assume that the organiser has a better idea than the audience of who’s more famous within specific subcultures?  Or how that fame would translate in desirability?  It feels kinda quaint to be addressed in this way.    

Conversely, Primavera’s alphabetised line-up is the closest a poster can get to Google, in terms of how we seek information in the modern age.  So perhaps it’s also fitting that Primavera’s line-up poster is all sexy minimalism – sans serif, black & white, clean backgrounds – while Glastonbury’s graphic design has yet to emerge from the early 1990s.

Democracy 2.0?

However, I think it would be a mistake to view this shift in music consumption as a move towards the democratisation of music. 

Alphabetisation and equal font sizes appear to create a level playing field for artists, and recognise heterogeneity in audience tastes.  They may even indicate a move away from centralised industry control.  However, I wonder if this conflation of myriad artists and styles onto a single continuum also goes hand in hand with the flattening of music into an amorphous mush of commodity. 

The information age has widened accessibility, so everyone has the opportunity to be connoisseur.  However, it’s also enabled the exact opposite: a generation of people with no need or interest in cultural discernment.  In fact, we’re often (myself included) not only undiscerning about what we listen to, but don’t even know what we’re listening to at any given moment, nor would it occur to us to have any desire to do so.   

We have huge swathes of musical material with no barriers to accessing or selecting it.  We can build infinite playlists without taking action in between to change records, and we don’t have a radio DJ between tracks telling us what was just playing, or what they think of it.  (Though we have kept onto the tradition of being sold stuff in between songs.)

The ‘shuffle’ function blends all of our music collection into a morass of ‘stuff’.  Instead of selecting a song we want, we simply listen to ‘some music’.  The Schrodinger-esque iPod Shuffle takes this one step further, by allowing us to listen to a load of shuffled songs without even displaying what’s playing – so you can quite easily own and listen to a whole load of music without ever knowing what it is.  We’ve moved from a Newtonian musical age to one where our tastes are probabilistically distributed along a Gaussian bell-curve of Heisenbergian uncertainty.  (Physics fans:  yes, I know this is a crap analogy.)

The phrase ‘one-hit wonder’ used to be a derogatory phrase applying to bands with only one famous song, rather than a whole well-known body of work.  But nowadays it wouldn’t even make sense to deploy such a term, let alone as an insult (“You had a hit?  Well done, you’re famous and talented!”), because we recognise the complex and arbitrary way that information, fame and memes spread, and how short our attention spans our.  (On a related note:  music is still written and distributed in the album form, but rarely listened to in the same format – when is the mode of music production and distribution going to change to reflect this?) 

This isn’t an old-person call for a return to the days of John Peel and Melody Maker.  But I do think that the connotations of the alphabetised playlist has some liberatory potential, whilst also conversely embodying the commodification and homogenisation of culture in late modernity. 

Watermelons and apolitical politics

Politics and the climate debate

James Randerson’s recent Guardian article discussed the public suspicion of ‘watermelon’ environmentalists – people who are ‘green on the outside but red on the inside’, ie who use climate change as an excuse to advance a socialist political agenda. 

During the debate that followed, some commenters accused leftists such as George Monbiot of being ‘watermelons’, whilst others, including Bob Ward, conversely accused right-wingers of doing the same thing.  (Conveniently for conservatives, no one has yet identified a fruit that’s green on the outside and blue on the inside.  Except maybe a mouldy blueberry, but that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.)

Randerson himself argues that climate change has been seized on by people from all across the political spectrum to suit their own, pre-existing, ideological standpoints.  To address this problem, he urges that “the political poison be drawn from the debate”, adding, “the reality is that atmospheric physics does not care which party you vote for.” 

Not all carbon is born equal

This appeal to an incontrovertible ‘reality’ is appealing, and at first glance seems straightforward.  If the problem is too much CO₂ in the atmosphere, all we need to do is get rid of the CO₂, right?  However, framing the issue in this way masks an important debate about whose interests are being prioritised by different policy options to manage climate change. 

Larry Lohmann argues that by focusing our discussions too heavily on carbon itself – an inanimate molecule – we run the risk of imagining that all policies to reduce carbon are equivalent to each other, and that their success can be measured purely by how effective they are at minimising atmospheric carbon – regardless of their social and economic implications. 

Can we really equate petrol consumption by American SUVs with, say, planting eucalyptus monocultures in Indonesia that will (temporarily) absorb CO₂ but which may have undesirable impacts on the way local people can use their land?  Is funding a windfarm in Kent the same as funding biofuel crop production in developing countries, which may restrict local food production?  Is (fossil-fuelled) economic development in Britain equivalent to that of developing countries whose own development has been harmed by Britain’s own history of colonial domination? 

I’m not disputing that CO₂ is indeed causing climate change, and I agree that the atmosphere doesn’t care which political party we vote for.  But I also think we need to pay close attention to whose interests are served by particular policies, and the processes that shape those policies. 

Whose interests get heard?

For example, Private Eye reported in August 2013 that a group set up to advise the government on fracking – the ‘All-Party Group on Unconventional Oil and Gas’ – was funded by a number of fracking companies, and receives admin support from Edelman, a lobbying firm that represents frackers. 

The Group does include a range of (non-paying) stakeholders including environmental NGOs – as was clarified in the following edition of Private Eye (#1348), following (tellingly) a joint complaint made to the Eye by MPs and Edelman.  But do these stakeholders have as much influence over policy makers as the companies that are funding the Group?  Indeed, why would Cuadrilla et al fund the Group if they didn’t think it would buy them influence?  And whilst the fracking companies undoubtedly have a wealth of valuable technical expertise to contribute, with the best will in the world it’s hard to imagine them as neutral, unbiased observers.

Apolitical politics

However, Randerson’s injunction to ‘draw out the political poison’ suggests to me a desire to make decisions that are somehow the logical result of rationally evaluating evidence of a range of social, political, economic and environmental factors, and then agreeing on an objectively optimal course of action.  This implies that political disagreements have the potential for a ‘correct’ or ‘neutral’ solution, as long as we have an honest debate about the issues at play. 

My own feeling is that politics is messier than that.  The very essence of political debate is that different individuals and social groups have directly conflicting interests, and people have vastly differing opinions, and yes, ideologies.  Although we try to debate, compromise, agree on solutions to problems, these underlying tensions will never go away.  For every policy decision – whether it relates to housing, transport, or chicken-farming – some people will think it’s too right-wing, and the other half will say it’s too left-wing.  The climate change debate is no different – and we should embrace that diversity of opinion, not try to ignore it. 

I admire the consensus-building impulse implicit in ‘removing the poison’, and share the wish to honestly debate politics, and dispassionately weigh up evidence.  But I think that this will only be done by openly acknowledging and discussing the intersections between science and politics, and negotiating ways to make them work together – not by trying to separate them.  

Divide and rule

Urban cycling has become perceived as a politicised act.  That’s not to say that cycling is necessarily radical – indeed, many of the most high-profile supporters of cycling are conservatives (with both big and small ‘c’s).  Only that current debates around cycling are politically contested in a way that, say, doesn’t apply to discussions of the cultures and infrastructures of waste disposal.  One aspect of this debate being somewhat heated is that a narrative has arisen in which cyclists are pitted in opposition to other road users, in an antagonistic struggle. 

In any shared public space, there will be balancing acts to resolve the different needs of the various groups who use the space.  Usually these compromises are absorbed as part of daily life without it even registering that there is a conflict of different interests.  For example, most of us don’t begrudge giving up our seat when a pensioner gets on the bus – it’s just the natural thing to do.  It doesn’t occur to us to decry the war on the buses between pensioners with their special seats, versus the ‘rest of us’.  (Though no doubt George Osborne would find a way of doing so if he thought he could blame them for the recession.)

In debates about road-use, cyclists are usually cast as a group of outsiders, posed antagonistically against the remainder of (presumably ‘normal’) society.  In doing so, cyclists have become subject to the same ‘divide and rule’ tactics that are familiar to so many marginalised groups across society, whereby ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sub-groups are established and played off against each other by those with power.    

Women ("Is she cooking her family's dinner, or is she a slut?");  Muslims ("Are you an extremist, or do you support the government?");  political activists ("People have a right to peaceful protest, but those violent anarchists deserve all the police beatings our taxes can buy"). 

By accepting the legitimacy of these distinctions, we give the green light not only for the supposed 'bad' sub-category to be vilified, but for society as a whole to be manipulated into submission to the powers seeking to divide us in the first place. 

In the blue corner:  cyclists who wear hi-vis apparel and helmets.

In the red corner:  those who ride on the pavement and jump red lights. 

Members of the blue camp are exhorted to shun those in the red, whilst being encouraged view themselves as 'ambassadors', in order to collectively appease some unseen but omniscient arbiter of public decency; an Aztec god of public highways.

The self-policing ‘ambassador’ complex also reflects the double-standards by which marginalised groups are judged.  When one member of a minority group commits a transgression, they are perceived as doing so as part of that group;  are seen as an anonymous member of a collective entity;  a manifestation of a stereotype.  When members of a majority groups transgresses, they are treated as individuals with their own life history and personality, and their belonging to any particular group is rarely mentioned. 

For example, when newspapers report crime stories, they will frequently publish the race of the perpetrator if they are from a minority ethnic background, thereby linking the whole social group with the offence itself.  Conversely if a white person commits a crime, it would never occur to anyone to point out that the offender is white, or connect this to other crimes committed by white people, or ponder how the crime reflects on ‘white culture’ or collectively held ‘white values’. 

Even Anders Brevik’s crimes, which were inextricably linked with his white identity, were never described as ‘white extremism’, ‘European fundamentalism’, ‘Christian terrorism’, or similar.  Instead, the predominantly white British media distanced themselves from him by using terms such as ‘neo-nazi’.    

I was once approaching a set of red traffic lights at a busy junction, when a pedestrian ran out into the road about 5 yards in front of the pedestrian crossing, straight into the path of the cyclist in front of me, who was just pulling up to the lights.  The pedestrian screamed at the cyclist for driving into the crossing;  the cyclist pointed out that the crossing was several yards from where the man was, and that he’d basically just walked out into the road.  The man turned round to glare at each of the cyclists at the lights (there were about 8 of us), and snarled “You’re all just so fucking charming, aren’t you?” before storming off.  I find it difficult to imagine a situation in which 8 car drivers are all abused simply for being in close proximity to a driver who has behaved inconsiderately.

Interestingly, the only time motorists are referred to as a category – as opposed to just being the normal way that people get around – is when motoring lobby groups wail about the ‘war on the motorist’.  This reminds me of amusingly named “men’s rights” groups, which complain about how men are structurally disadvantaged by a cruel matriarchal society. 

Treating cyclists with collective contempt rather than identifying the specific misdemeanours of individuals, and maintaining this power dynamic through a divide-and-rule culture, will only change when cycling is perceived as simply a normal means of getting from A to B, instead of an outsider activity.  In the meantime, cyclists must collectively reject the ‘ambassador’ millstone, or risk perpetuating their own marginalisation.

Visibility and victim-blaming

The early days – the car as a dangerous oddity

Traction engines are like steam trains that drive on roads.  They became available in Britain during the 1850s, when they were mainly used to transport heavy agricultural loads.  In 1861, in response to this new menace, the Locomotives on Highways Act was passed.  It set the world's first ever speed limit, at 10mph. 

Four years later, the Locomotives Act 1865 set the speed limit at 2mph in towns, and 4mph in the country, and required a minimum driving crew of three - one to steer, one to stoke the engine with coal, and one to walk 60 yards ahead waving a red flag or lantern.  For this reason, the law became known as the 'Red Flag Act'.

These laws were passed because, since driving was considered to be a dangerous thing to do, drivers were seen to have a duty to the public to announce their presence.  The burden was on them not to injure anyone during the course of their imposing and outlandish activities, by making themselves highly visible to other, more vulnerable, road users. 

Fast-forward 150 years, and the motor vehicle is seen as the rightful heir of the highway.  Pedestrians and cyclists are permitted to be present only by the good grace and magnanimity of motorists, and on the understanding that they are temporary visitors – outsiders.  They enter at their own risk – and indeed there is a constant and high risk presented by vehicles moving at 30pmh and faster.

The double-whammy of automobiles’ presumed right to the road, and the physical danger they present to the human body, is set against the backdrop of an increasingly risk-sensitive society.  One consequence of this is that cyclists are required to take increasingly burdensome precautions to make their presence on the roads socially acceptable. 

These precautionary measures come in two forms:  physical protection in case they’re hit by cars, and equipment to make themselves more visible to drivers.  We’re going to investigate the latter.

Hi-vis culture

There’s a huge variety of visibility apparatus on the market, and it seems to grow every year.   It includes hi-vis bands, ankle-clips, bag-covers, vests and even whole jackets, and tape stuck to bike frames;  reflective silver patches on trousers, tops, jackets, shoes, gloves, and bags;  plastic reflector panels on the front and rear of the frame, on pedals and on wheels;  lights on the front and rear, and integrated into bags and helmets.

It can be argued that these are simply common-sense measures;  that indeed provide valuable protection, by making it easier for cyclist to be seen. 

However, hi-vis and reflective materials are not designed to protect cyclists from some neutral, abstract danger, or even a danger that is inherent to cycling.  (Unlike helmets are – at least to some extent.)  They are specifically designed to make cyclists visible to motorists.  

Most bike lights used in cities are for being seen by others, not for lighting the road ahead.  More strikingly, reflective material is only activated by the presence of headlights – the passive cyclist is involuntarily 'switched on' at the behest of the motorist. 

Reversal of responsibility

Furthermore, wearing hi-vis is frequently not a precautionary choice made on the part of the individual cyclist, but an imperative imposed by car-driving (car-driven?) society.  Indeed, by failing to adopt the designated prison-uniform of the highway, cyclists are increasingly accused of recklessness with their own lives - and even endangering others'.

Extraordinarily, there was a recent court case involving a child who was hit by a car when walking home along a country road.  The insurance company involved refused to pay compensation because she was not wearing hi vis clothing, and was hence to blame for her own injuries.

This is a reflection of a perverse situation, where the onus of responsibility is on cyclists and pedestrians to ensure that they are not injured, as opposed to the responsibility being on the motorist not to cause injury to others.  After all, the motorist is the one doing something dangerous:  driving a big, heavy, hard, object at high speeds - and is the one who causes injury to cyclists, and not vice versa.

This is a perfect reversal of the logic of the Red Flag Act, in which the individual creating the danger was responsible for mitigating the hazard they posed.  The point here is not that there's anything especially great about preserving arbitrary mid 19th century legislation.  It simply illustrates how the power of the motor industry is so strong, and so pervasive, that it has not only repealed a law, but utterly reversed social expectations. 

It also highlights the unreasonable nature of the demands of hi-vis culture;  the logic is that of a stab-victim being accused by the perpetrator of not ducking fast enough.

Victim-blaming

Here there are strong parallels with misogynist victim-blaming culture, where women who have been sexually assaulted are accused of having brought violence upon themselves by their clothing or behaviour, rather than the blame being laid at the feet of the actual perpetrator of the offence. 

Of course I’m not equating the experience of sexual assault with traffic accidents, and of course the types of trauma involved are very different – I just want to note certain similarities in cultural responses to them both.

Victim-blaming in sexual assault cases is often justified by framing it as ‘common sense’ that women who dress in revealing clothing should anticipate the unwelcome consequences of doing so.  This is often equated with the argument that you’re at greater risk of being robbed if you flash your valuables about in the street. 

One reason that this argument is nonsense (as well as grossly offensive), is that there is a deeply rooted culture of shaming and stigmatising women who are deemed to have dressed ‘provocatively’ (an ugly and topsy-turvy turn of phrase), in a way that simply doesn’t exist for people who leave their wallet poking out of their back pocket. 

Furthermore, despite precautionary warnings to potential victims, victims of knifepoint robbery are unlikely to be asked if the robbery was their fault after the event (at least not immediately).  Contrast this with the response to victims of sexual assault, who are routinely asked by police about their dress, state of intoxication, etc, when reporting crimes.  The same response is encountered by cyclists, who are frequently interrogated about what they may have done to cause a collision, rather than being neutrally asked “What happened?”. 

I was once knocked off my bike in broad daylight by an oncoming van that swerved into my side 

of the road at 20mph without indicating.  I hit him head-on, went over his bonnet, and headplanted onto the road.  (His first comment was the immortal line:  “Sorry mate, I didn’t see you.”)  He admitted immediately that he was entirely to blame, and when we met weeks later so he could pay for the damage to my bike, he was clearly relieved he hadn’t killed me, and that I hadn’t gone through his insurance company for full compensation. 

When I returned to work, the first words from my boss’s mouth were “So, was it your fault?”  When I mentioned it to my mum, she asked if I’d been wearing hi-vis clothing before she even knew the circumstances of the collision.  It’s problematic to directly compare road traffic incidents, where joint liability is much more at issue than in more straightforward ‘perpetrator / victim’ scenarios such as most robberies.  However, I would still argue that cyclists are regarded with undue suspicion of guilt, even when they are blameless victims, due to being unfairly stigmatised as a collective category. 

*           *           *           *           *

Clearly all groups that use public space must make certain compromises in order to cohabit our cities.  If cyclists are to use the roads they must be visible to other road users. It’s not sufficient to critique victim-blaming whilst overlooking the need for all road-users to be able to see and interpret each others’ presence. 

But how visible is visible?  Is visibility in the eye of the beholder?  What level of precaution is it reasonable to expect people to take?  How can we achieve a fair but meaningful balance of responsibilities for seeing and being seen?  When we consider these questions, we must take into account the underlying imbalance of social and physical power on the roads, and the imbalance in the expectations placed on different road users in our general culture.  

Claud Butler vs. Judith Butler

The other day, I entered a well-known chain bike shop, and speculatively asked about buying a new bike. 

My bike is a Frankenstein’s assemblage of long-forgotten mutant parts;  the handlebars are the only surviving component that haven’t broken and needed replacing*.  Although I thoroughly enjoy (albeit somewhat masochistically) the never-ending task of repairing my bike, I also dream of a far-off day where I’ll simply be able to ride it.  As Jerome K Jerome astutely wrote in ‘Three Men on the Bummel’ in 1900, “There are two ways you can get exercise out of a bicycle:  you can ‘overhaul’ it, or you can ride it…  The mistake some people make is in thinking you can get both forms of sport out of the same machine”. 

I enquired about frame sizes.  I explained to the man in the shop that I have relatively long legs compared to the overall height of my body.  This means that if that an average bike is adjusted to accommodate the length of my legs, I have to lean uncomfortably far forward to reach the handlebars.  So, I asked if they had any bikes with a compact geometry – ie which are comparatively tall compared to their length.

I asked about track bikes, which match this description.  In one Whitechapel bike shop, I had previously been told that a track frame wouldn’t help me, as they’re shaped to tip down towards the front (I think this claim is spurious), thus still putting strain on your arms, shoulders and back, and not solving my initial problem. 

Conversely, I was told at yesterday’s shop that, yes, a track frame was exactly what I was looking for.  He proceeded to show me a model he said was ‘based on’ track bikes, which he said was popular with people wanting a combination of courier chic (ie track bikes) with retro chic (ie road frames).  He went on to say that its ‘track bike’ attributes were that it was fixed-gear, while its ‘road bike’ features included… a frame that was longer than it is high.  In short, the exact opposite of what I had asked for. 

After about 15 minutes, I had established that all their road bikes were assembled according to the same height / length ratio.  This meant that bikes that were the right height were too long, while bikes that were the right length were not tall enough.  [At this point in the story, you need to know that I’m a man.]

Just as I was about to give up, the salesman casually mentioned, “The only other bikes we have in stock are these women’s bikes, which are designed to be slightly compact, so that they’re relatively tall compared to their length.” 

Given that this was what we had been discussing for the last 15 minutes, I was somewhat surprised that this was the first time he had mentioned it.  But, having raised the option of women’s bikes, he was rather disturbed when I suggested that I might try out one of the women’s bikes, and immediately tried to put me off the idea. 

He told me with a dismissive and vaguely disgusted expression that most women’s bikes come in pink, or have butterflies painted on them.  I replied that all the ones in the shop were either blue and white, or red and white.  In fact, they looked identical to the men’s bikes, and I’d never have known that they were designed specifically for women unless he had told me.  He shrugged. 

I can understand that it may not be commercially viable for a shop to stock frames that suit every possible variation of body size and shape, and why bike manufacturers and retailers would sell frames to fit an ‘average’ size and shape.  I also accept that men and women have different average body sizes and shapes. 

But I struggle to believe (correct me if I’m wrong) that the ratio of body-height vs limb-length is gender-specific.  Even if it were, it goes without saying that it makes no sense that this should prevent me from riding a women’s bike.  Why do we need separately marketed frames for men and women, given that they appear identical?  (At least to us mortals who don’t work in bikeshops?)

*****

The shopkeeper responded to my request to ride a red bike by absurdly invoking a phantom butterfly-adorned counterpart.  This comment arose not from the reality of the situation, but from a need to construct (or rather reproduce) socialised differences between genders, particularly through the marketing of gendered consumer goods.  Yet the patently absurd logic that yielded the shopkeeper’s ‘red vs butterflies’ comment is precisely the same as that which is deployed to re-invent divisions between genders every day – not based on physical necessity, but on cultural habit. 

*  Footnote:  I’m not exaggerating when I say that all the components on my bike, other the handlebars, have broken and needed replacing isn’t an exaggeration:   either in terms of the fact that I really have replaced said components, or the fact that I did so because each part broke – as opposed to hipster bike-upgrade vanity.