R.I.P. The Bicycle Chef

A few days ago, I wrote about Stephen Ambruzs' bike shop/ cafe, "Downshift", and how it--and other bike cafes--could be affected by the repeal of "net neutrality."

Today, nearly any municipality with a community of a few hundred or more cyclists has at least one place where you can have espresso or Earl Grey--or even a craft beer or cider--and chat, check your e-mail or check out some books and magazines while your brakes are being adjusted.  It's sometimes hard to believe that just a decade ago, very few such places existed.

One of the first bicycle cafes--or, at least, one of the first places to bill itself as such--opened in Sacramento (near Davis), California in 2005.  Business owners, especially restaurateurs, often name their enterprises after themselves.  Well, the fellow who started the bicycle cafe I'm about to mention did just that--well, sort of.  Bicycle Chef was indeed begun by someone who was a bicycle racer--Category II, to be exact--and a certified chef.

Actually, by the time he started the cafe, he was no longer racing:  a back injury ended his career. But he never gave up his passion for pedaling:  He continued to ride and coach young riders--as well as football (soccer) players--even as the responsibilities of his business and family took up most of his time.

Christopher Davis-Murai with his wife, Jennifer Davis-Murai, and their children, Naomi and Toshiro.

It never seems fair that, like the rest of us, such a person has only a limited amount of time in this world.  For Christopher Davis-Murai, that amount of time totaled 51 years, and it ended last Thursday when he collapsed just after stepping outside his house. 

Jennifer Davis-Murai has just lost her husband, and Naomi and Toshiro their father.  Many others in their community lost a mentor and friend.  And, many of us could say we've lost a pioneer who helped to create an idea--a bicycle cafe--that is part of today's cycling landscape.

Working Undercover?

In the US, the term "states' rights" has become a dog-whistle for those who, essentially, want to roll back the clock to 1861 or thereabouts.

"Local politics" has an almost equally-sullied reputations, as school boards, cities, counties and, yes, states have used their authority to excise any mention of evolution, climate change or slavery from school textbooks and to mandate all sorts of other ignorant, mendacious and mean-spirited policies.

But, sometimes, there is something to be said for localities having the power to make their own rules and deciding how their money will be spent.  An example of that is occurring now in Davis, California.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Davis may well have been the original "bicycle friendly" city in the US.  Home to a major University of California campus, its planners--at least some of whom were and are cyclists--have a long history of taking cyclists seriously.  

At the same time, other California cities grew exponentially.  So did their motor vehicle traffic:  The Golden State has, to many people, become synonymous with car-clogged freeways and smog-choked skies.  

(Of course, not all of California is like that.  I have seen it for myself!)

Sacramento, the state's capital, is one such city.  Not so long ago, it was a west-coast version of Albany or Springfield:  a town that rose and slept with its legislative sessions.  More recently, however, the high-tech boom that turned fruit orchards into corporate blocks in the Santa Clara Valley has spread eastward from the Bay Area.  So, Saramento has experienced the sort of growth in population--and traffic congestion--cities like Los Angeles witnessed in earlier decades.

The President would not approve!

Thus, some folks in Davis are taking it upon themselves to encourage their neighbors in Davis (and the ones closer to home) to trade four wheels for two. They want cyclists who "know the Sacramento area inside and out" to share their knowledge and experience as "Bicycle Ambassadors."

In doing so, these "ambassadors" will,  according to Bike Davis President Trish Davis, help the city and region in its effort to reduce greenhouse gases.

Now, do you think the current occupant of the White House--or Congress, as it's currently constituted-- would ever implement such a program?  Hmm...Could it be that all of those tree-hugging liberals are really working undercover for the conservative Republican agenda?  Local control, indeed!

Davis: Still Trying To Set People On The Path Of Cycling

"It was Portland before Portland was Portland."

That is how someone described Davis, California for me. 

 Today, when you ask people to name a "bicycle-friendly", they are likely to think of the City of Roses.  I will not quibble with its reputation:  Few American cities have done more to promote bicycling as a viable means of transportation (though, as in most places, some of those efforts have been misguided).  Portlanders adopted their first bike plan in 1973; after meeting its goals, which included 190 miles of bike paths, new bike plans followed in 1996 and 2010.

It should be pointed out, however, that Davis was developing a reputation as a bicycle haven as early as the 1950's, at a time when few American adults cycled--and Portland was still a lumber-and-mining town.  (When Bill Walton arrived to play with the Trailblazers, the local NBA team, he was dismayed to find a "redneck" burg.)  The local agricultural college had just become the University of California-Davis (UC's seventh campus); the city's flat terrain and warm climate as well as enthusiasm over a new educational project attracted a diverse group of people who were willing, well, to try something new.  

According to local lore, the real driving (pun intended!) force behind the city's pro-bike efforts were a family who returned from a year in the Netherlands in the early 1960s.  They found sympathetic ears in a newly-elected city council that, no doubt, saw bicycling as a way to promote their city as well as the new UC campus. In 1967, Davis striped what were claimed to be the first bicycle-specific lanes in the US.  

Other efforts and experiments soon followed, which included facilities  and ways of accommodating bicycles at traffic signals.   The university invented the bicycle roundabout, now used on many other schools, to handle the large number of bicycles on campus.  Today, the city of ten  square miles boasts 50 miles of on-street bike lanes the same amount of off-street bike paths.

Even after other cities have ramped up their efforts to make themselves more appealing to cyclists, Davis is still seen as a cyclist's paradise--at least, in comparison to other American locales.  A far higher percentage of its citizens cycle to work or school every day than in almost any other city of its population (67,666, according to a 2015 estimate).  Still, Susan L. Handy muses, "Perhaps even more interesting than the fact that so many people in Davis cycle is the fact that so many more don't."

Professor Handy is the Chair of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at UC-Davis.  She is also Director of the Sustainable Transportation Center, part of the Federal University Transportation Centers Program.  She is probably  in as good a position as anyone can be to understand patterns of bicycle usage--and, more important, what might be behind those patterns.

She also uses what is, arguably, some of the best bicycle infrastructure in the United States. Still, she says it is not enough.  "[W]hile good infrastructure is necessary to get many people bicycling, it is not enough to get most people bicycling".  The experience of Davis would seem to bear this out:  Although a higher percentage of Davis workers ride their bikes to their jobs than their colleagues even in nearby Berkeley (home to another UC campus)  or Palo Alto (Stanford University), or in other campus towns like Ithaca, New York (Cornell University)  and Boulder, Colorado, the number for Professor Handy's hometown is still only 15 percent.  

Still more telling, a similar percentage of children cycle to their soccer games, even though most don't have to go very far.  

According to Professor Handy's research, whether or not children cycle to their soccer games is influenced by whether or not their parents also ride.  Ditto for whether or not they--or their older siblings who attend high school--ride their bikes to classes.  Of course, as in most places, whether or not kids ride to their high schools is also a function of whether or not they have drivers' licenses or access to automobiles.

Interestingly, according to the research, friends' and peers' attitudes about cycling have little or no effect on whether kids or teenagers ride to school or their soccer games.  Based on my own admittedly informal observations, I would say the same for whether or not adults ride their bikes to work.

Another factors that  helps to depress the numbers of cyclists who ride to school or work is the perception of safety:  People often express fear of traffic, crime or other factors.  (I often hear such anxieties expressed here in New York.) Perhaps not surprisingly, women express these fears more than men do.  And then there are those who simply don't like to ride bikes.

Nobody seems to know how to influence that last category. (I failed with a spouse and a couple of romantic partners!) They, like those who come from families who don't ride or worry about their safety, are not pedaling to work because of their attitudes about cycling.  And, as Professor Handy says, attitudes are even more important than infrastructure in getting people to forsake the steering wheel and grab a handlebar.

If there is anything discouraging about Professor Handy's conclusions, it is this:  She came to them in one of the few places in the United States with two generations' worth of "cycling memory", if you will.  In most other places in this country, most drivers have little or no idea of how to act around cyclists because they haven't ridden a bike  on a street, for transportation or other utilitarian purposes, since they were children--if indeed they even rode then.  In much of Europe, by contrast, far greater numbers of drivers are still cyclists, or have ridden recently in their lives.  And they are more likely to have come from families with at least one member who regularly cycled.  

I offer myself as an example:  I am the first--and, to date, only-- member of my family to regularly ride a bike beyond the age at which I could hold a drivers' license.  (I am also the first to do a number of other things, such as earn a high school diploma and college degree, and to do things that are the subject of my other blog!)   But I am an anomaly:    I simply found that I enjoyed riding and never lost that love.  I rode, even with a complete lack of infrastructure , very little cycling culture and few peers who rode. And I continue to ride. On the other hand, I have never been successful at enticing anyone to ride who wasn't already inclined to do so. The complaints and excuses were the same then as the ones I hear now.  

As Professor Handy points out, the real challenge is to change those attitudes--if they can indeed be changed.  She seems to think it possible.