Whose Streets? Their Streets!

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.