A week ago, on Wednesday night, the third night of a citywide curfew in New York, police officers were seen confiscating bicycles. Posts on social media described N.Y.P.D. officers violently seizing bikes from peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrators, who were continuing to march in defiance of the 8 P.M.. lockdown. In one widely shared video clip, a jittery camera captured a cop wheeling an apparently commandeered bike; a woman can be heard screaming at police, asking why bikes are being taken, and how protesters are supposed to travel home. Another piece of viral footage, retweeted by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, shows three policemen clubbing a cyclist with batons on a Manhattan street. It’s unclear whether the man was arrested, or what became of his bicycle.
In the days that followed, the N.Y.P.D’s anti-bicycle actions continued. On Thursday, Catherina Gioino, a reporter for the Daily News, tweeted that police had been ordered to “focus on the bicyclists.” Newsday’s Matthew Chayes said in a tweet that police had proclaimed that bicycles were “not allowed” and that bike-riding after the curfew would result in an “automatic collar.” Other online posts documented arrests and violent attacks on cyclists, including journalists with press credentials. The city’s first curfew since the Second World War had been imposed, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s executive order, to curb “assault, vandalism, property damage, and/or looting.” New Yorkers were left to wonder how scenes of cops beating protesters and snatching their bikes—or, in some cases, leaving the bikes littered on the street—squared with the stated objectives.
These incidents were troubling but not exactly surprising. The N.Y.P.D. has a long history of hostility to cyclists, especially cyclists who are also left-leaning activists. For years, police have used questionable, sometimes violent tactics to sweep up participants in Critical Mass, the guerilla group rides that aim to promote cyclists’ rights. In 2010, a former N.Y.P.D. officer received a felony conviction for body-slamming a Critical Mass rider and filing a false criminal complaint in an attempt to frame the cyclist. That same year, the city agreed to pay a settlement of nearly a million dollars to eighty-three Critical Mass riders who had been wrongly detained or arrested between 2004 and 2006.
In the de Blasio era, the N.Y.P.D. has engaged in sporadic crackdowns against bicyclists, issuing tickets and confiscating bikes. (Journalists and cycling advocates have charged that these “ticket-blitzes,” which often follow incidents in which cyclists are maimed or killed by automobiles, are a form of institutionalized victim-blaming.) Many recent police actions have been directed at cyclists of color. De Blasio and the N.Y.P.D. have waged a years-long “war on e-bikes,” seizing hundreds of the throttle-control bicycles, issuing summonses, and levying fines, a campaign that almost exclusively hits a workforce of immigrant food-delivery people, who are among the most vulnerable of the city’s working poor. The N.Y.P.D. have also targeted “ride-outs,” group rides that are popular with young black and Latino cyclists. Cops have reportedly broken up the events by ramming mopeds into bicycles, and have trumpeted the confiscation of teen-agers’ flashy BMX bikes on the social-media feeds of police precincts.
The conflict between law enforcement and cyclists is hardly restricted to New York. Bicycles have played a starring role in the nationwide uprising that has followed George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers two weeks ago. In Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, and dozens of other cities, protesters have pedalled and marched with their bicycles, facing off with police who, in many cases, are also mounted on bikes. The omnipresence of bicycles may be due, in part, to where the demonstrations are taking place, and who is doing the demonstrating. The bicycle is, supremely, a city vehicle; teens and young adults, who make up a sizable percentage of the protesters, are among the most enthusiastic urban cyclists.
But the visibility of bikes in the protests also reflects a larger trend. In 2020, we are experiencing what is likely the greatest bicycle boom in at least a half century. Several factors have contributed to the bicycling revival, but the spectre of climate change and other crises gripping the globe are certainly part of the equation. In an ecologically imperiled, rapidly urbanizing, traffic-shackled twenty-first century, the zero-emissions two-wheeler has reëmerged as a darling of urbanists, policymakers, and commuters. The boom has transformed American cities with new bicycle infrastructure, bike-share programs, and other pro-cycling initiatives. A further surge of bicycle commuting has accompanied the coronavirus pandemic: bike riding is an excellent way to maintain social distance, to swiftly navigate the city while avoiding buses and subways. The National Association of City Transport Officials has reported an “explosion in cycling” since the outbreak of the virus; huge increases in sales have left bike shops with a shortage of stock.
Bicycle politics, the causes championed by cycling advocates and activists, are often dismissed by critics as esoteric or élitist. But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities.
In fact, you could say that Black Lives Matter is a moral crusade about freedom of movement and who is at liberty to go where. For generations, police departments have patrolled African-American neighborhoods like occupying armies, surveilling and circumscribing the movements of residents, who are treated as interlopers even on their home turf. The mobility of black people is additionally restricted by a system that construes their mere presence in many public spaces as trespassing, a de-facto crime, punishable by imprisonment or even death.
Tensions over freedom of movement are ratcheted up during times of civil unrest. In the past two weeks, the streets of American cities have become ferociously contested terrain. Protesters chant “Whose streets? Our streets!”; police impose their authority with weapons and barricades.
A key episode was Donald Trump’s visit to St. John’s Episcopal Church, in Washington, which followed the violent clearing of protesters from neighboring Lafayette Square by police and National Guard troops. Trump’s bizarre photo opportunity, posing with a Bible outside the church’s parish house, has been endlessly dissected. But the more significant photo op may have come moments earlier, when Trump strode across H Street at the head of a White House entourage. Presidents are usually whisked from place to place by limousine, and Trump’s decision to go on foot was, surely, no accident: a strongman’s raw assertion that the streets belong to him. In a conference call with state governors that morning, Trump called for law enforcement to “dominate the streets,” a sentiment echoed by the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, who stressed the need, in a startling turn of phrase, “to dominate the battle space.”
Cyclists in New York and elsewhere found themselves caught up in a battle space. The N.Y.P.D. employed the military-style maneuver known as kettling, surrounding protesters on all sides to block exit routes and then charging in to make arrests. The strong-arm approach calls to mind earlier chapters in bicycle history. There is a long record of bicyclists engaging in protest, and of authoritarian governments cracking down on bicyclists. One of Adolf Hitler’s first acts upon assuming power, in 1933, was to criminalize cycling unions, which were associated with anti-Nazi political parties. Brown Shirts were sent to villages to confiscate bikes, a practice that was repeated years later by German soldiers during the occupations of Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and other countries. Then there are the famous scenes, from 1989, of pro-democracy demonstrators in China pouring into Tiananmen Square on bicycles, and the macabre images of flattened frames and wheels that were left behind after tanks moved in to crush the revolt.
These regimes recognized the bicycle for what it is: an emblem of freedom. The invention of the bicycle was the realization of an ancient dream. It was the elusive personal-transport device, a contraption that liberated humans from their dependency on draft animals, allowing individuals to move swiftly across land under their own power. Long after its primacy was usurped by the automobile, the bicycle retained a unique appeal. It was a cheap, durable, versatile, compact, lithe little machine, capable of whisking a rider across town through chockablock traffic, or transporting that rider out of the gridlocked city altogether, over the hills and far away. A bike could carry you five or ten or two hundred miles; when you got home, you could carry the bike into your apartment. To an authoritarian government or an occupying army, the bicycle was a menace, a tool of resistance that could be used by dissenters to sneak up and speed off, to organize and mobilize and elude.
But the emancipatory character of the bicycle is more fundamental; you might say that it’s built into the bike’s mechanism. The bicycle is a simple but ingenious invention, a vehicle with a passenger that doubles as its engine. A bike converts human exertion into locomotion with extraordinary efficiency; on a bike, a person moves much faster than on foot while expending far less energy. The mystery of cycling pleasure, the mind- and body-altering sense of freedom and possibility that a bicycle imparts, has moved physicists to seek new equations and prompted poets to reach for their most purple phrases. But it may ultimately be unquantifiable and ineffable. It lies in the uncanny fusion of the human frame and the bicycle frame, which can make a bicycle feel like an extension of your body, a prosthesis rather than a vehicle. It lies in the dreamy circular revolutions of the pedals and crank and chain, and in the spinning wheels that slip a continuous band of compressed air between the bike and the road, literally holding a rider airborne. If cyclists imagine themselves to be flying, it is because, in a sense, they are.
The bicycle’s nineteenth-century evangelists viewed this freedom in political terms. The bicycle was hailed as a liberator of minds and a leveller of class distinctions. Among the first major cycling organizations were socialist bicycle clubs in Britain, which enshrined the bicycle as egalitarian “people’s nag.” The bicycle’s reputation as an agent of change is based above all on its role in the turn-of-the-century women’s movement, when feminist reformers embraced bicycles as totems of modernity and tools of mass mobilization. “Many a woman,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, in 1895, “is riding to the suffrage on a bicycle.”
Over the decades, the bicycle has remained a symbol of progressive politics. In the nineteen-seventies, activists hailed the bike on environmental and spiritual grounds. The bicycle was a remedy for the car culture that was choking cities and polluting skies; bikes also embodied the lofty countercultural ideals of peace, love, and unity. In the words of a seventies “pedal power” manifesto: “Perhaps an interface between East and West is the bicycle, the machine which makes us all brothers and sisters.” Now, with climate change threatening the planet, the language has grown more messianic. The bicycle venerators of our time speak of “the noblest invention,” “the most benevolent machine,” “rideable art that can just about save the world.”
These sentimental ideas predominate in popular accounts of the bicycle’s history. The truth, of course, is messier. Bicycles have been instruments of empire, employed by armies and other agents of authority in European colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Raw materials that were used to build bikes, and to construct the roads that nineteenth-century bicycle activists campaigned for, were acquired at a steep cost to the environment and to human beings, in some cases through systematic violence against indigenous populations in colonial states—a legacy that complicates the portrayal of the bicycle as a peaceable “green machine.” The standard version of bicycle history describes how the fin-de-siècle cycling craze was kicked off by John Dunlop’s invention of the pneumatic bicycle tire. But it fails to trace the rubber in those millions of tires and inner tubes back to the source. Some of it came from the Congo Free State, where an estimated ten million people died harvesting rubber under brutal conditions of forced labor, atrocities driven by the desire of Belgium’s King Leopold II to capitalize on the demand for rubber incited, in part, by bicycle fever.
These complexities are not just artifacts of history. The present-day cycling boom has surfaced racial and social class conflicts. In many cities, the implementation of bike-sharing schemes is tied to efforts to attract global capital and to policies that exacerbate inequality. Scholars have linked the building of new cycling infrastructure and the predations of real-estate developers—often, bicycle lanes are maps of gentrification. There are millions of American bike riders, of all races and backgrounds, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the lily-white, and largely male, ranks of leading bicycle advocates. The term “invisible riders” has gained currency among critics who decry the marginalization of black, brown, female, and working-class cyclists by establishment activists.
The Black Lives Matter protests have revealed a new dark twist in the bicycle’s two-century-long saga. In cities across the country, demonstrators have been met by violent brigades of police officers on bikes. Bike cops have become familiar fixtures of police forces over the past couple decades. But in the current protests Americans have seen something new: militarized bicycle cops, utilizing aggressive riot-control tactics against demonstrators who aren’t rioting.
Online videos have documented bicycle cops unleashing tear gas, shooting pepper spray, tossing flash grenades, and pummelling protesters with batons. The officers have weaponized the bicycle itself, using bikes as shields and, more often, battering rams. (On Friday, BikeCo., the North American distributor for Fuji Bicycles, issued a statement announcing that it was suspending the sale of police bikes after seeing their products deployed in ways “that we did not intend or design them to be used.”) In New York, a new squad of “elite crowd control bike cops” emerged, wearing heavily-armored uniforms that split the difference between Storm Trooper, hockey goalie, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. The dystopian trend of American life has not, it seems, spared the humble people’s nag.
For the time being, at least, the Ninja Turtles appear to have packed away their breastplates. The chaos has abated in recent days. On Sunday, Mayor de Blasio lifted New York’s curfew. The next night, a multiracial throng took part in a bicycle demonstration that wended through Brooklyn, across the Williamsburg Bridge into Lower Manhattan, and back over the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn. Protesters pedalled bikes along placid streets, with chants and slogans ringing out above the hum of whipping spokes. After days and nights filled with dread and tumult, the vibe was festive: it seemed possible to hope that a more decent world, or at least a less lavishly funded police department, lay somewhere not so far up the road.
Or maybe the beatific vibe was more about the pure pleasure of riding a bike on a warm night, the kind of ride that seems to confirm the corniest and most bombastic bicycle encomiums. Perhaps the bicycle is the noblest invention, the most benevolent machine; God knows I like my bike. In any case, the nobility and benevolence isn’t inherent. Freedom lovers ride bikes; so do fascists. The ideal of the bicycle, like the ideals of justice and democracy and equity, is a thing that must be fought for—day after day, and, sometimes, block by block.
Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests
- The death of George Floyd, in context.
- The civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson examines the frustration and despair behind the protests.
- Who, David Remnick asks, is the true agitator behind the racial unrest?
- A sociologist examines the so-called pillars of whiteness that prevent white Americans from confronting racism.
- The Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi on what it would mean to defund police departments, and what comes next.
- The quest to transform the United States cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.
