A Path To Inclusion And Integration

An industry is booming. So it needs workers, especially those with the specific skills that industry requires.

There is a group of people who need jobs.

The solution seems obvious: Train the people and steer them toward those jobs.

An organization in said industry is doing exactly that for a particular group of people.

Bike New York is best known for running the Five Boro Bike Tour. It’s also become known for its programs that teach people how to ride. Bike New York CEO Ken Posziba, who calls the Tour “the world’s most inclusive bike ride,” explains that those classes—and ones aimed at training formerly-incarcerated people as bike mechanics—as extensions of that inclusivity.

The five-week training program not only trains the former inmates how to fix bikes and e-bikes.  It also makes them part of the mechanics’ union  and sets them up with job interviews—which, for them, is often the most difficult part of integrating or re-integrating into the job market and society in general.

This program, called Bike Path, is an example of how cycling can be not only inclusive, but also “transformative,” as Posziba says:  Bicycling can transform our environment just as getting the skills and professional (and personal) connections that lead to employment can transform someone’s life. Just ask Vincent Casiano, who got a job with Citibike upon completing the course.

On Their Backs

When I first became a dedicated cyclist—during the 1970s—Schwinn still manufactured a style of frame they called “camelback.” With a curved top tube and, sometimes, twin parallel buttresses, it was found on the company’s balloon-tired bikes as well as some of its kids’ bikes (like the “Krate” series) and some smaller-framed adult models.  Here is a particularly nice example from the 1930s.

I have never owned one of those bikes—or ridden a camel. So I can’t tell you whether those bikes rode like camels—or whether I would want such a ride characteristic.

Apparently, some people do:

Idyll By The Airport

 Ah, the joys of an early morning ride.

You can almost hear the overture from Sprach Zarathustra in the background 

or, perhaps one of those early Infiniti TV ads.

Believe it or not, I chanced upon this scene along the Malcolm X Promenade—about half a kilometer from LaGuardia Airport,

From there, I pedaled out to Fort Totten and back—40 kilometers on Tosca, my Mercian fixed-gear.  I’d say it’s a respectable “beat the heat” early morning ride.