The Kids Aren't Riding: Why That Matters

Depending on where you live, you might think that this is a great time to be in the bicycle business.   More and more adults are pedaling to work and for fun.  And wherever you look, new bike shops are opening, the online business be damned.

At least, that is the picture you'd see in certain urban areas and, perhaps, some inner-ring suburbs.  And most of those adults you see riding are relatively young and well-educated.

It is among that demographic in areas like Boston, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle that one sees bicycle culture flourishing.  On the other hand, in areas where people are poorer, older and less educated, one sees few adult cyclists, and nearly all of them are male.  As often as not, they are riding machines "rescued" from basements and junk piles, and seem to be held together by duct tape.

Those older, poorer and less educated people aren't the ones who are driving the bike business.  They don't buy new bikes or even spend spend money to refurbish old ones, and they certainly aren't the ones buying hand-tooled leather-and-oak craft-beer bottle holders. If they go to bike shops, it's because their bikes have problems they can't fix themselves.

I am not conjecturing:  I see such riders on my way to work or any other time I venture out of Hipster Hook and into the outlying areas of my city.

Those folks are not fueling all of those bike cafes serving Marin Macciatos or Linus Lattes.  Nor is another group of people.  The reason is that the cohort I'm about to mention doesn't ride at all.  At least, fewer and fewer of them are.

I am talking about children and adolescents.  While sales of adult bicycles and accessories are on the rise, that of bikes and related items for kids is plummeting.  At least, that's what industry analysts are saying.  They are genuinely worried about the future of the children's bicycle industry.

Time was when bikes for kids were the "bread and butter" of most bike shops.  I can recall such a time:  Shops were busiest in the Spring, around the time the school year began and during the weeks leading up to Christmas.  In fact, shops often had "layaway" plans for kids' bikes, in which the buyer paid for the bike over a period of time.  It was sort of like a "Christmas Club" for bikes.  

(I remember having a Christmas Club when I was a child and adolescent.  Nearly all banks offered them.  If I recall correctly, I opened my first one for a dollar a week when I was about ten years old.  When I started delivering newspapers and other work, I increased the amount I saved.  Do banks still offer such accounts?)

Even though most shops have at least a couple of kids' bikes for sale, not many seem to be sold.  Instead, I reckon, most such bikes are sold in department stores.  In a way, I can understand the reasoning:  Most parents can only, or want to, pay as little as possible for a bike that the kid will outgrow in a couple of years, if not sooner.  And, since there are more single-kid households than there were when I was growing up (I have three siblings; we weren't seen as a large family), there's less of a chance the bike will be "passed down".  

Aside from changes in the family structure, there is another compelling reason why kid's bike sales are falling:  Fewer and fewer kids want new bikes for Christmas or other occasions.  Instead, they want electronic toys.   I would also imagine that other outdoor activities are becoming less popular with young people for this reason. 

Finally, I will offer an observation that might help to further explain the decline of the children's bicycle industry:  Today, many kids are discouraged or even forbidden from venturing outside by themselves, or even in the company of other kids.  These days, when I see kids under 14 or so on bikes, they are accompanied by adults.  The days of kids going out and exploring on two wheels seem to be over.

So why should readers of this blog care about the children's bicycle industry?  Well, we might be keeping the adult bicycle industry thriving.  But how often do we buy new bikes?  After a certain point, we don't buy a whole lot of accessories:  When we have what we need (and want), we tend to stop buying.  

Also, in a point I don't enjoy bringing up, none of us is going to be around forever.  So when we go to that great bike lane in the sky, who will take our place?  Will today's adolescents ditch their X-boxes (or whatever they play with now) and climb over two wheels?  We should hope so; so should the bike industry.

Who Needs A Wall? A Fence Will Do The Job.

In other posts, I've pointed out that bike lanes and other bicycle-related infrastructure are not always received warmly by low-income or working-class people, or by people of color.

Bike lanes are often seen as paths to gentrification.  While the income level and hue of a neighborhood may well change after one of those green ribbons winds down a street, we cannot, as at least one of your teachers has said, confuse coincidence with causation. (The same association is often made between art and the ways neighborhoods change:  More than one commentator has referred to artists as the canaries in the coal mine.)  Still, I can understand why someone who's just getting by would feel resentment when he or she sees a cyclist who seems to be having fun--even if said cyclist is riding to work.

Also, that cyclist is, as likely as not, to be white.  Or, if he or she is not, he or she is, as often as not, an educated professional, and young.  That last fact is even more important than one might realize:  Gentrification often pushes out people who have been living in a neighborhood for decades--in some cases, their entire lives--and really have nowhere else to go.  

One more thing:  Nearly all planners and designers involved in building bike infrastructure are like the folks spinning down those lanes:  white, with at least one university degree and from at least the middle class, if not a higher rung on the socio-economic ladder.  Urban and transportation planning, it seems, are a bit like architecture:  a difficult profession to enter if you're not already connected, in some way, to the people who are already in it.  And, of course, it takes financial and other resources to, not only get the education required for such work, but to endure long periods at jobs that don't pay well.  That is why, for example, most of the students in the college in which I teach are preparing to become nurses, dental hygenists and the like, if they're not studying business. 

But today, in taking a slightly different route to work, I found yet another reason why poor, working-class and nonwhite people might fear and hate the arrival of a bike lane in their neighborhood.

As you might have guessed, those tall brick buildings to the left of the bike lane are projects (or what the British call "council flats").  Guess who lives in them?  

If you were one of them, how welcome would you feel on that bike lane?

Oh, and that ferry:  It's nice.  But, even with the location of that dock, one sees hardly a dark face on board.  

By the way, just beyond the end of the lane, a new development is going up. If nothing else, it just might make the bike lane seem welcoming, by comparison anyway, to the folks in the projects. 

Bike Share In "Dutch" Country

Yesterday, I wrote about two bike-share programs that went bust.

One of them, Pronto, was based in Seattle.  Its demise came as a surprise to some, including yours truly, because Seattle has long had a reputation for all of the things one associates with cities that develop successful share programs.  For one thing, it had an active, vibrant cycling community long before Portland or other cities developed their reputations as two-wheeled utopiae.  For another, it also has a large population of young, educated and creative people:  the very sorts of people who are most likely to be bike riders in urban areas. 

In other words, it seemed to have a lot in common with other cities in Europe and North America where share programs have succeeded.  Some blamed the failure of Pronto on Seattle's climate, which may have been somewhat of a factor, although other places where share programs are popular get as much rain (or as little sunshine, depending on your point of view) as the Emerald City.

When we think of the cities where bike share programs have succeeded, we think first of the US coastal cities and European capitals.  But they have also worked well in "second" cities like Lyon, France (whose "Velo'v" is often cited as a model) and  Hamilton, Ontario.  Even a town like Chattanoga, Tennessee has managed to support a thriving program.

But most people, I think, wouldn't expect to find the ingredients of vibrant cycling communities or successful bike share programs--let alone attempts to develop other kinds of cycling infrastructure--in declining industrial cities like Reading, Pennsylvania (which I mentioned in an earlier post). Or nearby Lancaster.

I have to confess that when I think of Lancaster, I think of the Pennsylvania Amish Country or "Dutch Country".  My family took a trip there every summer, where we would visit farms and the so-called "Dutch Wonderland".  In those days mega-theme parks like Six Flags were either new or in development, the Dutch Wonderland and Hershey Park still could capture a kid's short attention span.

We would simply pass through the city itself which, even then, seemed to consist mainly of factories and old buildings that didn't seem to be used for anything but no one had gotten around to declaring as historic landmarks.  I liked the train station--which served the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads, and now is an Amtrak stop--mainly because I liked trains and the Reading still had some of the old steam locomotives.

But Lancaster, like Reading, has witnessed the loss of its old industries and a population that has grown poorer, darker and older--though, to be fair, not to the same degree as Reading.  Interestingly, Lancaster has earned a new nickname: The City of Refugees.  It's believed that refugees make up a higher percentage of the population in Lancaster than in any other US city.

This is not what one normally associates with cycling:  Indeed, even today, when I ride through blue-collar and immigrant neighborhoods and suburbs of New York, I see no other cyclists. But, when you think about it, such places--like Lancaster and Reading--are exactly where cycling should thrive.  After all, generations of working-class people all over Europe, Asia and other parts of the world were, until recently, the vast majority of the world's cyclists.

So, in a way, we shouldn't be surprised that Lancaster is launching a bike share program.  What surprised me, in reading about it, is the degree to which the city is trying to develop a cycling infrastructure.  While I am not always enthusiastic about bike lanes, it seems that planners are at least trying to make them practical:  They lead to places like the train station and there seems to be some notion that a bike lane isn't just a few lines painted on asphalt or concrete.

Almost nobody believes that Donald Trump can actually deliver on his pledges to revive moribund industries.  After all, even if some company decided to build a steel mill or open a coal mine in Pennsylvania or West Virginia, it would be more automated than the ones that closed.  Thus, fewer workers would be employed--and few, if any, of them would be those men in their 50s and 60s who got laid off during the last economic downturn.  Instead, almost anybody who's not a direct adviser to Trump says that such workers should be retrained in the new technologies of the "green" or "greener" industries.  

It's not as much of a stretch as one might think:  People in industrial and rural areas tend to have more mechanical, and other practical, skills than MBAs or lawyers.  If we think of bicycles as part of the "green" economy, it's not hard to imagine employing workers from a variety of other industries--or simply folks who don't have the aptitude or desire for university--in them.  

One might say that nearby Reading--which I described in an earlier post--is attempting to do that, if on a small scale, with its efforts to make cycling more accessible for the working-class, poor and unemployed of that city.  Such efforts almost inevitably involve employing, directly or indirectly, the very people such programs try to put on bikes.  Perhaps something similar will happen in Lancaster.  If nothing else, as in Reading, Lancaster's new bike share program and infrastructure could make cycling affordable and practical for people who could benefit from it.

Cycling vs. Fishing: The Class Structure in New York City?

Sometimes I ride down to the Canarsie Pier, as I did today.  It's on the South Shore of Brooklyn, along the Greenway that connects Howard Beach to Sheepshead Bay and parallels the Belt Parkway as it winds along the beaches and coves of the Atlantic Ocean and Jamaica Bay.


At just about any time of year, in any kind of weather, at pretty much any hour of the day or night, people--usually older men--fish off the pier:

In my time, I've seen plenty of guys fishing off piers and bridges.  The ones I see on the piers seem to have a mutual non-acknowledgment pact with cyclists.  The ones on bridges, on the other hand, are often resentful or simply hostile toward cyclists.  That may have something to do with the fact that on bridges, we tend to pass closer to them than we do on piers, as the walkways on most bridges (where cyclists usually ride and fisherman cast their lines) are only a few feet, if that, wide.


It seems that the worlds of cycling and fishing, at least in urban or suburban settings, exclude each other, whether or not by design.  Sometimes I see men riding bicycles to their fishing spots.  But they aren't riding to take the ride; the bike is strictly is a means of transportation and portage.  As often as not, their fishing poles are strapped or even taped to the top tubes of their bicycles.


Perhaps some of those fisherman resent or envy those of us who are cycling for its own sake, or for training.  After all, even if we have to put down payments on our bikes and pay them in installments before we pedal them, we have lifestyles--and, with it, access to the means, or whatever will get us the means, to buy a nice bike.  Most of the fishermen (Most are male.) are poor and/or working class; many have families they are supporting in full or in part.  And most of them, at least in this area, are members of racial and ethnic minorities.  At the Canarsie Pier, as in other fishing spots in this city,  they are usually Caribbean or Latino.  On the other hand, most cyclists, including yours truly, are white.  Even those who are Caribbean, Latino or from other minority group tend to be a bit better off, financially as well as socially, than those who are fishing.


Hmm...Could it be that this city's class structure can be delineated according to whether someone fishes or rides a bicycle?