My access to the internet was intermittent during our family road trip over the past several days, but I did pick up some snippets from the blogosphere on my phone. This from a Nissan executive via Commute By Bike blog: car culture is fading.
I dunno...
It is true that our little retail operation has sustained itself and grown under the motto of urban cycling, when others said it couldn't be done. It is true that this year the shop has had the best season ever, by a wide margin. It is true that when I have occasion to travel into the Loop, I am amazed by the number of cyclists pouring out onto the streets at rush hour.
And yet...
When I look around at how people actually live -- many of my friends, relatives, people in my neighborhood and others like mine -- I don't see many signs of change. Children are shuttled to school in SUV's regardless of the weather, sometimes over a distance of less than a mile. The inconvenient and cramped parking lot at the wildly popular new Whole Foods in my neighborhood is always packed, while bike racks stand unused. When I walk to the bank, grocery, coffee shop or mailbox, all within eight blocks of my house, my neighbors pull up and offer me a ride. When they see me riding my bike with a basket full of groceries, they chuckle and remark: "on your bike again, heh?" When my husband used to take our son to school on a trailer bike, fellow parents clucked in admiration, but it was clear that most would not attempt a stunt like that.
One or two other parents eventually tried taking their kids to school by bike. One (ONE!) of my neighbors rides his bike to Whole Foods. An older couple who live around the corner are seen walking all over the place with their backpacks and totes. So is a lady with long gray hair, who even ventures as far as the post office and the library, which are over two miles away.
In our small ways, we push the boundaries of acceptable behavior. In our society of predictable patterns and fixed expectations, biking or walking -- not for health, or fitness, or a cause, but just to get somewhere -- is a subversive act. And those of us who engage in it, even if we do so without any particular plan or agenda, are perceived as being subversive. As we weave our way through traffic, and negotiate our way through a larger community in which we live, we find our spaces in between. Between lanes of traffic, between the street and the sidewalk, between cracks in the pavement.
If we are tenacious enough, will we dislodge the car culture? Maybe. But it hasn't happened yet.
Hooray!!!!!! Please inform my non-Chicago family members that not only am I a complete Black Sheep, but deeply deeply subversive too. That will get their undies in quite a twist. I'll have to tell them to walk it off... LOL
Car culture is so entrenched that many people just don't see it. Cultural hegemony? Lack of critical thinking? Inability to deconstruct the status quo? Unfamiliarity with concept of paradigms and the ways they are shifted?
I'm going for a walk. I can think when I am not driving!!!!
Posted by: Ishkadebble | January 19, 2008 at 01:41 PM
I think that's precisely what makes just getting around a cause. Maybe not to us, or maybe not most of the time, but certainly to everyone else. Aren't we so often dismissed as a small special-interest group with an agenda? We walk and bike for some "cause" simply by default. Hopefully the day will come when that's not the case.
Posted by: Jennifer | January 19, 2008 at 01:56 PM
You are right, Jennifer, and what kills me is that walkers are considered a "special interest group". Aren't all able-bodied humans over 15 months of age walkers? At least in theory?
Posted by: Justyna | January 21, 2008 at 08:08 AM
In theory, yes. In practice, I think "pedestrian" is becoming a political euphemism for "children and senior citizens," which probably isn't helping matters.
Ah well, I love the pic of the weeds in the parking lot.
Posted by: Jennifer | January 22, 2008 at 01:04 PM