Well and good--and the success of OSU's Bike to Work Week suggests that there are more cyclers in Central Ohio as well. (Congratulations, btw, to the University District's Catherine Girves and Pedal Instead, winner of an international Innovative Transportation Solutions award from the Women in Transportation Society). Step by step--or should I say, mile by mile?--we can work towards more eco-friendly mobility habits.
The success of cycling in Portland, as I'm sure Mapes points out, is connected to their green-belt zoning policies, adopted in the early 1970's, which has created a much denser urban fabric. Contrast Columbus' famous land-annexation policy, which sprawled our city out across the scaffold of freeways--a nightmare for walkers, cyclists and public-transit. The next two-decade challenge is to undo that legacy, to condense without leaving dead-zones.
A bikescape, though, is not a walkscape. A bike is transportation technology; it moves us more quickly. Byrne is good on manufacturers efforts to athleticize cycling:
“Pedaling Revolution” is not about mountain biking the Moab sandstone formations in Utah or the network of bucolic paths that link some of the rural Massachusetts colleges; it’s not about racing, Lance Armstrong or what kind of spandex to buy. Nor is it about the various forms of extreme biking that have arisen lately: bike jousting on specially made high-horse bikes, BMX tricks or the arcane world of fixed-gear bikes, or fixies. For decades, Americans have too often seen cycling as a kind of macho extreme sport, which has actually done a lot to damage the cause of winning acceptance for biking as a legitimate form of transportation. If your association with bikes is guys in spandex narrowly missing you on the weekends or YouTube videos of kids flying over ramps on their clown-size bikes, you’re likely to think that bikes are for only the athletic and the risk-prone. Manufacturers in the United States have tended to make bikes that look like the two-wheeled equivalent of Hummers, with fat tires and stocky frames necessitating a hunched-over riding position that is downright unsafe for urban biking and commuting.Efforts to athleticize walking are goofy (remember Michael Dukakis "power-walking"?), generally step-downs from jogging--running for people with bad knees. That suggests that the rhythmics of walking are congenial rather than competitive, coordinating with others rather than outdoing them. Getting in step, falling in, matching strides--being, overall, responsive rather than assertive--walking has a social dimension that resists being framed in terms of performance-measures or efficiency. With its intimate relation to thinking--to imagination--walking is a practice or habit; it's not a skill to be improved upon by training. It eludes firm conceptualization, which is the province of technology.
A walkscape is thus related to place, the phenomenological primordiality of place. It brings into view that bodily relation, corporal intentionality, including the possibility of straying, of yielding to sights, to events, vistas, memories, and what Heidegger might call "the fourfold." This is a dimension of human action and social life that tends to be hidden beneath the pursuit of efficiency, forgotten in the cultivation of conscious thought. In the kingdom of conscious thought, it recedes into the aesthetic or decorative. An integrated vision of education--of the campus as the site of education--would design an environment to facilitate walkscape, to counterpoint the efficient and deepen our relation to what seems merely decorative.
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