Tag: Greenline

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Toby Sells’ cover story, “Bike Memphis!” …

I enjoyed reading Toby Sells’ “Bike Memphis!” article. It made me want to get out and ride. I didn’t see anything in it about the Hightailers, though — the biggest cycling club in Memphis. They’ve contributed to the success of cycling in Memphis, simply by the sheer volume of their membership, their advocacy, and their cycling education efforts.

If you’re not already a Memphis Hightailer, consider joining. There’s a huge wealth of knowledge and social enjoyment in being a member!

Drew

I live in Desoto County in Southaven and commute 31 miles round trip twice a week to Hernando. I ride upwards of 4,000 miles a year, some in Memphis but mostly in Desoto County, where there is zero bike infrastructure. And yet, I have almost no problems whatsoever. I control my lane at all times and communicate to motorists whether or not it’s safe to pass on two-lane roads. Almost all motorists are appreciative and courteous. The ones who throw tantrums still give me a full lane change when passing. A tantrum means I know they’ve seen me.

I will not ride in bike lanes next to parked cars or hidden behind parked cars like on Overton or Broad. Those are super dangerous. I sure hope Peabody doesn’t get bike lanes next to parked cars. Peabody is perfectly easy to ride on as it is.

Don’t ride in the gutter or on the sidewalk. Ride big. Be visible and predictable. Be aware of surroundings and communicate with other road users.

Patrick Smith

West Memphis has their Greenline into downtown completely finished now. I visited recently to check the progress and was happy to ride on paved Greenline all the way to Pancho’s.

It’s great that the Flyer is encouraging people to get out there and explore, and I hope that more people share your initiative. Also visit adanay.co and see some of the interesting rides around Memphis.

Cort Percer

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s Letter From the Editor, “Who to Hate” …

America leads the world in mass shootings. Why? National news media attention is like a vector that reaches people who are vulnerable. These disaffected people can be infected by the attention other angry, disturbed people get by becoming mass killers.

Before he shot dead 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Adam Lanza created a spreadsheet documenting the names, body counts, and weapons from previous mass murders.

Killing former colleagues, schoolmates, or groups of strangers in a suicidal spasm serves not only as an act of revenge but as a way of forcing the world to be aware of the killer’s inner torment. These public attacks also give the killer the fame that eluded him in his failed life.

Revenge over real and imagined slights, the desire for attention and fame, and delusions all can play a role. Almost all mass shooters are male, with about 64 percent white. The American dream may contribute to the frequency of these killings. When success fails to materialize and men find themselves in the margins of society, they feel cheated and emasculated. They’re in real pain, but they’re eager to blame that pain on those around them. 

The United States has five times the number of mass shootings as the next-highest country in the world. Why? The most obvious reason is our unique gun culture. The U.S. easily has the most guns per capita of any country in the world, with an estimated 310 million guns in circulation, and lax gun laws. In a civil society, what does anyone need with a military style weapon?

Bob Lawrence

High-tech guns in the hands of low-tech minds continue to foster mass killings. Fifty young people killed in Orlando by a lone wolf, male gunman wielding a military-style weapon. It’s the guns, stupid; semiautomatic guns allow mass murders to happen. Over and over again, alienated young males have taken out their anger and hate on innocent victims. This was a hate crime of domestic violence directed at the people in a gay and lesbian nightclub. All these young people would still be alive today if it hadn’t been for the guns and bullets used in this killing spree.

Dion

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Opinion The Last Word

Wuz That … ?

CREDIT: GilbertC | Dreamstime.com

When my brother was a little guy, he’d look through the new Sears Wish Book and make his Christmas list. He didn’t write it down, it went more like, “I want everything on these two pages except that. That’s for girls.” As an adult, my list is just as easily made. I’d like to have the freedom of a toddler to run around and look adorable without pants as opposed to being asked to “leave quietly” because I’m “disturbing the other customers in the cheese shop.”

But I am nothing if not a giver, so as I begin making a list of presents I will not buy my family and friends this holiday and instead order something at the last minute from Amazon Prime because, hey, free shipping and no pants, I have also made a list of things I want to give my beloved Memphis. Understand, I’m not offering what you fancy types call “solutions.” This is pure slacktivism. I’m just saying what I want and leaving it up to people who actually know about stuff and how to do it. I’m a facilitator. The ideas guy, if you will.

GilbertC | Dreamstime.com

My first wish is that we find another name for the flyover. That’s what it is, not what it is to us. Your old beater in high school had a name, right? Mine was the Blue Booger. I have proposed to several people that we start calling it the Grinder. We’re the home of the Grindhouse, right? And don’t you grind your teeth into meal when you’re stuck at the junction? I got those sort of blank, polite looks like when a kid in church tells the nice lady next to him that morning his daddy stubbed his toe and screamed, “JESUS HORATIO CHRIST ON A RAFT!” Then, once I drove up it, I decided on the Tower of Terror. Y’all ridden that thing yet? It’s cool as all get out. Just don’t look down. But last night I decided that Memphis should never be without the Zippin Pippin, so we could call it that.

When driving along Winchester, my husband and I play a game I call Wuz That. Wuz that a Circuit City? Wuz that a grocery store? Thousands upon thousands of square feet of empty buildings just sit there. Meanwhile, a show called Memphis Beat was filmed in Louisiana. Work with me here. I’ll tie these things together. I think Memphis should be Movie City. I don’t pretend to understand the problem with giving the film industry the kind of breaks Georgia and Louisiana do, especially since we threw so much cash at another industry that upper management dances around with their tax credits making it rain in the boardroom. Those buildings could be soundstages, post-production, animation, craft services (we are a food city, after all), whatever. Memphis has a few tall buildings to be leapt in single bounds, swampy areas for battle, Rhodes College — especially in fall — looks like the perfect New England school where two awkward nerds can fall in love. Then there are those production facilities I was talking about where giant purple horses can battle blue lizards to colonize Des Moines and turn Americans into Ood-like creatures who wail to communicate. But I don’t want to give too much of my screenplay away.

Cars are on my list, too. Get off the pot and build a damn parking garage for the zoo. At least allow me a bus route there that doesn’t take me to Collierville first. My husband, being a budget- and environmentally-conscious fellow, wanted to commute by bus to work. The commute involves starting in East Memphis, making three turns, and going straight down Getwell a few miles. Most of his commute is a straight shot. Right past a bus terminal. The 8-mile commute takes about 15-20 minutes in the car. By bus? TWO HOURS AND TWO MINUTES. In fairness, there is another route to get him to work by 7:30 a.m. that only takes an hour and 52 minutes. I understand that a public transportation system won’t expand and improve if people don’t use it. I also understand that if it doesn’t expand and improve, people won’t use it. If the Greenline has taught us anything, it’s that if you build it, they will come. And please, for the love of Pete, hurry up and make those trolley tracks of use for something other than getting your bike tire stuck in them and breaking a collarbone. Unless a secret cabal of Memphis’ world-class orthopedic professionals are in cahoots with MATA to shift business their way. I’m all for revenue, and I like secret plans.

Also: Boscos must never ever never take the black bean and goat cheese tamale off the menu. I’m willing to trade renaming the flyover for that one.

Susan Wilson also writes for yeahandanotherthing.com and likethedew.com.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Playing the Bike Card

In a recent Flyer column, Wendi C. Thomas posed a question that demands an honest and sincere answer. Her question is relevant to all Memphians, and to all residents of Shelby County, Desoto County, Greene County, and any other place in the U.S., or in the wider world, where people of different races and cultures must live and work together. She asks: “How will biking be different from the other well-intentioned movements that still leave brown and black people and poor people behind?”

While her question was framed in the context of the economic impact of bike lanes on disadvantaged brown and black Memphians, the underlying problem behind her interrogative will come up again and again for as long as the world turns: How will we all make public policy together that doesn’t leave someone behind? This isn’t some random local issue that we Memphians alone have to deal with when we’re worrying about bike lanes, of all things. This is a fundamental problem within democracy itself, and woe to us all if we ignore it.

Nobody likes talking about race, but there it is, staring us all right in the face every day. Memphians, especially, must strive to reconcile the race issue for ourselves and for others, because we have the opportunity to do so. If we, of all communities, of all houses divided, can work out our differences and stand united afterward, we can become an example for the rest of the world to follow. The world desperately needs that kind of example, and we are uniquely poised to offer it. The stakes are higher for us than we might at first realize, because there are a lot of other people who don’t live in Memphis who will also be helped if we can we can get our own house in order.

Here is how we will not work out our differences: leveling the charge of “replicating racist systems” — essentially an accusation of racism — for supporting bike lanes. Firstly, if institutional racism is so pernicious that it can infiltrate the minds of staunch anti-racists when they endeavor to support a public project that has nothing whatsoever to do with race, then we all may as well drive home and go back to bed because there is no possible way to defeat an enemy that powerful. Moreover, even if the social theory behind that accusation describes reality with 100 percent accuracy, that is one of the single most depressing things you could possibly tell someone else: You were being racist without even meaning to. That message will win no elections and change no minds, because it immediately puts the listener on the defensive and tells them that they are not in control of their own thoughts and feelings. Nobody wants to hear that. Not even the Devil himself is believed to have that much power over the human will.

There is a movement afoot to make privileged Americans more aware of the largely invisible class, sex, gender, and race structures that undergird our society. Contemporary academics who study race and gender use a framework for understanding and mapping out those social dynamics called intersectionality. Among social scientists, intersectionality is used as a way to account for the fact that a single black mother of two in Binghampton might face a different set of challenges in life than an unmarried white male college graduate in Connecticut. In popular discussion or debate, it has become a way to bludgeon privileged individuals who are seen to be insufficiently devoted to the cause of social justice. If you’ve ever been told to “check your privilege,” you’ve already encountered it.

As long as this movement points an accusatory finger at the people it ostensibly aims to enlighten and tells them that they have no control over the problem, it is bound to fail. Race and class privilege are difficult enough concepts to understand and apprehend on their own, let alone when they are accompanied by a guilt trip. There are many more constructive ways to approach the problem, and while those privileges may very well permeate every aspect of our daily lives, the insistence that we shoehorn a discussion of race into absolutely every aspect of public policy decision-making is simply not practical. Sometimes a bike lane is just a bike lane.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Downtown Memphis: Less is More

An early proposed version of Beale Street Landing.

The one thing Memphis and Shelby County have surely learned from the past decade or so, during which hard times visited and stayed around for a while, is that necessity truly is the mother of invention — and often a single mother at that. 

Even before the Great Crash of 2008-9, there was a general sense that we had let our ambitions on the development front soar a little too much. Take our riverfront: Organized opposition on the part of Friends of the River and other environmentally interested citizens was, along with alarms about the anticipated costs of the project, a major reason why some of the more ambitious iterations proposed by the Riverfront Development Corporation did not come to fruition. 

What was left on the plate was Beale Street Landing (BSL). Beset with delays, cost overruns, design controversies, and intermittent failures to cooperate by a sometimes unruly river, it finally got done within the past year. The public spaces are welcoming, the views are spectacular, and BSL has proved, if nothing else, to be a great place to have a party. The Flyer‘s own annual Best of Memphis celebration was held there to good effect earlier this year. 

It brings to mind the phrase — and the concept of — “less is more,” a term which, we discovered upon doing a little research, was originated not by the minimalist architect Mies van der Rohe, as was long supposed, but by Robert Browning in the British master’s 1855 poem, “Andrea del Sarto (Called ‘The Faultless Painter’).” 

We were stirred into admiration of a sort a few months back at an insight offered by Mayor A C Wharton (whom we had previously taken to desk, along with city planning maven Robert Lipscomb, for the grandiosity embedded in some of the ideas floated out of City Hall): Frustrated  by the scarcity of the times, by the drying up of public and private funding sources, and by overt warnings about fiscal over-reach from the state Comptroller’s office, Wharton offered a new, leaner version of development, which cast downtown Memphis as an open-air arena, with its parts — among them FedExForum, the National Civil Rights Museum, the soon-to-be Bass Pro Pyramid, and, yes, Beale Street Landing — being connected by relatively inexpensive public transportation. 

This was how the mayor saw us responding to tourist and convention competition from, say, Nashville, with its massive (and massively expensive) new Convention Center. 

“Less is more.” Yes, indeed. And even the nascent Main Street to Main Street Big Water Crossing project (aka Hanrahan Bridge project), establishing pedestrian connections between downtown and West Memphis, involves minimal transformation of existing natural surroundings at relatively low cost — the key component being a $14.9 million “Tiger Grant” from the federal government. Greg Maxted, the project’s executive director, made that modest but far-reaching project sing when he described its prospective glories to a luncheon meeting of the Rotary Club of Memphis on Tuesday. 

We have much to look forward to, and much of what is to come is already there, in a landscape that needs only some judicious tweaking, not a massive overhaul.

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News News Feature

Bicycling Bias?

Those who sit left of center often gloat at the relative ease with which we broach the tender topic of race, at least as compared to the right. But given the oversized defensive reactions to a recent journal article about the primary beneficiaries of Memphis’ bike lanes, perhaps we progressives should pump our brakes. Without the thick skin that conservatives earned during decades of regressive racial politics, some Memphis progressives winced like spin-class rookies at the assertion that the movement does more for the creative class than it does for the 30 percent of city residents who live below the poverty line.

In “Behind a Bicycling Boom: Governance, cultural change, and place character in Memphis, Tennessee,” published last month in the journal Urban Studies, the authors quantified in detail the rise of the biking movement in Memphis.

Despite the advent of 60-plus miles of bike lanes, the development of the Shelby Farms Greenline, and plans for the Harahan Bridge project: “…change does not automatically benefit all citizens,” the authors wrote. “In fact, changes in place character of cities may play an active part in perpetuating inequalities in who has power and for whom that power is used.”

What the article did not do is call the bicycling bunch classist and racist, but that seems to be what some heard.

A commenter on the Memphis Flyer‘s website wrote: “Because we should obviously tilt our city to the ‘uncreative class’ and the ‘stagnation machine elite’ instead, for the sake of ‘inclusion’. (sic) … I’m as liberal as anybody, but cities cannot survive or grow on the backs of the apathetic, the unemployed, the dependent, and the criminal.” Another online reaction: “Idiots (both black & white BTW) who choose to try to stand in the way of positive changes with claims of racial inequality are what’s wrong with this city.”

In a far more sophisticated rebuttal, Kyle Wagenschutz, the city’s bicycle/pedestrian program manager, noted that the percentage of black cyclists was 57 percent in 2013, which almost mirrors the city’s black population.

Although the number of bicycle commuters has more than doubled between 2005 and 2013, the actual number of two-wheeled commuters is fewer than 650.

Does this mean that bicycling is bad? Of course not. But in backing Madison Avenue bike lanes despite business owners’ protests, did bike advocates lead with their commitment to reducing racial/structural inequality? Did they throw their fund-raising prowess behind the failed 2012 gas tax referendum that would have raised up to $6 million for public transportation?

They did not. And that’s okay, but it’s disingenuous to bristle when the article’s authors note the class privilege inherent in the $2 million raised for the Shelby Farms Greenline, used primarily for recreation.

Take the $4.1 million in tax breaks won by a developer to build an apartment complex along a planned pedestrian-bicycle route connecting Main Street in Memphis to Main Street in West Memphis. How will the profits from these and related projects build wealth for black families, where the median household wealth is $6,446 compared to $91,405 for white families?

How do we secure bikes for those who have lost their driver’s licenses because of unpaid traffic tickets — while advocating for changes in criminal justice policies?

How can a single mother of two kids (the typical makeup of a low-income Memphis family) get to her job by bike? Where would she shower when she arrives? Where would she store her bike?

There are bike advocates considering these tough questions, but if it’s true that only a hit dog hollers, why did this article strike such a nerve?

“Studies show that inequalities are reproduced by social processes, sometimes despite the best efforts and best intentions of good citizens,” said Wanda Rushing, a sociology professor at the U of M and one of the article’s three authors. “Sometimes good intentions lead to unexpected, and sometimes undesirable consequences.”

(Disclosure: Rushing and I will co-teach an economic inequality class this spring. The journal article was written months before we met.)

The awful efficiency of racism is that it persists even when there are no cross-toting, white-hooded Klansmen to be found. You can be a spandex-wearing, black-friend-having, progressive white bicyclist and still unwittingly replicate racist systems that advantage some and neglect others.

The question isn’t whether bike lanes run through black neighborhoods (they do) or whether bicycling advocates are bigots (most probably aren’t).

The question is: How will biking be different from the other well-intentioned movements that still leave brown and black people and poor people behind?

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Bicycle Politics

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.

Categories
News News Blog

Greenline Connector to Crowdsource $75,000

A rendering of the Hampline shows the two-lane design and physical barrier that distinguishes the project from standard bike lanes.

  • A rendering of the Hampline shows the two-lane design and physical barrier that distinguishes the project from standard bike lanes.

With Memphis on the coattails of being named last year’s Most Improved Bike City by Bicycling Magazine, the city’s first two-way cycle track bike lane is seeking financial help from a crowdsourced fund-raising campaign.

The two-mile Hampline will connect bicyclists from Overton Park to the Shelby Farms Greenline, running through Binghampton. The project, which has been in the works since 2010, will have a lane in both directions and will be separated from the main road by a barrier to increase safety for cyclists. The line will have two miles of murals and sculptures, as well as art galleries and an amphitheater.

The development needs $75,000 from the public, but the additional $175,000 needed to break ground will come from private contributions and organization donations. In total, the Hampline is estimated to cost $4.5 million.

To donate, visit the project’s fundraising page.