Anthony Siracusa – Memphis Flyer

Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned by the Italian government in 1926 for his intellectual work, watched from his jail cell as fascism slowly consumed Europe. Disgusted with those ignoring the spread of totalitarianism, Gramsci wrote in his prison diary: “Indifference is the dead weight of history … nothing of what happens … is a matter of luck, nor the product of fate, but the intelligent work of the citizens.”

If you’re interested in the story of citizens working to make Memphis a better bike city, you’ll be disappointed by the recent article “Behind a Bicycling Boom: Governance, Cultural Change and Place Character in Memphis, Tennessee.”

The authors claim Memphis’ recent bicycle boom has created only “superficial changes to the city’s image” and effected no real change in “divisions along city and suburban lines, profound racial residential segregation, and stagnant population growth.”

Why? Because bicycle advocates in Memphis are an elite white “consumer citizen” class who, in partnership with Memphis Mayor A C Wharton’s government and local developers, crafted an “amenity-based urbanism” that reinforces their power.

Titillating though it is, the authors have a neat theory in search of a problem.

Their first mistake is portraying people on bikes as spandex-clad, helmet-wearing elites with no interest in truly connecting with people unlike them. Their second mistake is painting a portrait of bicycle advocates as an elite white class espousing connected communities while actually marginalizing poor non-white people.

The most recent U.S. Census reports the bicycle community roughly mirrors the demographics of the city at large: 53 percent of people on bicycles in Memphis are black, 37 percent are white, 4 percent are Asian, and 6 percent are listed as “other.”

What’s more, Memphis’ bicycle culture has shifted in the past five years from one dominated by spandex warriors to a culture filled with a growing group of daily commuters. If anything, the people being marginalized are “the bike guys” with helmets and spandex.

But more troubling is the authors’ assessment of bike advocates who, they claim, occupy a “class status higher than that of many of their fellow city residents.” Why? Because bike advocates possess “the command of capital” to support businesses that support bike lanes — turning bike advocates buying sandwiches at Fino’s into Andrew Carnegie-like capitalist magnates.

But the more damning implication of this argument is that less well off “fellow city residents” are too broke to do anything to revitalize their neighborhoods. Just as the authors rely on a false image of bike riders as spandex titans and bike advocates as white elites, they also rely on the condescending image of a poor and helpless citizenry.

Finally, the article is patently wrong about the South Main neighborhood. The authors claim the neighborhood is suffering from “racialized gentrification” because the black population around South Main fell from 43 percent in 2000 to 14 percent in 2012. (It’s worth noting the population of Hispanics and Asians in South Main doubled in the same period).

Despite the fact that artists drove South Main’s revitalization decades before Memphis had a bike lane, the authors attribute these demographic shifts to the failed “politics of bicycling.” These “bicycle politics” are even more despicable because they emptied out a black neighborhood less than a mile from the Lorraine Motel — connecting the failed politics of bicycling to the assassination of Dr. King.

I concede that bicycles haven’t bridged the urban/suburban divide or healed wounds of the King assassination. But they haven’t made them worse.

The city’s recent improvements for bikes have made Memphis a better place, and the authors might have understood this had they talked to Big Mike — the Ice Man — about his bike business. Or asked Sylvia Crum about the “kidical mass.” They could have talked to James Williams about his work to repair bikes for his neighbors near LeMoyne-Owen College. Or they could have talked to Megan at the YMCA about the Multicultural Achievers’ regular rides on the Greenline.

But they apparently didn’t talk to anyone in Memphis.

So what’s left? At best we have a cautionary tale about the need of “professional” thinkers to shoehorn a complex city full of people into a neat academic theory.

Anthony Siracusa is a graduate fellow in history at Vanderbilt University. He also serves as president of Bike Walk Tennessee.

I’ll admit it: I’m not a very good planner.

I don’t track my finances in an Excel spreadsheet, I often wait till I’m lost before seeking directions, and when traveling abroad, I often forgo museums for aimless bumbling in the streets of a new city.

So in 2003, when I was asked by the Memphis Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) to join 41 other bicycle “stakeholders” in a two-year planning process, I accepted with trepidation. But in 2003 the MPO needed “bike people.”

U.S. transportation policy since the 1990s has mandated bicycle and pedestrian transportation planning. Section 1202 of the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, signed into law in 1998, required that “transportation plans and projects shall provide due consideration for safety and contiguous routes for bicyclists and pedestrians.”

The problem for the Memphis MPO in 2003 was simple: It had never made “due consideration” for bicycles and pedestrians.

In compliance with federal transportation policy, the MPO assembled an ad-hoc committee and charged them with creating a comprehensive bicycle and pedestrian plan to complement the region’s long-term transportation plan. Completed in 2005, the plan is clear in its purpose: “This plan is intended to identify the opportunities for enhancing bicycle and pedestrian travel within the Memphis MPO region. The recommendations contained in this plan should be used as guides for taking advantage of these opportunities.”

The completion of the Memphis MPO’s bike and pedestrian plan brought the MPO into compliance with federal transportation policy, but in itself — as a recommendation — the plan was incapable of forcing the construction of a single mile of bike lane or sidewalk within the nine municipalities and three counties in the Memphis MPO region.

In fact, until recently, local government’s commitment to a walkable and bikeable region has been less than impressive. In 2008 and 2009, Memphis was spotlighted in Bicycling Magazine as one of the three worst cities for cycling in America. This year, the Memphis region was evaluated by Transportation for America’s landmark “Dangerous by Design” report as the seventh-most dangerous area in the country for pedestrians. According to the Centers for Disease Control, Shelby County’s obesity rate in 2008 was 33.4 percent. The national obesity rate is 26.5 percent.

Although Article 46, Section 490 of the municipal charter for the city of Memphis explicitly states that “the governing authority shall have power to pass all laws to preserve the health of the city,” this provision does not contradict John Branston’s recent assertion in his column that “it isn’t government’s job to get people to bicycle.” We must remember: The bike plan is far from law. It’s just a suggestion.

But this debate about the role of the government in our lives — be it municipal, state, or federal — constitutes a perennial debate in the U.S. In the Federalist Papers, founding father James Madison noted this tension in his discussion of how the federal government relates to the states.

His response to “the adversaries of the Constitution” — those seeking to evade federal power in favor of full state power — was to say that such critics had “lost sight of the people altogether in their reasonings on this subject. They must be told that the ultimate authority, wherever the derivative may be found, resides in the people alone. … Truth, no less than decency, requires that the event in every case should be supposed to depend on the sentiments and sanction of their common constituents.”

The Memphis MPO and its constituents — the nine municipalities and three counties in our region — met their federal transportation obligations by designing and regularly updating a bicycle and pedestrian plan. But the people of our region — through a process of public participation, advocacy, and civic engagement — are the ones responsible for the bike lanes, trails, and sidewalk improvements popping up across the city.

Whether we agree that the promotion of bicycling and walking are the responsibility of local government, a central tenet of our democracy is that government be, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, of, by, and for the people. Cities across the United States are rushing to reorganize roadways to include bicycle lanes. New York City leads with more than 200 miles of bike lanes created since 2009.

In these cities, government has proven an able partner for bike advocates — recent political leadership in Memphis included. But the blame for this surge of bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure belongs not with the government. Instead, it lies with the citizens of our city. Not a single mile of infrastructure would have been created without this people-powered movement. And for that we should be grateful.

Anthony Siracusa, a native Memphian and founder of Revolution Community Bicycle Shop at First Congregational Church, spent a year investigating bicycle cultures on four continents as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow.