{"id":8103,"date":"2014-06-02T07:21:08","date_gmt":"2014-06-02T14:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wabikes.org\/?p=8103"},"modified":"2015-02-27T15:48:52","modified_gmt":"2015-02-27T23:48:52","slug":"personal-privilege-biking-it-takes-more-than-a-bike-lane-to-start-riding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wabikes.org\/index.php\/2014\/06\/02\/personal-privilege-biking-it-takes-more-than-a-bike-lane-to-start-riding\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal Privilege and Biking: It Takes More than a Bike Lane to Start Riding"},"content":{"rendered":"

The way I used to tell the story of \u00a0how I started bike commuting<\/a>, it was an infrastructure story: I started riding because the city put a bike lane in front of my house. Short, sweet, simple — and grossly oversimplified.<\/p>\n

\"Riding<\/a>

Riding my bike at the official opening of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way in Spokane. The city’s official plans for the opening didn’t involve bikes but when I started rolling and headed past the police officers who were there, no one challenged me. That’s privilege. If you could jump into an official event with the mayor and have no one question you, you have it too.<\/p><\/div>\n

Infrastructure Does Matter<\/strong><\/p>\n

Granted, infrastructure and other visual cues are incredibly important tools to build bicycling — perhaps more so for women than for men because of the greater attentiveness to possible risk that shows up in studies of women across many realms.<\/p>\n

The bike lane certainly worked to suggest the idea. I bought my house on a bus line to provide transit access, I had walked the 3.5 miles to work a few times, and I occasionally rode my bike for fun on weekends. The bike lane cued me to put all that together and try biking to work. Infrastructure does matter to help people start biking on city streets.<\/strong>
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But when I started unpacking\u00a0the invisible bag that I carry with me through life<\/a>\u00a0I found many other factors beyond infrastructure that made it possible for me to get on two wheels and stay there.<\/p>\n

[Tweet “More than bike lanes: Privilege plays a role in bicycling we don’t often acknowledge. #bikes4all”]<\/p>\n

Privilege Matters<\/strong><\/p>\n

If this seems like a really long list, that’s the point. If you hold privilege in this world you take a lot of things for granted that others don’t have. They can’t get the same things without thinking about it and working to overcome barriers you’ll never notice because they don’t exist for you. (You don’t need to feel guilty — it’s not that you deliberately set up this system — but you do need to do something about it.)<\/p>\n

A list of the advantages I have thanks to privilege (primarily arising from my race and socioeconomic status) that made it possible for me to start bike commuting:<\/p>\n