ChiWhoBike #6

Published October 6, 2023
A young man stands in front of his black bike with black drop handlebars against a wooden fence in a yard. He is wearing blue jean shorts, a sky blue short sleeved button down, black sneakers with white stripes and red laces, and has the black strap of a bike bag going diagonally across his chest. He has tan skin, brown curly hair, and a short beard and mustache, and is smiling off to the left.

I’ve been biking as long as I can remember, but it’s been my main method of transportation since I was 13. It was a way for me to get from point A to B, back in those days when I was a broke ass preteen, and a way to spend my day and to know Chicago a lot better and to know where everything was. It’s something that is very tied to my own sense of autonomy. Biking makes the journey memorable - it creates this unique emotional response with something that is ultimately meant to be transient.

I think a lot of us do kind of bike like jackasses, but more often than not it’s because the contours of the road give us no option but to bike like jackasses. I think people also don’t realize that, infrastructurally, what we do exists in a kind of weird gray zone, because a lot of bike infrastructure just boils down to fucking paint, and there’s this sort of ad hoc assignment of what you should and shouldn’t be doing on the road.

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