A striking image occupied two full pages of the Evening
Standard last week. It featured a
cyclist adorned with every possible ‘cycling visibility’ bauble you could
imagine, and then some. It was
reminiscent of a cartoon I once drew to illustrate the proliferation of bike
safety merchandise – except that this photograph managed to contain accessories
that didn’t even feature in my exaggerated doodle, including some contraptions
I’d never seen before.
Marketisation
The piece brings into the mainstream the idea of cyclists as
a new consumer market – and a high-end one at that. The subtleties of different types of bike
lights are no longer the sole domain of backroom bike-shop geek-talk: 57 varieties are now brought to us alongside a
column that compares youth-restoring face creams.
This reinforces the idea that hi-vis bicycle clips are no
longer enough. High-end bike clobber is
no longer the preserve of the elite lycra-clad men who think nothing of cycling
80 miles on a Sunday afternoon. It has
now become a staple for anyone who wishes to use the roads. A minimum requirement to avoid moral
opprobrium for endangering your own safety, both in conversations with friends
and family, and collectively in the popular press.
Furthermore, this marketisation of bike gear means that – as
with all other consumer markets – the bar is continually being raised, with an
ever-increasing diversity of products that must be purchased, at increasingly
high costs. The expansion of the range
of products also means that an increasingly outlandish culture is being
created, which moves potential riders further and further away from appearing
‘normal’. Who wants to go around looking
like Robocop, with the weird head-torch bike helmet in the picture above?
Part of me even feels that the spectacular nature of the
appearance of the modern biker-rider shares something with the ever-more
sinister uniforms of police forces and armies.
Seeing the terrifying pictures of the Taiwanese army’s new
Hannibal-inspired autumn range, I couldn’t help but think they resembled a
cross between a BMX-er and a bike courier, only wielding a gun.
Outsider clique
culture and professionalisation
But more subtly, this entry requirement also manifests
itself by making people feel that they just ‘don’t belong’ on a bike or on the
roads. That they lack some kind of
‘official’ status, which would presumably arise from some combination of
experience, skills, expertise, or simply ‘looking the part’. Rachel Aldred, a sociologist of cycling,
found in her research that many cyclists she interviewed stated that although
they regularly ride a bike to get around, they don’t identify as ‘proper
cyclists’.
The group of people who are perceived as holding this
‘official’ status themselves end up representing a psychological barrier to others
joining their gang – rather than cycling being perceived as something anyone
can do. This isn’t helped by the stereotypical
image of the cyclist – reproduced in the Evening Standard image above – which
is that of someone young, athletic, attractive, affluent, and usually white. (Though adverts in recent years do at least
seem to be moving away from the assumption that cyclists are all muscular,
lycra-clad men.)
As well as informal pressures on cyclists to conform with
trends in clothing and equipment, there are calls for helmets to become
mandatory, for some minimum level of training, for all bikes to be insured, and
even for bicycle number-plates.
A culture of increasing specialisation, professionalisation,
and bureaucratisation of cycling mirrors trends in many other areas of
society. Professionals such as lawyers
and doctors used to practice over a whole range of areas; it’s now extremely rare to find ones who work
on more than one highly specific field. It’s
become a cliché that journalism used to be a trade you could enter after
leaving school at 16 and making the tea at a newspaper; these days, hacks pretty much need an
Oxbridge degree and a trust-fund. And
speaking of making tea, it’s increasingly difficult to even find work in cafés
without having formal barrista training.
So, as cycling becomes increasingly marketised, its visual
culture becomes increasingly alien from ‘normal’ people; those who are considering starting have an
increasingly large gap of knowledge and equipment to overcome; and those who already participate in it and
want to continue must turn over an increasingly amount of their attention (i.e.
time and money) to keeping on top of developments in the field.
Cost and inequality
The problem isn’t just that the culture of cycling is being made more cliquey. The rising financial cost of keeping up with
all the necessary apparel is also creating a very real barrier to
participation. A bike light that costs
£125? Seriously?
The cultural and financial burdens of modern urban cycling
are surely no coincidence. The link
between the recent modishness of cycling among the young professional classes
descending upon Britain’s metropolitan centres has played a large part in the
ability of manufacturers and retailers to bump up their costs so
drastically.
I recently bought a new bike for £850 (which I couldn’t have
done without the government-subsidised cycle-to-work scheme my employer fortunately
participates in). This is almost double
what the same model cost about four years ago, and almost triple the price my
housemate recently paid for a small second-hand car. Even old second-hand bikes now command £150 -
£400, particularly if they have desirable ‘vintage’ (meaning ‘made in the
1980s’) steel frames. About 8 years ago,
they’d have cost more like £30.
Contrast this with the bike’s image in Britain until
recently – the means of transport of the person who can’t afford a car.
Another recent article in the Evening Standard featured a
former gang-member slamming the lack of government investment in youth services
in working class areas. He strikingly
singled out Boris bikes as emblematic of the state prioritising middle-class
interests. Boris bikes were cheaper than
buses until January of this year, and could in many ways be portrayed as a
great leveller of access to transport, and cycling in particular (albeit their
condensed distribution in central London and its most affluent suburbs caters
towards the city’s wealthier inhabitants).
However, cycling has now become so strongly associated with middle class
culture that for many it has come to represent a source of tension between the
perceived interests of the political classes and those of the disenfranchised urban
populace.
A little bit of history
repeating
This trend of the last 10-ish years isn’t a sudden
post-script to a history of salt-of-the-earth working class cycling
though. Carlton Reid has
noted that penny farthings in the 1870s were “The red Ferrari of the age”. It was only later that they became the mainstream,
cheaply available method of transport that saw my grandfather ride one each
morning to the factory where he worked.
In cycling’s new costliness and social status however, we
seem to be witnessing a disappointing return of Victorian-era phenomena to the
present day – in common with welfare arrangements, tweed and rickets.
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