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SOURCE — Transportation Alternatives @ medium.com - photo by @The_Jank on Twitter
Editors Note: the word, "Cyclist" has been changed to, "People on Bikes." And the word, "Cop" has been changed to, "Police Officer."
Ona recent night in Brooklyn, a few thousand New Yorkers brought their bikes out to a Black Lives Matter protest. That night, the people on bikes were not there in solidarity with protesters on foot — rather, the people themselves were the protest. The ride, organized by StreetRidersNYC, was one of many around the country in response to a police officer killing an unarmed Black man named George Floyd in Minneapolis where a protest is made up entirely of people on bikes.
At the protest, organizer Orlando Hamilton told the crowd, “You guys all risked it with us, so thank you, first of all, for coming out.” And there certainly was a risk. Even outside of #COVID19, protesting on a bike can be a risky endeavor. From 1970s “bike-ins” to Critical Mass in the 1990s and 2000s, there is a long history of using bikes to create hyper-mobile protests, and an equally long history of police suppression of these protests.
Is it safe to bring my bike to a protest?
“There is absolutely nothing illegal or wrong with participating in a demonstration on a bike,” says Vaccaro. “Bikes can help you cover more distance and protest for longer. The First Amendment provides the same protection against government interference to bike-mounted and walking demonstrators, and the police should treat the two similarly.”
To help you feel safe while protesting on your bike, Transportation Alternatives spoke with lawyer Steve Vaccaro, who specializes in the legal challenges to cycling at the Law Office of the Vaccaro and White, where he has represented people that ride bikes injured by negligent motorists, harmed by negligent and abusive police officers, and who have otherwise had their rights violated. He provided some insight into what a protester on a bike should know about their rights to ride and resist.
However, he cautions that the police often single out cyclists for targeted enforcement, even outside of demonstrations. “The police training materials that I read teach that bicyclists are likely serving as couriers or lookouts for gangs and drug dealers,” he says. “Police officers aren’t trained to see bicycles as a form of transportation or a legitimate component of traffic. It’s no more unlawful to bring a bike than a wheelchair to a demonstration, but people on bikes are usually higher on cops’ radar.” According to Vaccaro, officers are trained to view people on bikes as a source of criminality, misconduct, and chaos.
Police also may not distinguish between protesters and passers-by on bikes. “People on bikes accompanying and mixed in with a largely pedestrian demonstration can become a focus for police, and any person on a bike in the vicinity should be aware that they may be corralled in with the protesters.” Essential workers or otherwise police-vulnerable people who don’t want to risk arrest should avoid the area.
It is often a situation of you’re good until you’re not. “Police may escort a bike demonstration as if it were a parade, even stopping vehicular traffic at intersections to let the people on their bikes through,” he warns, “but then suddenly begin to contain, forcibly dismount or otherwise brutalize or arrest demonstrators. Don’t be lulled into a false sense of safety, keep an eye on the police.”
Does being on a bike change my rights or status as a protester?
With the exception of traffic laws, like not riding on the sidewalk, all laws that apply to a person on foot apply on a bicycle. Given that the laws the police are enforcing are generally not traffic laws, there should be little technical legal difference. (editors note: and therefor "cyclists" should be considred just, "people on bikes.")
However, the Critical Mass rides in the mid-2000s taught the police that bike-mounted demonstrators are nimbler and harder to control. In particular, cyclists must be dismounted before they can be contained with metal barricades, as police like to do with demonstrators on foot. Police controlled the Critical Mass by targeting individual participants for traffic stops and issuing them multiple traffic summonses, sometimes forcibly dismounting them to do so. Vaccaro led a legal challenge against NYPD’s crackdown on grounds on selective targeted enforcement intended to chill First Amendment activity. The courts failed to rule clearly, on the one hand declaring that police were as a general matter allowed to issue traffic tickets to demonstrators on bikes, but on the other hand awarding nearly a million in damages to the people riding their bikes for wrongful summonsing activity.
If I do bring my bike to a protest and an officer targets me, what should I do?
If you have a clear, safe escape route, use your bike to disperse from the demonstration. If there’s no clear path out, try to lock up your bike and come back to retrieve it later.
At the very minimum, get off your bike. “I really don’t think you want to engage the police with your bike,” Vaccaro says. “If you’re on a bike, you’re more vulnerable than you are on foot. The police will have no compunction about knocking you off the bike and possibly causing a much more serious injury than they otherwise might. You don’t want to get into a tug-of-war with a police officer over your bike. It’s just going to turn into you getting beaten up. And if your moving bicycle makes contact with a cop — even if the cop is chasing you — you may well end up facing a felony assault charge.”
Recent footage of police assaulting demonstrators on bikes with billy clubs reminds Vaccaro of an old case in which a participant in Critical Mass was body-checked by a police officer named Patrick Pogan. Pogan went on to arrest the individual ridng their bike, Christopher Long, for assault. It was only when a tourist’s video footage was found a week later that the charges against Long were dropped. “It’s a good reminder,” says Vaccaro, “of how many police officers deal with cyclists, how they lie, and how they deal with demonstrators, all in one.”
If a police officer does grab my bike and take it from my control, what should I do, and what should I know?
If your bike is improperly seized, get the identifying information for the officer so that you can make a complaint — and do this whether or not you get the bike back in the moment.
Unless you’re being arrested for violating a law, seizing your bike would be deprivation of property without due process. This exact issue was ruled upon in a 2004 court case in which a court held that police could not just confiscate bikes without recourse, except as part of a full-blown arrest.
Can I be arrested for blocking traffic?
You can be charged with disorderly conduct for obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic, or for refusing a lawful order to disperse, but it must be with the intent to cause, or recklessly creating the risk of, public inconvenience, annoyance, or alarm.
“There is an unclear boundary between exercising your rights to travel in traffic and exercising your right in the public right-of-way to engage in First Amendment-protected political activity,” says Vaccaro. A large demonstration will certainly alarm and inconvenience some members of the public, but if all participants were charged with disorderly conduct, the vagueness and overbreadth of the law itself would come under fire as a violation of constitutional rights.
“Every person in traffic obstructs every other person in traffic,” Vaccaro explains. Much like many cities’ recently-enacted protest curfews, “these sweeping restrictions describe conduct that’s so widespread that they could never be fully enforced, inviting arbitrary, selective, and discriminatory enforcement. What is important to remember is that a police officer can charge a person with disorderly conduct or a similar charge under virtually any circumstances, as long as they’re not keeping out of everyone else’s way or not doing exactly what the police officers tells them to do.”
Photo by @SoleCityFilms on Twitter
Can police officers use their own bikes as battering rams or weapons?
It’s unclear, because this behavior is new.
“I found it disturbing to see police officers using bikes as weapons in a manner suggesting they had been trained to do so,” he remarks. There are reasons why officers don’t use hidden weapons. When a police officer carries a nightstick or a gun, it’s in part to signal the potential for use, and with the hope that the threat will help avoid the weapon’s use.
“People understand that if that weapon is out, it could be used on them,” Vaccaro explains. “This isn’t the case if an officer approaches with a bicycle. There’s a fundamental issue in terms of escalation and de-escalation that the police seem to have forgotten here.”
Vaccaro also notes that when bicycles are used as battering rams, they could injure protestors more than a smooth shield.
“We don’t allow cops to use knives, so we shouldn’t be giving them big, complex equipment with sharp parts and then instructing them to slam them into people,” he says. “If the purpose is to try to de-escalate or contain, someone could get caught in a cassette or a chain, perhaps become entangled with a bike that’s being used as a weapon.”
There is a lot to take in here, but it won’t stop us from showing up to the protest with our bike. Transportation Alternatives stands against police brutality and overreach in all its forms and believes in the power of protest and the rights of protesters, on and off bikes. We hope we will see you out there.
Transportation Alternatives is demanding New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio reallocate New York Police Department funding to the Department of Transportation to create “self-enforcing” streets designed for slow speeds and protected by automated enforcement.
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See original article @ medium.com
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SOURCE - Laura Killingbeck @ adventurecycling.org
Just when I reached the Golden Gate bridge, the nausea deepened. It was perfect. I took one hand off the steering wheel, rolled down the window, and vomited out the side of the car. The pavement flew by, and the red bridge flew by, and even though I was puking my guts out, I also felt like I was flying. I was winning the game. I rolled up the window, wiped my mouth, and kept driving. My stomach felt better like it always did at that point. I was in control.
I started hating my body when I was 12. I didn’t like the way I looked or felt. I didn’t like very much about myself at all. This self-loathing was mitigated by a deep enchantment with everyone and everything that was not me. I loved people, bugs, ideas, rocks, flecks of dust in the sunlight — the world was full of wonderful things, it’s just that I was not one of them.
I spent my early teenage years alternately vomiting up my meals and training for my Great Escape. I was hoping to leave as soon as possible to live in the forest or join a tribe of hunter-gatherers. On the days I wasn’t at the eating disorder clinic, I hung out in my parents’ front lawn, tanning roadkill pelts and foraging wild plants. Something about society just did not agree with my constitution, and I knew it.
When I turned 18, I packed a bag and hitchhiked to Mexico. Life on the road was a different kind of wilderness than I had planned for. I slept in alleys, ate out of dumpsters, and found friendship in the fringes. Homeless people took care of me and taught me how to survive. In Mazatlán I jumped a freight train and let my little blonde braids fly out in the wind: this was life. The world was bigger than me and I was unprepared for it, but people everywhere were mostly kind.
A year later I started college, and that summer I had to find a job. Stripping was not my first choice — I had wanted to mow lawns or be a magician’s assistant — but when both of those gigs fell through, I decided to audition at the Foxy Lady. When your body is a source of shame, the last thing you want to do is expose it on stage. But I had come so far. After so many years of hating my body, stripping felt like an appropriate, positive challenge.
My audition was spectacular. I had never been to a strip club before and my only reference for anything remotely pornographic was my mom’s aerobics VHS collection. Those ladies wore their outer panties high up on their hip bones and used lots of hair spray. So that’s what I did. I showed up at the Foxy in giant underwear, a velvet skirt, and thrift store stilettos. I hadn’t realized that people normally change in the dressing room. Or that velvet had gone out of style many years ago.
The Foxy wasn’t a great club, so the dressing room was full of dancers in various stages of personal and career dishevelment. One woman had short-cropped hair and jittered everywhere, yelling. Another woman had one eyeball with a melted pupil. I asked the bouncer what I should do, and he said to just be sexy and wink at people. When my song came on, I wobbled out on stage, pulled off my velvet skirt, and stood there in my high-waisted underwear. I could not undo the clasp of my bra, so I finally just yanked the whole thing up over my head. And then I tottered around, winking.
I was not hired at that particular establishment.
But I was a go-getter, so I went right back out and got a job at the club down the street. The man who hired me was very large, and for this audition, I just had to sit on his belly and wiggle — this is what they called a lap dance. Afterward, he looked at me in my velvet skirt and shook his head.
“I shouldn’t hire you,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because you will leave here crying,” he replied. “All the girls leave here crying.”
He knew it and he told me ahead of time. But either I didn’t believe him or I didn’t think it mattered. I took the job.
They say that the sex industry is a slippery slope. But what they don’t say is how normal it feels to slide down it. I didn’t like the way my bosses fondled me or the things men said to me. I didn’t like the way men leered or scratched or groped. But I was too strong to let it bother me. Or at least that’s how I framed it. I was so strong I could smile through anything. My job as a sex worker did not feel entirely new; it was more of an extension of what had always been.
The reality of stripping was a gray area, full of complications and contradictions. There were moments when I stood naked on stage and felt more proud of myself than I’d ever felt in my life. There were moments when I threw my pants into the crowd and thought: Ha! I will gladly get paid to show you my wedgie. There were moments when I curled up on some man’s belly and held him while he cried about his divorce. There were moments when I said yes because I didn’t know how to say no. And there were moments when I said no, but no one listened. Amid all these complexities my boss was right — I did leave crying.
Every time I quit a club, I would audition at a better one. My best friend Basil* also worked the circuit. Eventually, we drove out to Vegas, and then later to San Francisco. We studied the industry and changed our bodies to meet the male demand. I bleached my hair and started tanning. Basil got eyelash extensions. We were both honors students finishing our bachelor’s degrees in philosophy. On weeknights, we sat on the floor with a bottle of cheap champagne and watched Hugh Hefner’s “The Girls Next Door.” In between episodes, we argued about existentialism. And on the weekends, we danced.
Eventually, Basil started working for a pimp, and sometimes she was gone for days. When she got home her eyes looked glazed over, like she was there but also not. I started drinking and taking painkillers at the club each night. It took the edge off of everything, including my own coherence. It also made me puke. If I timed the pills perfectly, I would vomit right when I reached the Golden Gate Bridge on my way home after work. It was a way of self-destructing without jumping, and it was exhilarating.
There came a night when I realized I had to change or I would die, and on that night I walked around the club in my high heels and said goodbye to my clients. I felt close to many of them. Even though they paid me for my services, there was still intimacy involved. But as I walked from man to man, they all gave me the same look. They did not believe I was really going. As I turned away from one of them, I overheard him laugh to another dancer, “She’ll be back when she needs the money.”
This man was a lawyer. He was short and stout, with little wire-rimmed glasses. It wasn’t his words that hit me. It was the way he spit them out, with the full force of extraordinary arrogance. She’ll be back when she needs the money. I could feel my life inside that sentence.
Afterward, I worked briefly as a mascot for a local aquarium. Each day I zipped myself into a giant, full-body costume of “Scuba Sam” and stood on the sidewalk, waving at people as they walked by. Sometimes I had to ride around in a boat or just stand in a corner at team meetings. Once my boss set up a platform in front of the aquarium and hired a band to play children’s music. I lumbered out onto the stage and gave the music everything I had. It was the fullest of full circles.
Life can be funny and dark at the same time. Basil’s work was dangerous, and I didn’t know how to help her. She slipped further and further away. I moved out of the apartment and onto a sailboat with my sailor boyfriend. I felt like I had failed Basil, and myself. I felt weak for not being able to stick out the sex industry. And I felt confused about what we had become. We had made all our own choices, hadn’t we? So why had we made so many choices that hurt us?
I missed the sex industry. I missed the power I felt when I hustled high rollers. I missed the smell and weight of cash. I knew that if I went back, the industry would own me and I would never be able to leave it. I could see that it was a trap. But still, I craved the trap.
I had to go away; I had to go so far away that I would be safe from myself and my choices. I had to go so far away that I could never fully get back again.
I boxed up my things. I gave away my mattress and got rid of my car. I said goodbye to my boyfriend and to Basil. Then I gathered up my bike and my camping gear and bought a one-way ticket to Alaska.
Alaska was wilderness. There were bears there, and moose! I wanted to become wild like those creatures. I wanted to become a creature like those creatures. I didn’t plan a route, a destination, or a timeline. I was going and that was all that mattered. In the weeks leading up to the trip, I felt ecstatic.
Finally, I boarded the plane and we took off. I was giddy with the thrill of my escape. Everything would be different now. Everything would be okay.
The plane touched down in Anchorage and I built my bike in the airport. It was dawn, I had been up all night, and my adrenaline ran high. I loaded up my gear and cycled out the door into the wild.
Except that Anchorage is not wild. It is a city with lots of gray concrete. I pedaled through the streets, my bike wobbling with all my gear. I hadn’t ridden in over two years. It was early in the morning and the roads were mostly empty. Each street looked the same, and to my horror, I could not find my way out of the city.
I pulled over in an empty lot to make breakfast. I was so frustrated that my hands were shaking. Then it started to rain. It was a cold rain.
I sat there on the curb, the water drizzling down over everything, and I realized that I could not do this. Who did I think I was coming here, planning some wild trek? I was alone and I had no destination. I sat there and cried.
I’ll have to find a job here, I thought, finally. I’ll just find a job and live in Anchorage.
I imagined myself waiting tables at a café or hauling fish off a boat. It seemed possible. And then I imagined dancing again. I sat there in the rain and seriously considered this. I could buy some high heels, some makeup. It would be easy.
But as my mind opened to this possibility, other thoughts and feelings came flooding in with it. All the times when I had said yes but meant no. All the hands on my body. All the eyes, watching me, wanting me. Wanting me to be what? I could see the little lawyer with his little sneer and his little wire glasses. She’ll be back when she needs the money.
And in that moment in the rain, I suddenly felt something that I had not fully let myself feel before. I felt anger. No, not anger — I felt rage. I felt rage at the compromises I had to make to be wanted by men. I felt rage at the way men took without asking. I felt rage at the way they thought they owned something they did not own.
It wasn’t all men as individuals. I loved men. But I felt angry about my relationship to maleness. It wasn’t just the sex industry. It was everything I had always felt and known my entire life. If you are a good girl, you stay down, you stay small, you stay quiet. You smile. You dance. There is an underlying pull toward certain directions, certain choices. There is gravity to the slippery slopes. At the age of 23, sitting in that empty lot, I could not articulate this. But I could feel it. I could feel it in a way I had never fully felt it before.
I packed up my gear and stowed it back on my bike. I got on the saddle, gripped the handlebars, and pressed my feet down on the pedals. One rotation, two. I was moving. And as I pushed my body through my rage, a strange thing started to happen. All of the moments and memories that made me feel so bad about who I was started to crumble. They fell apart and turned to dust, and when I looked at them again I saw them differently. They had turned into fuel. And each pedal stroke was a spark. I blazed out of Anchorage like a rocket ship. No one in the world could have stopped me.
Within the first week, I was breaking a hundred miles a day. I rode through sunshine and storms. I passed bears and crossed mountains. Whenever I reached a hill that I knew I could not summit, I drew out the worst of everything from inside myself. I channeled the moments in my life when I had felt the most powerless, the weakest, the most ashamed. I channeled feelings that were alive inside me that I didn’t know how to express. And then I burned them up on the hill. The same things that had held me back were now my source of power. I made it to the top every time.
According to the Law of Conservation of Energy, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed from one form to another. I believe this. And I believe that this also applies to our emotional selves. We cannot ignore, deny, or anesthetize our feelings and expect them to just go away. The body cannot hide from itself. Our feelings stay with us, trapped inside our cells until we release them. And once we let them out, once we experience our feelings as ourselves, we enter a process of transformation.
As I burned through my rage, I began to experience myself as a person who could move forward. I began to experience my body as a thing that was powerful in its own right. And I began to feel joy.
Joy was motion. It was legs pushing and pulling. It was sweat evaporating into air. Joy was the warmth of sun and the rush of wind. It was breath flowing in and out. Joy was my body, free to be itself on its own terms.
I pedaled my way through Alaska, the Yukon, British Columbia. Each night I set up camp in the forest. I didn’t have a phone, an iPod, or anything to distract me. I was just there: pedaling, eating, breathing, sleeping. I was a body that took care of itself. I was a wild female human creature.
After I crossed the Rockies, I camped in a little field by a river. I built a fire on the rocks and cooked dinner. The river flowed, the sky melted into sunset, and my whole body felt strong. I felt like I was part of something that made sense. Life was not perfect, but that moment of it was.
Every long journey has its cycles. You go up and you go down. You dig deep and you let go. Joy was not something I ever learned to capture or control. But it was something I learned to let happen. It was something I learned to be grateful for, and it was something that became a part of who I was.
After 3,500 miles of pedaling, I rolled back into San Francisco. But instead of staying there, I just kept going. I moved on with my life. I had gone too far to go back again.
*This name has been changed to protect the privacy of the individual.
A special thanks to my friend Basil for all the conversations leading up to this essay. Thank you for being there then, and for thank you for being here now.
The original article can be found @ adventurecycling.org
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Photos by Trevor Raab
written by Gloria Liu @ Bicycling.com, September 24th, 2018
If you spend enough time in my tiny, bike-crazy town in eastern Pennsylvania, sooner or later you’ll meet Army Jay.
He’s six-foot-one with long hair and a scraggly beard, and a missing pair of front teeth. He dresses in camouflage. He smokes cigarettes. He sometimes carries a Viking blowing horn on rides. He is usually actively drinking a beer.
When you first meet him, you probably wouldn’t understand that Jay is as central to our hardcore cycling community as the shiny-legged roadies who ride six days a week, or the mountain bikers in their pads and baggies.
But if someone is having a good time on bicycles, Army Jay will be there. He builds the bonfire every week at our Thursday night #cyclocross series. He hands out PBRs at our local enduro, then rides the #singletrack descent on his loaded touring bike. He good-naturedly heckles ’cross racers while sporting his military fatigues and tin pot helmet—Jay served as Army infantry in the Gulf War—and wielding a blow-up pickle.
Jay lost his driver’s license years ago. So he rides everywhere—in 90-degree heat or after a snowstorm. He’s 48 now. He could probably own a car again, but he’d rather get from one place to another on his own power. He lives about nine miles away, and fully loads his well-loved (and well-maintained) steel Surly Disc Trucker for his trips into town. If it’s too late to ride home after an event, he’ll ride into the park or a friend’s backyard and set up camp. In the winter, he’ll sometimes camp on the local ’cross course in the snow, just to prove to himself that he can still do it.
One of my favorite Army Jay stories is about the first time he did 2-5-10, our annual dumb-idea century, which tackles ten 10-mile laps of the three steepest hills in town for over 14,000 feet of climbing. It was July. The heat was oppressive. Jay wore combat boots and cargo pants. He rode a bike with a rack on it and smoked a cigarette after every lap. This amazed Olympic track racer Bobby Lea, who recalls passing Jay on course throughout the day. Each time they saw him, says Bobby (who now works at BICYCLING), Jay looked the same: “completely disheveled and so stinkin’ happy.” The afterparty had been going on for hours when Jay turned up. “We had no idea he was still out there riding his laps,” Bobby says.
Jay likes to compete, in his own way. “I have a number and I’m riding my bike while a race is going on,” he explains. He’s often DFL, or close to it. “I’m not a pro, I’m not big in the industry, I don’t have big aspirations.”
Jay doesn’t ask a lot out of cycling. He loves the freedom of it, the way it lifts his bad mood and helps with his anxiety, and the cool stuff his bike helps him see. The other day, it was an eagle that sat on a branch right next to him at a fishing spot he had ridden to. “You’d never see that in car,” he says.
All the good cycling communities have—or should have—beloved outliers like Jay: riders who ostensibly are doing everything wrong in terms of keeping up, getting better, and fitting in, yet who still achieve the best parts of what it means to be a cyclist. These riders remind us that you’re not one of us because you’re fast or you have the right bike or the right look or a silky pedal stroke, or because you started racing when you were 13 or you have a lot of followers on Instagram. You’re a cyclist because you ride, you really ride—whether it’s shitty or beautiful out, whether you’re first place or last, whether anyone is still watching or even knows you’re out there. And you’ll know you’re doing it right by the way it makes you feel: so stinkin’ happy.
Army Jay's Essential List of Bikepacking Gear
Surly Disc Trucker
surlybikes.com
Endura Singletrack Jacket II
chainreactioncycles.com
$96.59
Endura MT500 Men's Spray Cycling Pant Trouser II
amazon.com
Topeak Master Blaster Road Frame Pump
chainreactioncycles.com
$15.99
Big Agnes Insulated Air Core Ultra Sleeping Pad
backcountry.com
$159.99
A bike with braze-ons. "So you can mount racks and bottle cages. I'm riding a Surly Disc Trucker. You can put wider tires on it. I've also taken the racks off and raced cyclocross on it."
Rain gear. "I have Endura's Singletrack Jacket II—the hood tucks away—and MT500 II waterproof pants. They have an elastic waisband and zippers around the cuffs so you can get them on over your boots."
Frame pump. "Frame pumps are cool because it's not like you're gonna run out of CO2 and you're not gonna be out there pumping all day with your minipump. I've had the Topeak Road Masterblaster for at least a year and a half, maybe two years. Possibly three."
Poncho or tarp. "If you have a poncho or a tarp with grommets, and some good cordage, you can make yourself a shelter. I don't bring a tent."
Air mattress. "In the Army, we used to have these air mattresses that were just big enough for you, and you'd blow them up in one go, and it'd give you a helluva head rush. If you can get a little air mattress like those old military-issue ones, it forms an air pocket of warmth, and if if rains, you're actually up above water."
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