Whose Streets? Their Streets!

While rush-hour traffic clogs the streets, outlaw bicyclists hailing from Uptown, Dinkytown, and the Wedge, wearing threadbare T-shirts, oversized aviators, and denim cutoffs, roll out from the Loring Park fountain—Critical Mass is loose again. Four hundred strong, the righteous brigade on $25 Schwinns, pink and yellow Centurions, worn-out Treks, shiny black SEs, brand-new Surlys, second-hand Beachcruisers ride high on their saddles, crouched over the handlebars, most of them helmetless, jamming crazy down the middle of Hennepin Avenue. Hopped up on flavored Camel cigarettes and overpriced lattes, with European ideals aimed squarely at your tax dollars, they coast at seven miles per hour, through red lights, laughing and shouting “Happy Friday!” at the crimson-faced nine-to-fivers sitting dead in their coffincars . . . .

Don't panic. They aren’t the Hell’s Angels.

Critical Mass is the local version of a protest ride for bicycle commuters that began in San Francisco in the nineties. On the last Friday of each month, hundreds of cyclists take over south Minneapolis streets at rush hour, stopping traffic and sounding out their solidarity with the battle cry “Whose streets? Our streets!” The ride has a prankster spirit—and it’s pretty funny, actually, watching the quizzical mien and slumped shoulders of four-wheel commuters engulfed in a tidal wave of spokes. There are incidents of antagonism on both sides—bicyclists flicking off SUV drivers, and drivers losing their tempers at the dirty hippies delaying their escape from downtown—but, ultimately, it’s the most benign protest I’ve ever seen.

Evidently, in SF—in terms of sheer numbers, perhaps the biggest bicycle city in the country—motorists can be stuck at an intersection for twenty minutes. In Minneapolis, the wait is usually no longer than the time it takes to get through a Led Zep song on KQ. But though the disruption of the local ride is relatively modest (a bemused cop in an unmarked squad car slowly trailed the pack during the July ride), and has been going on for only ten years or so, Minneapolis has become, by percentage, the second-biggest bicycle-commuting city in the country, behind only Portland, Oregon. According to 2005 U.S. census data, of the 160,000 commuters who go downtown to work each morning, about 2 percent come on bicycles. That doesn’t take into account the 5,000 students who, according to city officials, bike to and from the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus every day.

It’s easy to understand why Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle are at the top of the national bicycle list: Greenie politics meets sublime landscape meets temperate climate. But somehow, here in Minneapolis, with our long, cold winters and flat lake-country landscape, we are incubating one of the nation’s most powerful bicycle movements. We have ninety-five miles of bike trails and lanes, including four so-called bicycle freeways. We have one of the oldest and some of the largest bike clubs in the country, together boasting more than 5,000 members. We have four times more bike racks per capita than anyplace else in the country. And there are innumerable local cycling blogs devoted to vintage bikes, bike rides, bike politics, and bike message boards. Minneapolis was one of four cities to be awarded $25 million in federal money last year for bike amenities. Our mayor rides a Trek while training for triathlons. You can’t cross the city without hitting a bike shop. When trying to make sense of a culture, it’s usually wise to start with the aficionados, the crazies, the obsessives—and work outward. Unfortunately, the freakiest freaks in the Minneapolis bike culture are currently unavailable. They’re the self-described “last bicycle outlaws,” a mangy gang of twentysomethings who flop together in a house somewhere in Seward and have christened themselves The Black Label Bike Club, evidently after the cheap Canadian beer to which they’re partial. They’re visible—perched six feet off the street in their postapocalyptic steel Frankenstein contraptions—they’re just not available. Their primary hangout, the Hard Times Café, a notorious gutter-punk nexus in Cedar-Riverside, is mysteriously closed for renovations during the summer. The next best thing seems to be a local punk band on MySpace: Fixed Gears Are For Jerks and Lesbians. I immediately arrange an interview.

For many Minneapolis riders, the fixed-gear bicycle has become a fashion statement. A fixed-gear, or “fixie,” is a bicycle with the sprocket (the toothy cylinder that bites the chain) attached directly to the hub (the center of the back wheel) so the pedals travel at the same rate and in the same direction as the rear wheel. A couple of strains of the most dedicated riders—messengers and track racers—swear by the feeling of grounded control. Everybody else—anybody who actually knows what a “fixie” is—believes the bikes are both too trendy and unsafe. You can’t coast, and some fixies don’t have brakes, so the only way you can stop is by stomping down with your feet, using your leg strength to stop the back wheel.

I meet the band in front of their practice space—curiously, in an on-the-market Kenwood duplex. “Oh, the drummer’s mom is a Realtor,” rasps the lead singer, who calls himself Jay Awesome. “We’re just practicing here until she sells it.” Drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, the stocky, baby-faced twenty-two-year-old runs his hand over his unwashed Mohawk and explains how the band’s name came to him when a dude on a fixie beat him in an impromptu race to the corner. “Then I remembered one of Homer’s lines from The Simpsons: ‘Public transportation is for jerks and lesbians.’ ” The band doesn’t really believe fixed-gear bicycles are for jerks and lesbians because (or although) two of the band’s members ride fixies. The guitarist, Eric Frame, started riding one when he delivered sandwiches for Jimmy John’s. (He now drives to work at the family industrial plasma torch business in St. Louis Park, and the band uses his car to tote their gear to gigs.) Drummer Kate McNulty rides a fixie for her downtown messenger job. In fact, McNulty earned a reputation in the messenger community after coming in first during last winter’s Stupor Bowl, a sort of orienteering-on-a-bike contest held on Super Bowl Sunday that involves slamming a beer or doing a shot at every checkpoint. Some messengers—there are only about twenty-five of them remaining citywide—are hired based on their performance at these events, known in the community as “Alley Cat” races.

Earlier in the summer, the band organized Ride Against Patriotism. Fifteen dollars bought all the beer you could drink. “The reason I ride,” Awesome explains, “is so I don’t have to buy gas and support a stupid war.” The band does write the occasional radical-bike-culture lyric, but for the most part, they stick to more general antiPope, anticop, anti-everything material. Marc Cohen, the bassist, points out one of the more compelling reasons for a punk band to ride bicycles. “It’s just easier to avoid being called a hypocrite,” he says. “Instead of riding around in the Volkswagen that Daddy bought you.”

McNulty has been silently judging me from across the patio during the interview. “What’s the point of your story anyway?” she asks. She suspects I’m out to write a hatchet job about how the hard cores are constantly trying to out-hard-core each other. In fact, she wrote a college ethnography essay on the subject. “I mean, in New York, only 10 percent of bikers are actually living the lifestyle.” She refuses to let me read her paper. Scott Smedberg has been active in city bike politics for years; he and a group of advocates founded Bike On, which promotes bicycling in Minneapolis. On a sunny Monday afternoon, we ride down to west Bloomington for the annual bike-advocacy pizza party at Quality Bicycle Products, one of the largest companies importing bicycle parts in the country. Smedberg, a tall, thin, middle-aged guy with a mustache and a long ponytail, has been “car-free” for thirty years. He loves riding his bike—“the bicycle shrinks the individual and expands nature”—but he says being a full-time rider can be awkward in the mainstream car culture. At dinner parties, people are always offering him rides home. And then there are the tiresome questions. “When people ask me if my wife and I would ever consider buying a car,” Smedberg says, “I tell them, ‘It’s just as likely we would buy a helicopter.’ ”

Quality Bicycle Products, now located on the south end of the Hyland Park Reserve, began as a one-man, one-dog parts shop in 1981 and grew slowly; now it boasts $100-plus million in annual sales and 400 employees working in a massive new LEED gold–certified complex with recycled office furniture, a rain garden to prevent toxic run-off from the parking lot, and buckets filled with compost worms in the sparkling new lunch room. Several beautiful Surlys and Salsa bikes—two popular local models designed or distributed by QBP—are chained to the racks out front.

My host at QBP is Gary Sjoquist. The in-shape fifty-four-year-old with silver perma-stubble quit his job as a computer programmer ten years ago to become one of Minnesota’s first bicycle lobbyists. He founded the Minnesota Coalition of Cyclists and began pushing for both state and federal funding. As QBP’s “director of bicycle advocacy” since 1998, he sets up rides for kids, is a regular presence at city, state, and national bike committee meetings, and on occasion delivers privately ordered bicycles to Congressman Jim Oberstar, chair of the powerful House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and Minnesota’s current bicycle sugar daddy. Sjoquist just got back from a bike policy tour of Amsterdam and Münster, two of the top bicycle venues in Europe, cities where four out of ten commuters ride bikes to work. Today he drops a surprising stat on the group. “The average age of the typical independent-bicycle-shop consumer is forty-six,” he says.

Sjoquist gets this number from the latest figures released by the National Bicycle Dealer’s Association, which tracks the $6 billion bicycle industry nationwide. “The biggest drop-off has been the under nineteen demo,” he says. “The number of kids riding bikes to school has dropped off 50 percent in one generation. So if you’re over forty, you probably rode your bike to school—if you’re under forty, you didn’t.”

That means that while big box stores like Target and Wal-Mart still sell almost eight of every ten bicycles sold in America, those sales account for only 37 percent of the total dollars spent on bikes. Bikes sold by independent dealers to older, more affluent customers paying $400 to $3,000 account for only 17 percent of the unit sales, but 49 percent of the national revenue. Locally, big box retailers sold 200,000 bicycles at an average price of $72, while indie retailers moved 50,000 bicycles at an average price of $422. Despite the fact that there are 110 independent dealers in Minnesota, most of those bikes are sold by either Erik’s Bike Shop or Penn Cycle, which are responsible for 70 percent of Minneapolis’s bicycle sales.           

According to Sjoquist, the avatar of the Minneapolis bike culture isn’t the punk rock fixed-gear dude who either rides his bike to work or works on it—it’s the affluent, middle-aged guy who pedals around the lakes to keep fit and who can a afford a garage in south Minneapolis to house his $1,000 Trek. “A lot of it has to do with location,” Sjoquist says. “And Minnesotans are determined to recreate.” Sjoquist’s demographic profile bears an uncanny resemblance to Minneapolis’s “Fittest Mayor” (so-called by Men’s Fitness Magazine in 2006), the honorable R. T. Rybak. When I talked to Rybak at city hall this summer, he had just completed a ten-mile morning ride as part of his training regimen for an upcoming triathlon. “I usually do about ten miles every three days,” he says. The mayor owns two bikes—a “perfectly functional” Trek road bike and a “great” Proflex mountain bike. “I bought one at Penn and one at Erik’s,” he says.

Like many politicians, Rybak often speaks in what sound like prefabricated and frequently used public statements. On the economic need for bicycle-oriented amenities in the city, he says, for example, “When you take any of the industries we depend on, the lifestyle and creative economies of advertising, the people who want to work at Target . . . more and more [potential employees] are choosing Minneapolis because we are in the forefront of a lifestyle that’s more than just getting in your car in a vacant parking lot and riding to the next vacant parking lot.”

On bicycles and the environment: “It’s a totally different world now because of the climate crisis, in which people, regardless of ideology, get the fact that we have to make dramatically different choices in the way we move or we will literally not be able to survive. ”

On two-wheeled childhood memories: “When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to grow up in this nice tree-lined neighborhood in southwest Minneapolis, where I could hop on my bike and ride four miles to the Hiawatha Golf Course with golf clubs on my back. What an incredible gift, where a kid can move freely and safely around the city!”

And just when you think you can’t take it anymore, he looks across his desk with his earnest blue eyes and says, “When you’re a mayor, you get to cut ribbons. I’m not somebody who in thirty years is going to get that big of a kick out of having a single building built as much as I would to know that a few years from now a kid can hop on a bike in the middle of the Jordan neighborhood in north Minneapolis and choose whether to take the bike trail to Theodore Wirth or to the river.”

The mayor’s bike man inside city hall is a big, blond country boy named Don Pflaum. A thirty-one-year-old civil engineer in the public works department, Pflaum grew up on a corn-and-soybean farm near Farmington. After graduating with an engineering degree from the U of M, he was hired by the city in 1999 and immediately given the job of staffing the Minneapolis Bicycle Advisory Committee, an influential little group that meets the first Wednesday morning of every month. Several municipal entities—including the mayor’s office, city council, police department, Metro Transit—send representatives to the meetings; also in regular attendance are members of the St. Paul and state BACs, lobbyists such as Sjoquist, neighborhood bike activists, and the occasional distraught (“I got pulled over for riding on the sidewalk”) citizen. Pflaum referees each meeting with a deadpan Napoleon Dynamite-esque demeanor. He is equally adept at detailing the progress of a $7.2 million federal grant, keeping a tiff between committee members from getting out of hand, and explaining the arcane city sidewalk statute to the distraught citizen.

Though Pflaum echoes Rybak on public health and environmental concerns, the BAC’s operating philosophy seems to be "Build it and they will come.” The BAC’s basic objective is “modal shift”— which means getting car people to become bicycle people. The BAC has an aggressive goal of pushing the city’s 2.4 percent commuting figure to 15 percent by 2015. “We’ve learned you can’t take away parking on city streets,” Pflaum says. “Other than that, everybody’s for [bicycles]. Now you see ‘Just off the Cedar Lake bike trail’ in real estate listings.” And whereas bike trails were once under the sole jurisdiction of the park board, the public works department has been the driving force behind new bike amenities since bikin’ mayor Don Fraser drew up the first citywide bicycle plan in 1982 and created the city’s first BAC. Now public works is infested with probike engineers. “And engineers want to build stuff,” Pflaum says. Pflaum acknowledges that one of the reasons our cash-strapped city government has such a healthy political will for bicycles is the massive influx of federal dollars for bike projects. Though the city and the park board must come up with matching funds for many of them, the feds have stepped up in a big way. A $5.1 million suspension bridge carries the Midtown Greenway over Hiawatha Avenue, and $21.5 million in grants was earmarked for Minneapolis as part of the Bike/Walk pilot program in a recent federal transportation bill. Pflaum and the BAC seem to have Jim Oberstar on speed-dial. At the BAC meeting I attended, a resolution was passed to circumvent the city council and go directly to Oberstar regarding some bike-friendly airport legislation so he could “slip it into a bill” under the radar of the antibike bogeymen.  

Not surprisingly, some corners of the local bicycle community don’t believe all those millions are being spent on things they actually need or want or that their voices are heard in the seats of power. “I mean, who has time to go to a 10 a.m. meeting?” Gene Oberpriller wonders. We’re riding from his downtown shop, One-on-One Bicycle, to his friend Hurl Everstone’s punk rock bike shop/coffee bar, Cars-R-Coffins, in Uptown. The forty-five-year-old Oberpriller—with the look and attitude of a healthy Paul Westerberg—is revered as the high priest of the fixed-gear/single-speed cult of cool. He got himself kicked out of Washburn High School in 1981 to race BMX bikes, but he slowed down recently, after expanding his bike shop to a coffee shop/café and having two kids. “Yeah, I don’t smoke much grass anymore either,” he says. “I can’t think the day afterwards.”

As we cross Loring Park, Oberpriller points out a dirt shortcut slicing through the grass. Then, on the way over the Loring Bikeway Bridge—built in 2004-05 with $3 million in federal funds secured by Minnesota’s former bike sugar daddy, Congressman Martin Sabo, now retired—Oberpriller points out, “See, bike commuters don’t get what motorists and pedestrians get—a straight line from point A to point B. We get these winding, curvy things.” He thinks that the $5.1 million spent on the Greenway bridge over Hiawatha that takes you three blocks out of your way could have been better spent on bicycle education. “Maybe I will go to one of those meetings,” he says. 

Spend any amount of time in the Minneapolis bike culture and you’re going to hear how great Europe is. You’ll hear about the bike racks in Amsterdam. Paris’s subsidized rent-a-bike program.  The cool bike lanes in Münster. The Tour de France.

In 1998, when the mountain bike was still a hot commodity, only 60,000 road bikes were sold in the United States. In 2005, after Lance Armstrong won his fifth yellow jersey and the ubiquitous Nike Armstrong campaign that followed, 240,000 road bikes rolled out of U.S. stores. On the street, the “Lance effect” is evidenced by the high number of thirty- to fifty-five-year-old men wearing what Gene Oberpriller (somewhat) affectionately refers to as “sausage suits.” And Lance’s influence isn’t confined to the streets: One of the most interesting places to witness the Lance effect is Birchwood Cafe in Minneapolis.

Tracy Singleton’s little Seward neighborhood restaurant leans toward the crunchy. They make a nice veggie burger, and the servers’ attitudes toward shaving range from ambivalent to hostile. The restaurant sponsors the Birchwood Racing Team, one of the largest racing teams in the city. (Whether they race or not, team members receive a sleek sky blue and black Birchwood Racing Team sausage suit jersey for their $100 joiners fee.) And Birchwood  has established one of the most popular female-only team rides, on Tuesday nights. These factors, together with the café’s proximity to the Mississippi River and the Midtown Greenway, make it a favorite stop for cyclists of all orientations. But that’s not all that’s interesting. Each morning during the Tour de France this summer, Lance-o-lytes were invited to sip coffee and nibble on vegan scones while watching the race on a forty-two-inch flat-screen high-definition TV. The day after the race ended, the HDTV was taken down and replaced with a decorative earthenware plate.

The first big event I endured for this story was the weekly Saturday-night mplsbikelove.com bike ride in July. I met thirty riders, mostly of the messenger and “posenger” (Gene Oberpriller’s derisive coinage) variety—Surly fixed-gears, oversized messenger bags, visible rock-hard calves. When I pulled into the Dinkytown McDonald’s parking lot at five minutes before ten, a pedal snapped off my 1970s Schwinn Continental. “Bummer,” some dude commiserated. I was actually relieved.

Somebody examined the damage. There was enough left when the bolt snapped off to remove it. “You’re in luck!” the guy exclaimed. (Uh, maybe not . . . .) The cry went out, “Who has an extra pedal?” Messenger bags were searched. Somebody stepped forward out of the darkness. “I do.” But that pedal didn’t fit—something to do with vintage-Schwinn English-measurement issues. Unless these strangers could smell writer, they had no idea who I was or what I was up to, but they persisted. “Wait here, man,” one of them said. “We’ll go up the block and see if Varsity Cycle has any pedals in their dumpsters. They usually do.” I went to the liquor store across the street and bought a six-pack. No matter how this turns out . . . .

When the guys came back, they had a pedal that fit. I went on the ride, and, at each stop, I drank a beer (somebody had room in his messenger bag for my six-pack) and listened to the other riders talk about eggbeater pedals and bullhorn handlebars and how Chrome brand messenger bags are still good but too trendy—also about collections for comrades injured by moron drivers. (Note: According to the city’s figures, 30 percent of all bicycle accidents are the result of cars failing to yield to cyclists, and 30 percent are the result of cyclists failing to yield to cars.) There were also horror stories about people getting mugged or “bottled” on the greenway after dark and something called “U-lock justice,” wherein you stick your U-lock in your back pocket and use it as a blunt instrument if someone cuts you off in his car. (Note: Nobody ever really admits to this.)

Both at the beer stops and on the ride, as I listen to the cyclists and whip through a night illuminated only by a $25 bar-mounted lamp, a psychological profile reveals itself. The profile seems to apply to all cyclists, whether they wear sausage suits or ride fixies, whether they’re commuters or recreationists. High in the saddle, they’re aware of their vulnerability, knowing an open car door could put them in traction; they feel either ignored or persecuted by both the motoring public and the police; they’re infused with the self-righteousness of knowing they’re combating America’s obesity trend and that their carbon emission number is next to zero. All of which can render them either amusingly insufferable or just plain insufferable. 
The pedal-shearing incident was as good an excuse as any to invest in some new rolling steel. I share this only because by this point in the story, you should realize that a bike is a fashion accessory, just like anything else. I had to determine what I was going to say.

Like many commuter cyclists (and I’m enough of a Johnny-come-lately to remember how annoying cyclists can be when viewed from either the sidewalk or behind a windshield), I’m lazy but impetuous, perhaps even selfish. On the one hand, I will lock my bike to a pole if the pole is ten feet closer to the door than the rack; on the other, a fifteen-minute bicycle commute is more attractive than a fifteen-minute bus commute because I don’t have to wait fifteen minutes at a bus stop. Bottom line, I’m a convert to the technology simply because of its slothful elegance—5 steps = 100 feet. It should go without saying that coasting is an important part of my lifestyle. So a fixed-gear was out. And I’m a commuter, not somebody who wants to qualify for the next Life Time triathlon. I wanted something reliable and sort of light, but it didn’t have to be too light. I liked the way a classic steel frame looked—those high-tech bikes make you look like a NASA dork. But I still wanted something cool enough to impress my new peers while asserting my individuality. I decided on a single-speed.

It came down to a Surly Steamroller or a Bianchi San Jose. They’re both beautiful single-speed bikes built in the same Taiwan factory—the former a twitchier racer, the latter a cushier crossbreed. I could buy either bike at One-on-One, and Gene Oberpriller seemed to be enough of a grouch to be trustworthy.

He exceeded my expectations. He actually tried to talk me out of buying either bike. Neither would be that much lighter than my Schwinn, he said. I could convert my Schwinn into a single-speed. He seemed to be taking his pious DIY ethos to an unreasonable degree. Was this the gambit of a brilliant salesman? Then I remembered another one of Sjoquist’s stats: Most independent bike shops with less than $500,000 in annual revenue (surely Oberpriller’s sales strategy yields at least that modest a number), take home only $30,000 annually. In a final moment of self-doubt, I asked Gene if I was good enough to ride a single-speed. “It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “It’s the way everybody used to do it.”

I bought the Bianchi because I’ll never be able to afford an Italian sports car. 

If your bicycle says something about you, then Minneapolis’s bicycle culture says something about Minneapolis. It says something about how much the city values environmentalism and public health. It says something about how the city is led by crazy liberals who also spend time at hearings considering circus animal–cruelty bans. The muffled collision between the Cedar Lake Park Association and the Minnesota Twins after the ballpark bill was passed last year provides an instructive case study.

According to former trail association treasurer Neil Trembley, when the group was in its infancy in the early 1990s, it advocated for Cedar Lake Park and there were no plans for a trail. “[But] the board realized that without trail development,” Trembley says, “it would have looked like ‘another park for Kenwood.’ ” Cut to 2006, when the Twins bill passed the state legislature (without the benefit of any votes by Minneapolis’s delegation of state reps, including Bryn Mawr’s Margaret Andersen Kelliher, a staunch Cedar Lake Trail supporter). The team’s architects had to work with the association regarding the trail. Now in its final phase en route to the river, the trail will run through the stadium site. There were rumors about how difficult it was to work with the association regarding issues such as “beautification.” But the rumors have been squelched and, according to the local design firm overseeing the project, such issues have been accommodated. “We got everything we wanted,” Trembley says, beaming.

There is no doubt as to which project the city cares about most. Lisa Goodman, the powerful Seventh Ward council member who represents most of downtown, is known as a dog person, not a bike person, but she’s still regarded as a close friend of the bicycle community. “We didn’t ask for a Twins stadium,” she says. “But we have been investing time and millions of dollars into the Cedar Lake Trail for more than a decade.”

Associate editor Steve Marsh wrote about wheelchair softball players in our August issue.