Aaron Wilcher
Hubs and Escape Routes:
Riding Bikes into the Middle Landscape
Carondelet Park, Saint Louis: "This essay is, then, a kind of map."
2003 National Off-Road Bicycle Association National Championships:
The professional men climb the steepest part of the course.
Riding a bike performs a particular set of transformations. These transformations take place on what have been called by bike sports pundits as both "the roads that ruin" and "roads of redemption." For children, in the precise moment they figure out how to balance a two-wheeler, a special kind of cultural memory is literally grafted into the body, creating one of these moments of change. Kinesiologists describe this shift as a kind of inscription, calling the process muscle memory or kinesthetic awareness. The philosopher Michel Foucault called this process discursive and corporeal discipline, a space at the crossroads between language, cultural memory, and the limits and training placed on bodies. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested that studies of infant movements be done to determine how psychological development relates to body movements babies perform, as they move their limbs to test the limits of their space and their selves. Similarly, the bicycle is a cultural technology that translates our relationship with the city and country into our bodies, spatially educating us in the discipline of the landscape, inscribing cultural practices and places into our muscles and our memory.
Plaza de la Armería, Palacio Real, Madrid; view of the fenced off team area before the start of the last stage of the Vuelta a España, 1999.After fending off his challengers in the mountains, German rider Jan Ullrich prevailed in the general classification. Citizens and travelers descend on the economic and governmental centers in cities and towns around the world for large cycling events like this one. Urban areas are transformed for the event, bringing the discourse of physiology to the main stage of the geography of the city.)
These bike/body trans(lations)(formations) are various. They are performative. They are discursive, historical, technological, and corporeal. Taking Leo Marx as guide, in his book The Machine and the Garden (1964), when we ride beyond and into the city, we perform the practice of cultural and corporeal memory by practicing the spatial discourse of the "middle landscape," an urban cultural (con)text for the places "outside" the metropolis, outside the suburb.
By breathing, oxygen passes into our muscles for respiration, training our bodies in the ways of Lewis Mumford's ideas on geographic and economic decentralization and regionalism--we ride into the urban periphery, or into Frederick Law Olmstead's periphery brought to the city embodied in the urban park. We ride on bicycles increasingly designed, manufactured, and marketed by transnational corporations, and increasingly bought in corporate-owned bike shop chains. Thus, discourses about our bodies are much like the discourses about the landscape and global capital, since networks of business, institution, and trade radiate out from the hub of our bodies and the machines we ride from the hub of the city. The literary critic Ricardo Piglia helps us understand this process when he writes about conceiving of the land outside Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century, making the analogy, "phrenology is cartography." This essay is, then, a kind of map. It is a map that has hubs (central places) and spokes (routes and places of transformation). It has morphology, and it turns and transforms with the beat of the city and of history. It has, finally, a critical politics in which bicyclists are inexorably pedaling through.
photo by Joseph Heathcott, all others by the author; A railroad trestle and graffiti wall in Saint Louis frame one entrance to the riverfront road and trail, part of the network of trails and roads that form the Confluence Greenway, a metaphorical and actual system for linking the city to its history and the environment in and around it. See links below for more information on the project.
Hubs
In the early days of cycling, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, bicycle design waxed and waned as manufacturers and designers in the United States and Europe tried to find a machine that accommodated both the road and the rider. The Velocipedé evolved to the Ordinary, which had a large front wheel and rubber tires to absorb some of the shock from the road. Descriptions of late-nineteenth century bicycle training schools attest to the sheer difficulty of learning to ride these crude early bicycles. In order to mount an Ordinary bicycle, the rider had to perform a precarious high step maneuver. The large front wheel made the bike difficult to turn quickly. Falling meant the rider fell far.
Future High-Wheel: In the early 1990s, Specialized's prototype future/past high-wheel bike combined an organic sensibility of contemporary plastics to an off-road mountain bike language mixed with the model of the nineteenth century Ordinary. The qualities of utterly impractical and anachronistic, coupled with a penchant for quotation, make this a bike in high-postmodern style.It would take more than a half-century before the arrival of the Safety bicycle and the pneumatic tire made the bike a more easily accessible technology, one that was decently maneuverable, shock-absorbing, low enough to the ground, and, perhaps most importantly, affordable. The period during which the Safety bicycle was introduced marked the beginning of what bicycle historians regard as the Golden Age of cycling in America, the years from the 1890s until the 1920s, before war industry, car ownership, and changing conceptions of the city shifted pastimes and people elsewhere, at least for a while.
The increasing popularity of the bicycle in the late nineteenth century meant that there was a large population, including a large number of adults, who wanted to learn how to ride bikes. The semi-official training institutes had a sizable market, and charged students to learn a set of guidelines from manuals on how to ride. The institutes were often attached to retail shops that sold bicycles. The unofficial guidelines they used to teach riding skills and etiquette emerged with growing concerns over the bicycle in city streets, which led to official city ordinances on speed, parking, and accessories, like bells and lights.
Many of these training schools were attached to bike shops, thereby creating a social center for enthusiasts who bought and repaired bicycles there (Smith 1972, 27). But the bike's importance was not limited to the communities in which they were located. Its role radiated out from bike shop to form a critical junction in American technological and transportation history. Manufacturers' contracting of sales, a practice later of the auto industry, was fostered in bike shops in the late 1890s while many of the auto industry's future leaders were cutting their teeth either as bike shop employees or as bicycle manufacturers. Colonel Albert A. Pope, a major bike manufacturing mogul, later turned auto industry player, is one famous example of this latter case. Orville and Wilbur Wright got their start as bicycle mechanics, and incorporated bike technology into early aircraft technology. Bike manufacturing design set important precedents for the manufacturing design of auto plants. Bicycle design itself clearly influenced the design of first internal combustion driven machines. The first versions of Benz automobiles were clearly internal combustion engine adaptations of bicycles (Lay, 148-157).
The transition from bicycle to automobile was preceded by conflicts of bicycles and horsepower in America's streets, a conflictive relationship that had consequences in street ordinances and city planning design. The League of American Wheelmen (LAW), a national organization established in 1880 for dealing with policy issues and social concerns of bicyclists, handled non-official practices and official regulations of their own, and of city, state, and federal law. They established codes of conduct for riders, politically campaigned for better roads and against discriminatory laws against bicycles in city traffic laws, supported social cycling clubs, offered property insurance to its members, and regulated much of early bicycle racing.
The LAW directors would eventually form an early national automobile agency, the American Road Makers, a rival to the American Automobile Association (AAA), setting another of the bicycle's many precedents for the invention and rise of the automobile's industry and culture (Segal 1989, 208). The LAW codes joined the manufacturers in communicating to the public through the retail store, the bike shop. Bicyclists in late nineteenth century American culture, thus, had a network of governmental and bicycle regulatory institutions, as well as commercial interests, which flowed through the bike shop, a social focus for transportation and leisure practitioners.
The bike shop today is an architectural space resembling its older, turn-of-the-century ancestor. It is a hub for bike clubs and enthusiasts, for window-browsers and nearby residents who need a repair. It is an extension of the manufacturer as a representative dealer, a liaison for the national governing body of cycling as an affiliate community representative. The federation in charge of competition today, USA Cycling, has long since changed its name from LAW, which itself underwent many alterations and became an organization dealing with bicycle advocacy in Washington D.C. called the League of American Bicyclists (LAB, see links below). Though vastly modernized institutions, both organizations use the bike shop to promote events and connect with local cyclists.
USA Cycling is located on the campus of the United States Olympic Committee's Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.Interestingly, USA Cycling divides its mission statement into 3 M's: Membership, Money, and Medals. The architectural division at the center reflects the organizational divisions. One office supports the drive to foster grassroots racing, sponsorship, and club and regional support, incorporating bike shops. The other, the sport science division, has one mission--to win medals at international competitions by employing the most advanced training techniques and physiological testing. The disciplinary regimen of the contemporary endurance athlete, who is subject to the rigors of blood chemistry analysis, power output analysis, and psychological training, along with the campus's location in the buildings and on the site of a decommissioned Air Force base, offer a clear parallel to the writings of philosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote about the relationships between language, social power, and architecture, all of which come to play directly upon the body.
Counting the minutes until Athens and Torino.Despite its many problems, like challenges from the auto industry and suburbanization, the contemporary bike shop links the average rider to the governing body of the sport, to local political issues regarding transportation and the environment, and to the geography of local cycling roads and trails. This network connects a number of institutions and manufacturing powers, which are themselves extensions of cultural and economic discourses. These material and institutional spokes reciprocate for cultural ideas about the body, and for values in morality, leisure, environmentalism. From these radiating spokes, cyclists of various abilities are brought together into a commercial space that provides a critical community service at the hub of the bike shop, the locus for bike culture in America.
Unfortunately, A&M Cyclery is the only bike shop located centrally in Saint Louis. As in other cities in America, most bike shops with functioning service departments and a good selection of bikes are located in more affluent areas. More research should be done into the socioeconomic indicators of cycling, but the lack of bike shops central to the City of Saint Louis likely finds its cause in the overall patterns of disinvestment, resource shifts to the county, where many more bike shops are found in peripheral cities like Kirkwood and University City.As with the bike shop, the turn-of-the-century history of the bicycle in America in general, despite its typical service to a nostalgic, contemporary, anti-automobile discourse, demonstrates how the practice of riding bicycles and associating with other cyclists functions as an important social adhesive today. Regardless of the bike's four-decade plus dormancy in America from the 1920s to the 1960s, with the years’ tremendous alterations in bike design and designer sport physiology, the fin de siècle Golden Age of cycling is a potent sounding board for contemporary bike culture. Many of cycling’s hubs and escape routes, embodied in the cultural values which produced the need to come together for leisure, fellowshipping, and riding into the urban periphery, draw upon the deep structures of cultural practice then as now. The bike shop, for its part, traffics as much in bicycle equipment as it does in the resources and regimens of the transnational corporate manufacturers and sports institutions that feed it, providing a way into and out of the city. It provides a democratic and a capitalist space for this kind of interaction, the hub from which its corresponding spokes radiate.
Escape Routes
What happens when we ride away from the bike shop? Where do we go, and why do we go there? Do we ride toward a place or away from it? Do we actually escape, or are we caught up in the discourse and elusive text of language? Is riding a bike into the country different from driving a car there? Is there a “there” there?
Carondelet Park in South Saint Louis features a criterium race on weeknights in warmer months. Combining several middle landscape tropes, the city park, the bicycle, and high-level exercise, these roads offer urban bicycle catharsis.With popularity increasing in the post-Vietnam era cycling reemerged as a public policy and cultural issue in America. Though the bicycle was dormant in the world war and post-war years, bicycle discourses (values surrounding the bicycle contingent on popular trends) after 1970 articulate strikingly similar benefits as they did in the late nineteenth century: jaunts outside the city to escape urban plight; individual and humanist moral redemption through leisure and exercise; corporeal discipline and body fad achievement; individualist freedom, particularly women's liberation, to name a few.
Unfortunately, there is a tendency for American bicycle historians to nostalgically write about the American bicycle heyday of the 1890s to 1920s without paying attention to their own participation in discourse-making, a practice which is guilty of repolarizing a transportation and environmental issue they generally wish to address. The bicycle is somehow inherently a pro-environmental, pro-community vehicle, while the diametrically opposed automobile rends neighborhoods apart and incessantly pollutes. By writing backwards through an anti-automobile, pro-Dutch city planning ideology, the American cycling historian misses the big picture: there are equally critical ways in which the cultural draw of the automobile is also the cultural draw of the bicycle, since both "redeem" in startlingly similar ways.
A street in Amsterdam, September 2000. The Dutch are world-famous for their hyper-use of bicycle transportation. American planners, environmentalists, and critical mass enthusiasts ogle over the possibilities of a hybrid, Dutch-import version of a transportation system. Controversy, however, lies in the Netherlands' policy of separating bike traffic from auto traffic by creating segregated bikeways. The staunchest opponent to this method is John Forester, who has written extensively about the issue in his book Bicycle Transportation: A Handbook for Cycling Transportation Engineers.One example of a bike history blunder is to dote on a popular anti-auto conspiracy theory that outlines an anti-trust violation by an alignment between the auto, oil, and road industries in the early twentieth century. In popular bike culture, magazines and histories both indulge in suggesting that transportation’s big business menacingly subverted the "utopian" headings of public transit and cycling's popularity. A closer look at one dominant, recurring paradigm in cultural theory, the "middle landscape," however, shows two important cultural trends in another direction: (1) that the sinister acts of curtailing public transit and central cities actually represented a broader, decades-long tendency enacted by business, public policy, unhindered development, and consumer choice to live out of the city; and (2), that the car and the bike participate in a similar practice of looking beyond the city, searching for a way to join the city to the country, bringing “the best of both worlds” together. In this way, we can uncover cycling as not always already a politically radical practice, but an activity that must be practiced with a renewed awareness.
A foundational scholar in American studies, Leo Marx, helps begin the uncovering. In his book, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964), he offered his version of the middle landscape as an American metaphysical literary and cultural trope, which attempted to reconcile nature and civilization by extending the pastoral ideal to include industry, a desire for "the best of both worlds," city and country. While his methodology has been troubled by the cultural turn in cultural studies, Marx's work has continued to influence contemporary scholars like Howard P. Segal, who has revised and revived Marx's middle landscape idea with the tools of contemporary historiography and social science to suggest that it survives as a cultural practice.
Against Marx's 1964 conclusion, Segal argues that the middle landscape paradigm is a remaining phenomenon, which continued long after 1860. Marx asserted that industry overran the pastoral ideal of the middle landscape through the Civil War years, producing a harsh reaction that railed against industry. Segal not only revises this thesis to show how the middle landscape idea remains, but he uses various examples of twentieth-century phenomena in city planning and transportation practices that suggest new manifestations of the middle landscape--urban, suburban, and regional.
The famous Eads Bridge, itself a mid-nineteenth-century transcontinental connector, is part of the contemporary Confluence Greenway plan to include a bike trail on the west and east sides of the Mississippi river, bracketed to the north by the Chain of Rocks Bridge, and to the South by the Eads Bridge. The plan proposes a network of inner-city bike routes connected to the cross-Missouri Katy trail, the Riverfront trail, and a host of historic bike tours and routes in concentric circles radiating out from St. Louis. The forthcoming bike route connector through St. Louis is not without its political economy either. Associated with the racial and moral cultural capital of leisure and the built environment, the bike path will raise property values along its route. City aldermen and city planning officials enacted public policy to create the route with its according economic consequences. See links below.
The Eads Bridge on a cold winter day.
The road in the foreground of the train is the road upon which the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic in Colorado is held annually in May. The event features a symbolic race between the Durango-Silverton train and hundreds of professional, amateur, and recreational cyclists. While it is not much of a race between human and machine, since the bicyclists handily arrive in Silverton well before the train, the event is a powerful commentary on the middle landscape discourse. The train and horses pictured here, added to the road along which bicycles and cars pass, comprise the context of America's transportation debates for nearly two centuries. While each mode of transport has competed for resources, all have served as vehicles into the middle landscape, connecting urban cultural dreams to "the land" with the portal of technology.Furthermore, Segal locates the bicycle and the automobile side-by-side as two transportation practices that reinforce the middle landscape trope. For the majority of the twentieth-century, and into the twenty-first, the automobile has facilitated the expansion of suburbs and garden cities (towns with industrial and agricultural combinations), since car travel permitted longer commutes. Similarly, the bicycle enables urban peripheral leisure recreation and inner city transportation, a middle landscape act of bringing the country to the city. In this last case, if exercise has become so associated with cultural constructs of the country, a need to get outside the city, however artificially designed, going to a city park can preclude actually leaving the city.
Exiting Carondelet Park in Saint Louis does not mean getting off the bike. A bike route leads north into the inner city. Recent controversy has erupted over transportation policy that would facilitate inner-city bus access to the affluent white Carondelet Park neighborhood. Historically, threats of minority or poor influx into predominantly white neighborhoods arising from economic shifts or policy changes like this draw either harsh criticism from existing neighborhood associations or, where they are absent, the creation of them.Segal's insistence, following Marx, that technology is critical in a prosthetic connection to the land from the city in the middle landscape construction, shows how crucial technology is in our personal relationships to the environment and the city. Spatially and corporeally, the discourses of the body (another hub) refract out upon cultural constructs of the land (more spokes) to produce cultural maps where we ride, both in our imaginations and actually. Turning again to the turn of the century's connections between landscape, technology, leisure, and body help explain the paradigm:
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans systematically transformed the face of their land . . . . The nation's inhabitants cut down forests, extracted ores and coal, and built roads at unprecedented rates and in unprecedented numbers . . . . Cities and city structures achieved great size and prominence, and spawned persistent suburbanization . . . . Many were drawn to the less explicitly political question of leisure, itself a product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and therefore a fit object of social concern . . . . [Some leisure institutions] sought to appeal across group boundaries and help organize the nation's fractious social groups. Americans generally found new technologies or technical processes instrumental in achieving their aim. (Segal and Marcus 1989, 180-181)
Celebrating technological perfection and movements through the land, the Saint Louis Gateway Arch/ Jefferson National Expansion Memorial commemorates Westward expansion in a high modernist design. Along with the arch, the old industrial factories, railroad trestles, and brick architecture form the backdrop to the beginning of the Riverfront trail, marking a major hub from which industrial and leisure routes escape the city. The monument, however, is haunted by the history of land clearance policy (not to mention Indian removal policy), which were carried out from the 1930s to the 1970s in Saint Louis and other cities, when federally funded slum clearance projects and interstate highway building perpetuated racial injustices.Middle landscape practices can take the form of commuting to work by bike (being outside at least) or visiting an urban botanical garden, activities which partially fulfill the desire for a middle landscape experience of the land. As William Cronon argued in his towering essay, "The Trouble With Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," however, these activities lend themselves to questions of authenticity regarding “land,” “fresh air,” “place,” and “nature.” These questions are important ones if cycling is to be considered a political action, if it hopes to make accomplishments with regard to environmental, racial, and economic agendas. The point in bicycle advocacy should not be to polarize the bicycle and the car as oppositional entities, because both enable middle landscape travel and movement, just as both can serve as environmentally sustainable modes of transportation. The point should be instead to find ways to legitimate practical uses of the bicycle alongside evolving concepts of the car as environmentally positive vehicles for transportation and recreation.
(A)Politics Now
So far, this has been a politically conservative essay. I have not highlighted the bicycle's gains as a fuel and cost-efficient vehicle in America’s cities, a status toward which it has inched since the early 1970s. My intention, however, is not to ignore the more radical potential that the bicycle has exercised in the past, or to disregard its role as a viable means of alternative transport in the future. Instead, what this essay’s cultural and technological discussion of the bike challenges is that the bicycle is not always already a radical political vehicle for change in social and transportation policy.
Through its participating in the same middle landscape discourse as the car, I have shown precisely the opposite, that the American cycling community in its popular demographic (white, suburban, and middle-class) and in the context of its organization (as manufacturing business and athletic institution), as often demotes or silences social justice issues like multiculturalism and environmentalism as its cruder and heavier cousin. Hanging around the bike shop, the inner city, and the trailhead in the last ten years, I charge that the American cycling industry’s and institutions’ failures with the bicycle (though not totally through faults of their own) rank in the following order, from not-so-hot, to dismal: (1) as a significant form of environmentally-sound transportation; (2) as an accepting community for minorities; and (3) as a viable means of transportation for the urban poor.
Cycling's hubs, its bike shops and institutions of sport, namely USA Cycling and community cycling organizations, posture leftist political stances while they (pedal)stroke a right-oriented, suburban, middle-class, and white constituency value system. The institution that represents role model professional cyclists to whose status young riders strive has a questionable record with regard to the environment and racial diversity. The consistent economic strife of American bicycle racing and bike sales is no excuse for its conservative political agenda of a uniform white, middle-class marketing, and encouragement of driving energy inefficient vehicles by advertising for Subaru, Jeep, and Chevrolet trucks and SUVs (past primary sponsors of the NORBA National Championship Series).NORBA’s support of the land-access, environmental organization the International Mountain Bike Association (IMBA) is offset by, (1) its media transmission through Outdoor Life Network (OLN), which promotes suburban “bike driving” through its brand of advertising; and (2) its hugely spectator-popular (indeed, an economic savior for the organization) downhill and “mountain-cross” events, which are more like motorcycle racing than environmentally sound or even serious bike riding. Downhill racing not only encourages riding practices that destroy trails and curtail park access, but it fosters a growing anti-environmental ethos across the institutional and manufacturing sectors of cycling. The growing trend in the industry’s manufacturing and advertising is to promote product lines filled with dual-suspension bikes whose design is best-suited for jumping and riding at high speeds downhill, designs which enable handling that would not otherwise be possible without the suspension system. For its part, the road division of USA Cycling, the United States Cycling Federation (USCF), has a scant record of popular media promotion of public policy issues like environmentalism and city and federal transportation planning initiatives. In addition, USA Cycling’s connections to organizations that promote these issues, like the League of American Bicyclists and the Institute of Transportation Engineers, have no place in the organizations’ mission statements, agendas, or marketing.
Moving outward in our map, cycling's spokes, of which the middle landscape cultural trope is one, continue to represent the environmental politics of the right as bike enthusiasts increasingly buy large suburban homes near suburban parks, and "bikedrive" equally large sport utility vehicles to where they are going to ride. In fact, looking around the inner cities of America, the most environmentally sound bike riding is clearly not located in the suburbs where major bike manufacturers’ customers live. Instead, those who perhaps have the most limited access to quick and expensive transportation, our nation's urban poor and immigrant population, are the one’s who do the greatest amount of environmental bike riding. Have low-end bikes in the $100 to $200 price range, like Huffy, done more for the environment than the $700 to $1000 dual suspension bikes distributed by major manufacturers like Specialized or Trek? Do bike shops cater exclusively to the middle class, leaving the poor to buy low-quality bikes at department stores that do not offer service departments?
Without a doubt, cycling's businesses and institutes stand to incorporate more environmental and multicultural politics into their dealings in manufacturing, race promotion, marketing, and grassroots sports programs. Not only would these organizations profit economically by serving a customer base in need, but they would act on the environmental politics they so often posture. Indeed, at a local level, the cycling industry, which struggles to maintain a non-corporate, community presence embodied in the bike shop, could stand to do some reorienting, and not toward China to increase profit by cutting manufacturing costs. Maybe instead of offering ten new full suspension bikes in 2006, Trek could offer nine, with the addition of one commuter bike for $150. This would be a step in the right direction.
I am not writing the bicycle off. The bicycle has made progress in environmental awareness, establishing links with city transportation systems and to organizations like the Sierra Club through IMBA. I am challenging, instead, that these forgotten issues renew their vitality so that they are considered at all levels of cycling society: in manufacturing, marketing, sales, journalism, city planning, competition, and sport organizations. As soon as those of us who love to ride and talk about bikes stop pretending that our riding instantly makes us politically progressive, the sooner we can begin to examine the bicycle as a real vehicle for radical politics, a vehicle which both represents and enacts the values of a democratic society with an environmentally sustainable system of transportation. The issue is as critical now as it has ever been. We’re fighting a big-business war at home and abroad, and cycling threatens to enter a recession like the one it saw after the turn of the twentieth century, when war industries and automobile hysteria left American bikes crippled for the next fifty years.
www.confluencegreenway.org A project around Saint Louis having direct
relevance to the idea of hubs and escape routes.www.trailnet.org An important resource for cyclists around the Saint Louis area.
www.imba.com Link to the principle organization joining mountain biking to environmental and trail-use advocacy.
www.usacycling.org For information about competitive cycling in America. The National Governing Body's website.
www.critical-mass.org A very interesting site and resource for the critical mass movement worldwide.
www.johnforester.com For sour manifestos on the ills of bicycle transportation debates, see his website.
www.tedwhitegreenlight.com The director of two fabulous documentaries on cycling, “The Return of the Scorcher,” and a film about Critical Mass, is located here.
www.bicycleretailer.com The bike industry’s trade publication.
www.ibike.org A non-profit dedicated to providing bikes to developing nations.
www.bikeleague.org Website for the League of American Bicyclists.
www.bikesnotbombs.com A non-profit dedicated to providing bikes to developing nations. A bike shop and distribution center in Boston.
www.railtrails.org Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s aim is to create public trails from former railroad routes
www.thunderheadalliance.org Thunderhead Alliance’s advocates increased and safer bicycling in the United States.
www.breezerbikes.org Mountain biking guru Joe Breeze stopped his company’s manufacture of mountain bikes to produce a line of commuter bikes. Read the amazing story at www.bicycling.com in the September 2003 issue.
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This essay forms part of a larger project regarding bicycle culture in America. The author invites feedback via email: Aaron Wilcher aaronwilcher@yahoo.com.
