The (re)gentrification of cycling

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.

More cyclist victim-blaming

This afternoon I met a friend of a friend, and we discussed her experiences of driving in London, having moved here from China a couple of years ago.  I sympathised with her nightmarish experiences of driving lessons involving the enormous roundabouts in the part of East London where I grew up, and related to her feeling unconfident in navigating London’s often hectic streets.  

She then told me that she’s failed her test four times – but in the same breath, added with outrage that two of these failures had been due to cyclists.  I raised my eyebrows.  It seemed harsh for a driving examiner to fail her for a mistake that was someone else’s fault.  On the other hand, I could imagine a learner driver not having the experience to deal with out-of-the-ordinary situations, and panicking during interactions with other road-users behaving in unexpected or selfish ways, leading her to feel cyclists were to blame for whatever the incident was.  (Notwithstanding the fact that she felt that failing her driving test four times was an injustice against her, rather than an indication of her ability as a driver.)

She elaborated on her story.  The first time she failed, it was because she was asked to pull over when she was in front of two cyclists.  When she indicated and slowed down and, she incorrectly anticipated that they would undertake, and waited in the middle of the road for them to do so.  Instead, the cyclists (correctly) just waited patiently behind her for her to pull in.  She ended up stationary in the middle of the road, for which she was failed. 

I asked what the cyclists had done wrong.  Her response was that if they hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t have failed. 

In the second story, she overtook a cyclist on a relatively quiet road.  The examiner soon afterwards asked her to take the next left – which she immediately did without checking her mirrors, cutting up the cyclist who was now just behind her, and who she’d now forgotten about. 

I asked how the cyclist was to blame for her cutting in front of him without looking.  Her response was that he should have used a different road.  I said, ‘What, the other London roads, with no cars on them?’  To which she responded ‘yes’, before going on to say that on a policy level, “They” shouldn’t be permitted on “Our” streets, thus enabling better overall road safety . 

I didn’t ask her any further about why she used the words ‘them’ and ‘us’, or about her use of the possessive ‘our’ – ie why she thought the road belonged to her, but not to cyclists.  But I was quite sarcastic in pointing out that she blamed the cyclist for her own driving test failure, even though it was her behind the wheel, and furthermore it was she who nearly killed the cyclist.  However, she remained adamant that the cyclist was at fault, and that she had done nothing wrong.  

For her, the idea that the cyclist must have been the one in the wrong was closely tied to the idea that cyclists don’t belong on the road.  This gave her the right to drive exactly as she pleased, as cyclists are only temporarily permitted to ride there by the good grace and patience of the car drivers who legitimately inhabit it (ie her). 

The explicitly espoused views that 1)  car drivers are the natural owners of the road, and 2)  cyclists are in an ‘other’ category that has no rights either as traffic or as human beings, seem to be heavily connected, and apparently remain prevalent among London road-users.

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.  

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.  

Riders in the abyss

Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a tale of a haunting.  A house is infested with voids that exist between its walls;  the adventurer who enters them finds a parallel universe of eerie nothingness, which slowly but brutally consumes the inhabitant through its very lack of spatial and temporal substance.  These non-spaces are an affront to the ‘legitimate’ sites of domesticity, which characterise the rest of the ‘normal’ rooms in the house. 

The fear of being trapped in a parallel world, where one can see – but not be seen by – the familiar, is a potent one, which has been repeatedly articulated in popular culture.  Honey I Shrunk the Kids, 1960s TV series Randall and Hopkirk Deceased, and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, all feature protagonists who can look in on the real world they have left behind, but who are invisible to their loved ones. 

Neverwhere is particularly important, because it draws an explicit political link between invisibility and powerlessness.  The unseen inhabitants of Gaiman’s ‘London Below’ represent the homeless and otherwise disenfranchised poor of the city, whose plight is ignored both by the authorities, and by individuals whose personal circumstances create them as ‘recognised’ citizens. 

It is also this expression of powerlessness that makes tales of being ignored such an important theme in children’s books, such as David McKee’s Not Now Bernard, which play on children’s sense of insignificance in an adult-dominated world. 

The same logic is seen in the shanty towns on the outskirts of cities in developing countries.  Vast groups of people dwell in un-titled properties, in places that are not bestowed with legitimacy by the authorities, and that rarely even feature on official maps. 

But every day, all urban cyclists become Bernard;  become Hopkirk;  are thrust into London Below, and into the abyss within the walls of the House of Leaves;  occupy uncharted shanty-territory.

Our mental constructions of road-space divide our streets into different regions.  One region is the large block of space in the middle of each lane, which is used predominantly by motor vehicles.   Collectively, motor vehicles dialectically create this space as legitimate, whilst individual drivers simultaneously become the beneficiaries of this legitimacy whenever they inhabit that space as they use the roads. 

The two other regions of the roads are the space between the kerb and the nearest car, and the gap between the cars in adjacent lanes.  In other words, these regions are defined as the spaces in between motor traffic;  not as a space in their own right, but as a region that lacks traffic. 

It is these regions – undocumented, unlegitimised, even non-extistent - that are, necessarily, inhabited by cyclists.  (They are given short shrift if they cycle in the middle of the lane;  besides, it is the area next to the kerb that contains the cycle lane.)

One of the main reasons given by motorists for cutting up, knocking over, and otherwise besmirching cyclists, is that they did not see them.  Public information campaigns urge motorists to be vigilant, and ‘look out for’ cyclists;  others entreat cyclists to make themselves more visible to motorists, either by making themselves brighter (through hi-vis apparel and lights), or by staying out of motorists’ blind spots. 

But until we collectively reconfigure the way in which we conceive the physical space of the roads, cyclists will, by definition, remain in a permanent blind spot.  Not a bind spot created by the positioning of wing-mirrors, but by inhabiting a part of the road that simply does not exist. 

Cycling through Kafka's Castle:

Why cyclists bend the rules

Motorists don’t like cyclists breaking the rules.  They argue that cyclists will only garner respect on the roads when they stop jumping reds and riding on the pavement.  Many cyclists take the reverse stance, demanding equal respect with motorists before they conform to the same strictures. 

This is a manifestation of the classic ‘rights vs responsibilities’ argument – the idea that your ‘right’ to express certain freedoms, and to be treated to a certain standard, should be in direct proportion to how well you discharge your ‘responsibility’ to behave as a good citizen.  

But this line of reasoning is misleading.  The idea that everyone should be expected to behave (and be treated) in the same way is based on the false assumption that everyone inhabits the same road.  They do not.  Motorists and cyclists have fundamentally different experiences of using the road, which inevitably leads them to develop very different road-use behaviours.  These are rarely examined outside the confines of moral notions of how either party should behave, obscuring the real issues at play.

It is a truism that our cities are designed for cars.  However, while a great deal has been written about the implications for city-wide mobility, consumption, class and gender, etc, little has been said about the environment within roads that distinguishes between their various inhabitants. 

When drivers get behind the wheel, they find themselves in a seamless landscape.  Roads all join up with each other.  Signs always point in the right direction.  Maps all show you exactly what roads you can go down, and which direction you can go in.  (Albeit with the odd glitch in new satnav technology in recent years.)  The most difficult obstacle encountered by motorists is probably finding where they are allowed to park, in the case of zones requiring residential permits – but even parking is usually pretty clearly signalled with lines painted on the roads. 

Cyclists are not afforded such luxuries.  Bike lanes frequently stop dead at physical obstructions, or just disappear without warning.  (This phenomenon is so prevalent that whole books have been published containing nothing but pictures of absurd cycle lane cock-ups.)  Blue signposts marked ‘Quiet route’ lead unwary cyclists into backstreet shortcuts – only to leave them stranded in the middle of nowhere when the breadcrumb trail of signs runs out.  Standard A-Z maps (as opposed to specialised bike lane maps) display areas prohibited to cars – but don’t include contra-flow cycle lanes down one-way streets, or alleys that cyclists may (legitimately) cut through.

Parking is a minefield.  Street cycle racks are rare, meaning that street furniture must first be scouted out, and then assessed for its probable legality (“Am I allowed to chain my bike to these railings?  How about these ones…?”);  its security (“Could my bike be lifted over the top of this sign…?”); and finally its physical availability, as you embark upon a grim bodily struggle with a street lamp that’s just too thick to wrap your lock around.

The upshot is that motorists never have to think about the space they move through.  They never have to make split-second decisions about how to interpret mixed messages about how they’re expected to drive along a particular road – everything is handed to them on a plate. 

Cyclists meanwhile are forced to constantly question how they are going to navigate an obstacle;  to second-guess whether a cycle lane that directs them from the road onto the pavement will lead to them being shouted at by pedestrians 50 yards down the line;   to query every few minutes what is being asked of them by the authorities, and whether they are responding in the correct way. 

Cars drive through cities designed by Euclid.  Cyclists ride through cities that were designed by MC Escher, and which are administered by Franz Kafka. 

This article is not a straightforward justification of law-breaking by people who have been hard done-by.  It is a critique of those who get surprised when cyclists behave as though they exist below the radar.

When a group of people inhabits a world that demands constant reflection on what behaviour is required of them, they inherently develop a more fluid and immediate form of cognitive and physical engagement with their surroundings.  This blurs – even transcends – the more bureaucratic elements of the laws that are designed to govern the presumably legitimate heirs of this landscape.