Listening to my introduction from "Negro", Sept. 18, 2009.
Thanks for inviting me! I apologize in advance for my poor Spanish. I’ve never tried to speak publicly in Spanish, so I beg your indulgence.
I’m very happy to be in Guadalajara, which my father-in-law explained to me was once dishonored by the label “Pueblo Bicicletero,” but today that same label indicates a city far advanced rather than behind. Bicycling is enjoying a new Renaissance in most of the world. My friend Ted White did a short documentary on the resurgence of cycling and called it “The Return of the Scorcher,” a name given bicycles in the late 19th century because they went so fast that they burned up the roads, hence “scorching.”
As we gather to discuss urban cycling, it’s useful to recall that there were mass bike rides of thousands in many cities, including San Francisco where I live, in the 1890s. In those days, cyclists belonged to various clubs and associations and when they rode 8,000-strong in July 1896 (before the invention of the private automobile) they had a demand: asphalt and Good Roads! Sometimes you get what you ask for but it doesn’t quite work out the way you plan!
Even darker in the early history of bicycling is the role of that new invention, the air-filled rubber tube or tire. Today rubber is made from oil but in the late 19th century it was only available from rubber trees tapped in the Amazon and the Congo. King Leopold II of Belgium took personal control of the Congo during that imperialist era and used his army to brutally exploit the Congolese. They were ordered to bring in hundreds of kilos of wild rubber every few weeks or have their families tortured and murdered, or even have their own limbs cut off as punishment. Over a million people died during this forgotten holocaust, while millions more were mutilated. What drove this madness? The rising demand in Europe and the United States for rubber. And what drove the demand for rubber in the 1880s and 1890s? The bicycle! So we cannot forget that the bicycle, too, is an industrial device, and has its own dark history like most aspects of the modern world.
In our car-choked modern cities, we cyclists are again the fastest vehicle on the road. Personally, I’ve been riding my bike nearly every day for over 30 years. Living in San Francisco, with its famous hills and cooling fog, I became expert at using the landscape to my advantage. One of the hidden pleasures of urban cycling is how it reveals the forgotten secrets beneath the cement. When you’re rolling downhill, you’re approaching the historic waterways that predate urbanization. When you’re pedaling uphill you are leaving those forgotten creeks and streams behind. In San Francisco, the intrepid cyclist of the 1980s, trailblazers for the many thousands who started cycling in the decades since, pioneered many of the routes that are now commonly used to avoid steep hills. One famous way is called The Wiggle because of how we zig-zag along an old waterway, avoiding steep climbing to go from one neighborhood to a much higher one.
During those long-ago years, cycling was mostly a solitary experience. One could ride for many blocks and only see one or two other cyclists. Today, it is common to find 10-20 cyclists bunched up at each red light on Market Street, the city’s major thoroughfare. Some neighborhoods have so many people on bicycles now that we are starting to worry about bicycle-bicycle collisions at busy intersections.
