One Street News
June 2012
Vol. 5, Issue 5
- Velo-city 2012 Snapshots:
- Resources – City Cycling, by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler
- Hot Topics – I Was a Criminal for Seven Days
Velo-city 2012 Snapshots
The annual Velo-city conference is like a One Street reunion for us and Velo-city 2012 in Vancouver was no exception. This international bicycle conference series offered by the European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF) brings together the top innovators and experts who are transforming cities into places where everyone wants to ride a bike. We enjoyed a week of reconnecting with our colleagues from around the world as we offered our bicycle advocacy expertise to the conference.
One Street board members took a leading role in the conference organizing as well as nearly a dozen sessions and events during the week. From cycle tourism to policy to cycling fashion we offered quite a spectrum.
One Street’s executive director, Sue Knaup, presented in three sessions. The first covered our work with three bicycle organizations in Uganda and Rwanda – TAFMOD, Ride 4 a Woman and FAPDR. The next was a roundtable discussion on One Street’s Social Bike Business program. The last was a two-hour symposium designed to bring people together around the bicycle helmet issue and learn how to discuss bicycle helmets in a reasonable and professional manner.During her first presentation on the three African organizations, Sue enjoyed one of the best surprises of the conference when she invited Amanda Ngabirano from the TAFMOD board of directors to join her at the podium. As many of you know, we worked very hard over the past year to raise funds for our colleagues from these three African organizations to join us in Vancouver, but our efforts fell short of the necessary goal. Up until a few weeks before the conference, we believed that no one from these organizations would make the trip. But Ms. Ngabirano had persisted and managed to raise the funds needed for her trip.
While her success was our greatest celebration for Velo-city 2012, we now must take a hard look at the situation. Velo-city needs many African delegates in order to truly represent a global viewpoint that includes the second most populated continent. That is why we are already back to work on our Africa to Velo-city program and look forward to celebrating our reunion with many more of our African colleagues at Velo-city 2013 in Vienna next June. If you have ideas to offer towards our success with this program, please email Sue at sue{at}onestreet.org.
Another major effort we put into Velo-city 2012 was through our work with ECF’s Helmet Working Group and their program to stop the dangerization of cycling through helmet promotions. Overblown and horrifying helmet promotions as well as mandatory helmet laws do immeasurable damage to any effort to increase bicycling, so we were happy to help. It took many long months of preparation with the working group members in nearly 30 countries to develop the outline of our two hour long Helmet Dialog symposium.
From the start, we all agreed that the symposium must focus on one goal – to create a comfortable atmosphere where all attendees would participate and even the most ardent helmet promoters would feel comfortable stating their ideas. Because of this, we completely left out any presentations from experts. Experts on both extremes of the issue have published many papers on the topic. To pit them against each other would only fuel the flames of this topic which tends to descend into emotional battles. Instead, our goal was to learn from attendees how to bring reason back into discussions about bicycle helmets.
We were all thrilled when our paper for the symposium was accepted. But as the conference time approached, disturbing signs appeared – our session never made it into the online conference program, conference organizers requested complete revisions of our plans, emails and other messages signaled extreme stress regarding our symposium. Somehow the idea that we were planning a full-blown fight between pro-helmet and anti-helmet experts had taken hold. The irony of such misleading statements being associated with a symposium meant to break away from misconceptions was not lost on us. All we could do was continue with our plans and repeat and repeat again our professional and respectful intentions for the symposium.
There was no clear sign that the symposium would even take place until we arrived at the conference venue and found our helmet symposium listed in the printed version of the conference program on the last page and on the last day of the conference. From then on, everything fell into place.
We were delighted to greet 38 eager participants at the helmet symposium and watched with tremendous satisfaction as they broke into four lively discussion groups. Enthusiastic voices escalated around the room, but none dominated. After each of the two breakout sessions, spokespeople announced their group’s priorities. During four separate sections of the symposium, participants were asked to not only speak, but to write down their most pressing ideas about bicycle helmets. As these were handed in, we grouped them and taped them to the wall for all to read.
Everyone had their chance to speak and make their case either verbally or in writing. Not everyone agreed and some admitted frustration that they weren’t able to sway others to their opinion, but even frustration was offered with a laugh. As the symposium came to a close, most of the participants lingered in the room to read the offerings from others. These written offerings will soon be published on ECF’s Helmet web page so be sure to check in the coming weeks. Some of the ideas took us by surprise and we’ve been at it since 2004!Greg Hull, Justin Devine and Taylor Kuyk-White, our three City to Velo-city scholarship recipients, devoured the Velo-city conference! These scholars were charged with capturing the best of Velo-city for the benefit of Prescott, Arizona, One Street’s home base. They attended a wide variety of sessions focusing on Prescott’s most urgent needs for bicycle improvements. They learned about best practices in street design, policy development and even the benefits of bicycling for local businesses.
As soon as they arrived back in Prescott they began plans for a public presentation about the lessons they learned at the conference. If you are in the Prescott area, keep a look out for announcements about this upcoming event which is sure to inspire citizens and officials alike to transform Prescott into a city that is proud to bicycle.
Resources – City Cycling, by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler
This book, City Cycling, by two of the best investigators of successful bicycle cities is sure to become a must-have for everyone in our movement. It’s due to be published by MIT Press in September. Until then, you can get a glimpse into the book’s offerings as ECF reviews a different chapter each month.
Hot Topics – I Was a Criminal for Seven Days
By: Sue Knaup, Executive Director
I don’t wear a helmet when I ride a bicycle, not even mountain biking. I don’t ride dangerously anymore. Even when I did ride extremely dangerously as a bike messenger in San Francisco in the 1980s, my bare head never hit anything even though my body hit the ground and many other objects regularly.
I realize there is a slight chance I’ll bang my head while I’m bicycling, but I’ve also learned from my work on this issue that I am more likely to hit my head as an occupant of a car or while walking around. I certainly don’t choose to wear a helmet while I’m engaged in those activities either!
Many factors have led to my personal choice not to wear a helmet, but these were only part of my decision to become a criminal for seven days while I was in Vancouver for the Velo-city conference. The other part is that I simply cannot support unjust laws. British Columbia has had an all-ages mandatory bicycle helmet law since the mid-1990s. Even with that law on the books for nearly twenty years, only 70% of bicyclists there wear a helmet.
I joined criminals of all ages on the streets of Vancouver. The first partner in crime I spotted was an elderly Asian woman cycling slowly along a side street, her bike racks full with shopping bags. I wanted to hug her for her heroism, but she didn’t have time for me. Over the following days I spotted commuters, hipsters, fashionable women and kids letting their hair fly free in the wind. After my first day spotting them and wanting so badly to connect with them in our collective disobedience, I finally realized there were so many that riding without a helmet simply wasn’t that big a deal.
I spoke to some of my fellow criminals about how they got along with that law constantly bearing down on them. They told of the stress of avoiding police officers, including harrowing tales of out running the cops. Some collected their helmet tickets like civil rights statements. Others had so far avoided fines. Every one of them hated the law with a passion.
I was a criminal for seven days. These Vancouver residents, 30% of all the bicyclists in the city, are criminals whenever they ride their bicycle. What does that do to their impression of bicycling? Does such a hated, regularly violated law undermine other laws in that province? Is such a law acceptable in a city that claims it wants to increase bicycling?
Don’t ask me! I saw it all as a lowly criminal.