Balancing Their Needs

 A week ago, I wrote about the measure l'Assemblee Nationale approved.  It would give a 2500 Euro (almost 3000 USD) grant for an electric bicycle to anyone who turns in an old, highy-polluting car, which would be used for scrap.  

Although I dream, to this day, of people giving up, not only two wheels for four, but also petrol power for muscle juice, I understand why some people can't or won't ride bicycles that require their own input in order to move.  Some are elderly and frail; others have illnesses and disabilities--including balance issues.

Of course, that last problem is also a reason why someone wouldn't ride an electric or otherwise-assisted bicycle.  Jiaming Xiong and his colleagues at China's Beijing University recognized as much.  So, they created what they describe as a self-balancing electric bicycle.

What look like training wheels are attached to the rear stay.  It also looks like they're mounted just above ground level so that one of them touches when the bike wobbles, or is turned.

More important, and revolutionary, though are the gyroscopic sensors. They detect when the bike starts to lean and trigger it to steer into the direction of the potential fall in order to stabilize the bike.  

Another benefit I can see is that it's less cumbersome than an adult tricycle. (Are there electric or motorized adult trikes?)  It would take up less space and, perhaps most important, would probably be more maneuverable and visible in traffic.

If there are positive side-effects to the pandemic, one of them just might be efforts to make bicycling, in whatever form, more inclusive and practical for more people.  This self-balancing electric bike, like the French scheme, are two examples of that.

Who And What Can It Carry?

Two questions for today:

1.  What do you carry on your bicycle?

2.  How many people can, or should, ride it at one time?

 

Seeing Myself, Seeing Themselves In Alex

 Last month, I wrote two posts--"The Unbearable Whiteness of Cycling" and "Our Bodies, Our Bikes"--in which I describe how some people are discouraged from bicycling because they don't see themselves represented in images of cycling and cyclists.  Too often, ads and other media show only certain types of people astride bikes.  Usually, they are young and Caucasian--and thin, especially if they are female.  By implication, the folks depicted in those images are, or seem to be, middle-to-upper class professionals or living on trust funds.

And they all seem to fit cultural notions of gender and sexuality as well as they fit the "lifestyle" apparel they wear.  The women might be fit, even somewhat muscular, but they always fit into  standards of femininity and attractiveness of their milieu.  The men likewise fit into their society's ideas of masculinity.  Nowhere does one find any hit of gender non-conformity or "queerness."

In those posts, I also mentioned that I nearly gave up cycling when I started my gender-affirmation process because while I saw dudes on bikes who looked something like the guy named Nick I was--and images of men like that--I didn't see many of middle-aged women and, although I had mental images of the woman I wanted to be, I really had no idea of what I'd actually become, other than a woman named Justine, and whether she would be anything like any of the few women I saw on bikes.  

That, after I spent much of my life cycling--and some of my youth participating in other sports--in an attempt to fit into those notions of masculinity (and heterosexuality) represented, not only in bike-related ads and art, but in the general culture.  And, I must say that I fit in, at least somewhat:  I got respect in my circles of bike riders and other athletes as well as from teachers and professors.  Sometimes I was teased for not bragging about sexual conquests of girls or women, but the taunts could be taken only so far when the taunters and teasers saw me beside a woman.

Now, I've been talking about seeing myself, or one's self in images of cycling and cyclists.  While I am referring to visual and graphic ones, I am not referring only to them:  I know how much all of us--gay, straight, trans, cis, male, female, White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Pacific/Alaskan Native, rich, poor, or whatever--need to hear our stories echoed, or at least paralleled, in the ones told in books, magazines and newspapers, or on websites, radio, television, film or podcasts.

Alex Showerman in the White Mountains of New Hampshire

That is why I had a brief catharsis in reading about Alex Showerman.  As much as she excelled as a cyclist, as well as in other sports and in school,  "I was not experiencing the world as I wanted to, and the world didn't see me as I wanted to be seen."  This sense of isolation and alienation led to depression, which she tried to numb with alcohol.

In 2015, she began seeing a gender therapist to make sense of who she is.  Last July,  on a bike trip in New Hampshire with two of her closest friends, she "came out" for the first time.  She never felt so free, she said:  She finally could ride just for the love of riding rather than to "outrun her shadows," as a Bicycling article put it, or to pound herself into maleness, as I tried to do.

I am happy that she has begun to live as her true self a decade and a half earlier in her life than I did in mine--and that she realizes that life includes cycling.  She might become the cyclist in an image in which some young trans girl or boy--or other gender or sexual non-conformist--sees him-, her- or them-self for the first time.