Bicycling Detroit

Somehow, the highly romanticized version of a Saturday Night stroll, feels awkwardly corrupted.  Two tired legs propel this steel frame forth, as a calloused hand directs the bike around abrupt corners and over jutting cement embankments.  The other hand straddles an awkward cigarette, while the ashy organ orange glow jettisons forever forth from its paper extremity.  A pint in a back pocket insures a little warmth, as a water color sun sets on a backdrop of urban endeavor.  The Renaissance Center and recently renovated Cadillac building spill forth in tumultuous steel tides, as unsteady waves reach the very upsetting banks of Belle Isle.  The banks are strewn with trash fragments; this is the unforgiving haven of countless shipside discards.  The freighters are mostly silent, though they trudge through heavy blanketing waves, hard steel carelessly intruding upon the blue skirt of this very lake.           

The fog rolls in heavy and relentless channels across the isle.  A friend disappears in the density as he weaves forward on an old dark blue Varsity.  We ride with the maximum amount of inefficiency conceivable.  We ride on old rusted bikes without gears; without a means of shifting.  Our choices reflect on the city, casting it in an interesting metaphorical relationship.  We ride on uncomfortable retrofitted exteriors.  These bikes were probably purchased for use during the first dramatic explosions of urban sprawl; in the first suburbs that developed around the proximity of this same place.             

Bicycling in Detroit has been acknowledged in numerous forums; popular online journals such as Model D, web logs, and various local newspapers.  Perhaps, as it has been argued, the desire to bicycle urban thoroughfares is a reminder of late trends in physical capitalism; the response of a youth that realizes its parent’s television induced folly.  Perhaps, more accurately, and yet similarly dissatisfying a synopsis, bicycling in Detroit is liberating.  It is humorous to imagine that every time a bicycle leaves the rack, we are pursuing some great democratization of the city.  Here, some take pleasure in the abandonment of the car, for the much more maneuverable vehicle.  These conclusions, though, provide little satisfaction.             

 If the efforts of bicyclists in Detroit, can be considered for any great significance, it is not in the form of exercise or liberation, though, these are promising prospects.  Instead, it seems quite evident that this movement, this two wheeled endeavor attains its more positive attributes from, as with the other movements described in the corpus of this work, what it seems to contribute on quite a secondary level.            

Here, the bodily transformations that occur by the very means of exercise are an interesting point of reference.  It seems quite evident, as Jane Jacobs suggests, that the transformations that will occur for the city will be gradual.  The city, as she most astutely argues, can not possibly suffer the transformations incurred by planning or zoning.  Planning insists more planning, more zoning, more control.  This control manifests in the hands of the designers that long to perpetuate some wet spatial dream, that will most assuredly be more awkward to the people that the very plight that existed previously.           

 If bicycling in Detroit is suggestive of a different means of action or response, as it seems to this author, than it is appropriate to consider what it contributes.  What does the very presence of more pedestrians upon the urban thoroughfares, the cement, the open depression rendered fields contribute.  Perhaps, as Jacobs argues, the presence is enough.  As she suggests in her text, the sidewalk is to be hailed over the planned public space, the park that excludes, or that is, itself excluded from the realm of daily comprehension; a place only to be visited by means of a special journey or sojourn.  The sidewalk offers something that a park often fails to contribute.  There exists the potential for safety, for interaction, and for amusement or diversion.  There exists the potential for all three at once.             

Bicycling in Detroit contributes to this very ideal in profound ways.  On the immediate level, bicyclers are present as another crime deterrent on the streets; another person that contributes to the social force