A2Politico: Ann Arbor—the Bicyclists’ Medina
by Bryan Kelly
IN LAST WEEK’S issue of The A2 Indy, my physically fit colleague Brent McDermott published a column dubbing Ann Arbor “a Mecca for runners.” Few may know that our city is, at the very least, in the running for a lesser-known (and less coveted) distinction: “a Medina for cyclists.”
I am a road biker. Above all else, I crave speed. I ride a bicycle in order to expose the automobile as slothful and démodé.
In the cyclist’s Medina that is Ann Arbor, biking takes you where you want to go six times faster than walking, and twice as fast as the automobile. The latter is true thanks to traffic lights timed by civil engineers who do not appear to be operating in the public interest.
The bicycle, a hermaphroditic mode of transportation, crosses terrains, and codes of law, at will. Depending on flow and availability of space, I can spend one moment jetting down the street; the next, zipping down the sidewalk; the next, riding on a lawn, preferably of a neighbor who tried to get my backyard chicken permit denied.
The cyclist transcends.
One caveat: on a bike, you’re supposed to ride in the street and follow streetlights; you’re not supposed to ride on the sidewalk. Fortunately, there are few downtown cops to police this situation. In fact, downtown right now is a transportational free-for-all. The long arm of the law is bent akimbo, hand on hip, in a posture of mute disapproval. This, primarily, contributes to the notion of Ann Arbor as “a Medina for cyclists.” I have not been to Medina, but I have some idea of the state of civil jurisprudence over there.
For a road biker—one who craves nothing more than the drug of speed—the small conflicts between self and motorist are all part of the challenges of cycling. For every car door that opens into a cyclist’s path, for every cross word exchanged between biker and motorist, is but a small scuffle in the larger battle for the future of transit.
The biker, after all, is a punk—albeit a good punk. We are not like skateboarders, or building-taggers, or computer-gamers, in that, at times, we are sensible.
The cyclist is programmed to battle, to rebel, against vehicular supremacy. It follows that the automobile should be the better-armed and better-shielded of adversaries (and that pedestrians should have their immutable legal right-of-way). The cyclist cares less about these advantages. We’re winning the battle for hearts and minds. Literally, while the motorist’s health degrades, and pedestrians makes steady, if unremarkable advancements, cycling enhances the biker’s cardiovascular state.
The bike refines one’s mental state, as well. The cyclist arrives at his or her destination feeling stimulated—though not, as with caffeine or other additives, to distraction. Rather, having removed all anxiety through exercise, the cyclist settles into an almost post-coital buzz of pleasant, lucid exhaustion. The body, dog that it is, has had its walk, and curls about itself, contented. The mind, its owner, is now at liberty to think, absorb, ponder. Immerse. Expand.
All of Ann Arbor should cycle; productivity would skyrocket. Yet the virtues of cycling are constrained, as always, by the vices of infrastructure.
In short, the roads are terrible; but you know about the roads. You’ve felt them yourself. Paul Fournel, a French writer and cyclist, described the experience of biking this way in his excellent book, Need for the Bike:
“With the bike there’s an animal relation to the world. To be in the landscape, in its heat, its rain, its wind, is to see it with a different set of eyes. The mountain rising before me isn’t a mountain, it’s first a grade to climb, a test, a doubt, sometime anxiety. At the summit, it’s a conquest, lightness. I’ve taken it and it’s in me.”
Drivers can complain about the roads. But bikers, in their direct, animal relation to the world, live the danger. The cyclist “takes in” potholes, those scabrous notches of neglect, traumas that, beyond mere harm of the equipment, threaten the life of the operator.
Sadly, the sidewalks are in awful shape, as well. The pace of pedestrian traffic is too slow to pick up on these sundry breakages. But, speeded up, the piano roll of our pavement features a number of sharp and unforgettable notes.
Local officials should be forced to campaign from the seat of a moving bicycle—they should be arrested if their cycle stops its motion. Handcuff them if they so much as slow down for a donation. We’ll see how long it takes for the roads and sidewalks to be repaired.
What redeems Ann Arbor as a biker’s Medina is its natural beauty. The speed at which the scenery changes in this town is ideal for the biker’s fast-moving comprehension. Passing through downtown, one catches a new restaurant, greets an old friend, ogles an attractive stranger—and is ogled in return. (Bikers, along with being punks, are vain punks.)
At length, we descend into a quiet neighborhood. Free at last from the cars, lulled by the whirring of our simple machines, we pick up on the sounds, the smells, of nature. The woodpecker. The fresh-cut lawn. The warming, sighing world.
One learns, on the bike, as one never would in a car, or would too slowly on foot, that Ann Arbor isn’t flat and stable. Everywhere underneath us, the earth curves, rises, descends, buckles, challenges. The mountain is a grade; sometime, an anxiety. We’ve developed this town over a wildness, a forest, with all its dips in elevation. It is a progressive topography.
It is matched by a progressive transport. The cycle should be our municipal symbol: a compromise between man and landscape, a waypoint between ponderous pedestrianism and constrained, environment-harming vehicular transport. There is no God but speed, and the bicycle is its messenger.