Hacker News Reader

Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

> Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?” When you are using transportation infrastructure that’s designed with contempt for you, you know, and you don’t want to be there.

I grew up in close contact with a large urban poor population and I think the view of bikes was the exact opposite of this. Biking in the city is considered the purview of affluent white people

View on HN

I grew up in a low income, immigrant suburb and the poor rode bikes. They didn't wear bike kit and they had crappy mountain bikes with franken parts, not an 11 speed electronic shift bike. Often they either couldn't afford a car or the family only had enough money for 1 car, which in patriarchal immigrant households went to mom and the kids she drove around while dad biked to his back of house or construction job.

in my local facebook bike-to-work group i often comment about Schrödinger's cyclist: "too poor to have a car" according to some haters, and at the same time "too rich to be in a hurry" (because motorists have a real job they're driving to) according to others

Ye I am really getting whiplash from these contradictions

I've had multiple professional-managerial friends tell me they personally won't bike because that's something they left behind in their childhood or broke-student days. It's beneath them now. But you're right, people also complain about bike infrastructure projects taking space from working-class drivers to benefit white yuppies.

We see this often with urbanist topics. New multifamily construction is gentrification and colonization if you lean left, full of crime and a threat to our schools if you lean right. The only widespread agreement is that it represents the Other. The stranglehold of postwar suburban car culture on the American psyche is self-reinforcing at this point.

Leftwing radicals and rightwing septuagenarians both joining hands to oppose new development was absolutely not on my bingo card for this decade.

Why? It's the basis of WW2. Their raison d'etre are the other side, both enflaming each other, giving a scapegoat and a simplistic good/evil worldview.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

The lowest income group of people is the demographic most likely to bike.

https://lede-admin.usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/si...

The chart of income vs percent who commute by bike is u-shaped but with a higher left side. Rich people bike more than middle class people but poor people bike more than either the rich or middle class. People who are on the right half of the distribution think biking is affluent-coded because they only see the right tail where it curves up and they don't know anyone on the left side of the distribution where the gradient goes the other way.

I ride my carbon fiber road bike down the bike trail in the morning; when I drive home after a night of entertainment, I see laborers riding their bikes in the busy street to get home after a long day of work. I feel the irony deeply.

    We should improve society somewhat. 
    Yet you participate in society.

Out in the (poorer) suburbs, the only adults who bike are those who can't afford a car, or have had their license revoked.

Perhaps. I think suburbs with high density of poor people used to be less common in the past so I am less familiar with the dynamics there.

Moving the poor to the suburbs was one of the intended consequences of cleaning up the cities where now only affluent white people own bikes.

I'm not joking. Cities tore down their tenement housing "projects" because of the rampant amounts of crime, and the residents went to the suburbs to live in Section 8 private housing. It's one of the reasons (there were many) that violent crime decreased so sharply beginning in the 1990s: the criminals were more spread out, diffusing much of the network effect.

In some way it makes sense. The poor are driven by high property prices to live far away. The more affluent can choose to buy property in the heart of the city and use bikes in the city.

I think a lot of people are overgeneralizing the dynamics of urban poverty from what they have observed in the last decade of home ownership trends, but affluent white flight from cities only really ended in the mid-00s-2010s (for some cities) and there are plenty of significant poor populations near urban cores able to remain because it's either where section 8 housing was built or by rent control.

They just take public transit or walk. Not biking.

You know how long the waitlist is for section 8 is, in say, New York? All poor people don’t just go out and ask for section 8 or rent stabilized apartments and instantly get them.

I think I likely know more about urban poverty than you do. It is incredibly hard to get a section 8 apartment, especially if you aren't a family, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to do that in urban cores as section 8 contracts are being shifted towards outlying areas.

Nonetheless, there are lots of people in urban areas living in section 8 housing and it is a substantial part of the story around urban poverty and how people still afford to live in urban cores.

I think it depends; biking because you need to and biking for fun look very different. IME of Phoenix you could have the cyclist doing training routes in their kit and the crackhead strapped with bags of their stuff pass by on the same street.

It can look very different.

Burdens can be nonobvious.

I don’t think anyone with financial burdens is spending $500 on a bike and $150 on a kit. And if they are that’s more of a mental issue than a financial one

Not very relevant but I just thought it was funny how it's obvious that you don't do cycling when those are the prices you came up with as an example :)

It's considerably more expensive than that.

$500 is unfortunately now the floor price for mountain bikes, even a Walmart entry level brand.

Walk behind restaurants in many US cities and you'll see the cheap mountain bikes that the lower-paid kitchen staff (mostly immigrants) rode to work. This is particularly common in the SF Bay Area.

(I am in favor of improving cycling infrastructure for everyone regardless of income level.)

Thank you! OP's view is a naive outsider's view. Anyone who actually lives in the US knows you need to be rich enough to not be car dependent.

https://grist.org/cities/black-chicago-biking-disparities-in...

In reality, only rich (and white) folks can afford to live in areas that are not car-dependent.

https://granfondodailynews.com/2020/01/17/is-north-american-... > From 2001 to 2017 the number of people cycling increased the fastest among high income, highly educated, employed, white men between the ages 25 and 44.

This isn't an immutable law of the universe. It just demonstrates that there is ridiculous demand for walkable, pedestrian-friendly cities, and, predictably and demonstrably if you've ever been to any city council meeting ever, not nearly enough supply. Everyone always says "not in MY back yard!" and then complains that downtowns are expensive. You cannot have it both ways.

You are wrong. The poorest decile of people are the most likely to bike because they cannot afford a car.

https://lede-admin.usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/si...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com