As with Bicycle Week in 1923, in 1924 it was limited. It had only a single day of promotion 100 years ago on April 29th.
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| April 29th, 1924 |
The morning paper offered a couple of brief advertorials for each to the two advertisers, Lloyd Ramsden and Harry Scott. The themes they hit, of course, are perennial: Modest exercise, much cheaper than a car (cheaper than a streetcar fare, also), freedom from a streetcar schedule.
(A much more dated theme is the preparatory manliness, the "man-making" element.)
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| April 29th, 1924 |
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| April 24th, 1924 |
Previously, Bicycle Weeks in 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, and 1923.
The note on 1922, "Break the Annual Cycles of Bike Month," specifically discusses the inadequacy of the frame of bike promotion, however. Bike Month just does not seem like anything that leads to durable change.
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| Bike Month in 2024 |
In 2024 for bicycle month the League of American Bicyclists offers National Ride a Bike Day on the 5th and Bike to Work Day on the 17th.
With the City's new Climate Action Plan Manager, it will be interesting to see if the City promotes in any stronger way Bike to Work Day both internally for employees and externally to the public.
Salem Bike Vision is also promoting the Ride of Silence on the 15th, which has always seemed to fit uneasily in the celebratory frame of Bike Month, and also seems more effective as a personal and inward-facing "Rite" of Silence, a ritual of mourning and memory, and less effective as any outward-facing advocacy aimed at communicating (silently) with those in cars who employ lethal force as they drive.
The fun ride and revisionist revival of "Critical Mass" will surely have a Friday evening ride in late May. (See also "Did Critical Mass ride in Salem During the 1990s?" for more.)
Salem Social Cyclists will have more casual, social rides.
But behind all this, here anyway, is the sinking feeling that the current modes of advocacy are still all oriented to the late 20th century, to the "last battle and war," and to a set of norms for bicycling and bicycle advocacy that seem pretty well broken now.
In April, and of course this is anecdotal only, just what I have seen, people riding regular "acoustic" pedal bikes are less than 50% of the total micromobility mix. Over half of riders appear to be using some kind of motor assist, usually electric, but not always. In mid-April at Bush Park a person was on a small bike with a lawn-mower type engine on it, a mini gas-powered motorcycle. What looked like a parent and child were motoring along the paths and across the grassy lower fields. Routinely I see people on "throttle" type ebikes that require no pedaling, again which are basically very light electric motorbikes, salmoning in bike lanes or on sidewalks. People take ebikes on the path system in Minto, and end up scorching, going way too fast. People do the same with electric scooters.
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| Very off-hand references to "e-bikes" |
A part of the LAB's Bike Month package of support materials, the 14 page "National Bike Month Guide" hardly references e-bikes, even on the bike commute tip page.
The primary battle, of course, is not to scold and police how people use micromobility. The primary battle is to tame the employment of lethal force in jaydriving and to curb our reliance on driving trips and the erosion of urban space it effects.
Bike Week and Bike Month don't address our autoism sufficiently, and they do not seem to have caught up with the actual reality of motorized micromobility as it comes to overtake the previous frame of "bicycling."
1 comment:
Strong Towns has a note on Bicycle Week, "3 Ways National Bike To Work Day Can Miss the Mark." It overlaps some with the criticism here, but is not identical.
"First, it ignores the reasons people don't bike, assuming that people only need to be nudged toward the activity with a dedicated day. The reality for most people is that biking is just too much of a risk. In my town, hardly anyone bikes for a variety of sensible reasons, and I don’t think this would change for a single day."
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