Cities

Black folk need a “place to relax, a ‘safe space’ where they can be themselves,” and Spooner, remembering the intense feeling of freedom of his own first bike ride, wanted cycling to be one of those safe spaces. After a chance meeting with the black owners of Bikestyler Customs in Hollywood, Spooner started “Black Kids on Bikes” (which is not limited to kids or black folk) and began organizing the “Freedom Rides” under its aegis.

As Balugo says, “Kids” refers to their feeling “kind of like unsupervised grown-up teenagers,” but the rides tend to be mannerly and oriented to community-building among participants. Balugo heard of the Freedom Ride through Afro-Punk but was wary of joining in as he had a white girlfriend at the time. He asked Spooner if he could bring her, and the answer was, “Why would it matter?” Balugo adds, “There’s no hidden agenda; we’re just out to ride and have fun. It’s a bike ride. Simple as that.” Anyone who shows up can ride.

Many of those who do show up haven’t been on a bike for fifteen years or more. Spooner keeps a couple of “invitation bikes” that curious but wheel-less riders can borrow. So far, every rider who has borrowed one has ended up buying their own bike, and two of them are now riding to work every day!

But there’s always the pull of athleticism, so the pair has started another ride, their answer to the Wolfpack Hustle – a fast-paced midnight ride called Zulu Dawn. Fast-paced – but still no spandex! They’ll always be punk-rockers at heart.

In mid September, I rolled into the vast underground garage of the CalTrans building downtown: a huge building that also houses the Los Angeles City Department of Transportation (LADOT), which is home to the Bureau of Capital Programming where Michelle Mowery – a vigorous, willowy fifty-year-old – is the Senior Project Coordinator of Bicycle Outreach and Planning.

Mowery, who has held the position since 1994, has managed to get a good bit of bicycle infrastructure on the ground in the last fifteen years. She has come to realize that “a huge part of my job is talking to people who always say ‘No,’ till they finally say ‘Yes’ to bicycle projects. But it isn’t easy.”

Still, there have been successes: when Mowery began at LADOT, there were no public bike racks in Los Angeles; now there are 3,500 of them, with more going in weekly. Mowery also began working on parking meter retrofits ten years ago – a hard pull back then. But now that parking meters are being phased out in favor of pay-stations, Mowery has persuaded LADOT not to uproot all the old meters, but to slip a lock-on adapter over them and convert them to bike racks, complete with LADOT logo and a little silhouette of a bike.

Mowery lives thirty miles away in Long Beach but makes the round trip by bike at least once a week, coming in by Metro most of the other days and driving only about once a week. She’s been a street rider since her teen years but she understands that not everyone is comfortable facing Los Angeles’ notorious traffic and so has worked hard to establish bike routes, lanes and paths throughout the city.