On Bicycles by Evan Friss

Author:Evan Friss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

FIGURE 4.8 Athineos leads a protest against the impending bike ban.

Photo by Carl Hultberg, July 1987, from the Garden of Eden book series

While many nonmessenger cyclists were behind Athineos, one important group was slow to declare a position: the bike advocates. Whether or not they should stand with the messengers had long been a subject of debate. As Steve Stollman, a radical newspaper distributor whose storefront became a messenger hangout, said, the conventional bike advocates thought that messengers “were a bad thing because they were besmirching the name of goody good bicyclists.” And Charles Komanoff, an energy policy whiz who had become president of Transportation Alternatives in 1986, recalled that there was a “war going on in my head.” The cycling community was “fractious,” and there was “pressure” to avoid backing the messengers.84

Komanoff’s friend, partner, and mentor, Carl Hultberg, argued that TA needed to bring the messengers into the fold to both “reform them as well as organize for them.” So in 1986, Hultberg and Komanoff began manning a lemonade stand set up for messengers on Broadway in Greenwich Village. As the messengers sipped free lemonade, Hultberg handed them a copy of the “safety code,” encouraging them to “never threaten pedestrians” and “show respect.” The hope was that messengers would behave better and that the broader community would, in turn, develop respect for them. While those goals were not immediately met, the stand did nurture a relationship between TA and the messengers that would soon prove powerful—a combination of tough messengers armed with heavy locks and policy wonks/community organizers armed with data, lobbying skills, and Ivy League vocabularies.85

Because of his experience at the lemonade stand and as a consequence of Carl Hultberg and other colleagues’ input, Komanoff, by the time of the 1987 Bike Ban, had begun to see messenger work as a “sweatshop of the streets.” And he believed that there was a broader, “common cause” to be fought; while the messengers would be on the front lines, the other cyclists—commuters, racers, and recreational riders—also stood to gain from victory. He soon realized that the messengers were the ideal group to back. They gave the battle a “personality” and a “currency” that other cyclists could not. For better and worse, they were also more vulnerable than other cyclists. Their lives and their livelihood depended on the right to ride.86

The advocates began attacking the ban on legal, logical, and moral grounds. Why were messengers being singled out? Pedestrians and drivers broke the laws too. As one messenger put it: “We were scapegoats for the chronic failure of the city government to control its rampant traffic disorder.” Charlie McCorkell, a former director of TA and then owner of a well-known bike shop who generously paid part of Athineos’s salary so that he could spend less time messengering and more time organizing, spread the blame around to include the pedestrians who crossed the streets on a whim, the motorists who parked their cars illegally, and the taxi drivers who notoriously violated the rules of the road.

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