Devil’s Gear’s Brehon: City has double standard.
Black and brown people don’t feel part of New Haven’s busy cycling scene, in Nadine Herring’s view. She and others have set out to change that.
Herring said she didn’t think about cycling as being a sport for people of color, until she learned the role black people played in its history.
She brainstormed strategies for drawing more people of color into New Haven’s busy cycling scene on the latest episode of “In Transit” on WNHH Community Radio. She was joined by Devil’s Gear Bike Shop sales manager Johnny Brehon and Bradley Street Bike Co-op founder John Martin.
Organizers of an upcoming Bike Month event series this May are working to host more activities in neighborhoods outside of downtown, East Rock and Wooster Square — which could be a step in the direction of diversifying the face of New Haven cycling.
About 0.3 percent of whites, 0.4 percent of blacks and 0.6 percent of Latinos in the state of Connecticut report using bicycles as their primary mode of transportation, according to a recent DataHaven survey of more than 16,000 people. Accurate, comprehensive data does not yet exist for the city of New Haven.
But Herring, who heads the Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills management team, said people of color in her neighborhood don’t feel like they fit into the mainstream conception of cycling in the city.
“There are people in the neighborhoods who do ride. There are people in the neighborhoods who would like to ride. But they don’t know a lot about bike culture or bike education,” she said. “For them, it’s just a means to get from place to place.”
She hasn’t hopped on a bike since she was young and growing up around Whalley Avenue. But when she found a group of black women interested in starting a cycling group in New Haven, she started doing research on where she could get her own bike. Devil’s Gear Bike Shop was too expensive, so she is scoping out Walmart instead, she said. “I’m going to be able to ride farther than I can run.”.
Aliyya Swaby Photo
Brehon, Herring, Martin at WNHH.
Herring said some people from her neighborhood don’t bike downtown because they fear getting harassed or stopped by the police. “People will think they’re coming down to do something wrong,” she said. There’s a double standard in New Haven, Herring said. White people downtown can ride on the sidewalks without being stopped, but black people will get stopped for doing the same thing.
Brehon agreed that standard needs to change. “You see kids riding bicycles. Tons of kids popping wheelies, just slowing down traffic. You know what I call it? An urban critical mass,” he said. “These kids are phenomenal.”
He is working with Herring on a Bike Month education event on the ways black people have helped to pioneer the sport of cycling.
Kittie Knox was the first black person — and one of few women — to be part of the League of American Wheelmen in Boston in 1895, insisting on wearing “knickerbockers” to ride instead of skirts. Major Taylor or the “Black Cyclone” was the first black cyclist to win a world championship in 1899.
When Brehon first began working at Devil’s Gear, two black kids came into the shop looking to borrow tools to work on their own bikes. Brehon said yes, but with one condition: that they write him a paper on Major Taylor first, in exchange for five bucks. After three days, the boys came back, papers in hand.
“I said, ‘What did you learn?’ They were like, ‘I didn’t know that we were riding bikes back then. I thought it was something new. It’s crazy,’” Brehon said.
A study based in Washington D.C. found low-income black people more likely to aspire to own cars — as status symbols or as methods of completing relatively long commutes.
The urban poor might not be able to use bikes in the same way as middle-class people who are able to live close to their jobs. “A car is important because a lot of the jobs might not be in the community,” Brehon said. He has noted jobs popping up in suburbs like Danbury. “Unfortunately, a lot of folks just can’t get there,” especially not with a bike from New Haven.
Martin, who hosts cycling education programs out of the Bradley Street Co-op in East Rock, asked Brehon and Herring how he could help to pique interest in the coop’s services in other neighborhoods. “How do we connect the community more, connect the neighborhoods more? How do we make it more layered?” he asked.
Herring offered a simple solution: Go to them and offer your services. She said there are always people in Goffe Street Park during the day in nice weather. “If you were just to come there, have somebody from the neighborhood with you,” she said. “If you were to just come there with your bike, with your tools, and we just said, ‘Hey guys, look…we’re doing a free workshop on how to fix your bike.’ Just doing a pop-up thing like that. It’s very organic.”
She said people would appreciate the gesture and show interest in the co-op. “They’ll feel they’re included,” she said
Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full discussion on WNHH’s “In Transit.”
I've actually never once seen someone stopped (by an authority or otherwise) from riding on sidewalks. In my experience I see more white 20-50 year old people doing it outside of the city center and more black 15-25 year olds (almost always male) doing it downtown. Ounce for ounce the latter is a lot more dangerous because of downtown foot traffic density and because of people popping in and out of shops right onto the sidewalk.
On the subject of riding the wrong way down one way streets; that offense belongs to everybody and is 100% the product of our asinine one way street system.