This fascinating discussion of the social class of the people who ride bicycles made me wonder.
I always instinctively associated bicycles with comfortably middle-class people. One reason was that everybody I know who rides a bicycle is what I call “rich” and you call middle-class.
Another reason is that having a bicycle implies a certain lifestyle that I don’t identify with poverty. First, you need money to buy the bicycle and the paraphernalia. Then, you need to be prepared to lose that investment because bicycles get stolen a lot.
You need to have the leisure of tending to it and of transporting yourself at its slow pace.
You need to have no dependents and be physically fit. This could describe a young person, but where does a young person get money to buy and the space to store? If this is not a very young person, then it’s got to be somebody who can invest in good food, medical care, a gym, and psychological supports that allow them not to smoke or use drugs.
You also need the kind of wardrobe that accommodates biking.
The author of the linked piece sees non-white people on bicycles and assumes they are poor because of their race. That’s a silly assumption, though.
What do you think? Is a bicycle a habitual means of transportation for poor people where you live?
Clarissa's Blog 
We have two distinct classes of bicycle riders in Adelaide. Get up early in the morning on garbage collection day and you see people on bicycles collecting the bottles with a claimable deposit from the recycling bins. Younger groups of disaffected youths ride bikes for a quick get away from their bag snatching attempts (I chased one down last week and got the ladies bag back).
Then we have the lycra clad brigade that need to wear special gear that poor people don’t need to ride a bike.
BTW Bikes can get stolen by poor people thus making cost of ownership more affordable.
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I see plenty of older people riding bikes where I live. You don’t need to be young.
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Try to read more carefully, OK? Older people who ride bikes are people who have the time, the money, and the resources to take care of their health, hence I’m suggesting that they must be middle-class.
Are the people you see biking poor?
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Poor people here walk, take the city bus, or drive really old cars. There are some students who can’t afford cars and ride bikes instead, but their economic circumstances are temporary, so not the same as truly poor people.
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Same here. Maybe the linked author and I have very different definitions of poverty.
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Yes, absolutely, and mostly older poor people as well.
There are the mostly middle-class Lycra brigade, of course, and the students and young people, but there are also plenty of ‘ordinary’ users. Older people of limited means like bikes – they are much, much cheaper to own and maintain than cars, they increase the distance a person can travel under their own steam (buses are fine but not very frequent, and may not go where you want to go, and cost money) and the amount of goods they can transport (the home-made box-trailer or panniers is common). Cheap second hand bicycles are readily available, and bicycles are possible to mend by hand, unlike most modern cars. Bicycles can be taken into one’s house for safe-keeping, unlike a car. In northern Britain, the sturdy, hand-me-down bicycle has long been the working man’s means of escape – he can get to a canal to fish, into the country, just out. Women of all ages use them too, to shop – even if you walk back with your bags hung on the bike, it’s still quicker and easier on the hands than walking there and back and carrying bags directly – to get around – if a poorer family has a car at all, they’ll only have one, and they won’t want to use it for short journeys as it costs money.
We of course have a more moderate climate than the US in most parts, so you don’t need much in the way of special clothes – skirts can be a nuisance, and waterproof coats, hats etc. come in different qualities, but it is perfectly possible and common to see someone cycling along in their normal street clothes all through the winter – they get to their destination quicker, and they’d be out in the weather anyway.
Our cities tend to be more compact than the US and our roads in my experience anyway a bit more pedestrian friendly which also helps cyclists – but like your comment on Bingo a while ago, it seems to me this is about regional differences across the English-speaking world!
I worked in Canada for a while, and some of the strongest culture shock things were absolutely tiny. For example: DELIBERATELY CHILLING a dark beer. A whole aisle full of pizzas, but the only option without meat on it a plain cheese one. loads of varieties of sour cream, but an almost complete absence of live/Greek yoghurt. The cheese and the bread… oh, and the bouncing white balloonman “please walk” signal at traffic crossings, and the whole concept of ‘transfers’, and screw-in fuses. The superficial similarities made the little differences more jarring. Although I never did get the hang of the whole ‘not spending entire evenings in public establishments which sell alcohol without getting drunk’ thing either…
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“middle-class Lycra brigade”
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You can buy really cheap used bicycles here. But, I don’t see many people riding them because the traffic is extremely dangerous. On campus I see some and they are mostly white and Chinese riders.
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I forgot to mention we have bike kitchens where you can get a bike for free or get your bike repaired for free. Obviously services like this dont use the kind of components that enthusiasts would use so are only susbcribed to by those in need.
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In the city where I live, ten years ago, bicyclists and people who ride scooters were assumed to be people who had lost their license to drive, as a result of drunk driving. Pedestrians were so few and far between that my little family was accosted several times by concerned citizens offering us a ride. They would drive alongside us in their car, stop, roll down a window and ask, “Is something wrong?”
We would say, “No we just like to walk!”
After the economic crash, there was a definite rise in bicyclists, scooters and pedestrians. Now no one assumes that you are traveling that way because of a DUI.
You can walk and no one will stop to check on you.
We traveled exclusively by bicycle for months because we could not afford a car. This is fairly rare, as I think most poor people get around on the city bus. I knew we would not have access to a car and had saved up to purchase a bucket bike (a Madsen made in Utah) to haul our kids and groceries. We have a car now, but we still ride around in the bike on nice days to save gas money and get exercise.
The other groups going by bike are “middle class” (by local standards) professionals who want to be environmentally friendly, wealthy hobbyists and a small group of college students. There are poor people who travel frequently by bicycle in the summer. Their bicycles look old and sometimes improvised-built by people who tinker for fun & lack of money. I think the poorer bicycle riders tend to be older. The younger people are all riding scooters, which cost less in maintenance and fuel than cars.
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Well near where I live, there are some desperately poor (I assume homeless) people on bicycles. Interestingly enough, they rarely ride the bikes so much as they walk them and the bike becomes more of a cart of sorts.
And as someone said above, I see lots of college students on bikes. And these tend to be the college students from families with more modest incomes. The more wealthy students come in with fancy cars while students from working class or lower middle-class families come to college with bikes or beat up cars.
But overall I definitely agree with your assessment: middle class people tend to be the most regular bike riders. Along these lines, I would say most regular bike riders tend to be members of the political left.
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I’m in a completely different part of the UK from JaneB, but I agree entirely with her take on it. Cycling is by far the most cost effective and efficient way of getting around my city because of traffic and terrible public transportation. It’s easy to get a second hand bike for very little money and few people seem to use any special gear (I don’t – I just ride to work in my street clothes, as JaneB noted many people do). Sure, many cyclists are middle class people in head to toe Lycra, but they are far from the majority and it certainly seems to cut across social class and age over here.
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As for the gear, you still need a helmet, a lock, a pump for the tyres, a kit that makes the night signaling, the grease, etc.
Maybe it’s a different definition of poverty which is the problem here.
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Actually, in the UK you don’t need a helmet (I use one and would urge anyone to, but they are not mandatory and the majority of riders don’t wear them). People use cheap locks or get second hand ones; cycle surgeries can top up wheels for free and do the small repairs and (again I personally siagree with this, it’s just what I observe), very, very few people use anything beyond the standard issue reflectors at night. You can get a second hand bike and okay quality lock for less than the cost of a season ticket on public transportation here, so most people opt for that.
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Well, cheap or inexpensive bikes don’t need a lot of maintenance for one thing. For another, here in California the price of gas is higher than the national average cost. This is because it has to be specially formulated because of our problems with air pollution. You also have to have the car smogged every two years, and that with the cost of insurance makes cars more expensive than elsewhere in this country.
We’ve also had better public transport than we did 20 years ago, as well bike lanes that were created to increase safety for bicyclists around here. We’re a small town geographically, which helps as well. I had a friend in high school,who would bike 35 miles to the county seat on the weekends with her boyfriend.
We used to have a bike shop that was started back in the early 1900s, I don’t know if it still exists today. I think bikes are more popular in California because we don’t have summer rains and storms unless you live by the coast or in the mountains, and of course we have loads of foothills all around the state for people to do mountain biking and whatnot.
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My experience has been the same as yours. Upscale people with expensive bikes and gear, riding on weekends. Pure leisure. I haven’t seen anyone biking because they can’t afford to drive.
The group who drives a bicycle to work is employees at my university who do it for environmental and health reasons. But that group skews middle-class, too.
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I don’t know about the US, but a bike isn’t really expensive in Germany. ATt least if you don’t want some carbon racer or a Hipster bike.
Just getting a bike is possible for a couple of bucks. Hell, with a bit of luck you might even get one for free.
I usually associate bike usage with teenagers and young people. Or yuppies who are penny pitchers.
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When I was growing up in Hawaii, it was mainly very poor people who rode bicycles, and they usually rode them so they could make extra money for collecting bottles and cans from public rubbish bins to recycle, or by doing odd jobs. A lot of very old working class immigrants from Japan, the Philippines or the other Pacific Islands would ride their bikes in order to get to the post office, the grocery store (it was a common sight for old milk crates that they got free from the dairy to be used as shopping baskets on the bikes) and church/Buddhist Temple on Sunday, but were otherwise always at home unless their adult children/grandchildren came by with a car.
In Vancouver, where I live now, there are no “bike riders”. They’re “cyclists”. And they’re middle class assholes who are dedicated to proving that being a bike rider constitutes a marginalized identity and that the big bad city is oppressing them by not providing enough bike lanes or places to park their bikes.
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This seems to be a very geographically mediated phenomenon. Bicycles seem to mean very different things in different areas.
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It is, and I think the physical geography makes a big difference too. “Cyclist culture” isn’t as much of a thing in Seattle, I notice, even though the two cities are extremely culturally similar, Seattle has a much less straightforward city planning layout and a great deal of high hills and slopes. So it’s much harder to present biking there as a viable option for everyone that is accessible to all ages and abilities if they would just allow themselves to be weaned of their “car addiction”.
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I think perhaps the distribution of bicycles is bimodal. With the rich enjoying one end of the spectrum and the poor the other end.
As for cost I think the poor do what I do and buy second hand from gumtree. I have bought two bikes this way and still have both I paid $70 for one and $80 for the other and had the helmet and lights thrown in. It costs me $3.50 for a 10km trip from my house into the city on either the train or the bus. However to catch the train I must walk for 20 minutes first and then have a 15 minute train ride and the bus goes way out of the way and takes 40 minutes. I can easily cycle there in around 35 minutes and my ride takes me to exactly where I want to go and half of the ride is along a river bank. So after two weeks my bike became cost effective.
To put that in context: an unemployed single person with no children will recieve a payment from the government of $523.40 per forgnight so for around 4 days living expenses somebody on the bones of their arse can have some independence and cut future travel expenses whilst improving their opportunities. At least in this city where the weather is mild, the terrain is flat and poverty is perhaps less extreme than other places, bike riding is a viable alternative for poor people. The unemployed do get travel at lower rates on public transport, currently the same trip would cost them $1.32 so the payback period would be 3 times longer.
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The Census Bureau produced a report about biking to work. Both poor and rich people do it, but middle class people don’t. The Washington Post summary of the report is at http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/09/the-demographic-paradox-of-who-bikes-and-walks-to-work/
My take on the report is that people too poor to own and maintain a car ride a bicycle if they can get places more easily (and possibly more cheaply) on a bike than on inefficient public transit, as do rich people with flexible schedules. Where I live, poor people tend to ride on the sidewalks, and rich people tend to ride in the road.
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This is so not what I’m observing. Half of my colleagues bike to work, and I can’t imagine my university bring so unique in this respect.
Fellow academics, do your colleagues bike to work? Men, especially. This is mostly a very male thing, from what I’m seeing.
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