- TheThinkTank - lists.bikecollectives.org

Social effects of motorized transport - Ivan Illich
by Rich Points 19 Feb '08

19 Feb '08

http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/facts/social_effects.html <http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/%7Eira/illich/facts/social_effects.html> Social effects of motorized transport ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ivan Illich gives a set of very interesting facts and figures when he discusses his concept of convivial transport: * *The United States puts between 25 and 45 per cent of its total energy* (depending upon how one calculates this) *into vehicles*: to make them, run them, and clear a right of way for them when they roll, when they fly, and when they park. For the sole purpose of transporting people, 250 million Americans allocate more fuel than is used by 1.3 billion Chinese and Indians for all purposes. * The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. * The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: *less than five miles per hour*. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry. * Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment. * Man on a *bicycle *can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. *Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.* * Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it. * The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred. * Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim. [from: Energy and Equity <http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/%7Eira/illich/texts/energy_and_equity/>. In Ivan Illich: /Toward a History of Needs/. New York: Pantheon, 1978.] -- Rich Points Community Cycles Director http://CommunityCycles.org Rich(a)CommunityCycles.org 720-565-6019

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Re: [TheThinkTank] Mentor needed for an academic paper on Bikes and Poverity
by dragonfly＠mac.hush.com 19 Feb '08

19 Feb '08

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello, Cris and Geoffery and everyone else. My nane is Sasha, and I'm from Torotno, too. I'm from Torotno, but I've spent the past three years plus a little bit in the Detroit area. I lived in downtown Detroit until recently, when I moved back across the border to Windsor; I'm pregnant and I want my kid to be born in Canada. I don't drive, and when I moved to Detroit, I knew it was going to be a struggle to manage Motor City without a car. There are all sorts of issues. Downtown Detroit, (like many other poor neighbourhoods in the USA), is a food desert. That means that there are no grocery stores, or that the grocery stores that are here do not sell healthy food. When I first arrived, I was shocked at the number of diabetic amputatees I saw wheeling themselves around; many of them seemed to be homeless. The best vegetables come from the weekly farmer's market, and there are also good vegetables miles and miles away from my old neighbourhood, in Southwest Detroit, which is a very Hispanic neighbourhood. Transit sucks. Getting food is hard. The stores that do exist often close early, as the store owners fear the ghetto at night. They leave for their homes in suburbs like Dearborn, MI. You get out of school or work and have no where to shop; many families try to live off the terrible food you can get at gas station conveinience stores. Sometimes there are sections of scary no-go zone neighbourhoods inbetween you and the vegetables; the route can be fine or too dangerous at different times of day. This can change with the weather, too. Winter roads are unplowed; summer heat makes people antsy. If you are female, the level of sexual harrassment and threatened or actual sexual violence is profound. A bike is essential in a neighbourhood such as this. You are safer on your bike than you would be walking. The bike extends the available daylight in an amazing way, as you can run errands or meet friends at twilight and even at night, once you know your way around. My bike saved my female soul, I swear. It made me feel safe and powerful, and kept me from becoming stir crazy and too angry to function. It let me breeze past the men screaming obcenities or threatening me. Bringing groceries home from a long way away would be horrible without a bike and a knapsack. In winter, it still sometimes seemed too hard to even try. A bike can make all the difference, but it isn't enough to fix the problems. Until recently, people could not use their food stamps at farmer's markets, so even if they had had a bike, they wouldn't have been able to use it to get vegetables. The time question-- that the vegetables are only available one day a week, or during hours when the woman of the family is working at her job-- is a huge problem. Sometimes also people don't want to cross over an invisible neighbourhood boundery; there is gang activity, there are unwritten rules. A bike can help you go around a whole section of the city is would be better if you didn't try to go through, letting you access needed services or supplies. I don't know how anyone copes without a bike. If you are looking for a mentor, Chris, you might want to get in touch with some of the people who work at or run Back Alley Bikes in Detroit. Some of the best people to talk to are not actually at Back Alley these days-- after six years, some people have decidedto take a break, or to move on to try to start their own shops, or to start community shops in other neighbourhoods. I'll leave my e-mail, and you can contact me for some names. Back Alley was the most important place in Detroit for me. If your bike breaks down in a neighbourhood with no bike shops, you are screwed. I remember going on weird journeys out to suburbs I'd never been to just to get a new tire; the transit was so confusing. The psychological barrier to making that trip might be higher for a born and bred denizen of the Cass Corridor than it was for me, even though I was a disabled foreigner. I'm white, and I'm used to travelling to places I've never been, and I don't have any of the local angst about Eight Mile that xometimes seems like the only thing that city dwellers and suburbanites share. Back Alley is an amazing place. It is one of the most racially and economically integrated places in Detroit. It has the tools and supplies and helpers that you need to fix your bike. If you are thinking or writing about bike cultures in poor place, please always think about supply lines. Think about how you are going to acquire the basic things you need. It gets complicated. So much of you time is spent puzzling out how to get a tube or a patch kit or tire levers (and you need patches and new tubes at a crazy rate, due to all the broken glass all over the streets, and constantly torn up roads.) Sometimes, you are crippled without your bike for want of some simple, simple thing. You need to make friends with other people who ride bikes. You need to be a part of that informal network of reciprocal aid that allows you to survive. The way that people teach at Back Alley is gentle, and I've watched people who never had a good experience of school or of any other learning environment so amazed to discover their own capacities it made me want to cry. Learning how to care for your bike can heal some suprisingly deep wounds. I suprised myself, too. Now I can fix pretty much anything that goes wrong on my bike all by myself; I love the self sufficiency that Detroit and Back Alley inspired in me. As I rode around town, people would shout "Hey, Back Alley Bikes!" at me (now that I've moved, people still do this when I'm back in Detroit; being part of the bike culture make me local; in immigrant recieving areas, that is an important thing to know); it made me feel so much safer to know that I was known to all these people in my neighbourhood; it made me feel watched out for. It was great to start recogizing the bikes of everyone I knew when I saw them locked up around town. In a place where lots of people have no phones, you'd be amazed how easy it is to locate someone because someone else just saw their bike locked up outside someone's house or out in front of the coffee shop. I know that other people felt safer because of me, too. Many women friends or acquaintences would ask me if I'd ride with them when they were trying to claim for themselves some part of the city they'd been too scared to go on their own before they had a bike. Back Alley was the centre of bike culture in Detroit for a while; now that bike culture has more than one centre. There are problems at the shop these days. Back Alley deals with complex issues. Providing safe spaces for girls and women is a huge one. Also, women work hours that make getting to the shop difficult. (Bec brought in a Women and Trans night, like the one inovated by people at Plan B in New Orleans, but we still need more women mechanics who can volunteer, and there are other issues.) It is hard to Earn a Bike for yourself and your two sons when you are a working single mother with no transport who lives in the Cass Coridor. Some sort of better system has to be developed to meet the needs of these women. When my friend had her bike and the bikes of her sons all stolen she was totally devastated. She'd worked hard all winter to acquire them and to fix them up, and her heart was broken. Back Alley serves a large male homeless population, too. The shop is so busy on summer evenings that you have to come hours in advance and sit outside waiting to get a good spot on the waiting list so you can go in. This makes it very hard for men who also need to go and sit and wait to get a meal or a bed for the night. We need some sort of mobile shop to go to the shelters, or some daytime hours or hours especially designed for these men. It is interesting that people mentioned theft. That is a problem in Detroit. Back Alley sees a lot of stolen bikes; people try to sell them to the shop. Often, the owner of the bike will be known to the shop, and the bike will be taken from the theif and returned. Compared to Toronto, I thought people in Detroit were lax about locking up their bikes-- often, you'd see bikes left outside stores not locked up at all, which amazed me. On the other hand, last summer's rash of bike thefts at gunpoint was something new to me. The city policy of scrapping bikes for metal as opposed to taking them to some place like Back Alley provides a market for the thefts. A change in the law and local custom is needed. Bikes are stolen to get drug money, and to use to get away from the scenes of other crimes. Cyclists need to register their bikes and report the crimes to the police, who will laugh at you and not do anything, but who need to be educated about bikes and about how tracking bike crimes could help them deal with other, bigger crimes. I feel odd suggesting the police, but based on all the conversations I've had with people, it seems right to involve them. Perhaps to the bike shop would be a good idea. A map could be set up and the events plotted. Theft at gun point is a serious thing. Eventually, someone is going to be killed, and if caught, the stupid kids responsible are going to have awful experiences in prison. Sorry about the rambling early morning notes about bike culture in a poor neighbourhood. There is a lot more to share, of course. Detroit's bike cultures include fantastic art bikes, and the bike as a means of personal expression in my old neighbourhood would be a great paper for someone. (Some of us are collecting pictures for a book we may manage to create.)Detroit has a great Alley Cats race scene, and gleaner's rides, and many other bike rides. Detroit has Rock Dove Couriers (their T-shirts are coveted, and to possess one is some sort of badge of something.) Detroit has fixed gear scenesters, and old ladies with large bottoms who ride bikes decorated with plastic flowers (I see my future self in them), like any other place. If you bring your bike to the Blessing of the Low Riders in Southwest Detroit this spring, a priest will sprinkle it with holy water. We probably all know lots about the kind of community that bikes can foster, (including the relationship that seems to exist between bike people and community gardeners, which is a super important one in a place dealing with intense food security issues and problems), and I'm sure others share many of these issues and problems. Cris, please consider looking to Detroit for your mentor. On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:34:36 -0500 Geoffrey B <vous.je(a)gmail.com> wrote: >I am from Toronto, Canada, not much use for you > >I have done some research in this field. I have used Stat Can to >show >ridership in the suburbs. The social economic requirements of >riders is >evident. Its ten percent all around my city of Toronto, not >faulting or >fluctuating. The suburban populous ride their bikes not because >they want >to, but because they need to. Transit is three bucks a ride. >People are >forced to ride their bikes without bicycle infrastructure. It >becomes >evident with bike on car casualties in the suburbs and poor and >migrant >people riding their bikes in winter. > >Toronto has a huge migrant population, they know bikes better then >anyone, >they speak the universal language of bike. We work with them, they >help us >with bikes and we help them with English skills. > > One reason that boost bike theft is the level of impoverished >ridership, >the demand for used bikes on the part of the impoverished class >boost bike >theft. Our recycle bike groups try to under price stolen bikes >for sale. > >We give poor people money to volunteer in our shop, we give bikes >to >shelters and employment resource centers. We try to understand the >poor >commuter and work to meet their needs. They can teach us allot >about how the >city works. Relying on public transit us madness. > >Give me shout if i can help you more. Im with the >www.communitybicyclenetwork.org. I worked with BIKESHARE, the >yellow bike >program that lends bikes out to people in need. We scrapped the >program just >to focus on recycling used bikes and mechanical skill sharing. We >also give >out free cooked food cause people think and ride better on a full >tank. >Hehe. > >Geoffrey Bercarich >York Environmental Studies >vous.je(a)gmail.com > >On Feb 17, 2008 9:24 PM, Cris Shirley <cgshirley(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hey! >> So I'm taking a class at Yale on Inequality and American >Democracy, and >> the writing component of the class requires that I find well >established >> community member to work with in developing an academic paper >(about 20 >> pages long) about how bikes help combat poverty in America. If >you would be >> interested in working on this with me please email me back. >Your role would >> be an adviser that would push me to create a paper that would be >beneficial >> to both bike collective community as a whole and to the New >Haven Bike >> Collective by meeting with me on the phone making suggestions >and >> recommending any research that you are familiar with. (Need a >response >> soon!) >> Thanks! >> Cris >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Thethinktank mailing list >> Thethinktank(a)bikecollectives.org >> >> http://lists.bikecollectives.org/listinfo.cgi/thethinktank- >bikecollectives.org >> >> > > >-- >"Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia" - H.G. Wells -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Note: This signature can be verified at https://www.hushtools.com/verify Charset: UTF8 Version: Hush 2.5 wkYEARECAAYFAke6nIUACgkQ5O7ahKJmrRlJZwCeJ7xstESXEc+TFqXOkadLkzApgokA nRay6Xjx//PN6j/NnAZYMlhX33q6 =+4e5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Bike Bike Meeting East Bay 2/24 (Woo hoo!)
by Ivan Denker 19 Feb '08

19 Feb '08

hiya folks ivan, emilyn and quentin here. At the last bike bike meeting (bike church, santa cruz, 1/18) we decided to have the next meeting at our house in the east bay. We live at 3090 King St<http://maps.google.com/maps?q=3090+King+St,+Berkeley,+CA+94703,+USA&sa=X&oi…>. at Prince St. in south Berkeley. That's two blocks south of Ashby and three blocks west of MLK. We are about three minute's walk from the Ashby BART. Discussed meeting time was noon on sunday, february 24th. If you have a really, really big issue with that time, please email the group so we can see if we need to figure something else out, otherwise, I think that's the plan. Ok? Ok. any emergencies, please call Emilyn at (831) 421 1942 (i.e., if you're lost, if you get part of your bike stuck in the BART door and need us to send a rescue squad, if you're dying for want of an odwalla bar just a few blocks away, we'll be there.) Loving Bicycles from your Invasive, Non-Native Bike Church Transplants in the East Bay

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Mentor needed for an academic paper on Bikes and Poverity
by Cris Shirley 18 Feb '08

18 Feb '08

Hey! So I'm taking a class at Yale on Inequality and American Democracy, and the writing component of the class requires that I find well established community member to work with in developing an academic paper (about 20 pages long) about how bikes help combat poverty in America. If you would be interested in working on this with me please email me back. Your role would be an adviser that would push me to create a paper that would be beneficial to both bike collective community as a whole and to the New Haven Bike Collective by meeting with me on the phone making suggestions and recommending any research that you are familiar with. (Need a response soon!) Thanks! Cris

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Earn-A-Biker wants BMX
by Rich Points 18 Feb '08

18 Feb '08

Collectives, We work with the Boulder County Jail's work release program where inmates begin the program at our shop and Earn-A-Bike. This past weekend we did a bunch of work in our storage where we keep kids bikes. Three of the work release guys, in their late twenties and early thirties, found BMX bikes they wanted to keep as their Earn-A-Bike. Our response was to discourage this as we generally try to set people up with commuter style bikes. I especially tried to discourage the six foot two guy from choosing a BMX. We're aware that /some /people are more than happy to commute by BMX but believe that won't work for most people. So the question is should we allow the work release guys to choose any bike they want regardless of the practicality? Are we being elitist bike snobs to make this decision for them? Should we just be happy we got them back on a bike? Feedback is appreciated. -- Rich Points Community Cycles Director http://CommunityCycles.org Rich(a)CommunityCycles.org 720-565-6019

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Lance Armstrong unveils his new commuting bike shop
by Rich Points 18 Feb '08

18 Feb '08

Maybe there is hope. http://www.austin360.com/recreation/content/recreation/stories/2008/02/0214… -- Rich Points Community Cycles Director http://CommunityCycles.org Rich(a)CommunityCycles.org 720-565-6019

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Keeping track of bike/part sales...
by Jonathan Morrison 18 Feb '08

18 Feb '08

For those of you that do it, how do you do it? What information do you or don't you record? -- Sincerely, Jonathan Morrison Executive Director Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective 2312 S. West Temple Salt Lake City, UT 84115 w: 801-328-2453 c: 801-688-0183 f: 801-466-3856 www.slcbikecollective.org Get Addicted to Crank! http://www.slcbikecollective.org/crank/

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BCN: International Map of Shops now working
by Jonathan Morrison 15 Feb '08

15 Feb '08

http://www.bikecollectives.org/component/option,com_sobi2/sobi2Task,search/… In a nut shell you have to enter your lattitude and longitude into your directory entry. If you don't know it, just enter and save your address and visit this link to automatically calculate and set it: http://www.bikecollectives.org/component/option,com_sobi2test/ Note: If you entered a "poorly formated" address, it may have trouble calculating it. Try looking your address up in google maps first, and using the way they format it. -- Sincerely, Jonathan Morrison Executive Director Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective 2312 S. West Temple Salt Lake City, UT 84115 w: 801-328-2453 c: 801-688-0183 f: 801-466-3856 www.slcbikecollective.org Get Addicted to Crank! http://www.slcbikecollective.org/crank/

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Bike music festival
by Taylor 14 Feb '08

14 Feb '08

Yea gabe! I met him in san fran after a crit mass ride! Keep the list updated if its happening again!

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Bicycle Music Festival?
by Jonathan Morrison 13 Feb '08

13 Feb '08

http://www.bicyclemusicfestival.com/ -- Sincerely, Jonathan Morrison Executive Director Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective 2312 S. West Temple Salt Lake City, UT 84115 w: 801-328-2453 c: 801-688-0183 f: 801-466-3856 www.slcbikecollective.org Get Addicted to Crank! http://www.slcbikecollective.org/crank/

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