A while back, I wrote a post on “food deserts” and my belief that the fundamental issue was not lack of close grocery-shopping options, but lack of transit options, and said that two modes of transit that were commonplace in Europe — bicycling as a means of transportation (with saddlebags or trailer for carrying goods) rather than just recreation, and mass transit with a shopping/utility cart to bring the groceries home — didn’t appear to exist here, and the inner-city poor could really benefit from them. (Original posts here and here.)
So the other day I read a mention of a Chicago charity called “Working Bikes” and I thought — this is it! Someone’s actually trying to get carless poor Chicagoans to use bikes for transit. Unfortunately, having looked at their website just now, I’ve made the unfortunate discovery that this group collects bikes at suburban bike drives, repairs them, sells some in a shop to raise funds, and ships the others off to the Third World. Kind of feels a bit backwards, when these bikes (except the top-end ones) are being manufactured in the Third World in the first place, to spend all that money on the shipping costs — to ship something abroad in a container costs about $20,000, if I’m not mistaken, so it seems likely that using the bikes effectively in this country and making cash donations to purchase bikes locally would be a fare better use of money.
Now, their website does say that they “partner with homeless transition, refugee resettlement, and youth empowerment programs here in Chicago to donate bicycles and put them to good use on the streets of our own community” — but these are exceptionally narrow categories of people, far from sufficient to create a “bike culture.”
And that’s also where I wish I were a bit less nerdy and introverted. Ha! I’d start my own bikes program (it would also help to know more about bike repair, and have connections with people in the City). But instead I’ll just gripe about it. . .
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