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Umm, white people aren't the only ones who like bikes
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(Credit: Freedom Ride)
There's been some chatter on New Geography that bicycles and progressive transportation policy is a "white thing". (Yes, bicycles are #61 on Stuff White People Like, but does that really mean anything?).
In his post, blogger Aaron Renn cherry-picks data from a few "white" progressive bike-friendly cities--Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis--and contrasts them with his more diverse city, Cincinnati, whose citizens are apparently opposed to a streetcar project.
Umm...ok.
Matthew Yglesias has done a nice job of takling Renn down in this post, in which he points out that Washington DC--hardly a lily-white Portland--has one of the more forward-looking approaches to transportation in the country.
Though he never mentioned it directly, one of the odder subtexts of Renn's post is that non-whites are inherently hostile to alternatives forms of transportation. I don't buy it.
On my commute, which goes through much of Northeast DC, I see quite a diversity of riders on the streets. When I interviewed, DC's Bicycle Transportation Ambassador Ben West a few weeks ago he wasn't shy about the fact that there's an active low-rider bike culture in DC either.
If you really start to look, cycling is hardly the lily-white hipster street party that Renn seems to have in mind. (That's not to say, Portlanders, that there's anything wrong with such gatherings).
Reminders shouldn't really be necessary, but the videos below will hopefully remind folks that there are at least a few non-whites excited enough about bikes to get out and make music about them!
FREEDOM RIDES 2009 (Los Angeles) from Tara Conley on Vimeo.
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