BICING-BASHING

Learn to hate Barcelona's new high-visibility public bike program

by Montserrat Pons

I’ve been riding a stolen Bicing bike, and it's a sweet ride, more comfortable than any of the Frankenbikes I have owned. And since I pinched it, I’ve been thinking about the history of public bicycle projects, which started out much differently than Barcelona’s recent foray into the enterprise.

I think of Luud Schimmelpenninck, for example. Schimmelpenninck is a Dutch industrial designer, social inventor, entrepreneur and politician. In the 60s he was part of Provo, a radical group of anarchists which playfully antagonized the Dutch establishment of the time. In 1964, he and his colleagues collected several hundred bikes, painted them white and left them around Amsterdam to be used freely and for free. In the beginning, they offered to paint any donated bicycles white, thus launching the program. “White bicycle” programs still exist around the Netherlands, in a variety of formats, and with varying levels of success.

Lately it seems like everyone is talking about the stylized red bicycles you can just leave at the click of an electro-magnet at any one of 100 locations. Even usual detractors of the Ajuntament are saying things like, "Sometimes they do get things right." So why does this new apparition in our landscape make me so uneasy?

I guess it’s because it's sad to see something that originated as a joyful DIY project with a proposal for a car-less city give its eco-street cred to a public bike program such as this one. It’s easy to just sit back, relax and pat oneself on the back for living in a progressive city, but it is important to ask whether real problems are being addressed and who is really profiting from the proposed solutions. The Ajuntament’s persecution of more grassroots pro-bike proposals, all the while engaging in a “green” discourse, is inherently confusing (though in fact coherent in view of their past practices), and its choice of strange bedfellows — a company that has made it big privatizing the view one sees outside from the car window — for the purpose of reappropriating progressive discourse raises an eyebrow to say the least.

Clear Channel

Looking at the back part of the seat of my stolen Bicing bike, I noticed a white logo on the black plastic seat: "Clear Channel," it says. That’s the name of the company that won the sponsorship for the Bicing project. Looking up "Clear Channel" on Wikipedia, is well worthwhile. One could mistakenly reach this entry:

"A clear channel, in the general sense, is a communications channel (such as a radio frequency) on which only one transmitter operates at a time."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_channel)

To understand how apt a name this is for the company, one only need go to their own corporate website: "Clear Channel is now the world's largest outdoor advertiser with over 800,000 out-of-home displays." But that's not all. We're also talking 1225 radio stations in the US, 240 international ones in 300 markets, 37 TV stations, 900 websites and the world's largest concert promoter.
(http://www.clearchanneloutdoor.com/corporate/history.htm)

The channel this media monster is hoping to clear for its communications is our public space and our airwaves.

The two biggest companies in the world providing outdoor ad space are Clear Channel and their main competitor JCDecaux. Both are doggedly competing for the public bike program market recently emerging in European cities, with JCDecaux having installed the public bikes in cities across Belgium, France and Spain. But it is unclear why the two biggest billboard companies in the world are sweating it out to install bikes in European cities.

Who is Clear Channel? Are its corporate policies compatible with the image the city of Barcelona is working so hard to project, the eco-friendly, socially progressive "Barcelona brand"?

The biases of this company and their contradiction with what Barcelona wants its brand to be become apparent when does a bit of sleuthing on the Internet.

Remember the million-person demonstration against the war in Iraq in 2001? The one headed by Barcelona mayor Joan Clos? According the British newspaper The Guardian, Clear Channel, Barcelona's environmentalist partner in Bicing, organized their own demonstrations right around the same time:

"In a counterpoint to anti-war demonstrations, supporters of war in Iraq have descended on cities from Fort Wayne to Cleveland, and Atlanta to Philadelphia. They wave flags, messages of support for the troops - and also banners attacking liberals, excoriating the UN, and in one case, advising: 'Bomb France Now.'"

It turns out, however, that many of the rallies were organized and paid for by Clear Channel, Inc., as noted by Oliver Burkeman in an article from 2003.

Since the corporation is under so much heat, Clear Channel published a "myth" vs. "fact" article on their website. In it they defer responsibilities to their local radio stations. Regarding the pro-war demonstrations they say: "Clear Channel Radio local managers make their own decisions about programming and community events—including rallies to thank and support those in their communities who serve in the armed forces."

So is Clear Channel a decidedly right-wing company?

The same article also states that "Politics plays absolutely no role in reviewing ad copy. In fact, Clear Channel Outdoor actively works with groups across the political spectrum to help them reach their target audiences."

Nonetheless, in 2004, billboards popped up in spots all around Florida, and next to a picture of Dubya one proclaimed, "George W. Bush – Our Leader." Beneath the message was a disclaimer: "Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. A public service message brought to you by Clear Channel Outdoor." ("Corruption Up High," by Jake McGee, Kotori Magazine, re-published on www.clearchannelsucks.net)

Clear Channel has been accused of voluntarily launching campaigns in favor of politicians running for office in exchange for favors once they get elected, favors such as the de-regularization of billboard advertising. They rejected an anti-war billboard but had no problem putting up some for the white supremacy group "Nation Alliance," one of which read "Stop Immigration – Join the National Alliance" and was put on a billboard in the center of one of Las Vegas’ Latino communities.

What I'm trying to get to is this: while the Ajuntament heads anti-war demos and trumpets slogans of "Peace, Sustainability and Multi-culturalism," which were, of course, the three "ejes" of the of the much talked about and criticized Forum of the Cultures in 2004, beneath the surface it's still business as usual: partnering with corporations that are not perceived to be environmentally-oriented (Coca-Cola) and others that profit from war (Indra, La Caixa, El Corte Inglés).

Ordinances and regulations

The bicycle is generally the realm of the free-spirited. Being a fairly safe, low velocity vehicle, highly controllable by the rider, it never needed a lot of external control from the authorities. Bike riders enjoy an unregulated existence, without the paperwork and the high costs of vehicle insurance and licence plates. They don't get stuck in traffic and basically move unnoticed, below the radar.

The bicycle is also the vehicle of the precariously-situated economically, the so-called mileuristas, who are the waiters, museum workers, store attendants and part-time teachers that make the tourism/culture machine we call Barcelona function. It is the cheapest, most ecological form of transportation, always there for those who refuse to pay the rising metro and bus fares. As life in Barcelona becomes more and more expensive, with its rents tripling and its signature old markets becoming unaffordable, the bicycle is an obvious choice for a population that is struggling not to get pushed out of the city. It is this population who form the bulk of riders in the city, but their need for transportation and recreation is not solved by the short glitzy rides offered by the city-sponsored program.

And while Barcelona is busy patching the city's mobility and environmental problems with stylized band-aids such as Bicing, it is showing a lack of support for cyclists in other ways. The lack of bike lanes generates conflict between riders and pedestrians, who sometimes compete for sidewalk space. Finding a spot in the crowded bike parking around town is next to impossible (despite the city's claim that Barcelona will have 6,732 bike-parking spots by the end of the year). Last February, the Ajuntament modified the "Ordenanza de Circulación de peatones y vehículos" in a significant way for bike riders. Starting September 15th, locking up to a street light or any inmobiliario urbano is punishable by a fine of up to 450.76€. Instead of focusing on car congestion as the main problem, the city is exacerbating the conflict between pedestrians and bike-riders. This conflict could easily be resolved by prioritizing more space for bikes, but the city's solution is a series of high fines that could act as deterrents to the trend of increasing bicycle use.

On September 15th, the day the ordenança took effect, Plaça St Jaume was full of bicycles dinging their bells. A Critical Mass-type demonstration, organized by the Barcelona-based organization "Amics de la Bici," was taking place in protest of the city’s new bicycle ordinance. "Barcelona wants to be the Amsterdam of southern Europe, but they don’t know how to handle the rapid growth in bicycle use," says Albert Garcia, one of the organization’s spokespeople. "Instead of seeing this growth as a solution, they see it as a problem, and they have passed a law that is trying to erase bicycles from the city." The cyclists of Barcelona came out in droves to manifest their disapproval of the new law, to protest against the lack of parking and bike lanes and to demand a car-free Barcelona.

Alternatives

Barcelona's own counter-culture is alive with creative grass-roots proposals of the type that originated the "white bicycle" project.

La Recicleta was a bike shop that used recycled parts almost exclusively. Their bicycles were probably the cheapest in the city—they were sometimes even free. More than a business, La Recicleta was a labor of love: bike fans spent long hours playing around with parts, trying to make them fit; neighborhood kids were always hanging around, getting free help in fixing their bikes. It was like a hack lab, but with bike mechanics instead of programmers. But, unfortunately, Recicleta did not fit into Barcelona's new planned scheme of things. It lacked any licences; it was run out of a squatted storefront. So a few months ago the store got a visit from some city officials threatening high fines, effectively shutting them down. La Opera, a squatted social center in Hospitalet which had a free bike shop that used recycled material, was also recently evicted, and Can Masdeu, another high-visibility space in Nou Barris, is under threat of eviction as well.

D—, who was active in Recicleta, asked me the following: "Do you ever wonder what happens to all the bicycles the Ajuntament confiscates? The mal-parked bikes, the ones that they find on the streets, the ones belonging to owners who refuse to pay the fines. In some other cities, after a bike sits in the municipal bike graveyard for a year, it gets auctioned off." The Recicleta people, with their vested interest in bike-recycling, tried to find out. And they found out that the thousands of bikes held by the city simply get sent to the scrap yard to be recycled into metal.

What is it that makes Barcelona a "progressive" city? It is Barcelona’s progressive inhabitants, with their endless creative low-cost proposals, which make the city what it is. People should be encouraged and given the tools to solve their own transportation problems responding to their ecological concerns. By subcontracting supposedly environmentalist solutions to massive corporations, however, the city is snatching the Allen wrench from inhabitants’ hands and promoting bike use as a passive service, provided, like most everything else is, by big business and sophisticated bureaucracy. While offering a flojo bicycling solution for credit card holders, the Ajuntament is making life difficult for cyclists and not solving the lack of infrastructure in the city. The city would do better to support existing tendencies, which are ecological in the profound sense, rather than working against them, erasing them and replacing them with superficial environmentalism.

I hate Bicing. It's not that I don’t think Barcelona should have a public bike program. I'm all for it, but I think the Bicing project epitomizes the greenwashing and hypocrisy which is the Barcelona "brand."

Mine’s Bigger Than Yours

Why Velib and Paris is una mica millor than Barna and Bicing

by Joe Littenberg

You could say it’s all bullshit and stop reading now. You could say it’s basically the same system, funded by the same baddies (malos). You could say that it’s plagued by the same problems. But you would be wrong. I mean, sure, you wouldn’t be really, really wrong — but still wrong. There are differences. There are size differences. Mine is bigger than yours.

Whatever damn deal the mayor of Barcelona struck with Clear Channel in order to get Bicing up and corriendo, it seems he could have done a spot better (ethical concerns aside) by speaking to JCDecaux instead. JCD, the ad/communications/innovation/design monster that set up Paris’ Velib system in exchange for exclusive rights to 1.628 Paris billboards, has given parisianos a whole lot more bang for their euro, not to mention a little confidence boost. Did I mention mine is bigger than yours?

Yes, my amigos, the Velib bicycle is a real bicycle. None of this long-stem and tiny-little-wheels Bicing bullshit. This is a fucking bicycle. It’s heavy and sturdy and comoda and it parks like a normal bicycle should. In short, it’s bigger and better than yours. But Velib has gone even further to make its system one of the best bike-as-public-transportation systems around.

To start, you can grab a Velib no matter who you are as long as you have a major credit card. Can’t steal a bike? Just steal a credit card. Tourists can swing the Velib as easily as true Parisians with 1-day or 1-week cards for one euro and five euros respectively. Of course, year-long memberships are available as well.

Velib won’t repossess your wheels when you use your bike for longer than two hours, like the strangely fascist-leaning Bicing policy states it will. Oh, you’ll pay for them extra hours, just like in Barna, but it makes sense considering both systems are intended as a fuente de public transport as opposed to a touring thang.

The Velib bici has a lock built into it for those short little stops when you need to hop off and buy, buy, buy or, if you’re doing the drunk ride home in the early AM, pee, pee, pee. Which brings us to yet another way in which Bicing sucks and totally loses. Velib is open for your cycling pleasure 24 heures every single jour. Come on Barcelona! Put a few drunk people on bikes and you might "inadvertently" just "lose" a few if you know what I mean.  

The problems and complaints about the systems are pretty much the same. "Es que no hay bastantes bicis, tíooooooooo!" (and/or "Cuando quiero aparcar mi Bicing no hay ningún espacio libre!” Boo-fucking-hoo. That’s kinda part of the game, people, and on occasion, bound to happen. Paris, however, combats that problem mucho mejor que Barcelona. Velib opened up in July, 2007, with 750 stations and 10,648 bikes. Bicing opened up with 100 stations and 1,500 bikes. Even with the size differences between the cities (yes, mine’s bigger) Barcelona’s numbers look pathetic. With roughly 1.600.000 citizens, BCN provides one bicycle for every 1.066 people. Estimating Paris’ population at around 2.200.000, Velib provides one bike for every 206. Also, Velib workers haven’t stopped installing new stations as they march towards the goal of 1.451 stations and 20.600 bikes by the end of this year. If your local station is empty of bikes at that point, the closest next station will be within 300 meters. PIMP!

Mine’s bigger.