Oregon State University Press, 2009, 288 pp, ISBN 9780870714191

As I pedal to work every day – a middle-aged woman on a red girl’s bike – I’m so busy watching for turning cars and shattered glass that I rarely pause to wonder if I am, at that moment, part of a cultural revolution. Jeff Mapes would say that I am.

His book documents current and past bike activity and advocacy in support of his claim that we’re in the midst of a cultural shift toward bicycling becoming a mainstream form of transportation in the US. Biking, he contends, is increasingly being viewed as a sane, hip and even sexy way to get around town. Mapes, a political reporter who lives and bike-commutes in Oregon, has done his legwork, compiling loads of information. He includes interviews with key bike advocates and activists such as John Forester, the iconoclastic author of the 1970s classic Effective Cycling, tattooed Phil Sano, a fan of naked rides who has made several short “bike porn” movies,  transportation planner Susan Zielinski who uses the term “new mobility” to talk about getting around without a private car, and Janette Sadik-Kahn, the transportation commissioner in New York City who has, among other initiatives, closed a section of Broadway to cars. Mapes also includes interesting historical tidbits such as Belva Ann Lockwood’s presidential campaign claim (in the 1880s) that “a tricycle means independence for women.”

The book focuses on urban cycling in places long associated with biking: Portland, New York and Davis, California, with nods toward San Francisco, Boulder and Madison. He also includes a chapter about the biking culture and infrastructure in Amsterdam. Mapes clearly likes biking and serves as a comfortable and able tour guide on his visits to these cities. I’d be more convinced, however, that a pedaling revolution is truly underway if he had detailed thriving bike cultures in Atlanta, Dallas and Las Vegas.

Still, kudos to Mapes for bundling all of this information in a readable package. Some of the information is basic (bike riding saves gas and burns calories) and some of it complicated (the varied plusses and problems of bike lanes versus bike paths versus bike boulevards versus cycle tracks) yet it’s an interesting read. And, with a six-page bibliography and a six-page index, it’s a great resource on bicycling and bike advocacy in the US.

Book Review by Kelly Nelson

One Less Car is about the politics of cycling in North America.

One chapter covers the 1890s, while the rest of the book focuses on “biketivism” from the 1960s onward. It began, Furness states, in Holland in 1965. An anarchist group called Provo proposed several plans for social change including a White Bicycle Plan: ban automobiles from Amsterdam and launch a free bicycle program. “The white bicycle is a symbol of simplicity and cleanliness in contrast to the vanity and foulness of the authoritarian car,” a Provo manifesto stated.

Pro-bike/anti-car activities first appeared in North American in 1970 with a Bicycle Ecology Day in Chicago and then a 1972 protest in New York City where bicyclists rode by an auto show chanting “cars must go!” (The organizing group, Action Against Automobiles, later became Transportation Alternatives.) About these and other early political efforts Furness writes, “The active politicization…of bicycle transportation in those decades…set an important precedent for advocates and…vocalized a joyous rallying cry for cyclists to take to the streets en masse, as both riders and protesters.” He goes on to devote an entire chapter to Critical Mass, the once-a-month, leaderless rides that originated in San Francisco in 1992 and were initially called “Commute Clot.”

Furness does a nice job of presenting the various strands and tensions within bicycle advocacy: do we focus on the positives of biking or on the negatives of driving?; should we encourage biking for the environment or for public health or for urban vitality?; is it enough to use a bike for basic transportation or should riding a bike be harnessed to a larger social message?; is it better to build separate bike paths or to teach bicyclists how to ride with cars? My favorite sections happened to be less overtly political: a discussion of how bike-riding characters are portrayed in movies and television shows and an examination of pro-bike sentiments in punk rock lyrics.

This book stems from the author’s dissertation in cultural studies so you’ll bump into academic speak throughout: “mobile ontologies,” “complexity of capitalist space(s),” “mobile subjectivities.” The upside is that readers benefit from all of Furness’s research: loads of interesting facts, a 42-page bibliography and 115 endnotes on average per chapter. This is the kind of book that needn’t be read straight through. Each chapter can stand alone. Read it for a thoughtful look into the many faces of bicycling culture and politics.

Note: The author is donating all royalties from his book to three community bicycle organizations in Chicago and Pittsburgh.

Review by Kelly Nelson

Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space - © Kelly Nelson

Two urban planning professors have written an entire book about sidewalks, 330 pages on this part of the transportation infrastructure built for non-motorists. (Cultural note: Since both authors live and work in the United States, they use the term sidewalk not pavement, footpath or platform.) The book considers sidewalks as public spaces that serve social, cultural, political and commercial purposes along with being transportation corridors.

Part 1 overviews the history of sidewalks starting with the first ones built in modern-day Turkey 4,000 years ago. Part 2 discusses sidewalks as “urban theaters” where individuals promenade, gaze at others and participate in parades as audience members. Part 3 focuses on sidewalks as locations for dissent such as picket lines and political protests. Part 4 examines two non-transportation uses of sidewalks: as work places for street vendors and as home bases for some homeless people who sleep, eat, hang out and panhandle there. Part 5 presents sidewalks as potentially dangerous spaces that prompt regulations against such behaviors as prostitution, drug dealing, pick pocketing and public drunkenness.

For people who are rethinking and redesigning streets, neighborhoods and cities, this book can provide a multi-faceted view of sidewalks beyond their basic transportation function. For instance, Chapter 9 explores the darker side of urban tree programs. While making urban environments more pedestrian-friendly through landscaping can seem like a winning decision, this chapter presents potential problems to consider: roots damaging sidewalks, fallen leaves covering walkways, tree limbs breaking off and damaging property, cities having to pay to maintain the trees, trees blocking police officers’ view of the streets, trees blocking storefronts and signs, residents liking some tree species better than others and the potential of heightening socio-economic divides by planting more trees in wealthy areas and fewer in low-income neighborhoods.

The book is ably written and, as the subtitle suggests, it emphasizes conflict between different users and uses of sidewalks. While five American cities are featured (New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston and Seattle), Los Angeles is emphasized in the examples and the 32 photographs, likely because one of the authors lives there. The book’s main contribution is in raising awareness of sidewalks as complex spaces where walking is just one of the many activities going on there.

Kelly Nelson

Tempe, Arizona USA

Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht

MIT Press, 2009

Geoff Nicholson is a walker. It is what he likes to talk about; it is how he defines himself. So he requested and received his publisher’s approval to write a book about walking. However, this book is not about the ‘art of walking’. The author readily admits that he was in fact laid-up for much of the writing process due to injury. Perhaps for that reason, the book reads like an anthology of walks – littered by the author’s personal anecdotes and opinions about walking and walkers. But the book does do one thing very well – it makes you want to take a good walk.

Early in the first chapter, after describing the random, very damaging fall he suffered, Nicholson hits on a curious truth – in fact, humans are not very well adapted to walking. After all this evolution, we are still prone to frequent and occasionally severe foot, back, knee, and leg injuries. And while this seems to be a negative, his personal experience with injury provides the author with a revelation. He is able to identify that his attraction to walking is linked to his own personal contentment. He walks to feel happy, to release himself from the onset of depression, to resolve questions with his writing.

After this honesty about his own relationship with walking, it seems unfortunate that the tone of his book does not follow in that vein. This book is written from, and perhaps for, a white, hetero, male, British perspective. And his pronounced judgments about other walkers that do not coincide with that perspective permeate throughout the text. His response to pedestrian-advocacy and the ‘New Agers’ (sic) are uniquely glib and dismissive. As he sees it, most people who claim to be environmentally conscious are hypocrites who drive long distances in order to get in to ‘nature’ and go for a good walk. While he has a general point that this reader does not ignore, these types of judgements about how others value walking cannot help but leave a sour taste.

There are, however, some wonderful anecdotes throughout the book, provided by great walkers of yesteryear. These passages lend a gift of perspective and scope that the author’s words are often unable to accomplish. For instance, the author quotes William Blake as he refers to the need so many of us feel to shape our own environments by the walks we take when he says, “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s”.

The book’s unquestionable value is that the author whets your appetite for walking. In disclosure, since receiving the book, I have spent much more time walking than reading the text. Nicholson’s accomplishment is to tell tale after tale of walks and walkers: odd quests and benign routes, Crip Walk dance and walking sticks, some legendary tales, and some fake legends. But instead of digging into these stories, his descriptions often read as Wikipedia summaries – basic facts, curious surprises, and a lightly tossed, sometimes humourous remark that sums up the author’s opinion on that topic.

So follow the books examples. Get outside. Breathe some air. And walk.

By Tim Wojcik

When we take a moment to look at our traffic-saturated cities, with cars parked everywhere, roads and freeways spreading like the arms of an octopus, and the government’s blind support for the car industry, we are justified in asking how long can this situation last. It is high time to realise that we are closer and closer to radical changes in the car system. Kingsley Dennis and John Urry explore in their book what changes may occur, and develop potential paths for future transportation. According to them, the days of spontaneous “car get away” are counted.

The 20th century was the “century of the car”, instead of its “massive environmental resource use and an extraordinary scale of death and injuries”. After explaining how “such a monster came to take over the world during the last century”, Dennis and Urry demonstrate how, by necessity, the car system will sooner or later be “re-designed” and “re-engineered”.

This unavoidable shift, they argue, is spurred by the current context of climate change, peak oil and the development of virtual worlds; it is the pressure they create that will modify the ways transport and energy systems evolve. In their book, “what is the key is not the car, but its system of connections.” Dennis and Urry present different elements of this system and their relation, before focusing on new technologies, their perspectives and their dangers.

One great aspect of this book is that it manages to build some possible and realistic view of the future without neglecting its unpredictability. Its authors aim to “enact certain futures through developing particular kinds of analysis and not others”.

Indeed, this well-documented demonstration leads Dennis and Urry to develop three different scenarios of what could happen: “local sustainability” (inspired by the model of “local sustainability” from E.F. Schumacher), “regional warlordism”(with over-protected rich enclaves and “wild zones”) and “digital networks of control” (a scenario close to Orwells’ 1984). For the authors, “it is a limited set of choices that confronts societies in the early twenty-first century. And the reason for this constrained set of alternatives is, we argue, the twentieth century.”

The book keeps a very realistic look (tending to pessimism) at potential evolutions, but manages to keep a door open for brighter and more optimistic perspectives. It demonstrates potential benefits of a shift “from sprawl to small” (cf. New Urbanism in CB #38) and presents various innovative examples of urbanism like the Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED) in the UK or the future city of Dongtan, China…)

“After the Car” is a very inspiring book that we would recommend to all people interested in the future of transportation systems – especially those convinced by the importance of carfree perspectives in building it.

Review by Marko Thull