Carbon Trace

The following is a guest essay by Alexander Hogan, Associate Professor of Political Science at Lone Star College-CyFair in Houston, Texas.

Welcome to the HOV

Sometimes we stop for pancakes.

This little place on Shepard Street. It’s all organic-the dining room peopled with thiry-something professionals. Some in suits. Some in euro-travel clothes like Patagonia and Royal Robbins.

Most days though we just have a cup of yogurt and race out the door. Liberte is the brand. We get it imported from Quebec-my wife’s French-Canadian. I’m half.

I’ve been sharing a car with my wife for the last four years. I drive her to work every day now that we live in Houston. It’s a fifty mile round trip for me, twice a day, but only takes around an hour. If she drove herself, she’d be in the car between three and four hours a day.

It’s the high occupancy vehicle lane that makes the difference. In Houston, two passengers constitutes high occupancy and thereby allows us to bypass miles of traffic in what is called a commuter or express lane in most cities. The HOV is never busy. In fact, most days we are one of four or five cars sharing it with the bus. Every morning flying past stop-and-go traffic on 290, I think about why in a metropolitan area of nearly six million the HOV lane is so empty. Could it be that people in Houston are so isolated? They don’t know another person to ride downtown with? Could it be they’d rather sit in traffic alone than move quickly with someone else?

The Curious Case of the Bicyclists

Last semester, I played a film about Critical Mass in San Francisco for my students. None of my students use a bicycle to get to school, despite the fact that a significant number of them live within a manageable distance. So, I imagined the film would be an interesting oddity for them. We might generate some conversation about the local quality of policy making.

I was wrong.

While some students did laugh, a surprising number sat with their arms folded. Angry. I received e-mails, phone messages, and a couple of heated rants from these students. Some feedback addressed Critical Mass for destroying traffic and abusing “regular people”. Other feedback framed the cyclists as dangerous, probably criminal. Still other feedback suggested I was wrong for even introducing the film to the class in the first place. Two students felt that they had clear proof that I “hate normal Americans”.

This semester out of a sense of shock and curiosity, I decided to ask my students to give me their impressions of bicyclists as a preamble to the film. Perhaps the film itself was a poor choice, or some element of the filmmaker’s style was really to blame for the outrage. I’m always suspicious of comments made in class. Some students want to impress me, others want to test my limits, and yet others are concerned about how they’ll be viewed by potential romantic partners in the room. I don’t blame them. I thought about the same stuff.

Nevertheless, I am convinced we can learn something from this informal chat. As I expected some of the students expressed concerns about traffic violations. A few students said bikers were in shape and hot –  possibly good dating material. But as we dug deeper, traffic rules seemed to move off the center stage.

“They’re all rich and go to Rice,” a young woman said to the laughter and agreement of several other students.

“Yeah, yeah, I agree. Everyone down in River Oakes and Rice Village, they’re all like that. I think they just ride bikes for attention. They want you to think you’re a bad person, cuz you’re not all eco-lover,” another young woman chimed in.

“I have a neighbor like that,” I heard one of my students who rarely speaks say.

“Well maybe it’s just convenience,” I challenged, “Would you ride a bike, if you lived in one of those neighborhoods?”

“Riding bikes isn’t safe, especially for women,” a forty-something student responded.

Two girls sitting next to me nodded their heads. The one closest to me, looked at me and said softly, “that’s true.”

“Like traffic dangerous?” I asked with a bit of a smile.

“No, they could get mugged or raped or who knows what. I wouldn’t let my daughter do that in the city,” my older student responded.

I stopped smiling.

Bikers are rich.  Bicycling is dangerous.

Behind Steel & Glass/Across Concrete & Asphalt

“They have a lot more home invasions up here in the ‘burbs,” my co-worker insisted.

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“They just don’t report that stuff here.” She stomps her brakes as a woman in a white S.U.V. cuts into our lane, nearly clipping the front of her car. We could have walked to lunch, but we both agreed we’d probably be hit by a car. “Uh-oh, We have an emergency. Someone else is wearing the same shoes.”

I laugh, considering the possibility that this could actually be the reason we were almost in a wreck. “Do you feel unsafe riding a bike?”

“Not really. I mean there are all kinds of people in my neighborhood. Some of them are kinda strange. There’s this one guy who lives down the street. He kind of smells. But he’s a really nice guy. I think people think he’s dangerous ‘cuz he smells funny.”

A friend of mine says he hates “these kind of white people,” he likes to say, “They just wanna pretend there’s no such thing as crime, because they think that way no one will think they’re racist.” Clearly race, class, and crime are linked in his mind.

But in all honesty, it’s difficult to understand danger in our cities. When I first moved to Rhode Island everyone I met told me to never go over by the Capital at night. Certainly I would be crazy to live in Providence. When I finally moved within walking distance of the Capital, I jogged there alone several nights a week, usually after midnight. On the steps, I often saw women alone or with their pets. In two years, I never saw or experienced any crime.

Houston has its share of crime, but the vast majority of that crime is property related, specifically car theft, burglary, and vandalism. Despite the city’s size its violent crime is not as severe as smaller cities like Kansas City. These kinds of “facts” have little if anything to do with our perception of danger. Let’s face it, no one quotes crime stats when they tell you not to go “over there”.

Houston advertises itself as one of the most diverse metropolitan areas in North America. Some media outlets estimate the area to be 42 percent Euro-American, 33 percent Latino/Hispanic, 18 percent African American, and 7 percent Asian. These numbers vary by media outlet and are ultimately difficult to reliably track in a city that has experienced 34 percent percent growth over the last four years. Major roads don’t always appear on GPS and neighborhoods continue to expand, sometimes as far as forty miles from the financial district-where many people work.

Houston has no zoning. This leads some visitors to conclude the city is integrated, maybe even post-racial. But in a city like Houston where zoning laws are absent, automobiles and the roads on which they travel take on a heightened importance.

Here it’s meaningful to talk about neighborhoods inside the 610 loop or outside the loop. We talk about living outside the beltway or east of T.C. Jester. These highway and major roads aren’t just short cuts to explain geographic space to one another, they tell us about social class, race and lifestyle differences-social lines along which Houstonians often live segregated side-by-side. Cars are the ultimate tool for maintaining order and space. We may all have to travel across land populated by people different from us, but we don’t have to speak to them. We don’t have to look them in the eye-our nearly ubiquitous tinted windows serve many purposes.

Hyper-Segregation: Beyond Race

“My students always tell me that we don’t walk or ride bikes here because of the heat.” The guy in the office next to me is a cultural geographer. But I point out: “Look at the situation in Miami. There’s humidity, there’s sun, and they still have a street culture.”

“I guess it’s the bikinis.”

“Yeah, right.” He laughs, “We built the city this way, to be far apart, to stay in our SUVs. That’s what I tell them.”

Segregation is fundamental to our culture now. Just bring up the topic in casual conversation and people get angry. Some will insist it’s the past. Others will tell you we’re going back to that. I say we never desegregated in the first place. Fewer of us than should know the history of the civil rights movement. Desegregation as a societal task was primarily dumped onto our school system. It’s at this point (the late 50s and 60s), that urban sprawl really takes off in the United States. During these decades, highway systems expanded beyond the original national security goals of the Eisenhower administration and public transit was quickly and systematically dismantled in many American cities.

It’s consumer choice. We want to live next to people who are just like us. This is the argument you’ll here when you question segregated living patterns. But substantial evidence exists to suggest that consumer choice is not the cause of racially or class segregated neighborhoods. Zoning laws help create class segregation in their definitions of land use. Determining value through the sale price of other nearby homes, ensures classism even in the absence or failure of official zoning policy.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, real estate agents spread pamphlets, rumors, and gossip linking minorities to falling property values and rising crime. This is well documented in a number of studies, perhaps the most recent and reader friendly being Kevin Fox Gotham’s study of Kansas City, entitled A City Divided. Across the twentieth century Gotham traces a city once geographically integrated through a series of policy choices that ultimately has produced one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in North America.

Back to my pancake breakfast. Segregation isn’t only racial or class based anymore. It’s cultural. Where we eat, the kinds of products we buy, the activities we choose in our free time — all fall along the lines of marketing demographics. Occasionally  we may cross those lines. We may think, “I’m a gamer AND I love sports.” But participating in two sub-groups is not integration. Interacting with those whom you do not share commonalities in an uncontrolled, unplanned way is the integration of community involvement that our living and transportation patterns specifically allows us to opt out of.

Bicycles Threaten Our Social Order

Watching, with my students, bicyclists roll down a hill and scream with glee, it looks like chaos. One of the women looks like she could be an office executive, another guy looks like a neo-hippie. There’s an Asian man looking affectionately at what might be his white girlfriend. In a city in which immigrant labor does everything from park your car at sandwich shops to mow your lawn and raise your children, none of the rules of engagement seem to apply for these bikers.

The social order itself appears to be threatened, as evidenced by police reaction. Bicycling is dangerous.

American cyclists cannot afford to understand their experience as a ‘tiff over traffic rules or as the indignation of self-centered motorists. Cyclists are not advocating the environment or even personal health, they are raising questions about the very nature of our society. You can’t expect these questions to be met with joy. We never want to question how we act in the beginning. We don’t want to feel guilty or face the prospect that we contribute to something that harms others.

To pretend that cycling isn’t cultural, that it doesn’t challenge the structure of our daily lives  is to fail to see the true motivations behind your opposition. Most of all cyclists have to engage fear. In this strange new world of cycling with its possibilities and random chance encounters with strangers who may live and think very different from me, is there a place for me?

This is the question a lot of hearts are asking. You must find a way to answer yes! Not just with your lips, but with your bodies and your bicycles.

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