Last year in June I went on the Sternfahrt rally, along with 90,000 other people. Berlin opened up the motorways for cyclists to ride on, and riders took 19 different routes from places around the city towards the Brandenburg Gate. The rally was for clean air and the passing of the Mobility Act (Mobilitätsgesetzes), which was passed soon after the rally, on 28 June 2018.
This was the largest cycling rally I had ever been to. Before that, I had ridden with Critical Mass and then the Ride of Silence. These rides had me wondering whether these types of cycling advocacy are effective.
Cycling Protests and Events
Critical Mass began in San Francisco in 1992, with a small number of cyclists handing out flyers to increase their membership. Their original purpose is debated, with some believing that it came from a place of protest, while others believe that the group was established for bringing attention to the rights of cyclists. Today, Critical Mass is an international movement, and is intended to assert that “riders have as much of a right to the road as their counterparts in cars.” Another purpose is to “make drivers feel what cyclists feel every day by being outnumbered on the streets.”
The Ride of Silence also started as a local effort, which over the course of a decade became an international movement. Originally held in Texas in 2003, approximately 1000 cyclists rode to commemorate the death of Larry Schwartz, a cyclist killed by a school bus. The purpose of the Ride of Silence is to “honor bicyclists killed by motorists, promote sharing the road, and provide awareness of bicycling safety”.
Other cycling advocacy groups with similar events are less protest-oriented, and more community focused. It makes me wonder whether less confrontational events can have an equal or greater effect on creating social change.
For example, CicLAvia holds rides four times a year with the purpose of encouraging “vibrant public spaces, active transportation and good health through car-free streets.” They note that their intention is to engage with people “to transform our relationship with our communities and with each other.”
The difference is that Critical Mass and the Ride of Silence appear to be forms of collective activism, while the CicLAvia events seem more like an appeal to local and regional transportation policy-makers, through a display of community. Critical Mass does also display community, but the nature and foundation of the movement is clearly one of protest.
This results in the question of whether these types of appeal and action are effective in bringing about changes in road-user culture. Measuring whether these events are effective is difficult, because determining whether a social event or movement has actually been the primary driver of a change is difficult; many other social, political and cultural forces are operating at the same time as an event takes place.
Pillars of Effective Social Movement
There are examples throughout history in which individual or collective direct action was an effective tool for political change. The Harvard Business Review notes five key steps that are a part of an effective social movement:
- Defining the movement
- Determining allies
- Identifying “pillars of power”
- Attracting, not overpowering
- Having a post-victory plan
While its movement is not tightly defined, the goal of Critical Mass has been explained as “to promote urban cycling and raise attention for better cycling infrastructure”, or to “to popularize the bicycle as a means of everyday transportation on a mass scale.” The intention of the “mass” aspect of the movement is to bring cyclists to the forefront of drivers’ minds, whether positively or not. However, with regard to determining allies, identifying pillars of power, and attracting buy-in, Critical Mass has a major image problem.
The Critical Mass bike ride has been subject to numerous controversies and conflicts, particularly due to the way in which cyclists act along the rides. Many rides use a technique called “corking”, where cyclists intentionally block a road to stop traffic getting through, allowing other cyclists to pass freely. Numerous riders have been injured, and many have had clashes with police around the world.
Critical Mass came from a place of “partly a celebration of cycling as a form of everyday transportation and partly as a protest of the bad conditions and maltreatment urban cyclists had to endure on city streets.” In many cases, Critical Mass works against power rather than with it, and the purpose of the rides is to literally overpower the roads. It’s possible that this kind of confrontational approach is working against cycling advocacy goals. Critical Mass has attempted to re-invent themselves and move away from protest-like rides, but due to the disparate and disorganised nature of the bike ride, strong rules are hard to implement. A splinter group called Critical Manners works to combat Critical Mass civil disobedience, by biking in groups and clearly and obviously obeying all road rules and not blocking cars.
The impact of Critical Mass has been analysed before, from various different perspectives. Cycling activist Mary Brown of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition noted that Critical Mass had “alerted decision-makers as to the existence of a large, unruly, and pissed constituency”, and had engaged with the local mayor in 1997 to set up more bike lanes in the city.
However, Mary Brown also noted that “the people doing the actual nitty-gritty organizing around specific bike lanes/proposals, (i.e., presenting at neighborhood meetings, lobbying the [Board of Supervisors], building support from seniors, pedestrians, etc.) often had the hassle and image of [Critical Mass] thrown back at them”. This indicates that cycling advocacy and protest groups can be effective in driving infrastructure or policy changes, but if the behaviour of the group has been disruptive, this may hinder the change they are trying to achieve.
CicLAvia’s approach may be a more useful one when attempting to make changes to cycling policy. They have a clearly-defined movement, work with local government and policy-makers, and have undertaken several studies on the effects of their bike rides, including on the positive impacts for local businesses, and improvement of air quality.
CicLAvia claims that it “has impacted local and regional transportation policy related to pedestrians and bikes”, and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health notes that “the Complete Streets, Mobility 2035 and the Zero Vision plans [cite] CicLAvia as an influencing factor to restructuring how we deal with urban infrastructure”.
These factors indicate that rides that are sanctioned by local governments can gain the buy-in of “pillars of power”. They can attempt to attract interest in a less-confrontational way, and may have greater and more measurable impacts. One obvious factor is that when advocacy groups work with policy-makers, the policy-makers want to see the outcomes of the work they are doing, which leads to more data collection and measuring of progress. Without this stakeholder buy-in, activist movements may be much less able to gather the resources and skills necessary to collect data and analyse it effectively. This may have the flow-on effect that policy change is less likely to happen, because concrete benefits or outcomes are not able to be presented to those making legal and political changes.
Given that the most effective kind of protests and social movements work with pillars of power rather than against them, it’s possible that activists and advocates working directly with policy-makers is a shortcut to driving change in cycling policies.
Why Not Protest?
In some cases, direct action and protest are clearly necessary, such as a violation of human rights issues, a serious abuse of the environment, or a high-level gaffe such as Donald Trump’s “grab her by the pussy” video. These issues are important enough and with widespread-enough repercussions, that immediate protest is a vital way of displaying community outrage. These protests can show that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable in society.
However, cycling advocacy is a movement in which policy changes are desired, across a broad swathe of cycling-related issues. Some want more bike paths, others want traffic laws changed, and others want more people-friendly cities in general (with more walkways, bike paths, and car-free streets).
Even with regard to more-controversial and pressing rights issues, activists are beginning to adopt more cooperative techniques. Take, for example, the area of animal rights activism. Bruce Friedrich, the founder of the Good Food Institute, recently discussed individual action, collective action, and working with the system on The Ezra Klein Show podcast, noting that traditional animal rights protesters and direct action may not be effective in creating systematic change. The Good Food Institute is a think-tank, investor, and advocacy organisation, promoting plant-based and in vitro meat. In contrast to PETA, the animal rights organisation, the Good Food Institute works together with large meat producers, to encourage them to shift towards harm-free meats.
This type of approach being adopted even in the animal rights activism space indicates that it may be a more effective way of obtaining better animal rights policies. Friedrich explained that the Good Food Institute has “really good relationships with Tyson Foods, with Smithfield Foods, with Purdue, with huge chicken conglomerates and meat companies. It’s helpful to recognise that the people who run those companies want to do something noble”.
Friedrich and Klein questioned the usefulness and role of confrontational animal rights activism, and whether or not it works. Friedrich, who had worked with PETA for over a decade, explained that confrontational activism seems to affect individuals (including him), but is not likely to be a complete solution, due to a need for greater systematic change. As a result, the Good Food Institute’s approach is to work within the system and the pillars of power, not against them.
Final Thoughts
It seems that measuring the effectiveness of cycling advocacy movements is difficult, but there are some indicators that particular types of advocacy may be more effective than others. Working with policy-makers, pillars of power, and governments appears to have clearer impacts, and protest-like movements may clash with the public and police, ultimately harming advocates and the cause. For issues like cycling advocacy (which is not a pressing human-rights issue demanding immediate protest), engaging within the current system may be the best way to achieve pro-cycling policies.
Direct action is in some cases necessary, but when the goal is to bring about infrastructure or urban policy changes, advocates should take care that their movements are set up to effectively bring about the changes they hope to achieve.
BERLIN STADT 