By Peter Kaufman

 This year the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA)
will take place in New York City. As much as I’m looking forward to spending a
long weekend with thousands of sociologists from around the world talking about
all things sociological, what I’m really excited about is not taking place
within the confines of the conference.

The highlight of my trip to New York City
will be riding the Citi Bikes—New York’s bike
share
program that recently started this spring after a year-long delay. I’m
particularly interested in trying out a Citi Bike during the Summer
Streets festival. Summer Streets is an annual event in New York City where
seven miles of city streets (from Central Park to the Brooklyn Bridge) are
closed for traffic and open for walking, biking, running and playing.  

New York’s bike share program and
auto-free days are new developments for the biggest city in the United States.
But around the world, programs that support non-motorized transportation have
been occurring for decades. Bike share systems
like the one in New York City allow individuals quick, easy, and temporary
access to bicycles so that people can commute, sightsee, and run errands
without relying on cars, taxis, buses, or subways. It’s hard to get an exact
figure on the number of bike share programs around the world but the prevailing
estimate is that there are about 500, with
new ones popping up each month. There are some interactive maps to see
where bike share programs exist and even a real-time map to tell you if
bikes are available at a particular docking station.

Traffic-free days are also a global
phenomenon that are increasingly being initiated in U.S. cities. One of the
original and most well known of these programs is Ciclovía in Colombia.
Started in the late 1970s as a way to make the city safer and reclaim the use
of the streets from automobiles, Ciclovía now attracts nearly 2 million
individuals (30% of the population) each Sunday morning in cities throughout
this South American country. As the following video illustrates, cycling is
just one of the many activities in which people engage.

I realize that my enthusiasm for
these bicycling initiatives is a bit subjective. After all, I would much rather
get from point A to point B on a twenty-pound vehicle with two wheels than in a
four-thousand pound vehicle with four wheels. Despite my somewhat biased
perspective, there is no denying the increasing influence and effect that
bicycling is having around the world.            

Whether it is being used for exercise,
recreation, socializing, commuting, or work, the bicycle is the preferred mode
of transportation for millions of people worldwide. In fact, nearly 50 years
ago bicycles were produced at the same rate as cars. Today, the production of
bicycles far outpaces that of automobiles—a sign that the car
culture might be waning. In fact, a
recent study by two researchers at the Transportation Research Institute of the
University of Michigan found that the between 1983 and 2008 there was a significant decrease in the number of
young people who had a driver’s license.

Despite its global influence, bicycling
has not attracted much attention among sociologists. I did a quick search
of the preliminary program of the upcoming ASA Annual Meeting and I found
only one session that had bicycling or bicycle in the title. It is somewhat
surprising that sociologists are not interested in studying cycling because
there are numerous sociological issues connected to bicycling: inequality, sustainability,
social change, social interaction, and well being, to name just a few.

An example of the connections between
cycling and sociology can be found in a new report published by the League of American Bicyclists and the Sierra Club. The New Majority: Pedaling Toward Equity
details the rise of cycling in the U.S. but focuses particularly on the
increasing ridership of youth, women, and non-whites. According to the report,
Hispanic, African-American, and Asian-American cyclists significantly increased
their usage of bikes from 2001 to 2009.

The report also noted that these
populations would like to further increase their time spent on the bike but are
dissuaded from doing so because of faulty and unequal infrastructures. This
point is demonstrated quite clearly with the Citi Bike program in New York.
Currently, the Big Apple’s bike share program only exists below 60^th
street in Manhattan and in a few “trendy” neighborhoods in Brooklyn near the
Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridge. If you are not familiar with the landscape of
New York City another way to say this is that Citi
Bikes are currently only available in neighborhoods that are largely white and
affluent.     

 The bicycle may not be the panacea for the
world’s problems but with rising greenhouse emissions

fueling global warming
and obesity rates skyrocketing worldwide, increased bicycle use can certainly
address some of our most serious environmental and health crises. For this
two-wheeled revolution to reach a critical mass what will be needed is a
dedicated shift—a cultural change—away from our reliance on
and romanticization of motorized transportation. So the next time you need to
run a short errand or visit a nearby friend, think about getting there on two
wheels instead of four. If you need more convincing, just calculate
the personal, financial, and environmental benefits that will be gained by
making this shift and you’ll be riding in no time.