15

Mass Movement

Bicyclists at a Black Lives Matter rally. Brooklyn, June 2020.

On June 4, 1989, the people of Beijing awoke to find a bicycle graveyard in the heart of the ancient city.

Overnight, tanks had rolled in, and People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops had shot their way through the streets, killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of their fellow citizens, including pro-democracy demonstrators who had occupied the vast plaza of Tiananmen Square for fifty days and nights. The indelible images of the Tiananmen crackdown are the photographs, taken on the afternoon of June 5, of “Tank Man”: an unidentified lone protester facing down a column of tanks on Chang’an Avenue, on the northern edge of the square. Today, those photos are suppressed in China, as are virtually all references to the events of June 4. But in the spring and summer of 1989, TV viewers in China became familiar with a different scene.

When the army retook Tiananmen Square, its first order of business was erasure. The pillows and blankets and tents, the placards and banners, the thirty-three-foot-tall papier-mâché statue that protesters had named the Goddess of Democracy, virtually every trace of the occupation, which, at its height, had seen one million people, mostly students, assemble in the square—all of it was reduced to rubble, plowed into piles, and either burned or airlifted away by helicopters. The footage broadcast on television in the succeeding days and weeks showed a spectacle of order restored: sweeping views of the now pristine and vacant square. Or almost vacant. At least one reminder of the protest and its violent end remained, and was caught in the slow camera pan across Tiananmen Square that aired over and over again. It was a picture of carnage: dozens of bicycles, mangled and flattened by army tanks, and left behind in a heap.

There could be no question that the government wanted the Chinese people to see that wreckage, and to heed the message it sent. The Tiananmen protesters had been a cycling army. The uprising was touched off by the death of Hu Yaobang, the former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary, who had been forced to resign in 1987 due to his support for pro-democracy activists. Hu was a hero to reform-minded Chinese citizens, and when news of his fatal heart attack reached Beijing’s university campuses on April 15, 1989, students began gathering for impromptu demonstrations. A Beijing Normal University student reportedly “took a bicycle and a loudspeaker to organize the chaotic crowd,” and soon they were marching together toward Tiananmen Square. One of those protesters, Zhang Boli, was a thirty-year-old journalist who was attending a training program for writers at Beijing University. Zhang realized that the students “needed to propose something to the government.” So he stopped marching, took out pen and paper, and jotted down a list of demands—including calls for democracy, for freedom of the press, for an end to corruption—which became the basis of the movement. “I wrote down seven requests,” Zhang recalled, “and rode a bike to catch up with the others.”

Over the next several days, thousands more made the journey to Tiananmen Square, pouring into the plaza that held the Great Hall of the People, the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, and other symbols and citadels of party power. A huge portrait of Hu was installed on the Monument to the People’s Heroes, the ten-story obelisk that rises above the square. On April 22, more than one hundred thousand students gathered outside the Great Hall of the People, where Hu’s memorial service was being held, demanding an audience with the Chinese premier, Li Peng. In the Politburo, a debate was raging. Demonstrations had spread across the length and breadth of China. Li and other hard-liners were pressuring Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader, to take aggressive steps to repress the protests. On April 26, an editorial in the state newspaper the People’s Daily denounced the movement as “a well-planned plot” designed to “throw the country into turmoil.”

But demonstrators still flooded into Tiananmen Square, and many came on bicycles. Most pedaled single-speed roadsters. Others rode tricycle rickshaws with cargo flatbeds. The cyclists carried flags and banners emblazoned with handwritten slogans, which streamed behind them in the breeze. One observer compared the procession to a fleet of tall ships—a bicycle regatta, sailing down the avenues and alleyways of the city. Some of the protesters linked arms while riding, a kind of trick-cycling stunt that doubled as a display of solidarity and might.

On May 10, students held a massive “bicycle demonstration” in support of journalists who had issued demands for press freedoms. More than ten thousand cyclists joined the twenty-five-mile circumnavigation of Beijing, which followed the line of the old city wall en route to Tiananmen Square. Philip J. Cunningham, an American student living in Beijing, was among the legions who set out that day from the campus of Beijing University. In a memoir, Tiananmen Moon (2009), Cunningham recalled the climax of the ride, a triumphant surge into the square in violation of police orders:

The mad dash across Tiananmen Square was the high point of the day. A defiant burst of energy propelled us clear across the forbidden ground in a giant, diagonal slash…. From the vantage point of a gliding bicycle, it was a magnificent scene. Before us and behind us, red flags and school banners lashed the air and unfurled in the jet stream of rushing cycles. This gave the illusion that flags and banners, some strapped to bicycles, others held aloft by skilled cyclists, were flying above the crowd under their own power, like the magical brooms of the sorcerer’s apprentice.

It is no exaggeration to say that bicycles and tricycles kept the Tiananmen occupation going. In the square, bikes were used to mount flagpoles and to support tents. People slept on and underneath cargo tricycles. Bikes and trikes ferried supplies and sustenance into Tiananmen Square. They were used as food and beverage stands. When more than three thousand protesters went on a hunger strike, volunteer doctors and nurses attached homemade red crosses to their handlebars and biked to Tiananmen. Cargo tricycles were converted into field hospital beds to treat the ailing.

Bicycles became even more essential after May 20, when martial law was declared in Beijing and public transit ground to a standstill. Protesters rode bikes between university campuses to convey messages and share intelligence. The Goddess of Democracy sculpture was delivered to the square from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, arriving piece by piece on the back of tricycle rickshaws. The students erected the statue just opposite the Tiananmen Gate, where it stood facing the iconic twenty-foot-tall portrait of Chairman Mao.

On the night of June 3, as PLA tanks rumbled across Beijing on the way to Tiananmen Square, citizens tried to thwart the advance by piling bicycles in the streets to create barricades. When the troops moved into the square in the early-morning hours of June 4, some protesters used their bikes to flee for their lives. Some stayed and fought as best they could, thrusting their bicycles at the enormous armored vehicles. Witnesses have said that riders of bicycles and tricycles saved many lives that night. Brave cyclists pedaled into the teeth of gunfire, retrieving the wounded and speeding them to hospitals as bullets whizzed past. Others were unlucky. They were shot down or crushed beneath the treads of tanks, and died amid the ruins of their bikes.

______

Three years later. About six thousand miles across the North Pacific. One evening in October 1992, a few dozen people were gathered in San Francisco’s SoMa district, in a narrow street lined with small apartment buildings, garages, and light industrial businesses. The ground-floor space behind the roll-up door at 498 Natoma Street was home to Fixed Gear, an underground bike shop and “bicycle salon” that was a magnet for the city’s bike messengers and cycling activists. That night, the crowd had come to view a screening of Return of the Scorcher, a documentary by a local filmmaker, Ted White, that celebrated “radical bike history” and advocated a bicycling renaissance as a remedy for social and ecological ills.

The previous year, White had traveled to China with a friend, a New York bicycle designer named George Bliss, to chronicle bike culture in the world’s most populous nation. The Tiananmen crackdown had crushed China’s bicycling insurgents. But when White and Bliss arrived in Guangzhou, a port city of 3.5 million on the banks of the Pearl River, they found another bicycle brigade: the great masses of Chinese citizens, commuters and children and the elderly, who swarmed the streets on two wheels, every day, everywhere.

China was the Zixingche wang guo, the “Kingdom of the Bicycle,” the nation that had embraced cycling on an unprecedented scale. It has been suggested that the country’s affinity for bicycles has roots in its agricultural traditions: for centuries, farmers in the rice-growing regions of central and southern China had “pedaled” the treadles of water wheels to irrigate fields. But the bicycle itself first entered Chinese consciousness in reports from diplomats who had encountered the exotic “self-moving cart” on missions to Europe. “On the avenues people ride on a vehicle with only two wheels, which is held together by a pipe,” wrote an envoy from the court of the Tongzhi emperor who traveled to Paris in 1866. “They dash along like galloping horses.”

In the 1890s, the safety bicycle arrived in China, finding niche popularity among a small group of elites and expats in cosmopolitan Shanghai. The failure of the bicycle to gain wider acceptance may in part be explained by its status as a Western import. In an era marked by the rising anti-imperialist fervor that culminated in the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), the association of bikes with missionaries and colonial officers was a black mark. But other factors—in particular, cost—kept the bicycle from reaching the masses. The most famous cyclist in early-twentieth-century China was none other than Pu Yi, the teenage last emperor of the Qing dynasty, who ordered the removal of the doorway thresholds in the Forbidden City so he could bike unimpeded through the palace complex.

History would soon sweep away the vestiges of China’s old ruling order; Pu Yi was expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924 and sent into the first of many exiles. Bicycles, though, would remain and proliferate. In the 1930s and ’40s, China’s politics were tumultuous, but its industrial economy boomed. The development of a domestic bicycle industry brought prices down, and cycling became a favored form of transit among the Republic of China’s modernizing middle classes. By 1948, there were about 500,000 bicycles in use across the country, including 230,000 in the city of Shanghai.

And then: 1949 and revolution. From the start, the People’s Republic of China promoted the bicycle as a tool for everyday use and a spur to the economy. The first Five-Year Plan, Chairman Mao’s sweeping economic-development initiative, laid out an ambitious vision for the growth of China’s bicycle industry. In the decade that followed, small manufacturers were consolidated into large ones, and bike producers were given access to rationed raw materials. Like other necessities of daily life in China, bikes were allocated to citizens through a coupon system, but the government encouraged cycling by prioritizing coupons and providing subsidies for workers who needed to commute to their places of employment. China’s streetscapes and landscapes—from Beijing’s narrow hutongs to the paths that wound through fields and paddies in the agrarian hinterland—were already conducive to cycling. The state went a step further, creating new infrastructure in cities, including wide bike lanes, which were segregated from automotive traffic on broad Soviet-style boulevards.

Within a decade, the number of bikes in China had doubled. The bicycle had also attained new cultural status. It was an emblem of the nation itself, a symbol of “an egalitarian social system that promised little comfort but a reliable ride through life.” Eventually, the bicycle would become something close to compulsory: along with a watch and sewing machine and radio, it was one of the proverbial “three rounds and a sound,” the must-have possessions for all Chinese adults who wished to get married and start a family. New bicycles rolled off the factory floors of state-owned manufacturers. They were simple, sturdy bikes with a single gear and unadorned black frames, but their brand names had a mythic chime, suggestive of majesty and durability: Phoenix, Pheasant, Red Flag, Flying Arrival, Golden Lion, Mountain River, One Hundred Hills.

Most hallowed of all were the “Ford and GM of China,” the Shanghai-based firm Forever (Yongjiu) and the de facto national bicycle, the Flying Pigeon (Fei Ge), a hefty machine modeled on the 1932 British Raleigh Roadster. The Flying Pigeon Company was headquartered in the northeastern city of Tianjin, in a former munitions plant that Mao ordered converted to bicycle production in 1950. When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, he promised “a Flying Pigeon in every household”: the Chinese people’s journey into an era of reform was to be made aboard the hard-wearing two-wheeler. During this period the Flying Pigeon was said to be the most popular mechanized vehicle on the planet.

Statistics appear to support the claim. In the 1980s, Flying Pigeon produced four million bicycles per year and employed a workforce of ten thousand. By the end of the decade, China’s annual bicycle sales had topped thirty-five million, surpassing global sales for motor vehicles. There were more than eight million bicycles on the streets of Beijing alone; 76 percent of the city’s road space was occupied by bikes. Yet the throngs who cycled to the Tiananmen Square protests represented just a tiny fraction of China’s unfathomably immense bicycle fleet: in 1989, there were some 225 million bikes on the nation’s roads. The numbers bespoke a cultural attachment, a sense of the centrality of bicycles to China and “Chineseness,” that penetrated the realm of national myth. The bicycle, writes Paul Smethurst, “was so absorbed into the state-sponsored culture in the 1960s that most citizens believed (and still believe) that it was a Chinese invention.”

______

This was the bicycle kingdom to which Ted White pilgrimaged, with his movie camera and his friend George Bliss, in the autumn of 1991. White, twenty-eight, and Bliss, thirty-seven, were bike lovers and bike advocates, part of an activist vanguard that aimed to revive cycling in American cities. They knew that once upon a time, in the 1890s, it was the United States whose streets had teemed with millions of cyclists. White and Bliss dreamed that those bicycling armies could be revived, and urban America could be wrested from the grip of car culture. Both men had spent time in the Netherlands, Denmark, and other northern European bastions of cycling. In China, they were sure, they would find more inspiration—another vision of the bike-friendly society they longed to build, or rebuild, back in the States.

But when White and Bliss set foot in Guangzhou, disembarking from a ferryboat that had carried them to the mainland from Hong Kong, they beheld a cycling culture of another order. There were bicycles in every direction, rolling through the city in columns too vast for the eye to take in. The traffic carried a blur of young and old, male and female, riding those famous black roadsters. There were load-bearing bikes and tricycles too, with goods battened onto racks and cargo beds. Moments after arriving, White watched as a paraplegic man swept by on a hand cycle. White had long championed the ideal of “velodiversity,” of streets that made room for all kinds of bikes and bike-like devices. Guangzhou itself appeared to be a kind of vast pedal-operated machine, powered by human sinews and by the whirring of countless cranks and chains and wheels.

It was this spectacle that White captured on film that day and in the days following, stalking the streets with a camera on his shoulder. A year later, in October 1992, at Fixed Gear on Natoma Street in San Francisco, an audience of a few dozen watched Guangzhou’s bicycle parade pour past on-screen. The crowd that gathered that night to see Return of the Scorcher were Ted White’s people: bicycle people, messengers and artists and young parents with child seats mounted on their bikes, the kind of urban bohemians for whom cycling was both a daily routine and a political cause. A number of those in attendance were part of a new movement that aimed to increase the visibility of San Francisco’s cyclists by staging a group ride through the city on the last Friday of every month.

A few weeks earlier, on September 25, 1992, about sixty cyclists had gathered in Justin Herman Plaza, near the San Francisco Bay waterfront, for the first of these rides, a journey that flowed southwest on Market Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares in town. “Aren’t you sick & tired of having to fight for your life on city streets?” a flyer advertising the event asked. There were precedents, of course, for protest rides that championed bicycles over cars. But the San Franciscans had a sharp political critique, a keen awareness of how the system was rigged against bicyclists and a strong sense of indignation about it: “Why are we treated like cars by the law, but like obnoxious and unwelcome obstructions by people in cars?” The ride’s organizers held up a vision of strength in numbers, of bicyclists asserting their right to the roads by converging on them, en masse: “Imagine 25, 500, or even 1000+ bikes heading up Market together!”

Now, at the Return of the Scorcher screening, the crowd at Fixed Gear saw images of another kind of bicycle armada: the cycling commuters of Guangzhou, rolling over bridges and fanning across avenues as they went about their daily business. This footage was intercut with an interview with George Bliss, the New York bicycle designer. In China, Bliss said, he’d learned “how it feels to get up in the morning and get on a bike and go to work with a million other people, riding with jingling bells.” The film, Bliss added, could not do justice to the experience of cycling in Guangzhou: “It’s not the same as being in it, and being swept along by it, and feeling it pour around you and coming at you from every direction simultaneously.” Bliss was especially impressed by the unwritten rules of the road, the systems that had developed organically on streets where motor vehicles had to yield to bikes, which far outnumbered them. Describing the way cyclists would navigate busy intersections with no traffic lights, Bliss said, “It was a kind of critical mass thing where all the cyclists would pile up and then go.”

That phrase, “critical mass,” struck a chord with the audience at Fixed Gear. The organizers of the monthly group ride had initially called it a “Commute Clot”—catchy enough, perhaps, but it cast the ride in negative terms, as a thrombosis impeding the flow of the city’s lifeblood. “Critical mass” sounded a different note, suggestive of both protest and power. Within days of the Return of the Scorcher screening, new flyers appeared, inviting cyclists to “Join the Critical Mass.” In November, Chris Carlsson, a writer and activist prominent in San Francisco bike circles, printed up a pamphlet, Critical Comments on the Critical Mass, hailing the nascent movement as “a public space where real politics between real people can unfold” and envisioning a radically altered San Francisco, a future in which “wild eco corridors,” laced with bike paths and walkways and restored creeks, would crisscross the city. “We can be proud of our choice to bicycle, and we can and should flaunt it,” Carlsson wrote. “Our CRITICAL MASS should be a mass and it should be critical!”

______

What does the future hold for the bicycle? What does the bicycle’s future portend for the wider world? Will our cities move to the thrum of millions of bikes, as Beijing and Guangzhou did three decades ago? Or will cyclists find themselves, as they did in San Francisco in 1992, unwelcome on the streets, and in a fight for their lives?

No easy answers present themselves. History twists and turns in peculiar ways. The cyclists who pedaled along Market Street on those first Critical Mass rides, a confederacy of just several dozen, could not have anticipated that their local protest would launch a global movement. In the years since, thousands of Critical Mass rides have been staged, in more than six hundred cities, on six continents. Yet Critical Mass has not strayed far from its roots. Critical Mass isn’t an organization; it’s an idea. There is no leadership or membership. In San Francisco in the early ’90s, participants established the tradition of “xerocracy,” whereby anyone could take the initiative to plot routes for the rides and distribute photocopied maps—a decentralized approach that worked both strategically, to stymie police who might intervene to stop the protests, and ideologically, as an expression of nonhierarchical principles.

Over the years, other tactics have evolved and spread from city to city. Critical Mass participants often employ the maneuver known as “corking,” stationing cyclists at the intersections of cross streets to block traffic and allow the Mass to roll through red lights. There is the “bike lift,” when riders dismount and raise their bicycles overhead. An even more arresting piece of street theater is the “die-in,” where riders lay their bodies and bicycles down on the street, in a group simulation of a massacre. The tactic appears to have first been used in Montreal in the 1970s by the proto-Critical Mass group Le Monde à Bicyclette; it is intended to evoke the injuries and deaths inflicted on bicyclists by cars and to suggest the peril we all face in an age of ecological collapse. But the die-in calls to mind other terrors—including, of course, the bicycle graveyard in Tiananmen.

Nearly everywhere Critical Mass rides have been staged, they have met resistance from law enforcement, motorists, and government officials. But there is no doubt that Critical Mass has made its mark. To the extent that cities across the globe have taken steps in recent years to adopt policies favorable to cycling—to the extent that even in those places where few changes have taken place, the question of bikes, cars, and safe streets is now a topic of debate—some credit must go to the activists who have taken to the roads in numbers and pressed the point.

Most Critical Mass rides are modest in size: a few dozen cyclists, maybe a couple hundred. Some are far larger. In Budapest, two Critical Mass rides held annually, on Earth Day (April 22) and International Car-Free Day (September 22), draw tens of thousands of riders, transforming the elegant avenues and bridges of that city into bicycle-mobbed terrain that calls to mind the streetscapes of China. To be precise: the streetscapes of yesteryear’s China. Here we must take account of another momentous historical twist. Over the past three decades, while activists and policy makers around the world have pursued the dream of building a cycling culture like China’s, China itself has made a drastic move in the opposite direction—embracing automobility and clearing its roads of the bike-riding masses that were, seemingly, as organic and omnipresent as the earth underfoot and the sky overhead.

It’s a change that can be traced back to Tiananmen Square and the spring of 1989. In the aftermath of Tiananmen, the Chinese government moved to suppress all vestiges of the pro-democracy movement and to purge those factions within the CCP that had advocated political liberalization. At the same time, Deng and other party leaders recognized that a new social compact was called for. In the 1990s, China instituted Deng’s program of economic “reform and opening,” casting aside the old Maoist ideal of collectivism in favor of competition and consumption. The government dissolved the people’s communes and shuttered the state-run factories, instituting a new form of market-economy socialism that welcomed foreign trade, direct investment, and private enterprise. The system rested on a Hobbesian bargain: Chinese citizens gained unprecedented personal prosperity while abjuring basic rights and freedoms, leaving politics and governance under the CCP’s unchallenged control. The result was “the Chinese miracle,” the supercharged economic expansion that unfolded through the ’90s and into the new millennium, and will culminate—around 2028, experts estimate—when China overtakes the United States as the world’s largest economy.

Cynicism about the government runs deep in China. Many citizens quietly disdain the CCP’s corruption, propaganda, and repression of dissidents. They resent the censors who expunge “subversive” material from the internet, and the facial-recognition systems and surveillance drones that cast a digital dragnet over the population. In private, they may roll their eyes at Xi Jinping, China’s president and paramount leader, who has promoted a Mao-like cult of personality and sought in recent years to tighten ideological adherence to “Xi Jinping Thought” at all levels of society.

But in a nation with a history of shattering political violence, deprivation, and famine—where the traumas of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution still loom in collective memory—the trade-offs are widely judged to be worth it. By most measures of safety, security, and material comfort, the Chinese people are vastly better off today than they were at the time of the Tiananmen uprising, or anytime before. In 1989, China’s GDP per capita was $310, a figure lower than that of such nations as Sri Lanka, Guinea-Bissau, and Nicaragua. Three decades later, the per capita GDP reached $10,216, and hundreds of millions had been pulled out of poverty, into the largest middle class any nation has ever known.

That new middle class, 400 million and counting, enjoys not just a baseline standard of living unimaginable to previous generations—ample food, decent housing—but also disposable income and nice stuff: the wares and trappings of the consumerist good life. There are an estimated 1.6 billion cellphone subscriptions in China, a figure that exceeds the country’s population; a reported 1 billion Chinese have internet access. (At least a third of them use a VPN to circumnavigate the government’s Great Firewall.) They purchase name-brand clothing and upmarket household commodities. And more than 200 million are owners of the luxury good that has come to epitomize individual ambition, success, and freedom in the new China: a car.

This may be the most miraculous—or, at least, the most consequential—development associated with China’s economic miracle. Until 1984, it was illegal for Chinese citizens to purchase a passenger car; at the time of the Tiananmen uprising, only 1 in 74,000 Chinese commuters owned a motor vehicle. In a series of directives issued in the early ’90s, the government designated the auto industry a “pillar” of China’s new economy, laying out heady plans to ramp up domestic motor vehicle production and seek joint ventures with foreign manufacturers, with the goal of producing 3.5 million cars by 2010. From today’s perspective, that figure seems laughably modest. In 2009, the year China surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest automobile producer and consumer, nearly 14 million cars were built in the nation’s factories. Four years later, China set a record for the most passenger cars sold in a country in a single year, 20 million.

Car culture expresses itself architecturally. To make room for motor vehicles, China has shapeshifted, altering its landscape and built environment at a rate, and on a scale, without analogue. Today, China’s network of expressways covers nearly one hundred thousand miles, more than twice the size of the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Those roads tie together a nation of sprawling cities, urbs and suburbs and exurbs, many of them brand-new places, populated by millions who have relocated from the countryside in recent decades. (China now boasts more than one hundred cities with more than one million residents.) These new urban settlements were constructed for automobiles, on a scale inhospitable to traditional patterns of city life and traditional means of city transit.

Meanwhile, China’s older cities have been retrofitted for cars. China has pulled down and built up, razed and refigured, bulldozing residential districts and demolishing ancient urban cores to construct multilane roads, overpasses, and highways. Many cities have been so comprehensively overhauled that lifelong residents find themselves disoriented—lost in their own hometowns or convinced that the towns themselves have been lost. “So many past events and recollections that were once clearly inscribed in cityspace are now all gone,” a native of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in southwestern China, told the anthropologist Li Zhang. “I can only trace them by looking at…faded black-and-white photographs in archives.” Since the 1990s, an estimated 90 percent of Beijing’s eight thousand hutongs—the famous courtyard alleyways where residential life thrived for centuries—have been destroyed, replaced by high-rises and ring roads carrying eight lanes of traffic. To appreciate the magnitude of China’s urban transfiguration, the scholar Beth E. Notar has written, you must imagine a scenario in which “most of the old neighborhoods of Boston, New York and Washington, D.C. were demolished and rebuilt within ten years, along with those of Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Phoenix, Seattle and San Francisco.”

As the old streets vanished, so did the cycling multitudes that had filled those streets. The numbers tell a tale of astonishing change. In 1996, bicycle ownership in China reached an all-time high of 523 million, or 1.5 bicycles per household. But with the onset of “automobile frenzy,” bike usage went into a precipitous decline. Within ten years, more Chinese people were traveling by car than by bicycle, and bike riding had become a marginal activity even in China’s oldest and most traditionally bike-thronged cities.

This was, among other things, a measure of the CCP’s awesome ability to wield centralized power and engineer grand social transformations. Just as China’s unparalleled cycling culture had been a creation of the state, the product of meticulous planning and investment under the regimes of Mao and Deng, the bicycle’s demise was a policy achievement. It is noteworthy that China’s huge automobility push was accompanied by lavish investment in alternative forms of transit, including the construction of the world’s most extensive high-speed rail network and the creation of new subway and bus lines in cities. China’s devotion to cars, in other words, was not monomaniacal—but the government’s promotion of car culture was based on ridding the roads of bikes, and that commitment was absolute. It pursued a program of, as it were, de-bikeification, conceived in Beijing and implemented at the municipal level.

China’s Road Safety Law, enacted in 1994, included a provision permitting local authorities to reclaim road space previously allocated to non-motorized transport. Cities across the nation moved swiftly, converting bike lanes to car lanes and parking spaces for cars. Planners set ambitious goals for moving cyclists off the roads. Guangzhou, whose bicycling critical mass so thrilled George Bliss and Ted White, formulated a transport master plan in the early 1990s that aimed for a 40 percent reduction in bicycle commuting by the year 2013. (That target was met, and eclipsed, a decade early: by 2003, bicycle usage in the city had decreased by about 60 percent.) Other cities took more draconian steps. In the early 2000s, Shanghai declared a total ban on bike riding in certain busy downtown areas. In the same period, the bustling city of Dalian, in the northeastern coastal province of Liaoning, pronounced itself a “non-bicycle city.”

The changes were especially dramatic in the great cycling city of Beijing. In 1996, there were an estimated nine million bicycles in the capital, roughly 2.5 bikes per household, and nearly two-thirds of all trips in the city were made by bike. Within fifteen years, the number of bicycles on the roads had fallen to under four million, and travel by bicycle accounted for just 16.7 percent of Beijing journeys. In part, this was a reflection of the city’s steroidal growth. Today, the urban area of Beijing is more than ten times the size it was in 1990, covering an expanse larger than the state of Rhode Island. Under the old Communist work unit system, citizens lived close to their workplaces and could easily cycle to work. But for millions in sprawling twenty-first-century Beijing, life without a car is untenable.

As car culture tightened its grip, conditions on Chinese streets began to resemble those that had prompted cyclists in San Francisco to found Critical Mass. The roads were congested, wreathed in exhaust fumes, and dangerous. Bikes were frequently struck by cars, and often, blame for the accidents was attributed to the cyclists. Bicycles were also said by critics to be a cause of the traffic epidemic, a judgment that led to the closure of more bike lanes. The hostile conditions compelled more cyclists to forsake bikes for cars or, in the case of those who couldn’t afford cars, to opt for mass transit. In Beijing, this development was commemorated, the researchers Glen Norcliffe and Gao Boyang Gao noted in 2018, by a new feature of the landscape: discarded bicycles, which were “abandoned by the thousands” and lay “in neglected piles outside apartment buildings and elsewhere.” They were monuments, you might say, to the lost bicycle kingdom.

They were monuments, also, to a change of heart—an emotional and ideological alteration as profound as those proscribed in policy papers and laid down in asphalt. The Chinese had fallen out of love with bikes. It wasn’t just that a nation of motorists now regarded bicycles, like San Francisco’s drivers did in 1992, as “obnoxious and unwelcome obstructions.” Anti-bicycle sentiment in China ran deeper and was more inflected by stigma and shame. In a society where the car had become the ultimate status symbol—the holy grail for untold millions of middle-class strivers, and for millions more striving to join the middle class—the bicycle was viewed as embarrassing, old-fashioned, “for losers,” “for the poor.” Bikes were anathema to a modern lifestyle, to the ambitions and aspirations of the young and upwardly mobile. Fashion-conscious Chinese women were now “choosing skirts instead of pants [and] giving up their bikes”—a mirror-image inversion of the 1890s boom, when women on the cutting edge paraded their modernity by forsaking dresses for bloomers and bikes. And where the bicycle had previously been an indispensable asset in the Chinese marriage marketplace, one of the essential “three rounds,” it was now an impediment to romantic success. On a 2010 episode of a popular TV dating show, If You Are the One, a twenty-year-old contestant was asked by a suitor to go for a bicycle ride on a date. Her response became a much-memed viral catchphrase. “I’d rather cry in a BMW,” she said, “than smile on a bicycle.”

______

If you want to begin wrapping your mind around global car culture—if, for that matter, you want to ponder the gnarly complexities of life on planet Earth in the globalized twenty-first century—a good place to start is Wuhan, the city of eleven million in Hubei Province, in China’s industrial heartland. Like so many Chinese cities, Wuhan was once a biking town, but most of its millions of cyclists long ago ditched their two wheels. Today, Wuhan is a car city par excellence. It is one China’s “Detroits,” a major production base for the automobile industry. Each year, millions of cars, approximately 10 percent of all those manufactured in China, are built in Wuhan’s factories. Wuhan is the headquarters of the Dongfeng Motor Corporation, one of China’s “Big Four” auto companies. Several foreign car makers—Honda, Nissan, Peugeot, Renault, and General Motors, among others—have plants in Wuhan. The city is also home to hundreds of automobile parts suppliers, which export their products across the world.

In the winter of 2020, Wuhan gained notoriety as a different kind of global origin point. The first known case of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was identified in Wuhan in December 2019. The precise nature of the virus’s origins was unknown, and is still the subject of heated debate. But the manner in which Covid-19 became a pandemic, rampaging across China and spreading to virtually every nation on earth, is no mystery. It moved at speed, in a world that moves at speed. It followed the same pathways as the spark plugs and catalytic converters and steering-gear components that are assembled in Wuhan and dispatched across the planet. It rolled out of town on the Shanghai-Chongqing Expressway. It made ocean passages on the container ships that ferry goods out of China. It zoomed above the seas in Boeings and Airbuses.

And then, as Covid took hold in one nation after another, everything slowed down and stopped moving. In cities great and small, a hush fell over the streets. Cars largely vanished from roads, buses and subways ceased operation, the skies were emptied of airplanes. Everyday existence had taken on a surreal and terrifying texture. But amid the dread and death, new, and very old, forms of life appeared.

Quarantining city dwellers looked out their windows and beheld arcadian scenes. Animals were wandering into abandoned city centers. Boars roamed in packs through Haifa, Israel; pumas appeared on the streets of Santiago. In Istanbul, where marine traffic had dwindled and a fishing ban was in place, dolphins were spotted in the Bosporus, far closer to the city’s shoreline than they normally ventured. There were similar spectacles in India, where hundreds of thousands of migrating flamingos turned Mumbai wetlands into a sea of pink, and herds of buffalo strode untroubled down empty highways in New Delhi.

Photos and videos of rewilded cities shot around the internet, including many that were clearly fake. (No, dolphins were not frolicking in the canals of Venice.) But the images, real and phony alike, offered a ready metaphor, and a degree of comfort, to those seeking meaning in the madness of the pandemic. Perhaps things were returning to the way they should be; perhaps a better existence was possible, one where we recalibrate our rhythms to match those of the natural world and life moves at a statelier, saner pace.

Changes were already taking place. There were other creatures roving cities. Bicyclists were repopulating the roads. With options for public transit reduced, and urbanites compelled to put distance between themselves and their neighbors, the rusty three-speed in the basement had new allure. As lockdown restrictions eased, millions began hauling out old bikes or buying new ones. “What do bikes and toilet paper have in common?” asked The Washington Post in the spring of 2020. “Both are flying out of stores amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

Between March 2020, when the lockdown began in the United States, and April 2021, year-over-year bicycle sales rose nearly 60 percent nationally. Lines stretched down sidewalks outside bicycle shops. Many shops ran out of bikes, and additional inventory was slow to arrive, as manufacturers struggled to keep up with orders and supply chains were disrupted. Bike theft skyrocketed. (The owner of a Brooklyn bike store told a journalist that the best way to avoid having one’s bicycle stolen under the current conditions was to “sleep with it next to you.”) Many of those buying bikes were recreational riders, seeking a socially distanced kind of exercise. In the early months of the outbreak, a nonprofit group that promotes the conversion of defunct railway lines into paths for biking and walking reported record ridership on American cycle trails. But there was also an explosion of bicycle commuting in such unlikely places as Houston and Los Angeles, where only a tiny percentage of the population traveled by bike in normal times. A study conducted in the first weeks of the outbreak found that one in ten American adults had recently ridden a bicycle for the first time in a year or longer, and a majority said they planned to continue cycling after the crisis passed.

America’s pandemic-provoked “transit upheaval,” as CNBC put it, was only one part of a much larger phenomenon—a global “Great Covid-19 Bicycle Boom.” In Santo Domingo, Lima, Milan, Moscow, Dubai, Beirut, Abidjan, Nairobi, Singapore, Seoul, and hundreds of other cities, cyclists were amassing on roadways. In many places, they took advantage of existing infrastructure, converging on bike lanes and patronizing cycle-share systems in unprecedented numbers.

But cities were assembling new infrastructure on the fly. “Corona cycleways” arose across the globe. Emergency funds were appropriated, programs were fast-tracked, incentives and subsidies to bolster biking were introduced. Pop-up bike lanes appeared in Mexico City and Bogotá, in Kampala and Cape Town, in Jakarta and Tokyo, in Sydney and Auckland. In the Philippines, temporary cycle lanes, installed in central Manila after Covid hit, were expanded into a permanent network covering two hundred miles and passing through twelve of Metro Manila’s sixteen cities. India’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, citing the “cycling revolution” that had taken over the country during the pandemic, launched the “India Cycles4Change” initiative, calling on municipalities to “transform…into havens for cycling” with new infrastructure, the establishment of open streets, outreach to women riders, and other measures.

Some of the most aggressive moves to remake roads and claim space for bikes were undertaken in the United Kingdom and Europe. A study published in the spring of 2021 found that new cycleways had been installed in 106 European cities since the onset of the pandemic. Under the leadership of Anne Hidalgo, its zealously pro-cycling mayor, Paris added hundreds of miles of bicycle “coronapistes” in the first months of the crisis and banned cars from the Rue de Rivoli, transforming one of the city’s most famous thoroughfares into a two-mile-long cycling cavalcade. The following year, Hidalgo introduced a more dramatic plan to ban through traffic in several arrondissements, a scheme that would turn much of central Paris into a virtually car-free zone.

These changes were testaments to the depth of the Covid crisis, how it had reordered priorities and unlocked political possibilities, emboldening policy makers and citizens to take action. Or maybe “emboldening” is exactly wrong; perhaps it was simply fear, the blind terror incited by Covid, that was the real driver of change. Commuters, scared of contracting the virus in buses and trains and taxicabs, gravitated to bicycles, a means of transit that put breathing space between themselves and the neighbors who had suddenly become nemeses, potential vectors of disease. These new cyclists rode on routes delineated by traffic cones, plastic bollards, and police sawhorses, the pathways that authorities patched together in panicky haste, desperate to get people moving again and to jolt moribund economies back to life. The result, in any case, was the realization of long-held hopes. The cycling cities dreamed of for decades by Critical Mass riders and other activists were—despite and because of a historic catastrophe—coming into view. The paradox was noted in a BBC interview with Will Butler-Adams, the managing director of Brompton, the English bicycle manufacturer famous for its folding bikes. Pedaling through a world gripped by sorrow and trepidation, cyclists found themselves in something like idyllic conditions—in clean air, on safe streets, riding free and easy. They were experiencing, Butler-Adams said, “the joy of…cities as they could be.”

______

New York was one of the places whose roadways, and folkways, were in the throes of transformation. The city’s first case of Covid-19 was documented on March 1, 2020. (Later research revealed that the virus had begun circulating in the five boroughs as early as January.) Soon, New York was the global epicenter of the pandemic. By April 6, there had been more than 72,000 confirmed Covid cases in the city, and at least 2,400 of the infected had perished. On April 7, 774 New Yorkers died. On April 8, there were 810 more deaths.

New Yorkers were learning that a plague brings a macabre logistical problem: lots of corpses that need to be disposed of. Morgues and cemeteries had run out of room, as the city faced what one official called “the equivalent of an ongoing 9/11.” The dead were piling up in refrigerated trucks parked on street corners outside hospitals. On April 9, an Associated Press drone camera captured video of bodies being lowered into a mass grave on a patch of land off the coast of the Bronx. This was Hart Island, a 101-acre strip in Long Island Sound, which for more than a century had been home to New York’s potter’s field, the city’s burial ground for the indigent and anonymous.

The footage, which circulated widely online, induced a shiver. For New Yorkers, Hart Island was a place out of sight and out of mind, a necropolis within the metropolis, cut off from the living population geographically and psychically. The island had been uninhabited for decades, was almost entirely closed to the public, and could be accessed only by the ferries that periodically made the Stygian voyage to deliver the dead and transport the crews, drawn from the city’s prison population, that were tasked with burying the bodies. The AP video showed workers in protective gear arranging coffins in a wide, muddy trench. The bird’s-eye vantage point lent the scene a chilling impersonality. When the burial crew shoveled dirt over the plain wooden boxes, they did so with the unceremonious diligence of a street repair team scooping asphalt into a pothole. It was a glimpse into the abyss.

Death was never out of earshot now. Day and night, sirens howled on the other side of the walls where millions were holed up. From my living room windows, you could see two levels of nearly empty roads. Down below, the Brooklyn streets; above them, resting atop huge steel pillars, a long, loping span of the Gowanus Expressway. Normally, both the streets and the highway were crammed with cars, but the traffic had thinned to a trickle, mostly those wailing ambulances speeding the stricken to hospitals. When the sirens faded, the quiet of the city was startling. You could hear birdsong, and the wind in the trees, and, now and then, lonely footfalls in the street. The silence was broken, each night at precisely seven p.m., by a callithumpian eruption, as New Yorkers leaned out of windows or stepped onto apartment balconies to rattle pots and pans with kitchen utensils, paying noisy tribute to the doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, and other essential workers who were toiling on the front lines while the rest of us stayed inside.

You could hear another sound, too, if you listened closely: the high-pitched hum of electric bicycle motors. The riders of these bikes were deliverymen, carting food orders to quarantining residents. They were frontline workers, too, deemed “essential” by the government. It’s doubtful, though, that many of those who hailed the heroes of the pandemic by banging on kitchenware were thinking of the guy who had just dropped off their dinner of pizza or pad thai.

The delivery workers were mostly immigrants from Latin America: from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Venezuela, and elsewhere. The machines they rode were not fancy e-bikes but hybrid bikes rigged with rechargeable e-bike attachments. Even in non-pandemic times, their jobs were among the most difficult in the city. They faced physical danger from motorists and adverse weather conditions; they were frequent victims of bike theft, often at the point of a gun or knife. Like many gig economy laborers, they were not entitled to a minimum wage, overtime, health coverage, or other benefits, and they complained that portions of their tips were being illegally garnished by the restaurants and the delivery app companies themselves. Most restaurants refused to let them use the bathroom when they came to pick up orders.

The neighborhoods where the delivery workers lived, in Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, had some of the highest Covid rates in the city. The deliverymen were keeping the restaurant industry afloat, feeding hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, and many of them were winding up in coronavirus wards. New York City, it seems, is not so very different from the megacities of the Global South. Dhaka has its rickshawallahs; we have our deliveristas: an underclass of working cyclists, tens of thousands of them, who keep the city going while enduring hardships, hazards, and abuse.

The deliveristas were not the only cyclists riding in the locked-down town. Other essential workers were commuting by bike to avoid Covid exposure on public transportation. In May, with the curve finally flattening, New Yorkers began to emerge from their homes. The pattern established in other cities around the world played out: bike lanes were jammed; share-bike usage was sky-high. And then, in the last week of the month, events more than a thousand miles away drew legions more New Yorkers, and their bicycles, out of lockdown and into the streets.

______

On the evening of May 25, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin after allegedly using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill to buy cigarettes. In the days and weeks that followed, an estimated 15 million Americans joined an uprising that has been called the largest protest movement in the nation’s history. In New York, demonstrators swarmed the city, marching and chanting. Over the weekend of May 30–31, the unrest got wilder. Protesters smashed windows and looted high-end retailers; they tossed Molotov cocktails and torched police cruisers. On Monday night, June 1, Mayor Bill de Blasio imposed a citywide curfew in an effort to restore order.

On the night of June 3, police officers were seen confiscating bicycles from Black Lives Matter demonstrators who were continuing to march in defiance of the eight p.m. curfew. In one widely shared video clip, a jittery camera captured a cop wheeling an apparently commandeered bike; a woman could be heard screaming at the police, asking why bikes were being taken and how protesters were supposed to travel home. Another piece of viral footage showed three policemen clubbing a cyclist with batons on a Manhattan street. It was unclear whether the man was arrested or what became of his bicycle.

In the days that followed, the NYPD’s anti-bicycle actions continued. The Daily News reporter Catherina Gioino tweeted that the police had been ordered to “focus on the bicyclists.” Other social media posts documented arrests and violent attacks on cyclists, including journalists with press credentials. The city’s first curfew since the Second World War had been imposed, according to Mayor de Blasio’s executive order, to curb “assault, vandalism, property damage, and/or looting.” New Yorkers were left to wonder how scenes of cops beating protesters and snatching their bikes—or, in some cases, leaving the bikes littered on the street—squared with the stated objectives.

These incidents were not exactly surprising. The NYPD has a long history of hostility to cyclists, especially cyclists who are also protesters. For years, the police used aggressive, sometimes violent tactics to sweep up participants in Critical Mass rallies. In 2008, an NYPD officer body-slammed a Critical Mass rider; the cop later received a felony conviction for this action and for filing a false criminal complaint in an attempt to frame the cyclist. In 2010, the city agreed to pay a settlement of nearly $1 million to eighty-three Critical Mass riders who had been wrongly detained or arrested between 2004 and 2006.

In the de Blasio era, the NYPD engaged in sporadic crackdowns against bicyclists, issuing tickets, levying fines, and confiscating bikes. (Cycling advocates have characterized these “ticket blitzes”—which often follow incidents in which cyclists are maimed or killed by automobiles—as a form of institutionalized victim blaming.) For years, de Blasio and the NYPD waged “war on e-bikes,” seizing hundreds of bikes, a campaign that almost exclusively hit the city’s deliveristas.

The conflict between law enforcement and cyclists played out nationwide. In Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, and dozens of other cities, protesters pedaled and marched with their bicycles, facing off with police officers who, in many cases, were also mounted on bikes. Bicycle cops have become fixtures of police forces over the past few decades. But in the 2020 protests, Americans saw something new: militarized bicycle police, using violent riot-control tactics against demonstrators who weren’t rioting.

Bike cops unleashed tear gas, shot pepper spray, tossed flash grenades, and pummeled protesters with nightsticks. The officers wielded their bicycles like weapons, using them as shields and battering rams. BikeCo., the North American distributor for Fuji Bikes, issued a statement announcing that it was suspending the sale of police bikes after seeing its products deployed in ways “that we did not intend or design them to be used.”

In New York, the NYPD’s own “elite” unit of bike-mounted officers emerged, wearing uniforms that split the difference between storm trooper, hockey goalie, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. This was the NYPD Strategic Response Group (SRG) Bicycle Squad, which specializes in crowd control. On June 4, the squad participated in police interventions and mass arrests at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in the Bronx, using their bicycles to strike, push, and help to confine, or “kettle,” protesters. Human Rights Watch characterized the NYPD’s actions in the incident as a “planned assault” and “police brutality.”

The SRG Bike Squad’s “Instructor Guide,” a 173-page manual made public by the muckraking news site The Intercept, details the unit’s duties. These include serving as a “force multiplier” at protests and gathering intelligence by monitoring “crowd[s], ring leaders, and/or organizers.” The manual offers examples illustrating the difference between “peaceful” crowds (“Parades or details such as New Year’s Eve”) and “violent” crowds (“Occupy Wall Street, BLM movement, Anti-Trump Demonstrations”), and provides instruction in a number of “aggressive” cycling maneuvers (the “Power Slide,” the “Dynamic Dismount”) that bike officers use to control and subdue. The dystopian trend of American life has not, it seems, spared the bicycle.

______

The high-profile presence of bicycles in the Black Lives Matter uprising was perhaps surprising to some. But transportation issues are social justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and serve low-income neighborhoods inadequately, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by Black and Latino communities. Researchers have found that the fatality rates in road accidents for Black and Latino cyclists are, respectively, 30 percent and 23 percent higher than for whites.

Studies also confirm that police pull over, harass, and arrest nonwhite cyclists at drastically higher rates than whites. A survey in Oakland, a city with a 28 percent Black population, concluded that sixty percent of the cyclists pulled over by police were Black. Studies of tickets issued to bike riders by police in Chicago and Tampa found even more pronounced disparities. In New York, 86 percent of all cyclists ticketed in 2018 and 2019 for riding on the sidewalk were Black and Latino, and nearly half were twenty-four years old or younger.

These statistics reflect the truth that, in many American cities, bike riding by people of color is de facto illegal. For the police, the presence of a bicycle serves as a pretext to engage in racial profiling and employ stop-and-frisk tactics that—institutionally, officially—they claim to have abandoned. A Los Angeles Times investigation analyzed more than 44,000 bicycle stops by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) between 2017 and July 2021. A majority of the stops occurred in low-income neighborhoods with large non-white populations, and seven out of ten stops involved Latino cyclists. The Times reported that LASD sheriffs apprehend cyclists “for minor violations such as riding on the sidewalk” and “search 85% of bike riders they stop even though they often have no reason to suspect they’ll find something illegal. Most bicyclists were held in the backseat of patrol cars while deputies rummaged through their belongings or checked for arrest warrants.” Bicycle traffic stops can have tragic outcomes. On August 31, 2020, ninety-eight days after the death of George Floyd, LASD deputies shot and killed Dijon Kizzee, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man, who they had attempted to apprehend for “riding a bicycle on the wrong side of the road” in the South L.A. community of Westmont. An autopsy found that Kizzee was struck by sixteen bullets, suffering wounds to his hands, arm, shoulder, chest, chin, back, and back of the head.

In New York, the summer and autumn of 2020 were seasons of bicycle protest. Deliveristas staged demonstrations outside NYPD station houses to decry the department’s indifference to an epidemic of e-bike thefts and assaults on delivery workers. In October, hundreds of deliveristas converged on City Hall, demanding better wages and working conditions. New movements were emerging. Street Riders NYC, formed in June by six Brooklyn-based Black activists, drew thousands of cyclists for protest rides that wound through the city. These were Black Lives Matter demonstrations, with calls for racial and economic justice, defunding the police, and the dismantling of the American carceral state. But the protests also addressed the politics of race and mobility, celebrating the ecumenical “freedom of cycling” while—tacitly, at least—critiquing a white bicycle activist establishment that for years had ignored issues of transit equity and the unique burdens faced by cyclists of color.

Perhaps the most revolutionary new form of bicycle protest is one that does not claim to be a protest at all. The term “bikelife” originally referred to “gangs” of motocross dirt bikers and four-wheeled ATV riders from cities like New York and Baltimore who gained fame with videos showcasing the wheelies, donuts, and other wild stunts they executed on urban streets and highways. In the early 2010s, Darnell Meyers, a Harlem bicycle deliveryman then in his early twenties, began posting online videos of his bikelife-inspired moves, performed not on motor vehicles but on an old-fashioned So Cal Flyer: a retro-style BMX bike, manufactured by the legendary company SE. The bike’s large but lightweight aluminum frame, big wheels, chunky tires, and pegs served as a sturdy platform for tricks, and Meyers’s repertoire was awesome. He could stand atop the seat or handlebars as the bike coasted forward at high speed; he could tilt the bike over so that it hovered, just inches above the pavement, and slide along on the side of the rear wheel, as if riding a surfboard or a magic carpet; he could yank his front wheel up, to a nearly ninety-degree angle, and pedal, balanced on his rear wheel, while reaching backward to let his hand brush the ground, like a boater skimming a lake with his fingers.

The most striking thing about Meyers’s brand of trick cycling wasn’t what he did, but where he did it: on the streets of New York, often while weaving through traffic. He prided himself on his wheelieing prowess, traveling with the front of his bike raised skyward for block after block, and gave himself a nickname that celebrated the practice: DBlocks. He garnered a large Instagram following, and began to post notices inviting fellow cyclists to meet up for group rides across the city. This wasn’t exactly a novelty. DBlocks had first caught the bicycle bug at age eleven when he saw groups of neighborhood kids pedaling through Harlem in packs. But DBlocks’s “ride-outs” quickly grew large, and then larger: squadrons of BMX cyclists, mostly young and Black and male, surging along the avenues by the dozens or the hundreds, with their front wheels raised off the pavement, performing dangerous, flashy tricks for mile after mile, and chronicling their exploits on social media feeds.

Today, the movement known by the hashtag #bikelife is a global phenomenon. Ride-outs have reached six continents and achieved pop prominence through their appearance in rap videos. Like drag racing and skateboarding, #bikelife is an example of the kind of anarchic thrill-seeking that captivates teenagers and young adults of certain dispositions, in no small part because it outrages authority figures. In New York, the police have targeted #bikelife events, confiscating participants’ bicycles and reportedly breaking up ride-outs by ramming mopeds into cyclists. (The SRG Bike Squad manual leaked to The Intercept includes the policing of “Bicycle Ride Outs” in a list of the squad’s achievements.)

But #bikelife is not just teen rebellion for its own sake. To behold a ride-out—to watch hundreds of Black kids, a dozen abreast, wheelieing across bridges, down highways, and along other roads where bicycles are forbidden—is to witness as radical a display of bike riding as freedom and resistance as any in the bicycle’s two-century-long history. Like prior generations of bicycle activists, #bikelife riders stake claim to the commons of the public roadways—but they do so with an aggressiveness and flamboyance that makes a Critical Mass rally look quaint by comparison.

Of course, #bikelife represents a larger politics. Black Lives Matter is in part a moral crusade about mobility and who is at liberty to go where. It decries a system that surveils and circumscribes the movement of Black people—that construes the mere presence of Black people in public spaces as trespassing, a crime punishable by imprisonment or even death. In #bikelife ride-outs, members of America’s most demonized and overpoliced population assert their right to absolute freedom of movement. Ride-outs dramatize the vulnerability of Black bodies, placing speeding riders in rowdy traffic, on thirty-two-pound bikes, amid vehicles one hundred times heavier. But ride-out cyclists enact defiance and fearlessness, transforming dangerous commutes into virtuoso performances while scorning the authorities by self-surveilling: documenting their putatively illegal activities on cellphone cameras and posting the evidence online. Thundering through the city with their front wheels aloft, like a cavalry on rearing stallions, #bikelife riders celebrate the joy, style, and audacity of biking while Black.

______

The bicycle’s foes have greeted the new American bike boom with old-fashioned vituperation. The culture wars are raging, and jabbing rhetorical thumbtacks into bike tires is a time-honored way to own the libs. In the first year of the pandemic, anti-bicycle invective resounded in the usual precincts of social media and the right-wing press. But it also rumbled down from the Olympus of the Supreme Court. In a November 2020 decision, Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Cuomo, the court barred restrictions on religious services that New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, had imposed to combat the spread of Covid-19. In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch derided the inclusion of “bicycle repair shops” in a list of essential businesses and included bicycles in a catalog of “secular” lifestyle adornments, alongside wine and acupuncture treatments. “According to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians,” Gorsuch wrote.

It was familiar rhetoric, and there was more of it to come, especially when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election and appointed the sharp-witted and ambitious wonk Pete Buttigieg to the post of secretary of transportation. Buttigieg made sensible statements like “I don’t think a lot of Americans are aware…how far behind we are on bicycle and pedestrian safety” and “We’re better off if our decisions revolve not around the car but around the human being.” This was red meat for right-wing pundits, and they chomped at it, wringing a couple of news cycles out of the proposition “Democrats are coming for your cars.” When cameras caught Buttigieg commuting by bicycle to a cabinet meeting, right-wing media falsely reported that Buttigieg had “faked” the bike ride, exiting a chauffeur-driven car “to ride his bike a few feet” for the paparazzi.

Boorish American car culture and incipient American fascism were natural allies. In the spring of 2021, Republican-controlled legislatures in Oklahoma and Iowa had passed bills that grant immunity to drivers who strike protesters with their cars. The second summer of the pandemic was upon us, and the mood in the United States was intensely, almost comically, ominous. Everywhere you looked, it seemed, there were scenes of decadence and portents of decline and fall. Covid vaccines had arrived, but so had the Delta variant. While billions around the world waited in desperation for their first vaccine dose, half of eligible Americans were spurning these readily available medicines based on lunatic conspiracy theories. Presumably there was significant overlap between the population of anti-vaxxers and those who claimed that the January 6 white nationalist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was a false-flag hoax perpetrated by antifa.

Meanwhile, tycoons were leaving the planet. On July 20, 2021, the wealthiest person on earth, Jeff Bezos, went hot-rodding in suborbital space for ten minutes aboard a phallic rocket ship called New Shepherd. The design of this spacecraft so closely resembled the silhouette of a penis and testicles as graffitied on the wall of a junior high school boys’ bathroom, it seemed impossible that Bezos was not in on the joke—until you remembered that he was Jeff Bezos. Nine days earlier, British magnate Richard Branson had nipped Bezos in the space race, successfully completing his own suborbital flight in Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, a supersonic plane. Then there was Elon Musk, the Tesla mogul, undeterred by the fact that his own prototype “Starships” spacecraft had crashed and burned in multiple test flights, and now busy working on two fronts: planning a program of Martian colonization with his “space transportation” concern SpaceX, while, in his capacity as founder of the Boring Company—either brilliantly or idiotically named, you pick—he was pioneering a new system of subterranean transit in which driverless Teslas would ferry passengers between cities via a network of “Hyperloop” tunnels.

You couldn’t really blame the billionaires for wanting to jet into space or head underground. Earth was experiencing a bad run of weather. The same morning that Bezos took off on the New Shepherd, I stepped out of my apartment building, unchained my bike, and started riding. Soon, I noticed that my eyes were stinging, my throat itched, and the sky was tinged a hazy hue of reddish orange. For weeks, dozens of wildfires had been ravaging the West Coast, burning millions of acres. The extreme heat generated by one of those infernos, the Bootleg Fire in Oregon, created ash-filled pyrocumulus clouds, which rode high-level winds three thousand miles east to drop a dusty veil on Brooklyn. There is no such thing anymore as local weather.

Several weeks later, another sign of the times descended from the skies. On September 1, a Wednesday evening, torrential rains fell on New York, causing flash flooding that swamped the town. The storm was the remnant of Hurricane Ida, which had struck Louisiana forty-eight hours earlier. Cars floated in the streets, bobbing in water that carried raw sewage. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway filled up like a Venetian canal. The flood burst through the ceilings of subway stations, cascading onto trains and platforms. Thirteen people died in New York City, nearly all of them immigrants in Queens who were trapped in basement apartments as the water rose. A viral Twitter post showed video of a Grubhub worker on a Brooklyn street that had become a river, pushing his bicycle through driving rain in waist-high water. On the handlebars of his bike you can see a plastic bag dangling: he is making a food delivery. Later, it emerged that some apps incentivized deliveristas to keep working in the life-threatening conditions by offering “severe weather incentives”: a few extra dollars per job.

The next morning, September 2, was bright, breezy, and dry, one of those preposterously crystalline days that seem to follow the once-in-a-century climatic events that now take place every month or so. Overnight, the MTA had shut down the inundated subway, so New Yorkers woke up and got on bicycles. Citi Bike recorded 126,360 trips that day: the largest single-day ridership in the service’s eight-year existence to that date. Ice is melting at the top and bottom of the planet, forests are aflame, political systems are fracturing, a pandemic has shaken daily life at its foundations, and amid the tumult, a new global bicycle culture is emerging. Today’s bike boom is, without question, the largest in history, taking in untold millions of cyclists, just about everywhere on earth. It is a mass movement, of epic proportions. But is it too little, too late?

______

Over the past two decades, Ai Weiwei, the dissident Chinese artist, has created a series of sculptures that bear the evocative title Forever Bicycles. The first of these, from 2003, featured a couple dozen bikes, with handlebars, pedals, and chains removed, rigged up in circular pattern to form a single structure—a kind of a bicycle ouroboros, a Dada freak bike. Ai continued to evolve the work on an increasingly massive scale, producing site-specific Forever Bicycles installations in which hundreds, or occasionally thousands, of bikes are arranged in vast symmetrical configurations that tower and arc overhead. The effect is strobic: gazing upward, the viewer takes in a psychedelic infinitude of frames and wheels.

There are art historical allusions here: a nod to Duchamp, certainly, and perhaps to M. C. Escher’s optical echo chambers. There are other resonances, too. The title, Forever Bicycles, contains a pun, a reference to the famous Shanghai bicycle brand Forever, which, along with Flying Pigeon, ruled the roads of Ai’s youth in the 1960s and ’70s. (In many versions of the sculptures, Ai has used Forever bikes.)

No one familiar with Ai will doubt that there are politics in this monumental assemblage of bikes without riders: an evocation of the vanished cycling multitudes of yesteryear, including those who pedaled together to Tiananmen Square. But Ai also speaks to the deeps of bike lore and bike love. Forever Bicycles is a poetic, symphonic tribute to the pure and timeless beauty of the bicycle’s form: all those bikes—or, rather, a single bike, the Bike Eternal, refracted endlessly—hovering on high, as if floating in the heavenly vault.

Of course, the bike probably isn’t eternal. In our age of collapse, what is? But the bicycle is resilient; it has a way of staging comebacks. In recent years, China has evinced second thoughts about the demise of its bicycle kingdom. The nation’s conversion to car culture has had a predictable series of environmental and social effects: increased pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, rising rates of lung disease and other respiratory maladies, an obesity crisis, and an epidemic of auto accidents. Today, China’s roads are the world’s most dangerous, and traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for Chinese people age forty-five and younger.

Bicycles remain a fixture of the nation’s economy. China is, by far, the world’s leading producer and exporter of bikes and bike components. And recently, the government has embarked on ambitious efforts to revive cycling at home. After years of building roads for cars on a gargantuan scale, the CCP has undertaken cutting-edge cycling infrastructure projects, including the construction of bicycle expressways in Beijing and the coastal city of Xiamen.

Bike-share systems are another key to China’s bicycle revival. The nation’s experiment with share bikes started badly: the boom-and-bust debacle of the latter 2010s, which left those mountain ranges of discarded Mobikes and Ofos piled on urban outskirts. But in the last half decade, especially since the onset of the pandemic, the industry has regained ground, with new bike-share brands, funded by corporate giants, operating in a moderately more regulated market. Dockless Hellobikes (backed by tech goliath Alibaba) and Meituan Bike (which acquired Mobike in 2018) are increasingly fixtures of Chinese cities, popular among a new generation of urban professionals who are, perhaps, less invested in the cult of the car and harbor fewer stigmatized associations with bikes. A growing number of the share cycles are electric bikes, which have emerged as the focal point of China’s cycling renaissance. Today, there are an astounding three hundred million e-bikes, both share bikes and privately owned, on China’s roads.

In historical terms, this is a pretty big deal. The rise of e-bikes—whose global market will grow to $70 billion by 2027, according to industry forecasters—may well be the most significant development in bicycle culture since the invention of the safety. A bike that requires minimal use of human muscle and pedal power represents a huge ontological shift, a great big reconceptualization of what a bike is. But what matters on the ground is that lots of people really, really like electric bikes, and are reconfiguring their lives around them. In China, the e-bike is clearly the new “national bike,” the successor to the iconic black roadsters of yore.

Those roadsters are still around, though. There are millions of them in China, quite possibly hundreds of millions, in various states of working order. I rode one when I visited Beijing, long before Covid hit. I was staying at a big corporate hotel in the center of town, not too far from the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, and the hotel had a half dozen or so Forever bikes, of 1990s vintage, available for the use of guests. I pedaled the bike all over town, and kept my eyes peeled for others of its ilk. I spied a lot of battered old roadsters—Forevers and Flying Pigeons and Golden Lions and the like—in Beijing’s extant residential hutongs, set against walls and leaning on crates. For a while I entertained the fantasy that these were well-loved bikes, treasured by old-timers who had ridden them for decades and couldn’t bear to part with them. Later, I learned that many people drag roadsters out of cold storage and use them in hutongs to hold parking spots for their cars.

Yet you do see Beijingers pedaling the classic bikes. Usually they are middle-aged or elderly, and not particularly well-to-do. Many Chinese people never graduated to a car, and will never ride an e-bike. In the city’s wholesale marketplaces and hardscrabble proletarian districts, cargo bicycles and tricycles are ubiquitous. Old-fashioned bicycle trades endure as well. You can still spot sidewalk bicycle repairmen, operating out of “shops” defined by a couple of concrete blocks laid out on a street corner, performing speedy surgery on snarled chains and punctured tires and bent forks. There are places where the Kingdom of the Bicycle never fell, where pedal power still has primacy, where the bicycle culture of yesteryear is intact and, by all appearances, unchanged.

In fact, it’s inaccurate to speak of “China’s bicycle culture,” as if it’s monolithic, or even comprehensible. There are only bicycle cultures, plural—too many of them to inventory or to wrestle into a grand unified theory. For some young people in Beijing, the appeal of the bicycle is that it is subcultural: something they’re into that’s a little bit weird and niche.

Certain Beijing cycling scenes that, in the Chinese context, are exotic may strike non-Chinese as rather mainstream. In recent years, the city has seen a proliferation of clubs focused on road biking. The members of these collectives own high-end racing and touring bikes; they take group rides en masse to the mountains north and west of Beijing. The membership of these clubs is almost entirely male, and they have, it seems fair to say, a recognizably male fixation on athletic achievements that can be quantified and compared—miles ridden, hills surmounted, speeds reached. They’re also really into stuff: top of the line gear and components, titanium bike frames, “technical” cycling clothing. Two generations ago, it was unimaginable in China that riding a bicycle could distinguish an individual from his fellow citizens. Today, Beijing’s sport cyclists know better. Pedaling the streets of the ancient capital wearing lycra uniforms and shiny helmets and pricey sunglasses with photochromatic lenses, they represent a novelty: bicycling as style and lifestyle, available to the discerning at a hefty price point.

There are other new Beijing bicycle subcultures. I discovered one, by accident, when I was tooling around one afternoon in a fashionable corner of the Dongcheng district, in east-central Beijing. There, in a hutong lined with slick stores, I stumbled on Natooke, a custom bicycle shop, run by a German expat named Ines Brunn, which exclusively sells single-speed fixed-gear bikes. Brunn is a character: a professional trick cyclist with a master’s degree in physics who has lived, and performed, all over the world. She had opened Natooke to spread the fixed-gear gospel to Beijingers, and evidently she had succeeded. Attractive young people with difficult haircuts were milling around, looking more or less like the kind of patrons you’d see at a boutique fixie emporium in Brooklyn.

But there is no analogous store, in Brooklyn or, as far as I know, anywhere else. Without question, it was the most beautiful bicycle shop I’d ever seen. Everywhere I turned my gaze, stacked in rows and hanging from hooks and wall racks, were bicycle bits and parts in an explosion of rainbow colors: frames, forks, rims, tires, hubs, spokes, chainrings, chains, handlebars, handlebar grips, in reds and blues and yellows and purples and pinks. The gimmick of the shop was that you could customize every component of your bike, in hues of your choosing.

I was struck by the difference, semiotically speaking, between the heavy-duty Forever that I had locked up on the street outside—a blunt and anonymous big black boat of a bike, built to ferry China’s proletariat masses—and Natooke’s lightweight, almost cartoonishly fun fixies, available in whatever candy-colored set-up a shopper desires. I was also struck by how badly I wanted one of these things for myself. For a good while I stood there, with a wildish look in my eyes, I’m sure, contemplating the color combinations I’d select, and how exactly I might manage to get a Natooke bike, or two, back to New York.

Instead, I decided to rent one for a few hours, an option the shop offered. I was given a bicycle with a white frame and white tires, and various other components in a shade best described as Kermit the Frog green. I left the Forever locked in the hutong and strolled north, rolling the fixie alongside me. I was heading to Ditan Park, about ten minutes away, an oasis of stretching trees and paved paths where I had spent a pleasant couple of hours reading the day before. Ditan Park is home to the Temple of the Earth, a sixteenth-century Ming dynasty edifice. It’s a serene park, a little bit sleepy, and was therefore good for my purposes. I’d have some room to experiment. I’d only ridden a fixed-gear bike once, briefly and not very successfully, back in high school. And a fixie takes some getting used to.

Most bicycles have a hub that is equipped with a freewheel, the mechanism that allows the pedals to remain stationary as the bike rolls along. It’s the freewheel that permits cyclists to ride without pedaling forward—to coast, one of the dreamiest and most pleasurable of all cycling sensations. (Iain Boal, the historian, has called “freewheeling” the bicycle’s greatest contribution to the English language.)

But on a fixed-gear bike, the drivetrain is attached directly to the rear wheel’s hub, a coupling arrangement that makes coasting impossible. When you pedal forward, the rear wheel is thrown into motion, and the bike moves forward. As long as the rear wheel continues to rotate—whether you’re actively pedaling or not—the pedals will continue to rotate. The relationship is reciprocal and unequivocal. The pedals spin the wheel; the wheel spins the pedals.

Devotees maintain that this makes a fixie the truest bike, the bikiest bike, the purist’s choice. It is the bicycle that most directly and efficiently deploys its human motor, without any extraneous hardware to interfere with the energy transfer. The feeling of merging with the machine is experienced more profoundly on a fixie than on any other species of bike.

There are other advantages touted by fixie fans. Fixies offer riders a greater degree of control. Trick cyclists often use fixies because they allow you to “ride fakie,” to pedal the bike backward. Fixies are fast. Because they operate so efficiently, fixie riders can maintain higher pedaling cadences than riders of geared bicycles in the same ratio. Some people refer to fixies by their traditional name, “track bikes,” because they were originally designed for races staged in velodromes and on outdoor tracks. Speed is also the reason that fixies were favored by New York’s hell-for-leather bike messengers back in the ’80s and ’90s.

Then there is the matter of aesthetics. Fixies are beautiful, in the Loosian, less-is-more sense, since they’re uncluttered by the extra parts necessary for a fully geared drivetrain. The fixie is the elemental bike—the bicycle reduced to its essence.

Brakes are one of the components not found on a classic fixed-gear bike. (Natooke sells fixies both with and without brakes; the bike I rented was a brakeless model.) The challenge, for a novice on a fixie, is not how to ride, but how to stop riding. To bring the bike safely to a halt, you have to apply reverse pressure, using your legs and body weight to push back against the rotation of the cranks. It’s an action I was used to performing: my own bike, at home, was a cruiser with a coaster brake, or foot brake, which is activated by that same backward-kicking motion. But a coaster brake is a separate mechanism, integrated into a bicycle’s internal hub; when you backpedal, the brake engages and does the hard work for you.

To arrest the movement of a brakeless fixie is a task of a different order. It calls for greater strength and more finesse. There are various techniques that can be employed. There is the basic method of applying steady back-pressure to the pedals to slow the bike’s roll. You can “skip stop,” rising out of the saddle and lifting the rear wheel off the ground a few times in rapid succession. Or if you’re moving fast, you can do a skid—a flashier move, where you jam the pedals back so forcefully that the rear wheel locks up and you slide to a halt. It all sounds simple enough, but braking a fixie is a feel thing, the kind of maneuver that you need to commit to muscle memory. It’s a skill.

If you don’t have a skill, you have to acquire it. I reached Ditan Park, which at that hour, about two p.m., was busyish but not buzzing. A postprandial languor hung over the place. There were young mothers pushing strollers, and old men sitting at tables playing xiangqi, the Chinese version of chess. There were a few people in a little fitness area outfitted with monkey bars, parallel bars, and a stationary bicycle. I walked around the park a bit, until I found a nice, long, mostly unpeopled pathway. It was September, but the weather was summery. A balmy breeze was blowing. It was a more or less perfect day for a bike ride.

I swung my right leg over the fixie, hoisted myself onto the saddle, and set the thing in motion, pedaling slowly and deliberately. I built up a bit of momentum, allowing the bike to roll forward maybe forty feet. And then I pushed the pedals backward, coaster brake–style.

But the bicycle pushed back. The pedals didn’t yield, they kept spinning forward, and I lurched forward in turn, rising up out of the saddle and dropping down to a standing position. I was straddling the top tube—a physically unpleasant position to be in, to be totally frank—while dragging my feet across the ground, trying to slow the bike down, a bit like Fred Flintstone in his Stone Age car. Eventually, the fixie came to rest.

All things considered, this wasn’t a great way to brake a bike. What I needed to do, I realized, was perform the maneuver more fluidly. The action required wasn’t the single violent jerk that I used when coaster-braking my cruiser. What I needed to do was to truly pedal backward, exerting steady pressure until the wheel reversed course. So I remounted, turned the bike around, launched it forward, and tried again—and again, the pedals disobeyed. My feet flew up, I was off the saddle, yanking the handlebars right and then left, teetering and swerving. My legs were spread akimbo over the top tube, and my feet were pawing the pavement in an ugly effort to slow the bike and keep it upright.

I managed to wrestle the fixie to a standstill. I glanced around. Is anyone watching this? A passerby might conclude that they were witnessing a maiden voyage: a man trying to ride a bike for the first time in his life. But there were just a handful of people strolling in this corner of the park. Off to my right, a dozen or so older women were doing tai chi. Everyone appeared to be perfectly indifferent to the struggles, to the existence, of the foreigner with the bicycle.

It occurred to me that I might have put myself at a disadvantage, riding a fixie that wasn’t equipped with toe straps. These little devices, which hitch a rider’s feet to the pedals, are helpful, some would say essential, for bringing a fixie to a stop. They prevent the problem I was experiencing—your feet zooming up and off the pedals—while affording a greater degree of power and control, allowing a rider to push down with his back foot while pulling up with his front one. Still, I’d seen many fixie riders over the years, biking around without toe straps. The issue, I decided, wasn’t the equipment I lacked, or even my poor technique. It was a question of conviction. This apprehensive attitude wouldn’t do. I had to go for it.

So I turned the bike around once more. I pointed the wheels down the long flagstone causeway, centered my weight on the seat, and shoved off, pedaling smoothly and steadily.

Two wheels hummed over the ground. The bike sliced the air. Overhead, ginkgo trees waved. There was no doubt about it: the Natooke was legit. It rode just about as good as it looked.

I’d traveled maybe twenty-five yards, building up a fair bit of speed. The time was nigh. I shifted my weight toward the rear of the bike, braced my thighs against the top tube, and gave a mighty backward shove. But again I felt the force of the pedals pushing back, again my feet flew up, again the bike wobbled and weaved, and I had to jerk the handlebars several times to steady the ship.

My feet sought the pedals. The only course of action now, it seemed, was to make peace with the bike, not fight against it. If you’re a person familiar with bicycle history, this is the kind of scenario that puts you in mind of the past: the testimonies of all those nineteenth-century cyclists who regarded their velocipedes and boneshakers as unruly beasts, machines with minds of their own. My feet were back on the pedals now. Was I pedaling the bike or was it pedaling me? It wasn’t quite clear. In any case, the fixie was barreling along and picking up speed. The situation presented a stark choice: I could either bail out—choose the softest-looking patch of pavement I could find and pour myself onto it—or tighten my white-knuckle grip and go along for the ride. With or without me, the bicycle was headed up the road.

For Lauren, Sasha, and Theo

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I racked up many debts of gratitude while working on this book. Some people are aware—all too aware, possibly—of the ways they helped me out. Others may be surprised to find their names listed here. Every one of them was crucial to the completion of this project. Words on a page can’t convey how grateful I am, but it’s a start.

My first thanks go to those who endured my questions, shared their stories, and allowed me to write about their lives. Thank you, Mohammed Abul Badshah, Syed Manzoorul Islam, Sonam Tshering, Barb Samsoe, Bill Samsoe, Greg Siple, June Siple, Danny MacAskill, Rev. Harry Latham, Ted White, and George Bliss.

My agent, Elyse Cheney, guided the book from inception to conclusion. I’m grateful for her advocacy, advice, and good humor. Thanks also to the entire team at the Cheney Agency, including Alex Jacobs, Claire Gillespie, Allison Devereux, Isabel Mendia, and Danny Hertz.

I am exceedingly fortunate to have landed at Crown, and am grateful to everyone there who has had a hand in publishing Two Wheels Good. Thank you to my wonderful editor, Libby Burton, for her sharp mind, shrewd judgment, patience, and kindness. Thank you, Aubrey Martinson, who did so much to ensure a smooth editorial, production, and publication process. Thank you, Gillian Blake, a great publisher and editor, whose support means the world to me. Thank you, David Drake and Annsley Rosner. Thanks to Evan Camfield, Bonnie Thompson, Stacey Stein, and Melissa Esner. Thanks also to Rachel Klayman and Molly Stern, who believed in this book way back when.

I owe special thanks to those who helped me during my travels. In Dhaka, I was assisted by Rifat Islam Esha, who served as a translator, facilitated my reporting, and shared many insights about her home city. Thanks also to K. Ahmed Anis and Imran Khan in Dhaka.

Ina Zhou was my translator and fixer in China, and was hugely helpful in the months that followed my reporting there. I am grateful to others whose generosity and knowledge I relied on in China: Andrew Jacobs, Xu Tao, Li Tao, and Shannon Bufton.

Without the assistance of Dhamey Norgay, I never would have traveled to Bhutan, or accomplished anything while I was there. Thank you, Dhamey.

Jake Rusby welcomed me into his studio in South London, showed me his beautiful hand-built bikes, and taught me valuable lessons about bicycle design and engineering.

I owe thanks to everyone at Rasoulution in Munich for all they did to coordinate my time in Scotland with Danny MacAskill.

I’m grateful to the intrepid cyclists of Longyearbyen, 78 degrees north latitude, who opened my eyes in new ways to the beauty, and insanity, of winter cycling.

Thanks to Franchesca Alejandra Ocasio and the Ovarian Psycos for allowing me to tag along with them in Los Angeles. This experience changed the way I think about bicycles and politics.

Thank you to the staffs at the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at NYU, the Library of Congress, the British Library, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Thank you, Omar Ali and everyone at Cobble Hill Variety. Thanks also to the staffs of a hundred coffee shops, or maybe it’s a thousand, in Brooklyn and elsewhere.

I am especially indebted to the bicycle scholars, activists, and aficionados whose ideas and expertise informed this book. Some of these people I have had the pleasure of communicating with directly; others I know only through the words they’ve written. I’m grateful to all of them, and to many others whose work is cited in the Notes. Thank you: Iain Boal, Zack Furness, Melody Hoffmann, Adonia Lugo, Aaron Golub, Gerardo Sandoval, Evan Friss, James Longhorst, Paul Smethurst, Peter Cox, Randy Rzewnicki, Hans-Erhard Lessing, Tony Hadland, Tiina Männistö-Funk, Timo Myllyntaus, Glen Norcliffe, Margaret Guroff, Robert Turpin, Steven Alford, Suzanne Ferriss, Nicholas Oddy, and Carlton Reid. Thank you, Gary Sanderson, Jennifer Candipan, and Evan P. Schneider. Thanks to the International Cycling History Conference.

Thank you to cherished colleagues at The New York Times Magazine, who have supported my career, such as it is, and in various ways aided my reaching the finish line on this book: Nitsuh Abebe, Jake Silverstein, Jessica Lustig, Bill Wasik, Sasha Weiss, Erika Sommer.

I’m grateful to the many family members, friends, colleagues, treasured acquaintances, et al., who offered camaraderie, advice, encouragement, ideas, and recommendations on sources, among other mitzvot. Thanks also to many of you for providing the inspiration of your own great writing and thinking. Gillian Kane, Ann Powers, Carl Wilson, Whitney Chandler, Dan Adams, Craig Marks, Eric Weisbard, Julia Turner, Michael Agger, John Swansburg, Adam Gopnik, Dana Stevens, Josh Kun, Stephen Metcalf, Ali Colleen Neff, Karl Hagstrom Miller, Sean Howe, Jennifer Lena, Karen Tongson, Garnette Cadogan, Nathan Heller, Daphne Brooks, Forrest Wickman, Emily Stokes, Eddy Portnoy, Eric Harvey, Mark Lamster, Erin MacLeod, Joe Schloss, Frankie Thomas, Miles Grier, Steve Waksman, Ari Kelman, Ken Wissoker, Jason King, John Shaw, Ari Y. Kelman, Christopher Bononos, David Greenberg, Joey Thompson, Steacy Easton, Stuart Henderson, George Rosen, Seth Redniss.

Thank you to my parents, biological and otherwise, whose support and love was essential to the writing of this book: Marc Rosen, Susan Rosen, Roberta Stone, Amy Hoffman. Many thanks also to my wonderful in-laws, Rick and Robin Redniss.

This book is dedicated, with all my love, to Lauren Redniss, Sasha Rosen, and Theo Rosen.